Iaponia
Iaponia is the Latin exonym traditionally used in European writing to refer to Japan. In classical and medieval Latin texts, Iaponia denotes the Japanese archipelago and, by extension, the country of Japan. The term is a Latinization of earlier transcriptions of the region heard by scholars and traders, and it appears in maps and encyclopedias from late antiquity through the early modern period.
In geographic literature, Iaponia as a label accompanied discussions of Japan’s geography, peoples, and customs as
Today, Iaponia survives mainly in historical or philological contexts. In contemporary usage, the Japanese names Nihon