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The term first came into use in European geopolitical discourse in the 15th century, particularly the British, denoting the Far East as the "farthest" of the three "Easts", beyond the Near East and the Middle East. Likewise, during the Qing dynasty of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the term "Tàixī (泰西)" – i.e., anything further west than the Arab world – was used to refer to the Western countries.
Since the mid-20th century, the term has mostly gone out of use for the region in international mass media outlets due to its perceived Eurocentric connotations. North Asia is sometimes excluded due to cultural and ethnic differences.
The term is still used in Russia to refer to its sparsely populated easternmost regions (being "far" in this case from the political, economic and cultural centres, Moscow and Saint Petersburg).
Popularization
Among Western Europeans, prior to the colonial era, Far East referred to anything further east than the Middle East. In the 16th century, King John III of Portugal called India a "rich and interesting country in the Far East (Extremo Oriente)." The term was popularized during the period of the British Empire as a blanket term for lands to the east of the British Indian Empire.
In pre-World War I European geopolitics, Near East referred to the relatively nearby lands of the Ottoman Empire, Middle East denoted north-western Southern Asian region and Central Asia, and the Far East meant countries along the western Pacific Ocean and eastern Indian Ocean. Many European languages have analogous terms, such as the French (Extrême-Orient), Spanish (Extremo Oriente), Portuguese (Extremo Oriente), Italian (Estremo Oriente), German (Ferner Osten), Polish (Daleki Wschód), Norwegian (Det fjerne Østen) and Dutch (Verre Oosten).
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Cultural and geographic meaning
Significantly, the term evokes cultural as well as geographic separation; the Far East is not just geographically distant, but also culturally exotic. It never refers, for instance, to the culturally Western nations of Australia and New Zealand, which lie even farther to the east of Europe than East Asia itself. This combination of cultural and geographic subjectivity was well illustrated in 1939 by Robert Menzies, a prime minister of Australia. Reflecting on his country's geopolitical situation with the onset of war, Menzies commented that: "The problems of the Pacific are different. What Great Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north."
Far East, in its usual sense, is comparable to terms such as the Orient (Latin for "East"), Eastern world, or simply the East, all of which may refer, broadly, to East and South-East Asia in general. Occasionally, albeit more in the past, the Russian Far East and South Asia have been deemed to be part of the Far East.
Commenting on such terms, John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer (both professors of East Asian Studies at Harvard University) wrote, in East Asia: The Great Tradition:
When Europeans traveled far to the east to reach Cathay, Japan and the Indies, they naturally gave those distant regions the general name 'Far East.' Americans who reached China, Japan and Southeast Asia by sail and steam across the Pacific could, with equal logic, have called that area the 'Far West.' For the people who live in that part of the world, however, it is neither 'East' nor 'West' and certainly not 'Far.' A more generally acceptable term for the area is 'East Asia,' which is geographically more precise and does not imply the outdated notion that Europe is the center of the civilized world.
Today, the term remains in the names of some longstanding institutions, including the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Far Eastern University in Manila, the Far East University in South Korea, and Far East, the periodical magazine of the Missionary Society of St. Columban. Furthermore, the United States and United Kingdom have historically incorporated Far East in the names of several military units and commands in the region, such as the British Royal Navy's Far East Fleet, for instance.