In May 1592 Japanese troops landed in southern Korea, initiating a destructive, seven-year conflict that escalated into the largest war of the sixteenth century as measured by the number of combatants on all sides. Japanese forces blitzed up the peninsula as far north as the Yalu river in the opening weeks of the campaign, compelling the Korean Chosŏn court to request aid from Ming China. Korean and Chinese troops and naval forces, as well as guerrilla fighters regrouping in the countryside, repelled the Japanese back to Korea’s southern shores, first in 1593 and again in 1598, after a series of stalled negotiations prompted Japan to renew its attack in 1597. Following the death of the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98), the war’s instigator, Japan withdrew that same year, its original goal of conquering China unfulfilled and now confronting a succession crisis in the wake of Hideyoshi’s death. Even though the war failed to change any boundaries, its longer-term consequences were immense. Chosŏn Korea and Ming China had successfully stress-tested their tributary relationship even as new threats emerged from their northern borders; Jurchen forces would harass the resilient Chosŏn polity and ultimately topple the Ming dynasty a few decades later. The Imjin War wreaked havoc on the Korean peninsula, forced tens of thousands of Koreans to Japan as captives, and prompted discussions over the scale, logistics and requirements of armed forces in the region. Although modern scholars have considered the multifaceted legacy of the war, some notable gaps remain, which this special section endeavours to fill.

Historians from the three combatant countries have driven study of the war, in service to or in tension with national narratives of its causes and legacy. In Korea, the devastation wrought by the conflict has not been forgotten, and the repulsion of the Japanese invasions marks a dividing line between the early and late Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897), and between medieval and early modern Korea. Admiral Yi Sunshin’s naval victories and the guerrilla resistance that plagued the Japanese remain touchstones in Korean accounts of the war. In Japan, Hideyoshi’s motivations for inciting the conflict consistently draw attention, and explanations include unchecked megalomania, a calculated effort to restart trade relations with China, and a warning to expansionary European powers with designs of their own.Footnote ¹ Japanese historiography has also examined how the mobilisation effort and subsequent campaigns catalysed or solidified Hideyoshi’s nascent political order and the more stable Tokugawa hegemony that followed. By contrast, in China, the focus is on state decline rather than state-building. A long-standing question pursued by historians of China, including anglophone scholars, has been whether the campaign to aid Korea contributed to the subsequent collapse of Ming finances, and ultimately the dynasty itself. Moreover, in Korea and China, the Imjin War is conceptualised as part of a longer history of aggressive Japanese expansionism, which flared again via in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and resulted in the annexation of Korea (1910), the establishment of a puppet state in Manchuria (1932) and the full-scale invasion of China (1937).

Scholars have also examined the lived experiences of people beyond core military and political figures and investigated captive-taking in the context of the war and its wider demographic impact in the region as part of a budding new field. A prominent example is the study of Korean captives forcibly relocated to Japan, especially those captives valued for their artisanal and intellectual skills. Clusters of Korean captives established themselves as potters in south-western Japan and went on to help shape ‘Japanese’ ceramics in the centuries that followed.Footnote ² The Korean intellectual Kang Hang, held captive for three years in Japan before his escape in 1600, recorded and memorialised his experiences, which were then published in Korea by his students.Footnote ³ Recent scholarship also explores the taking of captives and displacement within the context of slavery in early modern East Asia, as well as the experiences of immigrants from China and Japan who stayed in Korea after the war.Footnote ⁴

Scholarship on the war continues to proliferate as historians cross borders and archives. Military historians treat the war as a seminal conflict and have tackled a variety of topics, ranging from questions of logistics to the impact of gunpowder technology and the importance of naval and siege warfare. Increasingly, these are put into conversation with global military history debates about the relationship between warfare, state formation and technology. Furthermore, there is a trend to internationalise inquiry through scholarly collaboration and widening the pool of sources among historians of Korea, China and Japan. This is reflected in the war’s evolving nomenclature. Appellations vary across the three countries, but momentum has tilted towards ‘Imjin War’ (Chinese: Renchen Woluan; Japanese: Jinshin sensō; Korean: Imjin Waeran).Footnote ⁵ ‘Imjin’ (壬辰) refers to the year in the sinitic sexenary cycle utilised by all three countries – 1592 in the Gregorian calendar – in which the first invasion took place. This internationalisation is also reflected in the war’s elevated didactic profile in international relations scholarship as that field expands beyond the modern, transatlantic paradigms that have defined it.Footnote ⁶

