The Imjin War

Author: Samuel Hawley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780992078621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 684

Book Description
In May of 1592, Japanese dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi sent a 158,800-man army of invasion from Kyushu to Pusan on Korea's southern tip. His objective: to conquer Korea, then China, then the whole of Asia. The resulting seven years of fighting, known in Korea as "imjin waeran," the "Imjin invasion," after the year of the water dragon in which it began, dwarfed contemporary conflicts in Europe and was one of the most devastating wars to grip East Asia in the past thousand years. THE IMJIN WAR is the most comprehensive account ever published in English of this cataclysmic event, so little known in the West. It begins with the political and cultural background of Korea, Japan and China, explores the diplomatic impasse that led to the war, describes every major incident and battle from 1592 to 1598 and introduces a fascinating cast of characters along the way. There is Hideyoshi, hosting garden parties as his armies march toward Beijing; Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin, emerging from a prison cell to take on the Japanese navy with just thirteen ships; Chinese commander Zhao Chengxun, suffering defeat after promising to "scatter the Japanese to the four winds"; the courtesan Chu Non-gae, luring a samurai warrior into her arms and jumping into the Nam River with him locked in her embrace. One nation fighting to expand, another to survive. Shockwaves extending across China and beyond. THE IMJIN WAR is an epic tale of grand perspective and intimate detail of an upheaval that would shape East Asia for centuries to come.

A Korean War Captive in Japan, 1597–1600

Author: JaHyun Kim Haboush
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231535112
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
Kang Hang was a Korean scholar-official taken prisoner in 1597 by an invading Japanese army during the Imjin War of 1592–1598. While in captivity in Japan, Kang recorded his thoughts on human civilization, war, and the enemy's culture and society, acting in effect as a spy for his king. Arranged and printed in the seventeenth century as Kanyangnok, or The Record of a Shepherd, Kang's writings were extremely valuable to his government, offering new perspective on a society few Koreans had encountered in 150 years and new information on Japanese politics, culture, and military organization. In this complete, annotated translation of Kanyangnok, Kang ruminates on human behavior and the nature of loyalty during a time of war. A neo-Confucianist with a deep knowledge of Chinese philosophy and history, Kang drew a distinct line between the Confucian values of his world, which distinguished self, family, king, and country, and a foreign culture that practiced invasion and capture, and, in his view, was largely incapable of civilization. Relating the experiences of a former official who played an exceptional role in wartime and the rare voice of a Korean speaking plainly and insightfully on war and captivity, this volume enables a deeper appreciation of the phenomenon of war at home and abroad.

The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation

Author: JaHyun Kim Haboush
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
The Imjin War (1592–1598) was a grueling conflict that wreaked havoc on the towns and villages of the Korean Peninsula. The involvement of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean forces, not to mention the regional scope of the war, was the largest the world had seen, and the memory dominated East Asian memory until World War II. Despite massive regional realignments, Korea's Chosôn Dynasty endured, but within its polity a new, national discourse began to emerge. Meant to inspire civilians to rise up against the Japanese army, this potent rhetoric conjured a unified Korea and intensified after the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636. By documenting this phenomenon, JaHyun Kim Haboush offers a compelling counternarrative to Western historiography, which ties Korea's idea of nation to the imported ideologies of modern colonialism. She instead elevates the formative role of the conflicts that defined the second half of the Chosôn Dynasty, which had transfigured the geopolitics of East Asia and introduced a national narrative key to Korea's survival. Re-creating the cultural and political passions that bound Chosôn society together during this period, Haboush reclaims the root story of solidarity that helped Korea thrive well into the modern era.

The East Asian War, 1592-1598

Author: James B. Lewis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317662733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Book Description
As East Asia regains its historical position as a world centre, information on the history of regional relations becomes ever more critical. Astonishingly, Northeast Asia enjoyed five centuries of international peace from 1400 to 1894, broken only by one major international war – the invasion of Korea in the 1590s by Japan’s ruler Hideyoshi. This war involved Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Southeast Asians, and Europeans; it saw the largest overseas landing in world history up to that time and devastated Korea. It also highlighted the nature of the strategic balance in the region, presenting China’s Ming dynasty with a serious threat that perhaps foreshadowed the dynasty’s subsequent overthrow by the Manchus, played a major part in the establishment of the Tokugawa regime with its policy of peace and controlled access to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan, and demonstrated the importance for regional stability of the subtle relationship of Korea to both China and Japan. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the war and its aftermath in all its aspects – military, political, social, economic, and cultural. As such it deepens understanding of East Asian international relations and provides important insights into the strategic concerns that continue to operate in the region at present.

