Mimana

Mimana (Chinese and Japanese: 任那; pinyin: Rènnà; Korean: 임나), also transliterated as Imna according to the Korean pronunciation, is the name used primarily in the 8th-century Japanese text Nihon Shoki, likely referring to one of the Korean states of the time of the Gaya confederacy (c. 1st–5th centuries) as a territory of ancient Japan. As Atkins notes: "The location, expanse, and Japaneseness of Imna/Mimana remain among the most disputed issues in East Asian historiography." Seth notes that the very existence of Mimana is still disputed.

The name 任那 (pronounced Mimana in Japanese, Imna in Korean, and Renna in Mandarin Chinese) is used over 200 times in the 8th-century Japanese text Nihongi. Much earlier it is mentioned in the 5th-century Chinese history text the Book of Song in the chapter about the State of Wa. It is also used in two Korean epigraphic relics, as well as in several Korean texts, including Samguk Sagi.

The first serious hypothesis about the meaning of Mimana comes from Japanese scholars, who, based on their interpretation of Nihongi, claimed that Mimana was a Japanese-controlled state on the Korean Peninsula that existed from the time of the legendary Empress Jingū's conquest in the 3rd century to Gaya's defeat and annexation by Silla in the 6th century. This was one of the grounds for portraying the 20th-century Japanese occupation of Korea as a Japanese return to the lands they once controlled. This early Japanese view has also been often reproduced in old Western works. One of the main proponents of this theory was Japanese scholar Suematsu Yasukazu, who in 1949 proposed that Mimana was a Japanese colony on the Korean peninsula that existed from the 3rd until the 6th century. This theory has lost popularity since the 1970s, largely due to: 1) the complete lack of archaeological evidence that such a settlement would have produced, 2) the fact that a centralized Japanese state with power projection capability did not exist at that time (the Yayoi period), and 3) the more likely possibility that Nihongi is describing (or misinterpreting, intentionally or not) an event that occurred centuries before its composition, in which Jingū's conquest is a dramatized and politicized version of her immigration to the Japanese Archipelago, which would have been one of many during the Yayoi period (Hanihara Kazurō has suggested that the annual immigrant influx to the Japanese Archipelago from the Asian mainland during the Yayoi period ranged from 350 to 3,000).

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