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Ethnic composition
Japan is homogenous in national aspect: over 96% of the population consider themselves native Japanese. In Japan there also live about 24,000 Ainu people (mostly on the Hokkaido Island), about 700,000 Koreans and about 200,000 Chinese. Among citizens of Japan there are representatives of many other nationalities (including the Russians), but their percentage composition is insufficient. There is also a separate group of the so-called barakumin who anthropologically and ethnically do not differ from the rest of the Japanese, but who since the Middle Ages have belonged to outcast communities of the feudal era and have faced social discrimination. In the 20th century such discrimination was prohibited by law.
The Japanese ethnicity began to form in the 3rd – 6th centuries AD as a result of several migration waves from the Pacific Ocean islands (through Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands) and from the continent of Asia. The Austronesian and the Ural-Altai (Tunguska-Manchurian) components; some researchers also distinguish the Palaeoasian component. These tribes arrived to the Japanese archipelago from the Korean Peninsula between the 3rd century BC and the 3rd century AD. There was also a further flow of migrants from Korea including representatives of nobility in the 5th – 6th centuries. In the 3rd-6th centuries the patriarchic state of Yamato was formed that originally occupied the territory of the central regions of Honshu Island and in the north of Kyushu. Gradually the rulers of the “Yamato people” that formed the core of the proto-Japanese society subdued other regions of Honshu, Kyushu and Sikoku and assimilated the local population that, however, still preserved local peculiarities for a long time.
Until the 16th century sufficient regional differences between the central, southern, northern and eastern regions of Japan could be observed. The inhabitants of the central (metropolitan) provinces located around Kyoto considered themselves direct successors of the Yamato traditions, and viewed the inhabitants of other regions as “barbarian” periphery. The Japanese nationality finally formed by the end of the 16th – first half of the 17th century when the country was united in a military way after centuries of feudal separation that hindered the formation of common national self-consciousness.
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