Seven-Year War

This article is about the 1592–1598 war in Korea. For the 1756–1763 world war, please see Seven Years' War.

Seven-Year War
Korean Name
Revised Romanization/ McCune-Reischauer	Imjin Waeran
Hangul	임진 왜란
Hanja	壬辰倭亂

The Seven-Year War (called Imjin Waeran ("Japanese Turmoil of the Year Imjin" in Korean) was the conflict from 1592 to 1598 on the Korean peninsula, following two successive Japanese invasions of Korea.

The Japanese invaded Korea twice, in 1592 and again in 1597, bringing the already deteriorated political, economic, and social order to a state of complete collapse. Korean troops who had no modern weapons were unable to check the Japanese who had firearms. Korea was saved from subjugation only when the MIng Dynasty joined the fight against the Japanese.

The war carried dramatic consequences on East Asian history. For Korea, the horrible devestation would leave the country in a perpetually weakened state until the Japanese returned and colonized Korea in 1910. The cost of the conflict also helped to bankrupt the Ming Dynasty and lead to its eventual collapse at the hand of the Manchus.

The first invasion

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who established his hegemony in Japan in the latter part of the 16th century, had hoped but failed to receive cooperation from the Ming Dynasty in his attempt to make himself a new Shogun. Motivated in part also by a need to satisfy the perpetual land hunger of his vassals and find employment for restive samurai, he began making plans for the conquest of China. As the first step he launched a war against Korea, a vassal to China which had refused an alliance with Japan and denied the passage of Japanese troops through its country.

The Japanese invasion of 1592 with 160,000 troops had great initial success. Two armies, under Konishi Yukinage and Kato Kiyomasa, landed on the 25th and 26th of May and marched north. Konishi reached the Han River south of Seoul and entered the city on June 12, just 18 days after landing at Busan. The korean king Seonjo and his court fled first to Songdo, then Pyongyang and finally to Uiju, on the Yalu River. Japanese troops occupied many key towns in the southern part of Korea and advanced as far north as Pyongyang. At this juncture Hideyoshi proposed to China the division of Korea - the north as a self-governing Chinese satellite, and the south to remain in Japanese hands.

That offer was promptly rejected, and in February 1593 a large combined force of Chinese and Korean soldiers attacked Pyongyang and drove the Japanese into southward retreat. By the end of 1593, King Seonjo was back in Seoul. With the military assistance given by China, combined with the guerilla fighting by the Koreans themselves, and Korean naval victories won by General Yi Sun-shin (who invented the armored 'turtle ship'), Japan sued for peace in 1593.

The second invasion

For four years there was an informal truce. Some Japanese soldiers left the army and settled down, even marrying Korean women. Further peace talks were fruitless, however, and in 1597 Hideyoshi sent another force of 140,000 men to Korea. This time they met with stronger resistance and were turned back just south of Seoul by a large Ming force. As the Japanese retreated south through Kyeongsang-do they burned Kyonju and destroyed much of the historic and artistic legacy of Silla. The whole attempt was suddenly abandoned with Hideyoshi's death in 1598.

But the Seven-Year War left deep scars in Korea. Farmlands were devastated, irrigation dikes were destroyed, villages and towns were burned down, the population was first plundered and then dispersed, and tens of thousands of skilled workers (celadon ware makers) were either killed during the war or taken to Japan as captives. In 1598 alone, the Japanese took some 38,000 ears as trophies. The long war reduced the productive capacity of farmlands from 1,708,000 kyol to 541,000 kyol. Pillage by Chinese troops only added to the unmitigated tragedy of a war from which the peninsula kingdom never fully recovered.

Following the war, relations between Korea and Japan had been completely suspended. After the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, however, negotiations between the Korean court and the Tokugawa shogunate were carried out via the Japanese lord on Tsushima. In 1604, Tokugawa Ieyasu, wishing to restore commercial relations with Korea, met Korea's demands and released some 3000 captive Koreans. As a result, in 1607, a Korean mission visited Edo, and diplomatic and trade relations were restored on a limited basis.

See also

• History of Korea
• List of Korea-related topics
• Military history of Japan
• List of wars
• Military history of Korea