Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"By AD 250, Japan, like its neighbors to the west, was mutating from a land filled with allied warrior clans into a nation with a monarchy. . . . However, by AD 270, Japan had at least one monarch and one royal family. The Yamato dynasty ruled the flat fertile plain on the largest island: the Yamato plain, which gave easy passage to the Inland Sea. . . . They did not command world-conquering armies or control trade routes; they provided, instead, a nexus point where the divine could meet the earthly, where the presence of the sacred provided . . . a stable center for the people of the islands. . . . It is difficult for us to know exactly what the traditional faith of Japan (later known as Shinto) looked like before the arrival of Buddhism; writing came to Japan along with Buddhism, so all of the descriptions we have were written well after Buddhism had worked its way into the Japanese landscape. . . . The Seventeen-Article Constitution . . . was issued in 602. It is not exactly a constitution in the western sense; . . . it lists the principles by which the Yamato monarchs should be ruling their country—and by which the people should agree to be ruled." [Bauer: Medieval World, p. 217-21]