Nation Formation in Early Japan: An Entangled History

ABSTRACT The modernist argument that the nation of Japan emerged in the Meiji era (1868–1912) has achieved orthodoxy in the field of Japanese history. This article presents a challenge to this orthodoxy. My approach is two‐pronged. First, adopting a descriptive definition of the nation as a politically unified ethnicity, I analyse the social and symbolic processes that contributed to the political unification of ethnically related communities under the rule of the Yamato kingdom in Japan's Kofun period (200–600). Second, redressing a lacuna in the heterodox study of nation formation, I advance a theory of the wider context for the emergence of the Yamato kingdom. Through analysis of the linguistic, archaeological and textual evidence in light of the genomic data, I show that the Yamato kingdom arose in response to movements of people and culture across Northeast Asia in the wake of Inner Asian expansion in Late Antique Eurasia.