Mimana (), 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 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.
Usage of term
The name (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 a 5th-century Chinese history text, the Book of Song, in the chapter on the State of Wa. It is also used in two Korean epigraphic relics, as well as in several Korean texts, including Samguk Sagi.
Hypotheses on meaning
The first serious hypothesis on the meaning of Mimana comes from Japanese scholars. Based on their interpretation of Nihongi, they claimed that Mimana was a Japanese-controlled state on the Korean Peninsula that had 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. That was part of the Japanese imagery for centuries, envisioning Japanese supremacy and cultural superiority over Korea's Sadae policy centered on China, and it was also one of the grounds for portraying the 20th-century Japanese occupation of Korea as a Japanese return to lands that they had once controlled. That early Japanese view has also been often reproduced in old Western works. One of the main proponents of the theory was the Japanese scholar Suematsu Yasukazu, who proposed in 1949 that Mimana was a Japanese colony on the Korean Peninsula that existed from the 3rd to the 6th centuries. The theory has lost popularity since the 1970s, largely because of the complete lack of archeological evidence that such a settlement would have produced, the fact that a centralized Japanese state with power projection capability did not exist at that time (the Yayoi period), and the more likely possibility that Nihongi is describing (or misinterpreting, intentionally or not) an event that had 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).
The old Japanese interpretation has been disputed by Korean scholars. At first, they simply chose to ignore it, but more recently, their position has been bolstered as continuing archeological excavations on the Korean Peninsula have failed to produce any evidence supporting the hypothesis. Korean historians generally interpret the claim about a Japanese colony in Korea as nationalistic colonial historiography, which has been accepted by some historians. Korean scholar Chun-Gil Kim, in his 2005 book The History of Korea, discusses the topic under the section "The Mimana Fallacy."
