Japan not only borrows words from English; it often changes them radically. The present study reviews both the historical background to contact between English and Japanese and the periods in which English loans entered the Japanese language. Such loans are particularly significant sociolinguistically because they shed light on the exposure of the Japanese to English since they opened up to the world. Discussing the inflow of such borrowings both provides a background to the many English-derived words currently in daily use in Japanese and makes a broader point about the adoption of loanwords as a cultural process involving both acculturation and deculturation.