Far East

My mates in the UK sometimes say the word "far east", which means east Asia such as Korea, Japan, Thailand. Namely, for them east Asia is completely distanced from the UK and also the Europe.

In Japanese, we scarcely use "far east" but, Japanese dictionary has this word. Contrary to this, we never say "far west" and there is no word on dictionary.

Presumably, the word "far east" was born in Europe and was translated into Japanese. It might be a biased thought, they are not interested in east Asian less than we are into the European countries.