Yamato Period
The Yamato period (大和) (better known as the Kofun period) is the period of Japanese history when the Japanese Imperial court ruled from modern day Nara prefecture, then known as Yamato province.
While conventionally assigned to the period circa 250 - 710 A.D.,
the actual start of Yamato rule is disputed. The court's supremacy was challenged throughout the period from Bizen and Bitchū provinces in what is now known as Okayama prefecture, and it was only into the 6th century A.D. that the Yamato clans could be said to have any major advantage over their neighbouring clans.
Hence, Japanese archaeologists (and textbooks) tend to prefer the less deterministic term Kofun period, which reflects the diagnostic archaeological feature, the large, often keyhole shaped burial mounds (kofun) found across mainland Japan.
The Yamato Period can be divided into two parts based upon the arrival of Buddhism:
The above description is a typical Japanese version of Yamato period. It is certainly time for the readers of books and journals published in English to hear a typical Korean perspective on the origin of the Yamato kingdom and the roots of the Japanese imperial family. The essence of a typical Korean perspective is as follows.
The hunting-gathering Jomon culture (10,000-300 BC) on the Japanese archipelago was the product of the Ainu and Malayo-Polynesian people, while on the other hand, the rice-cultivating Yayoi culture (300 BC-300 AD) was the product of the Kaya (Karak) people from southern Korea together with Ainu and Malayo-Polynesian aborigine. The proto-Japanese people, speaking the proto-Japanese language, were formed during the Yayoi period. The early tomb culture (circa 300-375 AD) was, as Egami Namio (Thoery of Horseriders) contends, an extension of the Yayoi culture.
The late tomb culture (circa 375-675 AD) was, however, brought about by the Yamato kingdom, the first unified nation-state on the Japanese islands that was newly established at the end of the fourth century by the Paekche people from the Korean peninsula. Syntactically and morphologically, the similarity between the Korean and Japanese languages was very much strengthened, although the lexical and phonological influence of the Ainu and Malayo-Polynesian languages cast a long shadow on the subsequent evolution of the Japanese language. We owe to Kojiki and Nihongi a detailed account of the influx of the Paekche people into Yamato area.
Ishida Eiichiro (1974, p.85), a Tokyo University professor of cultural anthropology, stated: "Detailed research by historians had made clear that the greatest wave of immigration took place immediately after the unification of Japan by the Yamato court. If the Yamato court was established without any relation to Korea, how can these facts be explained?"
