Preface: I do not know Japanese, so please forgive any misnomers and inaccuracies. Also please forgive the crude transcriptions of the Japanese sounds; I mean no offense.
When watching anime/playing video games with Japanese soundtracks, I've often heard characters exclaim "ばかな!", apparently roughly transliterated as "ba ka na", which many anime/videogames translate as "impossible" and sounds to me eerily like bu4 ke3 neng2 (不可能 - "impossible" in Chinese). It's obviously tempting for me, with my Chinese background, to think that the phonological similarity is something more than coincidence: for example, I've heard the phrase "KAI SEE" in contexts where it quite obviously corresponds to Chinese kai1shi3/開始, so in some instances such similarities are actually not coincidental. But in this case it seems rather dubious to me that "ba ka na" is some Japanese reading of 不可能, which is a bit "too Chinese" of a construction, and I'd like to settle the speculation for good by inquiring as to the true genesis of this phrase.
So, where did this expression come from? One colleague argued that it stems from the the Japanese word "baka" (馬鹿), in which case I suppose one possible path towards the present meaning of "ba ka na" might be something like "this [situation] is just stupid" > "are you kidding me" > "impossible". Is this accurate, or is it sui generis, or something else entirely? It's driving me a bit mad, since right now everything time my ears hear "ba ka na", my brain hears "bu ke neng".
