“It Wasn’t Just the Imjin War – It Was the East Asian Seven Years’ War”
Subtitle: Was Joseon Really Just a Punching Bag?
1. The Old Story: “Imjin War = Total Defeat for Joseon”
If you grew up in Korea, you probably learned some version of this script:
“In 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea.
Joseon collapsed almost instantly.
Ming China stepped in and saved the dynasty.”
From there, the Imjin War is often remembered mainly as national humiliation.
Joseon troops are portrayed as doing little more than retreating and dying badly.
But if you look at recent scholarship and read through the campaign in detail, a more complicated picture comes into focus. In terms of grand strategy, there is a strong case that this seven-year conflict ended as Hideyoshi’s failure, not Joseon’s simple defeat.
2. Even the Name Is Too Small: “Imjin War” vs. “East Asian War, 1592–1598”
More and more historians in English call this conflict the “East Asian War, 1592–1598”, or “the East Asian War,” rather than just the “Imjin War.”
There’s a reason for that.
Yes, almost all the actual fighting happened on Korean soil. But the stakes were never “Korea alone”:
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Japan: Hideyoshi launched the invasion with the explicit ambition of pushing through Korea and ultimately attacking Ming China.
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Ming: could not ignore a Japanese army sitting on the route to Liaodong and Beijing, so it intervened to protect its own northern frontier.
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Joseon: became the unlucky battlefield where these larger designs collided.
If we just call it a “Japanese disturbance” (the literal meaning of waeran), we easily miss the fact that this was a full-scale international war that reshaped East Asian geopolitics.
3. The First Three Months: Joseon Collapses, Japan Blitzes
We do have to face one harsh truth:
The opening phase was a disaster for Joseon.
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Within three weeks, Japanese vanguard forces marched into the capital, Hansŏng (Seoul). (koreanhistory.humspace.ucla.edu)
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King Sŏnjo fled north to Pyongyang and then all the way to Ŭiju, near the Ming border.
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Major Joseon field armies were routed in battles like Tangeumdae.
If you freeze the story at this point, the dark joke that “the Joseon army got steam-rolled like tourists in a bad action movie” doesn’t feel entirely unfair.
But that’s only Act 1.
The problem is that our public memory often stops there.
4. Three Pillars That Flipped the War: Navy, Rebuilt Army, and Righteous Armies
From the summer of 1592 onward, the trajectory of the war begins to bend. Joseon doesn’t just “endure” — it gradually claws back initiative.
(1) Yi Sun-sin and the Navy – Cutting Japan’s Lifelines
The most famous piece is, of course, the navy.
Through a string of victories – Okpo, Sacheon, Hansando and others – Admiral Yi Sun-sin and the Joseon fleet smashed Japanese squadrons and seized control of much of the southern and western seas.
The practical result was brutal for Japan:
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Japanese armies sitting deep inside the peninsula suddenly found their sea supply lines constantly threatened.
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Major ports on the south coast became cages rather than launchpads.
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Long overland lines of communication grew vulnerable and thin.
Several Western historians have argued that without the Joseon navy, Japanese forces might well have overrun the entire peninsula and been able to bring Ming to battle on very different terms.
(2) The Regular Army, Rebuilt – Not Just Running Away
There’s another under-told part of the story.
After the initial collapse, the Joseon regular army did not simply vanish into thin air. It was reconstituted and fought repeatedly:
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Generals we remember by name – Gwon Yul at Haengju, Kim Si-min at Jinju, and others – were not guerrilla leaders but regular commanders.
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Many of the major set-piece battles in the later stages of the war were led by reorganized Joseon government forces, often fighting alongside Ming detachments.
So the cliché that “only guerrillas and volunteers fought, the state army just ran” is just as misleading as the opposite myth that “volunteers won the whole war.”
(3) Righteous Armies – Not the Main Body, but the Nervous System
At the same time, you can’t dismiss the righteous armies (ŭibyŏng).
