How Max Headroom led me to learn why the Japanese for "Japan" is "Nippon"

Way back in the middle of the last century (all right, 1985) Channel 4 aired a one-hour telemovie giving the background to their Max Headroom computerised TV show presenter character. (They repeated it a few years ago.) Like many others, I loved the telemovie, but sadly it was never released on DVD. There was an American version made, in which the plot of the telemovie was, it seems, stretched out to an entire series; but I'm sure it would grate for me as wrong compared to the version I've now seen twice.

A few years ago, the British telemovie was released on DVD for rental (only) in Japan. As happens with this kind of thing, occasionally ex-rental discs find their way onto the secondhand market, and I found one listed on Amazon's Japanese site. However, one of the reviewers comments "作品そのものとしては★5つのところだが、DVDとしてはあまりにもショボい（価格の割に）のでマイナス★2つ,", which Google translates "The work itself is just one ★ 5, DVD is not too SHOBO (for the price) so negative ★ 2," and given that, I thought it wasn't worth the price (￥3,334 (£29) excluding P&P).

Occasionally, thought, I'll do a search for マックス・ヘッドルーム and today discovered another one (hands off—I got there first!), but this one without a picture or much information. I wanted to know whether it was the British version or the American, so I put together an email to the seller, and tweaked it until translating it into Japanese using Google's translation engine and then translating it back again gave me something approximating to what I started out with. I'm quite pleased with myself for taking the effort.

Along the way, I had to go to Wikipedia to find out the Japanese for "Japanese" to put in manually, because Google was turning it in one context to "Japan". This turned out to be 日本語 "Nihongo". Which made me wonder why Nihongo and not Nippongo (seems /p/ in Japanese became /ɸ/ (like the sound of v in Spanish (but presumably unvocalised)) and then /h/.) Which it turn made me wonder why it is that the Japanese for "Japan" is "Nippon", whereas the English, going back all the way to Marco Polo, is "Japan". (Polo gave the name as Cipangu—Chipangu with English orthography.) I've wondered this before, but if I've found out the answer, I've not remembered it.

To cut a long story short, the original name of Japan in Japanese was (amongst others), hi no moto, meaning "source of the sun", i.e. the Land of the Rising Sun. This was written in Chinese characters as 日本, where each character expresses a concept, not a sound. Reading the same characters as they would be read in Chinese (Cantonese?), but mangled through the constraints of Japanese, in which syllables can only be CV(n), this comes out as "Nippon".

Reading them, however, through Wu Chinese or early Mandarin, they come out as something like "Japan" (/zəʔpən/ in modern Shanghainese). And this is the form Marco Polo came across when he was in China.

And the "-gu" or "-go" on the end? This comes from Chinese guó, meaning "realm" or "kingdom". (Presumably the same as the "kuo" in the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, that ruled the Republic of China and has ruled Taiwan on and off since the fall of mainland China to the communists, or in "Manchukuo", the puppet state the Japanese set up after invading Manuchuria.)

And that is how Max Headroom led me to learn why the Japanese for "Japan" is "Nippon".