Samuel Hawley - The Imjin War: Japans Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China

On December 8, 1941December 7 on the American side of the international date linearmy and navy forces of Japan launched a surprise attack on Western colonial possessions in Asia and the Pacific, initiating what would come to be known in Tokyo as the Great Pacific War. It was the final, ultimately disastrous step in an expansionist phase in Japanese history that had already led that nation into three other wars of increasing ambition: the Sino-Japanese War of 189495, the Russo-Japanese War of 190405, and the campaign to conquer China begun in 1931. By the summer of 1942, eight months into the Great Pacific War, the empire of Japan extended from Manchuria to Burma on the Asian mainland and south across the Pacific as far as the islands of Java and New Guinea. Then, in the face of overwhelming American power, it began to fall apart.

Today, this fifty-year period of international aggression tends to be regarded as an aberration in Japans long history, the only time most people are aware of when the Land of the Rising Sun dispatched armies overseas to conquer foreign lands. This, however, is not the case. The Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the invasion of China, the Great Pacific Warthey all had an important antecedent that is little known in the West. In May of 1592, some 350 years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the state of Japan, recently unified under a dictator named Toyotomi Hideyoshi, sent a huge army across the strait from Kyushu to Pusan on Koreas southern tip. Its objective was first to invade that neighboring kingdom, then to press on to Beijing and conquer China. Once China was securely in Hideyoshis grasp, he planned to extend his hegemony even farther: south into Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma; offshore to Sumatra, Java, Taiwan, the Ryukyu Islands, and the Spanish colony of the Philippines; west to Indiaperhaps even all the way to that distant place where the strange bearded men came from who had first appeared in Japan fifty years before, the southwestern barbarians who claimed to be from a country called Poru-tu-gal .

Hideyoshi, in short, was intent on conquering the whole world as it was then known to him, an ambitious goal for what was in fact the first centrally directed war of overseas aggression in the history of Japan.

The resulting conflict immersed Japan, Korea, and China, plus token forces from as far away as Thailand, in nearly seven years of bloody war. It came to be known to the Japanese under a variety of appellations, from the prosaic Korean War to the more poetic Pottery War and War of Celadon and Metal Type, references to the spoils that Hideyoshis armies took back with them to Japan. The Chinese would refer to it simply as the Korean Campaign, a designation lumping it together with two other military campaigns that occupied the armies of China in the 1590s, despite the fact that it dwarfed the other two in size. To the Koreans, who suffered by far the greatest devastation and loss, it would come to be known as Imjin waeran , the bandit invasion of the year imjin (water dragon), commonly rendered in English as the Imjin War.