It wasn't until much later that a friend coworker explained that while the word meant literally "blond" or of Caucasian descent, the connotation was very similar to "gaijin" in the same context: a specific reference to one being not only white and outsider, but less than human as well; a white ghost.
You're confusing the Japanese Gaijin 外人 = "outside(r)" + "person" (
compare Nihonjin 日本人 = sun "日" + origin of "本" + person "人", the Japanese word for "Japanese") with the Chinese Gweilo 鬼佬 = Ghost "鬼" + Man "佬" (
compare 中國人 for "Chinese person" = central "中" + state "國" + person "人").
You can see that Chinese and Japanese share the ideogram 人 for person and in fact if you wrote 外人 for "foreigner" to someone Chinese they would know exactly what you meant, even though they didn't speak a word of Japanese. I wonder if written Japanese looks to the Chinese like Chinglish looks to us - "
OK, you're using lots of words I know, but you're using them all for the wrong things and in the wrong place."
Guessing game for everybody, to be completed without Googling: 本田 is a Japanese surname, it's a very well known surname in the west. From the above you should already know that 本 is "origin of", and I'll tell you for free that 田 is "paddy field" (You can even
see it is, neat eh?) and is pronounced on it's own as "ta". You'll have to mash the pronunciation a bit to get the familiar way of pronouncing the surname.
So whose surname is "origin of (the) paddy fields" and how do you pronounce it?