Historians have also investigated the planned and unplanned legacies of the conflict by exploring its environmental and technological impact, as well as the war’s role in creating and contesting national memory into the present. Environmental and military perspectives have been profitably combined to examine the impact of military mobilisation and warfare on local ecologies as well as the reciprocal impact of the environment on human conflict.Footnote ⁷ Geoffrey Parker, for example, considered the role of the seventeenth-century ‘Little Ice Age’ in stimulating war, revolution and the breakdown of state authority across the globe. In East Asia, Ian Miller has looked at the impact of inter alia Ming naval demands on the forests of South China.Footnote ⁸ Recent scholarship has considered the impact of climate change and entangled natural disasters on the waves of premodern Japanese piracy affecting the region.Footnote ⁹ Scholars of Korea have set the pace on environmental inquiry with studies foregrounding how authorities managed and tended to the resources of the peninsula’s post-war landscape.Footnote ¹⁰ Meanwhile, scholars of China, Japan and Korea have considered the legacy of the war through extensive publications on the topic of the Imjin War and memory, and this ongoing work can be fruitfully put in conversation with the reflections of Western historians on the question of war and remembrance.Footnote ¹¹

For their part, anglophone scholars have been relative latecomers to the concerted study of the Imjin War. Monographs on the conflict appeared in the early 2000s, advancing the field but often drawing on sources from one or two combatant countries in line with the expertise of the author. Indeed, linguistic considerations make holistic study of the Imjin War difficult for any one scholar to attempt, let alone accomplish. The 2015 volume The East Asian War, 1592–1598: International Relations, Violence, and Memory edited by James Lewis, mitigated this problem by gathering experts on all three countries to contribute pieces on the before, during and after of the war.Footnote ¹² Rebekah Clements’s ERC-funded Aftermath project (2018–24) marked the first multi-year project outside East Asia dedicated to the conflict.Footnote ¹³ Aftermath traced the technological, demographic and environmental legacies of the war through the individual research outputs of project members as well as a regular, multi-year research webinar that provided a forum for scholarship on the Imjin War across the world.Footnote ¹⁴ Clements and Lewis are co-editors of a forthcoming volume, The Aftermath of the East Asian War in Early Modern East Asia (to which we are both contributors), which focuses on the themes of state-building, technology, and demography and the environment, and contextualises the Imjin War in terms of the advent of early modernity in the region.Footnote ¹⁵

It is the immediate impact of this major conflict that will be the primary concern of this special section. The articles here most often consider how the conflict reverberated in the seventeenth century rather than rooting around for precedents to the nationalist and imperialist accounts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ¹⁶ Modern memory of the conflict overshadows study of its immediate repercussions in early modern East Asia and beyond. Here, however, the bulk of the analysis covers the years and decades in which the conflict remained in living memory.

Interest in war memory and commemoration rose to new peaks in the late twentieth century and gave rise to a new field of historical enquiry. Possible stimuli for this phenomenon were the geopolitical changes heralded by the end of the Cold War, which led to a shift in global power structures and a renewed reckoning with the past. The disintegration of the communist bloc brought ethnic and nationalist antagonisms back to the forefront of public attention, and the past was a useful handmaiden to legitimise these grievances.Footnote ¹⁷ The research this stimulated has therefore predominantly dealt with war memory in the modern age, which can be seen as an aspect of modern cultural memory.Footnote ¹⁸ The reflections on this topic by Western historians are characterised by a dichotomy between considering the formation of war memory as a top-to-bottom process instigated by political actors like states, or as a grassroots phenomenon led by individuals and social groups. The former focuses on memory formation as a tool of political authorities to inculcate their subjects with a shared identity; the latter sees war memory as a personal psychological coping strategy to deal with trauma and loss.Footnote ¹⁹ Scholars engaged with premodern history have argued that the state-centred and social-agency readings of memory formation were equally valid for early modern Europe and that commemoration was ‘a truly multimedia affair’. Modern mass media really only altered the scale, not the mechanisms shaping and mediating memory. The biggest difference seems to have been on the level of individual memory, where the self was assumed to remain stable, and the narration of its history was bound to strict literary conventions.Footnote ²⁰

