Strategy Page: "The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and the Attempt to Conquer China" By Samuel Hawley
The 1592-98 Imjin War was sixteenth century Asia's biggest international conflict and a war that set the tone for relations between the three major combatants, Korea, China and Japan, for four centuries. Yet it is a conflict that remains virtually unknown in the West. Samuel Hawley's "The Imjin War"
remedies that ignorance, and what's more, the writer does it with a writing style that reads more like a prelude to Shogun than a dry academic text. The Imjin War sprang from the desire of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the samurai warlord who reunited Japan after centuries of civil war, to conquer China and dominate Asia...Unfortunately for the Koreans, the quickest way into China was straight up the Korean peninsula. Korea therefore became ground zero for Hideyoshi's marauding armies. The invasion which followed wrecked Korean society so thoroughly that parts of the capital of Seoul were still in ruins at the beginning of the 20th century...more...This is a new article but the book itself was published in 2005. One Amazon reviewer says it is written more from the Korean perspective and so makes a good companion to Stephen Turnbull's "Samurai Invasion"
which came out in 2004. It's also a good deal cheaper than that account if you can find a copy. There's a reasonable Wiki entry on the conflict if anyone wants a free introduction.
