Pre-Meiji period

Since antiquity, the Japanese have supplemented their native vocabulary, known as yamato kotoba, by borrowing many words from Chinese. After integrating the Chinese words into their vocabulary, they began creating their own kango.

One source of wasei-kango is the reinterpretation of yamato kotoba via on'yomi readings of the characters as opposed to the original kun'yomi. For example, the archaic word for Japan, 日の本 (ひのもと Hinomoto), has become the modern 日本 (にほん Nihon or にっぽん Nippon). Another example is the word for daikon, 大根, which changed from おおね ōne to だいこん daikon. Sometimes, an inversion of the character order is necessary, as in the construction of 立腹 (りっぷく) rippuku from 腹が立つ (はらがたつ) hara ga tatsu, for anger. Terms have also been coined for concepts in Japanese culture such as geisha (芸者), ninja (忍者), or kaishaku (介錯).

Meiji Restoration

As Western influence began to take hold in Japan during the 19th-century Meiji Restoration, Japanese scholars discovered that they needed new words to translate the concepts imported from Europe. As Natsume Sōseki once wrote in his diary,

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or in English, "Law governs the human world as the natural world." Eventually, once these European concepts became fully naturalized in the Japanese worldview, it became possible to write the above sentence as it would be in modern Japanese:

Japanese officials and scholars also imported new terms coined by Chinese and Western scholars from Sino-English dictionaries from China. Many of these terms are still commonly being used by both countries nowadays.^[2]

Sometimes, existing words were repurposed to translate these new concepts. For example, 世界 was a Classical Chinese Buddhist term which became the modern word for "world", and kagaku (科学, science) was taken from "欽定千叟宴詩". Other words were completely new creations, such as tetsugaku (哲学, philosophy) and denwa (電話, telephone). The majority of wasei-kango were created during this period. Following the Meiji Restoration and the Japanese victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, many of these terms found their way into the modern Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, where they remain today.