The Imjin War 1592-1598

Author: Jeffrey M Shaw
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781913118815
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
The failed Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592, known as the Imjin War, devastated the Korean peninsula and led to the eventual collapse of Ming China.

The Samurai Invasion of Korea 1592–98

Author: Stephen Turnbull
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1782007121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Stephen Turnbull, a renowned expert on the history of Japan, examines the samurai invasion of Korea, the first step in an ambitious Japanese plan to conquer China. Examining the various stages of the war, from the pitched battles of the early war years, to the great naval encounters, the dramatic sieges and the bitter trench warfare that characterized the end of the war, Turnbull provides a concise analysis of the conflict. Highly illustrated with contemporary photographs, full colour battlescene artwork, detailed maps and bird's-eye views, this is a concise history of a unique and exciting campaign, which not only involved huge numbers of men, differing terrain and tactics but was also the only time that the legendary samurai were pitched against a foreign nation.

Imjin River 1951

Author: Brian Drohan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472826906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 97

Book Description
After China's November 1950 intervention in the war and the subsequent battle of the Chosin Reservoir, UN forces faced a new onslaught in the spring of 1951 with over 350,000 veteran troops attacking along the Imjin River. The US 3rd Infantry Division took the brunt of the attack along with the attached British 29th Infantry Brigade which included the Gloucestershire Regiment (the “Glosters”). The heroic defence of the American and British forces would pass into legend, most especially the doomed effort of the Glosters, as they sought to buy time for the rest of the UN forces to regroup and organise an effective defence of Seoul, the South Korean capital city. Featuring full colour commissioned artwork, maps and first-hand accounts, this is the compelling story of one of the most epic clashes of the Korean War.

The Book of Corrections

Author: Sŏng-nyong Yu
Publisher: Institute of East Asian Studies University of California - B
ISBN: 9781557290762
Category : Korea
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

Samurai Invasion

Author: Stephen R. Turnbull
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9780304359486
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
“Lively....Skillfully pieceing together contemporary accounts from Japanese and Korean sources, the author provides a vivid and horrifying picture of the strategy, tactics, and technology of Japanese warefare....Belongs in public as well as college libraries.”—Library Journal. “Impeccably researched, lavishly illustrated, clearly written for the general reader, as outstanding on its subject as it is unique.”—Booklist.

Turning toward Edification

Author: Adam Bohnet
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824884507
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Turning toward Edification discusses foreigners in Korea from before the founding of Chosŏn in 1392 until the mid-nineteenth century. Although it has been common to describe Chosŏn Korea as a monocultural and homogeneous state, Adam Bohnet reveals the considerable presence of foreigners and people of foreign ancestry in Chosŏn Korea as well as the importance to the Chosŏn monarchy of engagement with the outside world. These foreigners included Jurchens and Japanese from border polities that formed diplomatic relations with Chosŏn prior to 1592, Ming Chinese and Japanese deserters who settled in Chosŏn during the Japanese invasion between 1592 and 1598, Chinese and Jurchen refugees who escaped the Manchu state that formed north of Korea during the early seventeenth century, and even Dutch castaways who arrived in Chosŏn during the mid-1700s. Foreigners were administered by the Chosŏn monarchy through the tax category of “submitting-foreigner” (hyanghwain). This term marked such foreigners as uncivilized outsiders coming to Chosŏn to receive moral edification and they were granted Korean spouses, Korean surnames, land, agricultural tools, fishing boats, and protection from personal taxes. Originally the status was granted for a limited time, however, by the seventeenth century it had become hereditary. Beginning in the 1750s foreign descendants of Chinese origin were singled out and reclassified as imperial subjects (hwangjoin), giving them the right to participate in the palace-sponsored Ming Loyalist rituals. Bohnet argues that the evolution of their status cannot be explained by a Confucian or Sinocentric enthusiasm for China. The position of foreigners—Chinese or otherwise—in Chosŏn society must be understood in terms of their location within Chosŏn social hierarchies. During the early Chosŏn, all foreigners were clearly located below the sajok aristocracy. This did not change even during the eighteenth century, when the increasingly bureaucratic state recategorized Ming migrants to better accord with the Chosŏn state’s official Ming Loyalism. These changes may be understood in relation to the development of bureaucratized identities in the Qing Empire and elsewhere in the world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and as part of the vernacularization of elite ideologies that has been noted elsewhere in Eurasia.