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Notes -
I don't disagree, but still think the description of Japan as "monoethnic" still has merit. I see the question as being one of cultural proximity, since by your definition there wouldn't be such a thing as a truly monoethnic part of the world - people tend to bifurcate hugely even within a small geographic region, and even those ethnic groups who are 99% similar culturally will often consider each other as irreconcilably different due to the remaining 1% of variance - Scott's post "I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup" comes to mind. It's not entirely wrong to state that the Yamato gained political and demographic dominance fairly early in Japanese history.
Even if the Yamato might not have considered themselves a singular group, it is also true that they would have been fairly culturally homogenous due to a shared origin from the Yayoi and a lot of cultural flow between different parts of Japan, and excepting a bunch of fringe minority groups like the Ainu, much of the ethnic/cultural bifurcation basically amounted to the tyranny of small differences. This is not to say these small differences aren't significant in local context, and cultural variance is a weak proxy at best for a spongy concept like self-identified "ethnicity", but there's a material difference in variance between a country like Japan vs. the exceptionally diaspora-like nature of many Southeast Asian countries (for example Yamato comprise over 98% of Japan's modern population, whereas Malays comprise 58% of the Malaysian population, with a lot of very distinct subgroups within every ethnic group and a lot of syncretism between them). Perhaps Japan wasn’t just one self-described ethnicity, but the level of within-country cultural variance is relatively low in global context, no matter how much tribal warfare they participated in.
I guess the point I would emphasise is that the idea of Japan being 'monoethnic' had to be produced, in large part by the Japanese themselves, through a struggle that took at least centuries. Japan, like every modernising nation, went through a process whereby national identity had to be constructed, often in the form of top-down policies of homogenisation and assimilation from the metropole.
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