Were they the main heavy-hitting force? No.
But were they marginal? Also no.
They mattered because they did the things regular armies struggle with:
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Harassing Japanese foraging parties and supply lines.
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Ambushes and raids in difficult terrain.
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Freeing captives, passing on intelligence, stiffening local morale.
If the regular army was the skeleton and muscle, the ŭibyŏng were more like the nerves and blood vessels of Joseon’s war effort.
5. Ming China – Saviour, Menace, or Both?
In a lot of modern online commentary, Ming sometimes appears as a kind of villain: a cynical great power that dragged things out, ate Joseon’s food, and made everything about its own politics.
There is some truth to that criticism – but it’s only half the picture.
(1) Military Contribution: Retaking Pyongyang and Pushing Japan South
In early 1593, Ming forces crossed the Yalu and launched a major campaign to retake Pyongyang.
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They succeeded in forcing Japanese troops to abandon Pyongyang and retreat south of the Taedong River.
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Japanese armies subsequently pulled back toward the central and southern regions, giving up any realistic hope of a quick march on Liaodong or Beijing.
On land, only Ming had the manpower, artillery, and logistics to confront Japan on this scale. In that sense, their intervention was militarily decisive.
(2) But They Were Not a Purely Benevolent Big Brother
And yet, it’s also true that:
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Ming armies extracted enormous amounts of grain and supplies from an already devastated Korea.
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There were many cases of looting, violence, and abuse against Korean civilians.
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Ming court politics – hardliners vs. negotiators – often meant more energy went into talks and internal wrangling than decisive operations.
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Above all, Ming did not come “just for Joseon’s sake.” The primary motive was to protect its own northern frontier and capital, for obvious strategic reasons.
So Ming was simultaneously:
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the power that helped save the dynasty, and
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a power that inflicted its own deep wounds on Joseon.
Any honest account has to hold those two truths together.
6. So Who “Won”? Toyotomi’s Failure, Joseon’s Survival, Everyone’s Ruin
If you reduce seven years of chaos to the bare outcome, it looks something like this:
Japan
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Hideyoshi’s grand design – conquer Korea as a springboard to attack Ming – failed completely.
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Japanese troops withdrew entirely from the peninsula; no lasting foothold remained.
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Not long after, Hideyoshi died and his regime collapsed; the Tokugawa shogunate rose on the ruins.
Ming China
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Militarily, Ming succeeded in preventing a Japanese thrust toward its heartland and in preserving Joseon as a loyal buffer state.
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But the cost in lives and money was enormous. The war seriously weakened Ming’s fiscal and military capacity and is often seen as one of the factors that left it vulnerable to the later Manchu conquest.
Joseon
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The peninsula was devastated; population, cities, and cultural heritage all suffered catastrophic losses.
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Yet the dynasty itself survived. The court returned to the capital, undertook postwar reforms and military reorganization, and the state endured for roughly three more centuries.
For that reason, many historians today describe the conflict as:
Japan’s strategic defeat,
Ming and Joseon’s “incomplete victories.”
7. How Should We Remember This War?
The online argument that sparked this essay was essentially asking:
“Aren’t we a bit too eager to brand ourselves as pure losers here?
Wasn’t this war, in the long run, Hideyoshi’s failure and Joseon’s survival story, not just a tale of national shame?”
Seen that way, reframing the conflict as the “East Asian Seven Years’ War” isn’t just a matter of changing the label. It pushes us to:
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Look beyond a one-note “we were crushed” narrative.
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Acknowledge both the humiliation of the early collapse and the resilience, adaptation, and sheer stubborn survival that followed.
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Remember that in great-power wars, “victory” and “defeat” are often messy, partial, and unevenly distributed.
It doesn’t magically erase the trauma.
But it does let us read the Imjin War not only as a story of how badly Joseon was hit,
but also as a story of how, against grim odds, it refused to disappear.
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