Would you believe me if I told you Japanese 蜜（みつ）and English ‘Mead’ were… related???
Well, they are. Thanks to our much-neglected friend Tocharian (not really ancient though, sorry for the clickbait).
First, I should say something that surprises most non-linguists (idk how it’s not common knowledge by now): the Germanic (including English), Romance, Greek, Slavic, Gaelic and even North Indian languages are decendants of one language: Proto-Indo European (aka PIE). These branches came to be through migration and loss of contact with one another, but originally, it was one group of people speaking one language. So perhaps you’re already surprised that English and Hindi are distant cousins.
I’ll take you to what’s relevant to this post, though! One branch of the Indo-European family, mistakenly called Tocharian (but we’ll call it that anyway) was situated as far East as Western China, and was a part of the Silk Road. When languages touch (like Tocharian and Chinese), they borrow words from one another. One of these touchy words originally came from PIE’s
*médʰu (“honey; mead”) → Tocharian ‘mit’ → Old Chinese 蜜 ‘mit / mjit’ (reconstructed) → Middle Chinese ‘mjit’ (reconstructed) → Japanese 蜜 ‘mitsu’
As you can imagine, this is also where English gets its word ‘mead’.
Here’s a link to all attested Tocharian words in Japanese (there’s not many): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_terms_derived_from_Tocharian_languages
Also, since the Proto-Indo-Europeans were animal domesticators compared to China’s agriculturalists, it’s also believed (by some, not widely accepted) that the root that gives us English ‘chariot’ gave Japan, through Chinese, what would become the onyomi 車 (しゃ). Crazy right?
