China having a coastline? Don't be silly. That's propaganda. Even if they did have one, who would they want to protect themselves from? It's not like they've ever been invaded by anyone. clueless

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[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Someone from an island nation probably would struggle to find the word to describe a...continental(?) country,

Japanese does not lack terms for describing the geographic situation of China's eastern coast compared to Japan. They have an extensive shared cultural heritage, including a long period of the Japanese intelligentsia sitting in China's shadow, and then a long period of them arguing against that attitude (frequently with silly arguments like "well our monarchs are gods"), and then another, and another.

They have catalogues of taxonomies we can barely even comprehend for talking about China,* and some of it probably doesn't translate very well, but I don't think it would ever mistranslate as "landlocked" rather than something like continental, as you said.

*though I should say that while some of it appears in influential classical literature, obviously the average Japanese person doesn't know the whole thing just like we don't know the equivalent for western phrenology, but notheless some phrenological concepts are in common speech and some is familiar to us beyond that despite it having much less literary importance.

[–] Damarcusart@hexbear.net 8 points 2 days ago

I was erring on the side of "I'm Australian and I would probably say something dumb like that about a country that isn't an island by mistake" but it is different when you're speaking and misspeak vs typing something out for sure.