During the Meiji Restoration, Japanese words were invented en masse to represent western concepts such as revolution (革命, kakumei) or democracy (民主, minshu).
Sometimes, an inversion of the character order is necessary, as in the construction of 立腹 (りっぷく) rippuku from 腹が立つ (はらがたつ) hara ga tatsu for "anger".
As Western influence began to take hold in Japan during the 19th-century Meiji Restoration, Japanese scholars discovered that they needed new words to translate the books imported from Europe.
For example, 世界 was a Classical Chinese Buddhist term which became the modern word for "world", and kagaku (科学, science) was taken from "欽定千叟宴詩".
Following the Meiji Restoration and the Japanese victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, many of these terms found their way into the modern Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, where they remain today.