Note 19 — Chapter II
Reading edition
The kingdom or province of Bungo is situated on the east coast of the second in size and southernmost in situation of the three larger Japanese islands, off the southeast extremity of which lies the small island of Tanegashima, where Pinto represents himself as having first landed.
The name “Bungo” was frequently extended by the Portuguese to the whole large island of which it formed a part, though among them the more common designation of that island, after they knew it to be such (for they seem at first to have considered it a part of Nippon), was Shimo.[A] This name, Shimo, appears to have been only a modification of the term shima (or, as the Portuguese wrote it, xima), the Japanese word for island, and as such terminating many names of places. On our maps this island is called Kiūshiū, meaning, as Kämpfer tells us, “Country of Nine,” from the circumstance of its being divided into nine provinces, which latter appears to be the correct interpretation. There are in use in Japan Chinese as well as Japanese names of provinces and officers (the Chinese probably a translation of the Japanese); and not only the names Nippon and Kiūshiū, but that of Bungo (to judge from the terminal n of the first syllable), are of Chinese origin.
A:
Shimo
is not the modification of
Shima
(Island), but a word meaning “lower”
geographically.—K. M.