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The or 4=David Blake Willis and Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu: Transcultural Japan: At the Borderlands of Race, Gender and Identity,, p. 272: "Wajin," which is written with Chinese characters that can also be read "Yamato no hito" (Yamato person). are an East Asian ethnic group that comprises over 98% of the population of Japan. Genetic and anthropometric studies have shown that the Yamato people predominantly descend from the Yayoi people people, who migrated to Japan from the continent beginning during the 1st millennium BC, and to a lesser extent the indigenous Jōmon people who had inhabited the Japanese archipelago for millennia prior.
It can also refer to the first people that settled in Yamato Province (modern-day Nara Prefecture). Generations of Japanese archeologists, historians, and linguists have debated whether the word is related to the earlier 邪馬臺. Around the 6th century, the Yamato clan set up Japan's first and only dynasty. The clan became the ruling faction in the area, and incorporated the natives of Japan and migrants from the mainland. The clan leaders also elevated their own belief system that featured ancestor worship into a national religion known as Shinto.
The term came to be used around the late 19th century to distinguish the settlers of mainland Japan from minority ethnic groups inhabiting the peripheral areas of the then Empire of Japan, including the Ainu people, Ryukyuan people, Nivkh people, as well as Chinese, Koreans, and Austronesians (Taiwanese indigenous peoples and Micronesians) who were incorporated into the empire in the early 20th century. The term was eventually used as race propaganda. After Japan's surrender in World War II, the term became antiquated for suggesting pseudoscientific racist notions that have been discarded in many circles. Ever since the fall of the Empire, Japanese statistics only count their population in terms of nationality, rather than ethnicity.
The historical province of Yamato Province within Japan (now Nara Prefecture in central Honshu) borders Yamashiro Province (now the southern part of Kyoto Prefecture); however, the names of both provinces appear to contain the Japonic etymon yama, usually meaning "mountain(s)" (but sometimes having a meaning closer to "forest", especially in some Ryukyuan languages). Some other pairs of historical provinces of Japan exhibit similar sharing of one etymological element, such as Kazusa Province (<* Kami-tu-Fusa, "Upper Fusa Province") and Shimōsa (<* Simo-tu-Fusa, "Lower Fusa") or Kōzuke (<* Kami-tu-Ke, "Upper Keno Province") and Shimotsuke (<* Simo-tu-Ke, "Lower Ke"). In these latter cases, the pairs of provinces with similar names are thought to have been created through the subdivision of an earlier single province in prehistoric or protohistoric times.
Although the etymological origins of Wa remain uncertain, Chinese historical texts recorded an ancient people residing in the Japanese archipelago, named something like * ʼWâ or * ʼWər 倭. Carr surveys prevalent proposals for the etymology of Wa ranging from feasible (transcribing Japanese first-person pronouns waga 我が "my; our" and ware 我 "I; we; oneself") to shameful (writing Japanese Wa as 倭 implying "dwarf"), and summarizes interpretations for * ʼWâ "Japanese" into variations on two etymologies: "behaviorally 'submissive' or physically 'short. The first "submissive; obedient" explanation began with the (121 CE) Shuowen Jiezi dictionary. It defines 倭 as shùnmào 順皃 "obedient/submissive/docile appearance", graphically explains the "person; human' radical with a shùnmào wěi 委 "bent" phonetic, and quotes the above Shi Jing poem. "Conceivably, when Chinese first met Japanese," Carr suggests, "they transcribed Wa as * ʼWâ 'bent back' signifying 'compliant' bowing/obeisance. Gestures of respect is noted in early historical references to Japan." Examples include "Respect is shown by squatting",Hou Han Shu, tr. Tsunoda 1951, 2. and "they either squat or kneel, with both hands on the ground. This is the way they show respect."Wei Zhi, tr. Tsunoda 1951, 13.
Koji Nakayama interprets wēi 逶 "winding" as "very far away" and euphemistically translates Wō 倭 as "separated from the continent". The second etymology of wō 倭 meaning "dwarf (variety of an animal or plant species), midget, little people" has possible cognates in ǎi 矮 "low, short (of stature)", wō 踒 "strain; sprain; bent legs", and wò 臥 "lie down; crouch; sit (animals and birds)". Early Chinese dynastic histories refer to a Zhūrúguó 侏儒國 "pygmy/dwarf country" located south of Japan, associated with possibly Okinawa Island or the Ryukyu Islands. Carr cites the historical precedence of construing Wa as "submissive people" and the "Country of Dwarfs" legend as evidence that the "little people" etymology was a secondary development.
