HISTORY OF JAPAN
The first human inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago have been traced to prehistoric times around 30,000 BCE. The Jōmon period, named after its cord-marked pottery, was followed by the Yayoi period in the first millennium BCE when new inventions were introduced from Asia. During this period, the first known written reference to Japan was recorded in the Chinese Book of Han in the first century CE. Around the 3rd century BCE, the Yayoi people from the continent immigrated to the Japanese archipelago and introduced iron technology and agricultural civilization.[1] Because they had an agricultural civilization, the population of the Yayoi began to grow rapidly and ultimately overwhelmed the Jōmon people, natives of the Japan archipelago who were hunter-gatherers.[2] Between the fourth to ninth century, Japan's many kingdoms and tribes gradually came to be unified under a centralized government, nominally controlled by the Emperor of Japan. The imperial dynasty established at this...
