[1] The people of the Yayoi culture are regarded as the spreaders of agriculture and Japonic languages throughout the whole archipelago and had both local Jōmon hunter-gatherer and mainland Asian migrant ancestry.
Yayoi people refers specifically to the mixed descendants of Jōmon hunter-gatherers and mainland Asian migrants, who adopted (rice) agriculture and other continental material culture.
[8] There are several hypotheses about the geographic origin of the mainland Asian migrants: According to Alexander Vovin, the Yayoi were present in the central and southern parts of Korea before they were displaced and assimilated by arriving proto-Koreans.
[21] In recent times, through archaeological and genealogical research, Japanese scholars have largely associated the origin of the Yayoi people with the Korean peninsula and have stated their impact in terms of shared ancestry between the two modern populations.
This idea began with finding Kara-styled bronzewares and shipwreck remains on the coasts of the Korean peninsula,[29] prompting some historians to suggest that there was a group of seafaring people who entered Japan via Korea from the seas during the Yayoi period.