The or the , are an East Asian ethnic group comprising over 90% of the population of Japan. It can also refer to the first people that settled in Yamato Province (modern-day Nara Prefecture). Generations of Japanese historians, linguists, and archeologists have debated whether the word is related to the earlier . The Yamato clan set up Japan's first and only dynasty. The clan became the ruling faction in the area, and incorporated native Japanese, Chinese and Korean migrants. The clan leaders also elevated their own belief system that featured ancestor worship into a national religion known as Shinto. 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, Emishi, Ryukyuans, Nivkh, Oroks, as well as Chinese, Koreans, Austronesians, and Micronesian peoples 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 racial notions that have been discarded in many circles. Japanese statistics only count their population in terms of nationality, rather than ethnicity. Etymology 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. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scribes regularly wrote Wa or Yamato with one and the same Chinese character 倭 until the 8th century, when the Japanese found fault with it, replacing it with 和 "harmony, peace, balance". Retroactively, this character was adopted in Japan to refer to the country itself, often combined with the character 大, literally meaning "Great", similar to Great Qing or Great Britain, so as to write the preexisting name Yamato (大和) (e.g., such as 大淸帝國 "Great Qing Empire" or 大英帝國 "Great British Empire"). The pronunciation Yamato cannot be formed from the sounds of its constituent Chinese characters; it is speculated to originally refer to a place in Japan meaning "Mountain Gate" (山戸). The historical province of Yamato within Japan (now Nara Prefecture in central Honshu) borders Yamashiro Province (now the southern part of Kyoto Prefecture); however, the names of both provinces appear to contain the Japonic etymon yama, usually meaning "mountain(s)" (but sometimes having a meaning closer to "forest", especially in some Ryukyuan languages). Some other pairs of