Japan is known as the Land of the Rising Sun. The nickname comes from 日本, the Japanese name for Japan, commonly pronounced Nihon or Nippon; its characters mean “sun” and “origin” or “base.”
The phrase reflects Japan’s position east of China and the Korean Peninsula, where the sun appears to rise earlier. A famous 607 CE letter sent from Prince Shōtoku’s court to China referred to Japan as the land where the sun rises and China as the land where the sun sets.
The nickname is not Japan’s formal constitutional name, which is simply the State of Japan. It is also different from the Rising Sun Flag, a Japanese military-associated design featuring rays around a sun disk. Korea and China are sometimes confused with the clue because both have strong solar symbolism and lie in East Asia, but the conventional geographic epithet belongs to Japan.