Description
These two characters read, (日) Sun and (本) origin, how can they mean Japan? Well, if you were a Chinese person looking to the East from the Chinese shoreline in the morning you would see the sun rise from the ocean, or “originate” from the East, so “Japan” was the “origin of the sun.” Depending on what dialect of Chinese you spoke, your pronunciation of these characters sounded like “Yerpen” to Westerners who mispronounced it as Japan the “Land of the Rising Sun.”
