Japan had contact with China, India and the Mongols, among others. Is there a
term they used for Asia (in the sense of "land mass where China is" or such)
before "アジア"?
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question
words loanwords culture
Did the Japanese have a concept of "Asia" apart from the Eurocentric definition?
**Short Answer:**

As for the Japanese language, we didn't have such a word and I don't think we
should have had. Ancient Japanese only knew as far as India, that means they
only knew one "landmass" in their world. Just like the Nile means "river", or
the Sahara means "desert", it was not supposed to have a name, except "outside
of Japan".

* * *

**Long Explanation:**

Most geographic knowledge outside of Japan was introduced with Buddhism in
olden times. As a result, ordinary Japanese were said to only recognize
roughly three regions in this world: Japan, China, and India. Japan has had
constant communication with the Chinese cultural sphere, but India was close
to a religious "Promised Land" which is too remote to see with your own eyes.
We have an old-fashioned idiom 唐天竺の果てまでも "to the very end of China and India"
which is like saying "to the Timbuktu" (see [Metaphorical equivalent of
Timbuktu or Outer Mongolia](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/38457/7810)).
The names of both China and India are often used as synonyms of any far-off
land, in a way we call _guinea pigs_ テンジクネズミ ("Indian mouse"; but from South
America), or _maize corn_ トウモロコシ (confusingly "Chinese China", because モロコシ
already means _sorghum_ ; also from Americas).

Though numerous places related to China and India (as far as Eastern Rome)
were recorded in Chinese chronicles, it is doubtful if Japanese made to grasp
them as geographic entities more than accessories of those realms. According
to [this paper](http://repository.tufs.ac.jp/handle/10108/81589), at the early
stage of the contact with Spanish and Portuguese, Japanese were unable to
identify the subcontinent where they said their intermediate ports were
located as "India" (天竺), by the time Buddhism was almost perished. They,
including overseas merchants, instead believed that Southeast Asia, which was
the center of Buddhism at that time, was their "India".

After the acceptance of the Western geography, there still sometimes was
manifestation of the traditional world view. An interesting example is
[南瞻部洲萬國掌菓之圖](https://kochizu.gsi.go.jp/items/165) (click for the original map)
drawn in 1710. In this map, the idealized India occupies the center one-third,
and another one-third to right is South-to-East Asian areas. The whole other
half of Eurasia is crammed into the top-left of India, with Europe seen at the
very corner like a cluttered marshland (the Netherlands seems to have a high
mountain! :D). Of course, this is rather a conceptual image like [T and O
maps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map) of Christianity.

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uEsc5.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uEsc5.png)

Compare it to [喎蘭新譯地球全圖](https://kochizu.gsi.go.jp/items/198), a faithful
reproduction of the state-of-art Dutch cartography, drawn in 1796. Most of the
geographical features and descriptions were correct as much as what modern
people expect. It employs a vast amount of Western concepts as well, including
the division "Asia".

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nQ2XB.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nQ2XB.png)

We can see that Japanese in the middle ages never had a chance to know the
world to the west of India, thus impossible to objectively recognize the
concept of "continent" unless it means "land outside of the islands of Japan",
which would be equal to "all other parts of world". We do have a word now,
namely 東洋 "the East", typically equivalent with that traditional range of
world we used to imagine, but this is obviously an idea after the contact with
the European civilization.
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answer