Mimana

As Atkins notes, "The location, expanse, and Japaneseness of Imna/Mimana remain among the most disputed issues in East Asian historiography.

The theory has lost popularity since the 1970s,[9] largely because of the complete lack of archeological evidence that such a settlement would have produced,[1] the fact that a centralized Japanese state with power projection capability did not exist at that time (the Yayoi period), and the more likely possibility that Nihongi is describing (or misinterpreting, intentionally or not) an event that had occurred centuries before its composition in which Jingū's conquest is a dramatized and politicized version of her immigration to the Japanese Archipelago, which would have been one of many during the Yayoi period (Hanihara Kazurō has suggested that the annual immigrant influx to the Japanese Archipelago from the Asian mainland during the Yayoi period ranged from 350 to 3,000).

At first, they simply chose to ignore it, but more recently, their position has been bolstered as continuing archeological excavations on the Korean Peninsula have failed to produce any evidence supporting the hypothesis.

[12] Korean scholar Chun-Gil Kim, in his 2005 book The History of Korea, discusses the topic under the section "The Mimana Fallacy.

A second theory on Mimana was proposed by the North Korean scholar Gim Seokhyeong, who suggested that Mimana was a political entity from the Korean Peninsula (possibly Gaya) that had a colony on the Japanese Islands, somewhere around the modern-day city of Ōyama, Ōita in Ōita Prefecture; thus Nihongi should be understood as referring only to the Japanese Islands and Jingū's conquest a description of a migration to a land in the Japanese Archipelago, not the Korean Peninsula.[14][15]: p.

[9][18][19][15][clarification needed] According to several linguists, including Alexander Vovin and Juha Janhunen, Japonic languages were spoken in large parts of the southern Korean Peninsula.