Yamato people

• Japanese: 大和民族 (yamato minzoku)

"Yamato people" is a term used to refer to the ethnic Japanese, as a people or an ethnicity, especially in contrast to the people(s) of the Ryukyu Islands and the Ainu, and especially in discussions of ancient origins.

The so-called "dual structure" hypothesis proposed by Hanihara Kazurô in the 1980s-90s remains perhaps the most widespread in the popular consciousness today. It suggests that all of the Japanese archipelago (including Ainu lands and the Ryukyu Islands) were once inhabited by the Jômon people, and that it was the admixture of the Yayoi people, to different extents or otherwise in different ways in different places, that resulted in the emergence of the ethnic (genetic) differences between the Ainu, Japanese (Yamato), and Ryukyuan peoples. While Hanihara suggested that modern Japanese likely contained equal biological inheritance from the Jômon and Yayoi peoples, more recent genetic studies have shown that most ethnic Japanese, on average, have around ten percent Jômon DNA.

Gregory Smits leaves aside the question of whether the Hanihara thesis is accurate for the Ainu case - i.e. whether the idea that the Ainu are descended from Jômon people who intermixed significantly less with Yayoi newcomers than the Yamato people is the best or most helpful idea for understanding the differences between the two peoples. However, he argues that in the newest (re)conceptions of Ryukyuan origins, the Gusuku period (c. roughly 12th-14th centuries) - during which significant numbers of Japanese/Yamato people intermixed with the people of the Ryukyus - was far more influential in defining the ethnic character of the Ryukyuan peoples today than earlier developments.

References

• Gregory Smits, Early Ryukyuan History: A New Model, University of Hawaii Press (2024), 71-72.