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On May 23, 1592, the first elements of a Japanese invasion force consisting of roughly 160,000 men began landing at Pusan on the southeast Korean coast. The Japanese warlord Hideyoshi, having reunified the home islands following a period of profound internal fragmentation, boasted that he would next conquer China. If the Koreans refused to provide assistance, his attack would start with Korea. By June 11, the Japanese had entered Seoul, and, as the Korean king evacuated his capital, the city's few remaining residents hurled garbage and insults at his retreating figure. Yet Korean guerrilla forces soon rallied, Ming China sent military assistance, and by 1598, the Japanese had been forced to withdraw.
Kenneth M. Swope labels these events the "First Great East Asian War"--a label that Swope assumes readers will recognize as a reference to the wartime Japanese term for World War II in the Pacific. Swope identifies Hideyoshi's invasion as "the single largest military conflict in the world during the sixteenth century," and notes that "one would be hard pressed to find another four-hundred-year-old conflict anywhere in the world with as much contemporary visibility" (pp. 4-5). Despite its significance, I would still quibble with designating it the "first." The seventh-century wars on the Korean peninsula also involved all of the major East Asian powers of the day, and were not only chronologically earlier...