Initially, to justify Imperial Japan's conquest of Continental Asia, Imperial Japanese propaganda espoused the ideas of Japanese supremacy by claiming that the Japanese represented a combination of all East Asian peoples and cultures, emphasizing heterogeneous traits. Imperial Japanese propaganda started to place an emphasis on the ideas of racial purity and the supremacy of the Yamato race when the Second Sino-Japanese War intensified. Fuelled by the ideology of racial supremacy, racial purity, and national unity between 1868 and 1945, the Meiji and Imperial Japanese government carefully identified and forcefully assimilated marginalized populations, which included Okinawans, the Ainu, and other underrepresented non-Yamato groups, imposing assimilation programs in language, culture and religion.
According to Aya Fujiwara, a postdoctoral Fellow at McMaster University, in an attempt to have some influence over the Japanese diaspora in Canada, Imperial Japanese authorities used the term Yamato as race propaganda during World War II, saying that:
"For Japanese-Canadians in particular, the Emperor was the most natural symbol to promote primordial national sentiment and superiority of the Yamato race - the term that the Japanese used to distinguish themselves from others. This term meant a noble race, the members of which saw themselves as "chosen people". The modernization of Japan, which began with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, produced a number of historical writings that tried to define the Japanese under the official scheme to create a strong nation. Imported to Canada by Japanese intellectuals, a "common myth of descent" that Japanese people belonged to the noble Yamato race headed by the Emperor since the ancient period was one of the core elements that defined Japanese-Canadian ethno-racial identity in the 1920s and the 1930s. The evolution and survival of an ethnic community, Anthony D. Smith argues, relies on the complicated "belief-system" that creates "a sacred communion of the people" with cultural and historical distinctiveness. During this period, Japanese intellectuals, scholars, and official representatives sought to keep Japanese Canadians within their sphere of influence, thereby reinforcing a transnational myth that would promote Japanese Canadians' sense of racial pride as God's chosen people in the world."
World War II and Holocaust historian Bryan Mark Rigg noted in 2020 how Yamato master race theory was included in government propaganda and schools in the decades leading up to World War II and how Gaijin were regarded in Japan as Untermensch. Discrimination also occurred against non-Yamato races in Japan such as the Ainu people and Ryūkyū peoples.
In present-day Japan, the term Yamato minzoku may be seen as antiquated for connoting racial notions that have been discarded in many circles since Japan's surrender in World War II. (2025). 9780203884997, Routledge. ISBN 9780203884997 "Japanese people" or even "Japanese-Japanese" are often used instead, although these terms also have complications owing to their ambiguous blending of notions of ethnicity and nationality.
In present-day Japan statistics only counts their population in terms of nationality, rather than ethnicity, thus the number of ethnic Yamato and their actual population numbers are ambiguous.
Archaeological evidence shows that Japonic speakers were first present in the southern and central regions of the Korean Peninsula. These peninsular Japonic-speaking agriculturalists were later replaced/assimilated by Koreanic-speakers, from southern Manchuria, likely causing the Yayoi migration and expansion within the Japanese archipelago. Whitman (2012) argues that the Yayoi agriculturalists were ethnically distinct from proto-Koreans and were present in the Korean peninsula during the Mumun pottery period. According to him, proto-Japonic languages arrived in the Korean peninsula around 1500 BC and was introduced to the Japanese archipelago by the Yayoi agriculturalists at around 950 BC, during the late Jōmon period. Koreanic languages arrived later from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula at around 300 BC and coexisted with the descendants of the Japonic Mumun cultivators (or assimilated them). Both had influence on each other and a later founder effect diminished the internal variety of both language families.
Overall, the most well-regarded theory is that present-day Japanese primarily descend from the Yayoi people and arguably, continental East Asian migrants from the Kofun period, and to a lesser extent, the pre-existing heterogenous Jōmon population in the Japanese archipelago.
From the Meiji period—during which the Ryukyuan's kingdom was annexed by Japan—and onward, Japanese scholars such as Shinobu Orikuchi and Kunio Yanagita supported the later discredited ideological viewpoint that they were a sub-group of the Yamato people. The Ryukyuans were forcibly assimilated into Japanese (Yamato) people with their ethnic identity, tradition, culture and language suppressed by the Meiji government. Today, the inhabitants of the Ryukyu Islands are mostly a mixture of Yamato and Ryukyuan.
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