The Yayoi Period

The Yayoi Period, generally dated from about 300 BCE to 300 CE and named for a Tokyo neighborhood where its distinctive pottery was first identified, marks the arrival of wet-rice paddy agriculture, bronze and iron metalworking, and organized textile weaving in the Japanese archipelago, technologies brought largely by migration and contact from the Korean peninsula and mainland China. Rice farming allowed much denser, more permanent settlement than the preceding Jomon Period and produced surplus wealth that fed the growth of social stratification, fortified settlements, and, by the period's later centuries, competing regional chiefdoms. Chinese historical records, including the third-century Wei Zhi, describe a Yayoi-era polity called Yamatai ruled by a shaman-queen named Himiko, one of the earliest written references to Japan by an outside civilization. The period ends with the rise of large keyhole-shaped burial mounds that define the following Kofun Period.