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The Emishi (also called Ebisu and Ezo), written with Kanji that literally mean "shrimp barbarians," constituted an ancient ethnic group of people who lived in parts of Honshū, especially in the Tōhoku region, referred to as roughly "deepest part of the road" in contemporary sources. The first mention of the Emishi in literature that can be corroborated with outside sources dates to the 5th century AD, in which they are referred to as (毛人 - "hairy people") in Chinese records. Some Emishi tribes resisted the rule of various Japanese Emperors during the Asuka, Nara, and early Heian periods (7th–10th centuries AD). The origin of the Emishi is disputed. They are often thought to have descended from some tribes of the Jōmon people. Some historians believe that they were related to the Ainu people, but others disagree with this theory and see them as a completely distinct ethnicity. Recent evidence suggests that the Emishi that inhabited Northern Honshu consisted of several distinct tribes (which included pre-Ainu people, non-Yamato Japanese, and admixed people), who united and resisted the expansion of the Yamato Empire. It is suggested that the Emishi spoke a divergent Japonic language, similar to the historical Izumo dialect. The first mention of the Emishi is from a Chinese source, the Book of Song in 478 AD, which referred to them as "hairy people" (毛人). The book refers to "the 55 kingdoms (国) of the hairy people (毛人) of the East" as a report by King Bu — one of the Five kings of Wa. The first recorded use of the Japanese word Emishi is in the Nihon Shoki in 720AD, where the word appears in the phonetic spelling 愛瀰詩 for (see also for an explanation of the subscript). This is in the record of Emperor Jimmu, stating that his armed forces defeated a group of Emishi before Jimmu was enthroned as the Emperor of Japan. According to the , Takenouchi no Sukune in the era of Emperor Keikō proposed the subjugation the Emishi of Hitakami no Kuni in eastern Japan. In later records, the kanji spelling changed to 蝦夷, composed of the characters for "shrimp" and "barbarian".

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Emishi

Sendai

is the capital city of Miyagi Prefecture, the largest city in the Tōhoku region. , the city had a population of 1,097,563 in 539,698 households, and is one of Japan's 20 designated cities. The city was founded in 1600 by the daimyō Date Masamune. It is nicknamed the City of Trees; there are Japanese zelkova trees lining many of the main thoroughfares such as Jōzenji Street and Aoba Street. In the summer, the Sendai Tanabata Festival, the largest Tanabata festival in Japan, is held.

History of Japan

The first human inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago have been traced to the Paleolithic, around 38-40,000 years ago. The Jōmon period, named after its cord-marked pottery, was followed by the Yayoi period in the first millennium BC when new inventions were introduced from Asia. During this period, the first known written reference to Japan was recorded in the Chinese Book of Han in the first century AD. Around the 3rd century BC, the Yayoi people from the continent immigrated to the Japanese archipelago and introduced iron technology and agricultural civilization.