[3] The term came to be used around the late 19th century to distinguish the settlers of mainland Japan from minority ethnic groups inhabiting the peripheral areas of the then Japanese Empire, including the Ainu, Ryukyuans, Nivkh, as well as Chinese, Koreans, and Austronesians (Taiwanese indigenous peoples and Micronesians) who were incorporated into the Empire of Japan in the early 20th century.

After Japan's surrender in World War II, the term became antiquated for suggesting pseudoscientific racist notions that have been discarded in many circles.

The Wajin (also known as Wa or Wō) or Yamato were the names early China used to refer to an ethnic group living in Japan around the time of the Three Kingdoms period.

Ancient and medieval East Asian scribes regularly wrote Wa or Yamato with one and the same Chinese character 倭, which translated to "dwarf", until the 8th century, when the Japanese found fault with it, replacing it with 和 "harmony, peace, balance".

It defines 倭 as shùnmào 順皃 "obedient/submissive/docile appearance", graphically explains the "person; human' radical with a shùnmàowěi 委 "bent" phonetic, and quotes the above Shi Jing poem.

[4] Pseudoscientific racial theories, which included the false belief of the superiority of the Yamato character, were used to justify military expansionism, discriminatory practices, and ethnocentrism.

[9] Imperial Japanese propaganda started to place an emphasis on the ideas of racial purity and the supremacy of the Yamato race when the Second Sino-Japanese War intensified.

This term meant a noble race, the members of which saw themselves as “chosen people.” The modernization of Japan, which began with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, produced a number of historical writings that tried to define the Japanese under the official scheme to create a strong nation.

The evolution and survival of an ethnic community, Anthony D. Smith argues, relies on the complicated “belief-system” that creates “a sacred communion of the people” with cultural and historical distinctiveness.

U.S. policy in Japan terminated the purge of high-ranking war criminals and reinstalled the leaders who were responsible for the creation and manifestation of prewar race propaganda.

[29] The Yamato show a close genetic relationship with other modern Northeastern Asians being most similar to Koreans, northern Han Chinese, and other clusters found in the area.

[30][31][32][33][34][35] Genealogical research has indicated extremely similar genetic profiles between these three East Asian ethnic groups, making them nearly indistinguishable from each other and ancient samples.

Yamatos were also found to share high genetic affinity with the ancient (~8,000 BC) sample from Devil's Gate Cave in the Amur region of Northeast Asia.

In any case, however, the study clarifies that "the estimate of ancestry profile cannot provide the definitive history of original migration, unless it will be further verified against historical evidence.

[39] Third-century Chinese sources reported that the Wa/early Yamato lived on raw fish, vegetables, and rice served on bamboo and wooden trays, clapped their hands in worship (something still done in Shinto shrines today), and built earthen-grave mounds.

[64][65] From the Meiji period—during which the Ryukyuan's kingdom was annexed by Japan—and onward, Japanese scholars such as Shinobu Orikuchi and Kunio Yanagita supported the later discredited ideological viewpoint that they were a sub-group of the Yamato people.

The Ryukyuans were forcibly assimilated into Japanese (Yamato) people with their ethnic identity, tradition, culture and language suppressed by the Meiji government.