Noun

1. A non-Japanese person.
   • 1976, Bill Henderson, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, Pushcart Press, page 207,

     For a while he began to speak Japanese, rather slangy, never having seemed to learn it — karoshi for death from overwork, yakitaori-ya for eatery, and gaijin for clumsy foreigner.

   • 1992, David Pollack, Reading Against Culture, Cornell Press, page 230

     And I did not intend to live my life as a gaijin—not merely, like the expatriate, someone by definition permanently out of place but someone unwanted as well.

   • 2004, Troy Anderson, The Way of Go, Simon and Schuster, page 149

     [...] I was placed in the gaijins' dormitory area up on the third floor.

   • 2006, Alan M. Klein, Growing the Game: The Globalization of Major League Baseball, page 127

     Oh's pitchers later acknowledged that they were instructed—under penalty of a fine—to throw no strikes to the gaijin.

Noun

1. outsider; an estranged, unfamiliar person
   • 995-999: Fusōshū (volume 9; Gunsho Ruijū volume 8, page 578)

   口畔懸河渉漢深。春杉拭盞就花陰。外人傾耳猶添愛、況是堂中父母心。

   • c. 13th century: Heike Monogatari (page 123)

   外人もなき所に兵具をとゝのへ

   • c. 1349: Renri Hishō (page 38)

   但、外人など上手おほからむ座にては、聊か斟酌すべし

   • 1597: Ekirin Setsuyōshū (page 133)

   外人 (グワイジン)

   Guaijin, グヮイジン(外人) Focano fito. (他の人) 他国の人、すなわち、土着の人ではない者.

   • 1617: Gennabon Kagakushū (page 73)

   外人 (グワイジン) 他人也

2. an abbreviation for 外国人; a person from a foreign country; an alien, a foreign national; a person who is not Japanese
   • 1875: 文明論之概略 (page 18)

   譬えば頑固なる士民は外国人を悪むを以て常とせり。又学者流の人にても少しく見識ある者は外人の挙動を見て決して心酔するに非ず，之を悦ばざるの心は彼の頑民に異なることなしと云うも可なり。