In the Chinese movie *Devils on the Doorstep*, the prisoners taught the Chinese kid to say “にほんじんちょうじょういるよ” so local troops would come to their rescue. However, the kid slipped and fell, after he got back up he only remembered “にほんじん”. When the officer heard this, he said “ああ に**ぽん**じん!”
Why? I know Nippon is the country… just not sure if you can say nipponjin
For anyone interested in viewing the actual segment, it’s at around 57 mins into the movie
6 comments
It’s an unusual reading of the kanji but most people would be able to understand what you meant.
More historical information here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan
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yes. generally saying nippon rather than nihon has a patriotic overtone.
I wish I had the link to the study but in my Japanology class (at Japanese University with Japanese professor) we studied linguistics and history of Japanese and one of the things we talked about was how even Japanese people don’t really know which reading is “correct”. We saw a survey asking about how people pronounced multiple words with 日本 in it and for every single word they surveyed, none had 100% agreement. There was some general majorites tho ofc. From what I recall にほん was the most common reading of 日本 but there was a decent amount of people saying they pronunce as にっぽん (Idr exactly but it was like 20 or 30%). When it came to words containing 日本 relating to government, there was more of a lean towards the にっぽん pronunciation.
Personally I’ve only heard にほんじん, but that could also be a regional thing. But I think you could say にっぽんじん and still be understood. I think maybe de facto pronunciation can be either way (depends on region and generation I would think too) but de jure and what I’ve been taught is にほんじん。
Really fascinating subject tho!!!
Nippon is often used for sport events because it sounds more active than Nihon. Nihonjin is more widely used but Nipponjin is not wrong either.
Yes, it can be.
An example is the anime Code Geass, the characters always says Nippon and nipponjin. As someone already said here, it has a patriotic and nationalist tone.