In the first article of this special section, Gowoon Seong looks at the commemoration of the Ming dynasty in Korea as a tangible and enduring legacy of the Imjin War. Highlighting the centrality of media within rituals of commemoration, Seong centres the Korean reception of Ming porcelains in her analysis. As a result of the Imjin War and the Ming intervention on behalf of Korea, these transformed from luxury items for elite consumption to vessels of ritual and ideological significance in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The porcelains were central to a gift economy between Korean literati and Chinese civil and military officials dispatched to Korea during the war, which increased the profiles of these pieces. Their significance was further reinforced when the Manchu Qing took over control of China from 1644 onwards. Korean literati viewed the new Qing dynasty as barbarian and illegitimate. The choice by Korean officials to commemorate the Ming through rituals that centred Ming porcelains was therefore at the same time an act of ideological resistance. Ambivalent emotions were thus expressed: gratitude towards the Ming for saving Korea during the war and mourning for the fall of the Ming and the Sinocentric world order. Throughout Seong’s piece, these rituals reveal themselves to be primarily spontaneous reactions by Korea’s civil elites, and only secondarily as conscious state policy. Important as well is the role former Ming military men who stayed behind after the war - themselves an enduring legacy of the war - played in the continuation of Ming rituals in Korea.

Kizaki Braddick examines the life and afterlives of Hizen-Nagoya Castle, erected on Hideyoshi’s orders in north-western Kyushu as the staging ground for the Japanese invasions of Korea. Braddick’s survey of the castle and its legacy complements scholarly work on the Japanese fortifications (wajō) built in Korea during the invasions. Dozens of daimyo encampments surrounded Hideyoshi’s castle at Nagoya; considered as a whole the complex probably swelled to a population of 200,000. Braddick focuses on the fortification’s political, economic and cultural importance. Nagoya castle served as an additional seat of power in Japan, culminating with Hideyoshi’s presence at his ‘court’ for much of 1592–3. Nagoya hosted noh drama and tea ceremony and provided a stage for merchants to sell their wares, for artisans to practise their crafts, and for the assembled leaders and warriors to practice patronage politics and express their cultural power. Those gathered also catalysed a market for goods from within and beyond Japan, converting Nagoya into a hub of exchange and consumption that competed with established settlements such as Hakata and Nagasaki. Although portions of the castle were reused in the construction of other fortifications and buildings, no other daimyo ever claimed Nagoya as a seat. It was abandoned and partially dismantled while the Tokugawa were in power but remained marked on many Edo-period maps, a testimony to its former import. Braddick includes records of visits by interested parties (including entourages of Korean guests) in the early modern era before concluding with a discussion of the site’s current status as a museum and host of reconciliation efforts with Korea.

An immediate legacy of the Imjin War was the forced circulation of humans across East Asia, predominantly consisting of Koreans captured during the war by the Japanese. The Imjin War provides a valuable case study for longer-running debates about global slavery and coerced labour. Slavery as an institution is still an understudied topic in East Asian history. In Western societies, enslaved people of East Asian extraction were a relatively rare sight in comparison with the large presence of enslaved Africans. This visibility has translated into a corresponding bias in modern scholarship as well.Footnote ²¹ A focus on Western regimes of slavery has also obscured the existence of similar phenomena within other world regions, and anglophone research on East Asia has only recently started to escape this tendency. New trends in scholarship have laid bare the use of bonded and unfree labour in East Asia, which was sustained by continental and maritime trade in human beings that extended into Southeast Asia as well. Here, Europeans were new participants in a much older regional system. Analyses of this phenomenon and comparisons with the Atlantic slave trade are still marred by a few issues, however. First of all, there is a lingering reluctance of modern states in the region to admit that the domestic practice of slavery was widespread in the past. Second, a comparison with Western practices runs into several definitional and taxonomical problems. In comparison with the chattel model of slavery made infamous by the Atlantic trade, coerced labour in East Asia existed on a spectrum. For example, it was not unusual for ‘slaveholders’ to possess ownership of the labour, but not the body, of the enslaved. The latter were often free to own their own property as well.Footnote ²²

