Understand
The name Chūgoku literally means "Middle Country", the sole surviving relic of a historical division of Japan into "Near Countries" 近国 Kingoku, "Middle Countries" and "Far Countries" 遠国 Ongoku, based on distance from the capital Kyoto. Strictly speaking, today's Chugoku covers only the Middle Countries along the San'indo and San'yodo roads, and hence Okayama is sometimes not considered a full part of Chugoku, as only three of its five component provinces Mimasaka, Bizen and Bitchu were Middle Countries.
In Japanese, the characters 中国 and the reading Chūgoku are also used to mean "China". The same characters are used in Chinese, but pronounced Zhongguo. However, as the Chugoku region is always referred to with the qualifier "-chihō" and the People's Republic of China and Republic of China can be referenced by their full names, there is usually little scope for confusion.
