The IMJIN WAR: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China Book

In the late nineteenth century the rapidly modernizing nation of Japan embarked on a period of colonial expansion culminating in the Pacific War of 1941-45. Today, this half century of international aggression is the only time of which most people are aware when Japan has dispatched armies overseas to conquer foreign lands. But this is not so. The Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the invasion of China, the Pacific War - they all had an important, cataclysmic antecedent. In May of 1592, three hundred and fifty years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi sent a 158,800-man army aboard a thousand ships from Kyushu to Pusan on Korea's southern tip. Its objective: to conquer Korea, then China, and 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, involved 300,000 combatants and claimed more than two million lives. It dwarfed any contemporary conflict 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 important event, so little known in the West. It begins with the political and cultural background of Korea, Japan, and China, discusses the diplomatic breakdown 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 himself, hosting garden parties while his armies march toward Beijing; Korea's admiral Yi Sun-sin, emerging from a prison cell to take on the Japanese with only thirteen ships of his own; Chinese commander Zhao Chengxun, suffering defeat after promising to "scatter the Japanese to the four winds"; the kisaeng Chu Non-gae, luring a samurai into her arms and then 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 shook East Asia more than four centuries ago, and that continues to strain relations today between Korea and Japan.