The Yayoi period is the era, conventionally dated from about 300 BCE to 300 CE, when the Japanese islands took up wet-rice farming, bronze, and iron carried from the Asian mainland. Radiocarbon work now pushes the start of paddy rice in northern Kyushu several centuries earlier, toward the 10th to 9th centuries BCE, though that early chronology is debated. These changes arrived unevenly across the archipelago rather than all at once, as migrants mixed with the earlier Jōmon population and the first ranked chiefdoms emerged, including the land of Wa whose Queen Himiko was recorded by Chinese chroniclers.
Sometime in the third century CE, clerks in a Chinese court wrote down what their envoys had learned about a chain of islands to the east. They called the place Wa, and its people short-statured, tattooed, and fond of drink. The most powerful of their many small countries, the record said, obeyed a woman. Her name was Himiko. She ruled by magic rather than marriage, kept a thousand female attendants, was rarely seen, and had a younger brother who carried her orders to the people. When she died, the Chinese account reports, a great mound was raised over her and more than a hundred attendants were buried with it. This queen is the earliest securely prominent named ruler in the surviving written record of the Japanese islands. Almost everything about her is disputed, including where she lived, and whether the mound is one archaeologists have already dug.