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Meh, it's kind of true. During our Chinese History unit in AP History, my teacher said that a lot of the romanization of Chinese words was silly because foreigners could not figure out some of the sounds and romanized it however they felt like, hence sometimes the translation of Beijing > Peking.

I kind of think we should call countries what they want to be called as well. Chuugoku is actually about the same thing as China though, because the word China comes from the emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, not the Chinese word for China, which is Zhongguo. Japanese actually uses the same characters for China that the Chinese do, but it is just pronounced the Japanese way, so it's not really much of a change.

But I can't be too biased about the way English romanizes country names and languages, I know Chinese mostly translates foreign words based solely on the way they sound.

America is written in katakana, not hiragana sweatdrop and Nihon is Japan. I've only heard 'Nippon' in songs.

I don't really see why it's relevent though. Maybe there is an actual reason countries are called what they are. Like Canada is from an Aboriginal word, United States of America are states that are united (not that creative though must say.) and yeah.

But why does it matter where the names are from? Do we care about them in life? Not really...

nippon is the polite/official way to say japan. nipponkoku is the completely offical sounding manner of saying japan.