The Rising Sun

Nihonium marks a milestone: it was the first element discovered and named by researchers in Asia, breaking the long monopoly of the American, Russian and German laboratories on the making of new elements, and Japan took justifiable pride in the achievement. The name Nihon, or Nippon, means literally the origin of the sun, the Land of the Rising Sun, the poetic self-description of Japan that arose from its position to the east. There is a quiet fitness in a nation named for the sunrise adding a new element to the world's shared table for the first time. Nihonium has no ancient, mythological or alchemical tradition, being a synthetic element of the twenty-first century; its significance is geographic and historic, the entry of a new nation into the select company of element-makers.

The name Nihonium was formally confirmed by IUPAC in November 2016, and Japanese media and educators treated the moment as a significant milestone for national science, with the achievement prominently featured in school curricula and public science outreach as evidence that Japanese basic research could compete at the very frontier of physics alongside the traditional American, Russian and German powerhouses. RIKEN has since continued pursuing even heavier, still-undiscovered elements using the same painstaking fusion approach that finally yielded nihonium.