already had some contact with the higher civilization of China before coming to Japan.
These invaders, with their superior bronze and iron civilization, soon became the dominant group among the varied peoples of early Japan. They were the founders of the historical Japanese state. Three of their most important possessions, the sword, the curved jewel, and the mirror, in time became the “Three Imperial Regalia,” which even today are the symbols of imperial authority.
The invaders from Korea were organized into petty clans. Chinese traders who visited western Japan around the year A.D. 200 found the country divided into scores of small clan states, each ruled by a high priestess or a high priest. At about that time feminine rule, strongly implied in Japanese mythology, seems to have been giving way to masculine rule.
A feeling of clan solidarity and a belief in the importance of hereditary rights and authority were undoubtedly strong among these people, for these forces have been dominant throughout Japanese history and are still much alive in modern Japan. Probably the figure of the aristocrat soldier, the man on horseback, was already important in Japanese society, for this shadowy figure of early Japan survived the deluge of borrowed Chinese civilization, to emerge at a later day as the backbone of a feudal Japan.
The religion of the early Japanese was primarily a naïve nature worship which, probably under Chinese influence, later came to include a certain amount of ancestor worship. Nameless at first, it was later given the Chinese-sounding name of Shinto, “the way of the