The Japanese are religious and militaristic. They start the game with Ceremonial Burial and The Wheel and build samurai instead of knights. It is not known when humans first settled on the Japanese archipelago, but the Jomon people might be called proto-Japanese, and they were spread throughout the archipelago by 250 BC. The Yayoi culture that arose in Kyushu, while the Jomon culture was still evolving, spread gradually eastward, overwhelming the Jomon. Culturally, the Yayoi represents a notable advance and flourished for some five or six centuries, from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD. The unification of Japan under the Yamato court, with the tenno ("Emperor of Heaven") at its center, occurred around the mid-4th century. The 6th century reign of Kentai (507-531 AD) represents a decline of Yamato influence both at home and abroad; the period can be characterized by the growing accumulation of power by regional leaders and a weakening of royal influence. After the Onin War, the power of independent local leaders increased markedly, and in many instances deputies of great shugo houses usurped the domains of their superiors; a new type of feudal lord, the daimyo, took their place. This Sengoku ("Warring States") period was marked by constant conflict among many such lords. The Yamato court was resuscitated by efforts made within the royal family itself, primarily the reforms of Prince Shotoku, who drafted the Seventeen-Article Constitution of 604 AD. The death of Shotoku in 622 prevented his Confucian ideals of government from bearing full fruit when the Soga family, regaining its former power, executed Shotoku's son Yamashiro and all his family in 643. Two years later, princes Nakano and Nakatomi engineered a coup d'état within the palace, killing the Soga family and wiping out all forces opposed to the imperial family. They then set about establishing a system of centralized government with the emperor as absolute monarch that would last 1000 years. In the late Heian period, the more powerful of the Samurai gathered in or near the capital, where they served both the military needs of the emperor and also as bodyguards for the great noble houses. Emerging from provincial warrior bands, the aristocratic Samurai caste of the Kamakura period (1192-1333), with their military