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.
