but these migrations from Korea to Japan continued for several centuries longer. As their numbers in Japan increased, they pushed their way up the broad highway of the Inland Sea to the central portion of Japan, conquering and absorbing the earlier inhabitants as they went.
One of the clans which, according to its own misty traditions, moved up the Inland Sea from an earlier home in Kyushu, finally settled in the small Yamato Plain not far from the eastern end of the Inland Sea. There it grew and prospered, establishing offshoots in new areas and absorbing other clans, until it had won a vague suzerainty over all of central and western Japan and even over parts of southern Korea.
Japanese control over southern Korea is represented in traditional Japanese history as the result of a semi-miraculous conquest by a warrior empress. A more plausible explanation would be that clans in southern Korea, feeling themselves more akin to related clans which had earlier crossed to Japan, sought aid from the peoples of western Japan against new invaders from northern Korea. In any case, Japanese power in southern Korea was apparently at its height in the second half of the fourth century and gradually waned thereafter, coming to an end in the year 562.
The suzerainty of the Yamato clan within Japan did not extinguish the autonomous rights of the other clans, but the priest-chief of the Yamato group became the chief among clan chiefs, and the special cults of this clan became the principal cults of the whole land. In this way worship of the Sun Goddess, the mythologi-