The Imjin War has not escaped scrutiny in this developing debate. Nam-Lin Hur has explored the connection between the abduction of Koreans by Japanese during the war and the slave trade.Footnote ²³ In this special section, Yang Liu makes use of a wide variety of sources to highlight the immediate fates of the many captives taken to Japan. Between 20,000 to 100,000 Koreans were forcibly taken to Japan, although many more were captured during the war who in the end were left behind in Korea by the Japanese when they retreated. Much scholarship has focused attention on the Korean potters captured by the Japanese with the aim of replicating Korean ceramics production in the archipelago. Liu shows that, in fact, Koreans were captured for a wide variety of other purposes, and sometimes for no discernible purpose at all. Yang Liu’s contribution differentiates the ways in which captives were taken to explain their subsequent lives in Japan. Some were pre-selected as gifts by Japanese daimyo and their soldiers or held back by specific samurai for their own personal use. Many others were transported en masse, frequently through the involvement of Japanese slave traders, while others were to be disbursed to common Japanese on behalf of the domains involved in the invasion of Korea. Once in Japan, their numbers overwhelmed local administrative arrangements, and many captives were left to wander around with minimal supervision. Others, particularly those who were individually selected, ended up in strictly controlled conditions. Yang Liu shows how a ‘guarantor system’ evolved, with individual Japanese made responsible for the whereabouts of assigned Korean captives. Koreans were often held together with their relatives to discourage escape attempts. While many escaped forced labour, they still struggled to feed themselves. Koreans with skills deemed useful, like knowledge of literary Chinese, could eke out an existence by providing services requiring literacy.

The temporal focus of these contributions is paired with a broader geography, as the section includes explorations of the conflict’s reverberations in the Iberian, trans-Pacific and missionary worlds that grappled with this conflict. Jaime Bolado traces the emergence of Korea in European cartography across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Korea remained a greater unknown than its neighbour Japan, and debate over the location and basic geography of ‘Corai’ persisted. In the later sixteenth century European cartographers often depicted Korea as an island; it was only in the early seventeenth century that they recognised its peninsular character. The Imjin War marked an inflection point, and Bolado makes use of Jesuit records authored by those who went to Korea in person and contrasts the information presented by the Jesuit mission in Japan and China. The former produced richer, eyewitness and ethnographic accounts as some of the first European visits to the peninsula. These sources often praised and profiled the actions of Christian Japanese daimyo who were leading figures in the war effort, folding the Imjin War into a broader story of Christian struggle converting souls across north-east Asia. But information gleaned by Chinese Jesuits, Matteo Ricci among them, furnished definitive cartographic information on Korea, and thus finally put the peninsula on the maps of European cartographers in the early 1600s. Bolado’s work places the Imjin War within the broader story of cartographic knowledge circulation central to a rapidly changing conceptualisation of ‘the world’ across the globe.

The final article by Eder Gallegos further extends analysis in an ‘Amerasian’ direction. Gallegos explains how the Imjin War catalysed artillery production in Manila and thus helped to shape the trans-Pacific circulation and adaptation of military armament. From Manila’s inception as a Spanish settlement in 1571, local authorities felt the need to defend the city from the threats posed by European competition, regional raiding and local violence. A threat that persisted for decades was the spectre of Japanese invasion, made manifest by Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea and his direct demands to Spanish authorities for tribute and submission. The governor of the Philippines sent multiple embassies to Hideyoshi in the 1590s (some hosted at Hizen-Nagoya) in an effort to mollify the volatile leader. Against this backdrop, Gallegos highlights efforts by Hernando Ríos Coronel to produce cannons at the Manila foundry in direct response to the Japanese threat. The resulting artillery pieces blended Iberian, Chinese and indigenous labour and expertise. Moreover, the foundry leveraged its location at the crossroad of exchange networks to supply the requisite metals from a diverse pool of locales. The pieces garnered interest well beyond Manila. In the early seventeenth century, Ming officials drew on Chinese technicians with experience at the Manila foundry in an effort to replicate their achievements, albeit with mixed results. The Manila pieces were esteemed within the Spanish empire, so much so that some were exported to New Spain and carried overland and installed in the fortifications of Veracruz. Hideyoshi’s invasion of Manila never came to pass, but his threats spurred military production that ultimately contributed to the defence of the Spanish empire’s Caribbean assets into the next century and well beyond.Footnote ²⁴

The Imjin War’s global reverberations – as reflected in cartographic knowledge, military production, rituals of remembrance and forgetting, and demographic upheavals – justify bringing this little-known, but highly significant, conflict to the attention of a wider scholarly audience.