Japan

The lacquer is simply the country, used as a verb.

European workshops imitated East Asian lacquerwork and called the finish japan, then japanned things with it. The lower-case word is now rarer than the country.

The word English speakers used for anime before they used anime.

American fans and distributors blended Japan and animation in the decades when Japanese cartoons reached the West mainly as dubbed television series with the credits changed. The Japanese word anime, itself a clipping of the English animation, displaced it in English during the 1990s. Japanimation now sounds dated and is sometimes used mockingly by fans.

The word arrived with the first wave of Western enthusiasm for Japanese art.

It is built from Japan with the Greek ending -phile, and it enters English in the late nineteenth century, after the country opened to foreign trade in the 1850s. European collectors and painters were then taking up japonisme, and Japanese prints reshaped Impressionism. The modern pejorative counterpart is weeaboo.