Imjin War

The Imjin War was the name given in Korea to two Japanese invasions of the peninsula, in 1592–1593 and 1597–1598, ordered by the Japanese ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Korea's Joseon dynasty, aided by a large army from Ming China, eventually forced the Japanese to withdraw, but the war devastated Korea and strained all three states.

Hideyoshi completed the unification of Japan, begun by Oda Nobunaga, after more than a century of civil war in the Sengoku period. With a large, battle-hardened army, he planned to conquer Ming China and demanded that Joseon, a Ming tributary state, let his forces pass. Korea refused. Its court, divided by factional disputes, had prepared poorly, and its army was small and lacked the matchlock firearms that Japanese troops used in large numbers.

On 23 May 1592 the first Japanese troops landed at Busan and quickly overwhelmed the coastal fortresses. Several divisions, with a total force of over 150,000 soldiers and support personnel, advanced north, defeating Korean armies in the field. Within about three weeks they took the capital, Hanseong, today's Seoul, after King Seonjo had fled north; they then captured Pyongyang and pushed into the north-east.

At sea the war went differently. The Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin, using heavily armed warships including a small number of armoured "turtle ships", won a string of victories along the southern coast in 1592, most famously at Hansan Island. These battles disrupted Japanese supply by sea. On land, volunteer "righteous armies" of scholars, peasants and Buddhist monks harassed Japanese forces and their communications.

In early 1593 a large Ming army crossed the Yalu and, with Korean forces, retook Pyongyang. A Ming advance on Hanseong was checked, but Korean defenders held the fortress of Haengju, and the Japanese, short of food, abandoned the capital and withdrew to fortified positions on the southern coast. Long negotiations between Ming and Japanese envoys followed, but each side misrepresented the other's terms, and they collapsed in 1596.

Hideyoshi invaded again in 1597. Yi Sun-sin had been dismissed and imprisoned after court intrigues, and his successor lost most of the Korean fleet at Chilcheollyang. Restored to command with only about a dozen ships, Yi defeated a much larger Japanese fleet at Myeongnyang in the autumn of 1597. On land, Ming and Korean forces stopped the Japanese advance in the south, and the war settled into a stalemate around the coastal forts. After Hideyoshi died in September 1598, the Japanese leadership ordered a withdrawal. In the last major battle, at Noryang in December 1598, Yi was killed as his fleet attacked the departing Japanese ships.

Korea suffered enormous losses of life, though figures are uncertain, along with famine, disease and the destruction of farmland, palaces and records. Tens of thousands of Koreans were taken to Japan, among them potters and other craftsmen. The Mimizuka mound in Kyoto holds noses and ears cut from Korean and Chinese dead as trophies. The cost of the war weakened Ming finances in the decades before the dynasty's fall, while in Japan power passed to Tokugawa Ieyasu, who restored relations with Korea about a decade after the war.

Our 1600 map shows the Joseon dynasty and Ming China just after the war, beside a Japan on the eve of Tokugawa rule.