A friend and I know fairly basic Japanese, and this topic came up
I argued that the word gaijin means “foreigner” in general. For example, if a Tanzanian person was speaking japanese and said “most of my clients are *gaijins*” it would mean most of their clients are not from Tanzania
However my friend argued that was incorrect. She explained all their clients are gaijins already because they are not japanese. She argued this is how a native japanese speaker would interpret it
We tried to settle this by googling, but we couldn’t find any definite proof, since all the examples we found about the use of this word were between japanese people or japanese people speaking with non-japanese people
15 comments
I believe it translates to outside-country-person, which would mean someone from not Japan.
It would depend, because 外人 literally means “outsider”, and refers to a person outside of an established social group.
So what a 外人 is would depend on what “group” they are not supposed to be a part of.
Things like “foreigner” or “non-Japanese” are extended meanings which would be defined based upon context.
That’s why you would find a lot of examples of Japanese people talking to each other and using 外人 to refer to “non-Japanese people”. They’ve likely contextually established that they are talking about people that are not like themselves (Japanese)
In some interviews videos in Japan I’ve seen that the Japanese interviewer used the word 外国人 for foreigners.
But ihm myself a learning beginner, so I’m also wondering what would be the appropriate word / usage.
Well, it’s the strange classification of japan or not japan. Same as with 海外. “I’m going to travel 海外” Like what country you’re going to is not important, because it’s either japan or it isn’t.
外国人 refers to “foreigners,” and would likely refer to non-Japanese individuals… but outside of Japan, wouldn’t Japanese people be the foreigners? Same with 外国語.
外人 is an “outsider.” It can refer to non-Japanese, but it has other implications. In one historic text it refers to member of a rival clan or another domain, so the historic use extends to Japanese who were not of one’s own area.
Like someone already mentioned, it literally means “outsider”, but is used to refer to foreigners, whereas 外国人 is the more “appropriate” and literal word for foreigner.
Either way, to Japanese people, it almost always is refering to “non-Japanese” or people not from Japan, even if they are 2nd or 3rd generation Japanese living in Japan.
I’ve even heard anecdotal stories of Japanese people traveling outside of Japan refering to the locals in that country as 外人 or 外国人, as in “There’s only gaijin here” (meaning no Japanese people).
Edit: TLDR While not PC in the way that we would approach it, contextually your friend is right.
Well that’s the problem, there’s really only one Japanese speaking country, and almost everyone who speaks Japanese is also from there, so the language and the country (and to some extent even the ethnicity) are inextricably linked to each other
外国人 means foreigner in general and is used as such when talking about foreigners in other countries (real or fictional), but since statistically speaking effectively every high-level Japanese speaker is also legally (and probably ethnically) Japanese, I think the default is to assume you’re talking about non-Japanese people when there’s no further context. 外人 can also mean other things, but in the context of citizenship I’d assume it’s usually meant as a colloquial and possibly ruder version of 外国人
If there was a large Japanese-speaking community in Tanzania your interpretation could work but since afaik there isn’t, a Tanzanian speaking Japanese is most likely doing so in the context of Japan and not Tanzania, or else they probably wouldn’t be speaking Japanese but a local language or a lingua franca like English or Swahili
The word 外人(gaijin) is the shortened version of 外国人(gaikokujin), literally meaning “outside country person,” but is standardly translated to “foreigner.” 外国人 is the standard word to use and refers to anyone who isn’t from Japan. It’s the type of word you’d see in the news. Some people consider 外人 to be impolite, but it’s almost never used with such an intent. You may even hear Japanese people jokingly talking about “gaijin meetings,” referring to how foreigners usually stay in their own groups. It’s sometimes translated as “outsider,” which has a a more distancing or condescending feel to it in English. The only time I’ve ever seen Gaijin used with negative intent was from someone who was blatantly racist, but that shouldn’t lead you to misconstrued the term as an overall bad thing. For the question asked in your title, I feel like if, let’s say, a white person was born and raised in Japan, 外人 probably wouldn’t be used. The word for “Caucasian,” or literally “White Person” is 白人(hakujin) if that was something you wanted to know.
Just looking it up, it says “外国人（がいこくじん）とは、ある国家の国民から見て、その国家の国籍を有しない者のこと。”, so your definition is technically correct. But she’d also right that a native can and probably will interpret it differently, so it’d be best to make clarifications.
I’m curious as to how she would feel about a foreigner using 邦人 or 異邦人.
To add to the “Japan vs. not-Japan” distinction, if you’ve ever tried to access a region-locked Japanese service from outside Japan, you’ll see stuff like 国内でしかご利用できません. I could argue that I am in fact in 国内 (“within the country”) in relation to my country, but to Japanese companies trying to region-lock their stuff, that’s simply not what that word means. Some sites like the NHK will clarify **日本**国内, but others won’t.
外人 is short for 外国人; contextually a Tanzanian person could use 外人 to refer to someone not from Tanzania, but both of you are right in a sense. The literal translation has no connection meaning foreign-to-Japan, but because it’s almost always used in a slang-y way, it’s come to partially mean foreign-to-Japan.
It’s more likely the Tanzanian would say 異国人 or the full 外国人, and not just 外人 since that has some slang meaning separate from the full word.
Technically “outsider”, but in modern Japanese it’s often going to refer specifically to white people and is typically derogatory. If a Tanzanian person were speaking Japanese and used this term about their clientele it would come across as very coarse and be understood to mean non-Japanese people.
It would be non-Japanese to me, although “foreigner” would be technically correct.
that’s the same thing
>She argued this is how a native japanese speaker would interpret it
And she would be correct. A Japanese person living in America would probably call the locals there gaijin (well, maybe not to their face given recent pop-culture trends and how out of control ポリコレ(PC) is today), even though you could say they’re the foreigner in that case.