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| Yokohama chocolate bars with the name chokorētō (貯古齢糖) in kanji |
The Japanese adopted many words from Dutch and Portuguese. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they also adopted very many words from English and other European languages. These words are called gairaigo (外来語). Gairaigo usually does not refer to words of ancient Chinese origin or Japanese words made from Chinese elements.
In modern Japanese, gairaigo words are written in katakana, and native Japanese words are written in hiragana. However, this is a relatively recent writing convention. It was believed for a long time in Japan that Japanese should be written as much as possible in kanji. In earlier times, these kanji were often accompanied by furigana. Thus, the new words taken from Dutch or Portuguese were given their own kanji. These kanji are sometimes borrowed from the ones used in Chinese, so that the word's pronunciation and its writing can come from two different foreign languages. Attributing kanji to foreign words has been largely dropped in modern times.
| rōmaji | English | kanji version |
|---|---|---|
| biiru | beer | 麦酒 |
| tabako | tobacco | 煙草 |
| saboten | cactus | 仙人掌 |
| koohii | coffee | 珈琲 |
| kurabu | club | 倶楽部 |
(Many more examples of ateji can be found in Portuguese and Dutch).
This is similar to a related phenomenon called gikun (義訓), where words which were originally Japanese had kanji attributed to them, for their meaning, such as
| rōmaji | English | kanji version |
|---|---|---|
| himawari | sunflower | 向日葵 |
| mukade | centipede | 百足 |
although the pronunciation of the word is unrelated to the pronunciation of the kanji.
Confusing the situation further, it is common to see furigana over Japanese or Sino-Japanese words written in kanji a different gairaigo word, for instance over the word ryoukai one might see the gairaigo equivalent roja- (roger).