is in the narrow sense, the old name of the ethnic group of the Yayoi people who lived in the Japanese archipelago. In the wider sense, an ethnic group that was mainly active at sea between mainland China, the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago.
In general the Wajin that established themselves on the Japanese archipelago became the Yayoi people, the ancestors of the Yamato people. The word "Wajin" also refers to related groups outside of Japan. Later in the history, the Kanji (wa) has been altered to (wa) and it is used to refer to the Japanese people ().
The first secure appearance of Wajin is in "Treatise on Geography" () of the Book of Han. After that, "Gishi Wajinden" (), a Japanese abbreviation for the "account of Wajin" in the "Biographies of the Wuhuan, Xianbei, and Dongyi" (), volume 30 of the Book of Wei of the Records of the Three Kingdoms,、。 described their lifestyle, habits and the way of society.
Descriptions about Wajin can be found in the Old Book of Tang (945 AD) and the New Book of Tang (1060 AD).
Several linguists, including Alexander Vovin and Juha Janhunen, suggest that Japonic languages were spoken by Wajin and were present in large parts of the southern Korean Peninsula. According to Vovin, these "Peninsular Japonic languages" were replaced by Koreanic-speakers (possibly belonging to the Han-branch). This event was possibly the reason for the Yayoi-migration into Japan.Vovin, Alexander (2013). "From Koguryo to Tamna: Slowly riding to the South with speakers of Proto-Korean". Korean Linguistics. 15 (2): 222–240. Janhunen also suggests that early Baekje was still predominantly Japonic-speaking before they got replaced or assimilated into the new Korean society.
Origin of the name "Wa" ( was the Chinese name for Japan in ancient times, but the oldest source on its origin is a document written in the 200s by the Wei official Rujun (), who argued that Wa was derived from the radical "man" and custom of "tattooing () on the face." This theory is also supported by many Japanese scholars, as the indigenous Ainu people of Japan have the custom of tattooing (sinuye).[https://www.furutasigaku.jp:443/jfuruta/kaiho172/kai17201.html
As Baiyue and Wu people The ethnic concept of "Wa-zoku" (, "Wa people") encompasses a wide range of regions and does not limit to the Wajin of the Japanese archipelago. According to Kenzaburo's theory, Wa-zoku are Wajin who came to the Japanese archipelago with rice crops, whose ancestor was the same as the Yayoi people. Torigoe says that the original place of the Wa-zoku is Yunnan.
Suwa Haruo considered Wa-zoku to be part of Baiyue in southern China.
The Wajin (and the Yayoi) are possibly descendants of the Wu people. A large paddy ruins in the area was created around 450 BC, the Warring States period, in Kyushu, and a record states that "Wajin [were the] self-named descendants of Zhou". An influential theory states that the Wu people of the Yangtze River area that followed the hydroponic rice cultivation culture, which is also a symbol of Yangtze civilization, drifted to the Japanese archipelago around the 5th century BC, in collaboration with the destruction of the Kingdom of Wu.
Genetics
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