Between about 3500 and 2000 BP the Korean population grew apace, and thriving communities of the Songgukri type hived off daughter villages and their surrounding fields into less densely populated lands farther and farther south until the new way of life spread all the way selleck chemicals llc down the Korean Peninsula and across the narrow Tsushima Strait into Japan (Rhee et al., 2007). The Middle Mumun culture complex that appeared in northern Kyushu and quickly spread northward is called Yayoi by Japanese archeologists but there is no

mistaking its Korean origins, and the cemeteries of Yayoi settlements in Kyushu and southern Honshu demonstrate distinctive skeletal differences between the new immigrants and the Jomon Japanese they intermarried with. A thoroughgoing amalgamation of originally separate Korean and Japanese peoples and cultures followed as Korean emigrants flowed into Japan over centuries, intermarrying with the Jomon Japanese and giving rise to a new hybrid Japanese population and culture

that grew and spread throughout the Japanese archipelago. The archeological site of Yoshinogari in Northern Kyushu, now a Japanese national park, offers a splendid recreation of the newly imported Mumun/Yayoi cultural pattern in Japan (Saga Prefecture Board of Education, 1990). The new continental wave had a lasting impact on Japan, but there was much continuity as well. Korean agriculture and metallurgy were new, but more ancient Japanese practices selleck products and values persisted. The genetic heritage of Jomon times remains forever part of the now-hybrid Japanese population (Hanihara, 1991, Hudson, 1999 and Omoto and Saitou, 1997), and various Jomon cultural and economic forms persisted for generations in the Tokyo region and beyond in northern Honshu and Hokkaido. Indeed, throughout the archipelago the ancient fishing and shell-fishing traditions of aboriginal Jomon Japan will always remain economically essential (Aikens, 1981, Aikens, selleck chemical 1992, Aikens, 2012,

Aikens and Higuchi, 1982, Aikens and Rhee, 1992, Akazawa, 1982, Akazawa, 1986, Hanihara, 1991, Omoto and Saitou, 1997 and Rhee et al., 2007). The Korea–Japan connection has been long lasting, with commerce and cultural exchange maintained continuously between peninsula and archipelago ever since these early days, as detailed by Rhee et al. (2007). State-level societies built on the new economic base soon appeared, and the Mumun-Yayoi cultural horizon was followed in both Korea and Japan by increasingly complex tomb cultures that led in Korea to the Goguryeo, Baekje, Silla, and Gaya States during the Three Kingdoms period (∼AD 300–668), and in Japan to a long Kofun Period (AD 250–538) of competing warlords, out of which came the founding of the first Yamato state at about AD 650.