All Japanese clan-families were classed under three heads,--Kobetsu, Shinbetsu, and Bambetsu. The Kobetsu ("Imperial Branch") represented the so-called imperial families, claiming descent from the Sun-goddess; the Shinbetsu ("Divine Branch") were clans claiming descent from other deities, terrestrial or celestial; the Bambetsu ("Foreign Branch") represented the mass of the people. [236] Thus it would seem that, by the ruling classes, the common people were originally considered strangers,--Japanese only by adoption. Some scholars think that the term Bambetsu was at first given to serfs or freedmen of Chinese or Korean descent. But this has not been proved. It is only certain that all society was divided into three classes, according to ancestry; that two of these classes constituted a ruling oligarchy;* and that the third, or "foreign" class represented the bulk of the nation,--the plebs. [*Dr. Florenz accounts for the distinction between Kobetsu and Shinbetsu as due to the existence of two military ruling classes,--resulting from two successive waves of invasion or immigration. The Kobetsu were the followers of Jimmu Tenno; the Shinbetsu were earlier conquerors who had settled in Yamato prior to the advent of Jimmu. These first conquerors, he thinks, were not dispossessed.] There was a division also into castes--kabane or sei. (I use the term "castes," following Dr. Florenz, a leading authority on ancient Japanese civilization, who gives the meaning of sei as equivalent to that of the Sanscrit varna, signifying "caste" or "colour.") Every family in the three great divisions of Japanese society belonged to some caste; and each caste represented at first some occupation or calling. Caste would not seem to have developed any very rigid structure in Japan; and there were early tendencies to a confusion of the kabane. In the seventh century the confusion became so great that the Emperor Temmu thought it necessary to reorganize the sei; and by him all the clan-families were regrouped into eight new castes.