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road building, and public works for irrigation. Immigrants introduced horticultural plants along with the mulberry for the silk industry. Turnips and gourds, but also Acorus and Celosia were newly cultivated plants. The development of the country in this period was accompanied by the clearing of the shady primary forests of evergreen oaks and trees such as the nagi (Podocarpus nagi). This gave new opportunities for light-loving plants such as the mountain cherries. As followers of civilization, the cherries entered a period of expansion after the influx of the immigrants and sprung up wherever people had settled. Whether these cherries were actually imported by the fifth-century immigrants or whether they were already in Japan when the immigrants arrived is not clear at present. Nonetheless, the flowering of the trees became associated in later centuries with the new civilization. In time one of the immigrant clans became closely related to the Japanese court because it provided brides to several generations of the early emperors. A power struggle between the inner court and members of this clan ended with the adoption of far-reaching political reforms that loosely unified the country. Japan rose as a stable confederation of clans, called Yamato in the seventh century. The ensuing Nara period (710794) started with the founding of Nara as a capital city for Yamato, and for the first time Japan witnessed civilization on an urban scale. The city had its avenues and markets; huge temples were constructed after Chinese architectural styles. Civilization became based on Buddhist ideology, and the country was ruled by a centralized bureaucracy modeled after the great Chinese dynasties. Chinese-style officials produced the first histories of Japan such as Kojiki (Record of ancient matters) in 712 A.D. and Nihon Shoki (Chronicle of Japan) in 720 A.D. These chronicles obviously were designed to legitimize the power of the imperial house during the Nara period. In a strict sense they are mythologies rather than histories. They begin with the creation of the land by the gods, who gave birth to the first emperor, thus founding the imperial house at a time that, in these sources, is dated back many centuries. In these oldest written sources of Japan we come across a plant called "cherry." The "Chronicle of Japan" describes, for instance, an imperial banquet that supposedly took place in the eleventh month of the Chinese calendar in the year 402 A.D. When the emperor Richu * was offered rice wine, a cherry flower fell in his cup. Surprised by this wonderful flower, the em-