Wa (Japan)

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Wa
Chinese character for Wō or Wa, formed by the "person" radical 亻and a wěi or wa 委 phonetic element
Chinese name
Chinese	倭
Literal meaning	submissive, distant, dwarf
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin wō Middle Chinese Middle Chinese /ʔuɑ/ Old Chinese Zhengzhang /*qoːl/
Korean name
Hangul	왜
Hanja	倭
Literal meaning	dwarf
Transcriptions Revised Romanization wae McCune–Reischauer wae
Japanese name
Kanji	倭 / 和
Kana	わ
Transcriptions Revised Hepburn wa

Wa^[a] is the oldest attested name of Japan^[b] and ethnonym of the Japanese people. From c. the 2nd century AD Chinese and Korean scribes used the Chinese character 倭; 'submissive'', 'distant'', 'dwarf' to refer to the various inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago, although it might have been just used to transcribe the phonetic value of a Japonic ethnonym with a respectively differing semantic connotation. In the 8th century, the Japanese started using the character 和, wa, 'harmony', 'peace', 'balance' instead due to the offensive nature of the former.

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