If you could ask the most Educated people in England in the early 1500s, like Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More, and Cardinal Wolsey their knowledge about the Far-East like China and Japan, what would they have known?.
Many of them would have been familiar with Marco Polo's work, so they would have understood that there was such a thing as China (a big country on the Asian mainland) and Japan (another society, a bit different, on some islands off the Asian mainland).