Welcome to Gaia! ::

heian is nothing, there more history before heian:

The beggining:

In the beginning japan was connected to china (9500 BCE) from there Ainu people came to japan. they lived on the china russia border, and they have caucasian blood. But their reign was short. after ainu had come to japan, some hundred year more people from manchu (eastern china, above korea) setled in japan.now where it get interesting: the manchuan mix with ainu and after enough of there race mix the dilute race is jomon people, but oddly, they push their ancestor,the Ainu, up north. but jomon were unskilled(they are technically part chinese after all ), and had primitive language and all could make pottery and primitive tools, they did not fish but rely on Ainu way, catching food with hand. this is luckily when korena came. korean mix with jomon and ainu and make new race:Yayoi. These people fished wove garment, made prized swords, valued honour, their china neighbour they value, looked better than jomon and:Invented japanese. many year later,(660BCE) Jimmu tenno was crowned. This was start of Yamato, the period at which Nara was the capital and Yamato family ruled.

PHEW, THATS ALL FOR NOW!

660 BCE until Year 1 : Nothing important happened; just some mail to and from places such as Korea and China through Korea, and Japan was, to them, a country named 'Wa', whose natives were disposed of and the land was ruled by the invaders thru chiefdom, the strongest of the chiefs was the one the Japanese later called 'Emperor'.

That far the Koreans were accurate, because since Jimmu's time the actual title of Japanese Emperors was 'Chief' -- 'Nin-o' (chief of men), 'Omi' (great man), and variants of those, none of which had anything to do with imperial glitter but based largely on manowar quality.

Of course Korea, which, at the time, wasn't even called 'Korea' (there were many kingdoms in Korea, like Kokuli, Silla and Pakche), was to have an everlasting bad relation with Japan, so the truth about what Japan was like before the year 749 is thereby can be dug in-between the Japanese myth and the Korean disdain.



Ruler of Japan according to a Korean history book looks like Fred Flintstone's colleague of Bedrock.

The first ruler of Japan ('Wa') mentioned by name but, alas, not by year at all, is 'Queen Pimiku'.

That's the Korean dialect; the real Japanese word is most likely to be 'Himiko' -- which means nothing but 'Princess'.


The name 'Wa' to call Japan with came from the same Chinese syllable that the Japanese pronounce 'Yamato'.

The latter means, ironically enough in this era of hatcheting and beheading, 'peace'.

That's how the Japanese referred to their country those days, as 'The Land of Peace'.

And at the left is how Himiko of the yearless 'Wa' looked like, according to the imagination of some unnamed but apparently authoritative staffers of the Japanese National Museum.

The fashion is a hybrid of the Japanese's own Heian era (click the name for pictures) and what the Ainu people used to don (click here for that). The headband, though, is Korean and Chinese.

Himiko, according to the Koreans, was 60 years old or so, a celibate, and a sorcerer. But the Japanese chieftains somewhat liked her, so the country was more or less okay under her rule.




This Land of Peace, which location was between today's Nara and Osaka, had their own language from the beginning, which was not much different from today's Japanese.

But, whenever came the time to write something, the Japanese had to get a bit nicer to whichever Korean immigrant around, because they had no alphabet.

So they used Chinese characters in this prolific snail-mail era, via these Koreans, who, as far as I know, could have just scribbled jokes down when told to write about trade -- because the Japanese, no matter what they said, couldn't read it.

71 - 130 : Emperor Keiko spent his entire time in office subduing unrelenting tribes of Kyushu, which some historians say were originally Malayans ('Malay' is the dominant ethnicity of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore). He also had to go to war regularly against the natives of the Japanese isles, the Ainu people.



201 : Most famous Empress Jingu Kogo -- néé Okinaga Tarashi -- ascended because her Emperor Chuai unexpectedly died while they were preparing invasion of Korea.

Empress Jingu matters in the history of Japan not because it placates 20th century feminists, but because coveting Korea would be a routine imperial dream of the Japanese until 20th century.

313 : Empress Jingu's son Ojin, the most warlike Emperor after Jimmu, died this year, and Emperor Nintoku instantly made him the God of War by Shintoism, given a new name of 'Hachiman'. He was elevated so high into divinity because all his relatively short life was spent eliminating the Ainu warriors in some unprecedented scale.

The life of Hachiman marked the start of samuraihood, since it was only in his era that the Japanese warriors started to believe in their own collective talent in wars, having Hachiman to demonstrate how much more sophisticated they were in the art of killing if compared to the Ainus who, until they met Hachiman, had been rather superior in this game.

Hundreds of years later, Hachiman would be appropriated by the Minamoto clan of Kamakura as their very own god. (Just in case you haven't noticed, samurai clans had their own gods. Click here for the procedure of this biz of deifying ancestors or alternately claiming anscestry from already existing gods.)

Besides leaving this major legacy to japankind, the same Emperor Nintoku would also leave something of his own to posterity: the awesome burial site like in the picture below, which surely has been transmitting a favorable impression about our species in the minds of aliens out there, reminding them of what they did to the cornfields of Nebraska.