The history of Japanese translation started with Chinese-Japanese translation dating back to when Japan sent its first official envoy to China in AD 57. At that time Japanese people did not have a script to write their language, so the sound and meaning of Chinese characters were adopted to write Japanese words. Reading Chinese texts in order to import culture, new information and ideas was extremely valuable and important for Japan, and the reading method called

kambun kundoku (interpretive reading of Chinese) was developed from the sixth to the eighth century. It uses grammatical indicators and markers to help Japanese readers decipher Chinese texts. Readers have to know the meaning of Chinese characters to be able to use this method. It was a direct means of construing a Chinese text into Japanese, and required close attention to the original text (Twine 1991: 39). This later contributed to the literal translation of Western languages into Japanese.

The first European language to arrive in Japan was Portuguese in the sixteenth century, followed by Dutch in the early seventeenth century, but the inflow of foreign texts was limited because of Japan's seclusion policy (1639–1853). It was not until 1853 that Japan formally opened its doors to the modern world. This led to a flood of imports of English, French, Russian and German works, and it was considered vital at that time to translate foreign texts so as to learn from the West. Translators at that time coined many neologisms by using combinations of Chinese characters to express the new concepts from the West. For instance, Nishi Amane (1829–1894), a Japanese philosopher, is known to have coined neologisms for the words "philosophy", "logic", "psychology", "ethics", "phenomenon", "subject" and "object" during the early Meiji period (1868–1911) to help the Japanese understand the new foreign concepts needed after the Meiji Restoration (1867). Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901), one of the leading translators/educators at that time, also helped produce neologisms for social concepts such as "society" and "individual" (Yanabu 1982:18–33). During that period, new ways of writing were also accepted as necessary to express these new ideas, and translators were under no pressure to express the original ideas in a way that conformed to the target language (Wakabayashi 1998: 488–489).

However, according to Yanabu Akira (1998), these efforts in coining acceptable expressions for Western ideas were not entirely successful, as the meanings of the neologisms created during the Meiji period are still not properly grasped by Japanese readers to this day. Yanabu explains this as the 'cassette effect' (1976: 23–41), suggesting that the newly coined neologisms gave the impression that they were of absolute validity, and Japanese readers had a blind acceptance imposed on them without fully understanding their meaning. In other words, Yanabu questions the acceptability of neologisms coined during this period. Most Japanese scholars (e.g. Shimizu 1959; Sigumoto 1961), however, admire the efforts of translators at the time for their achievement in cleverly utilizing Chinese characters to express modern Western concepts in Japanese.