Imjin war

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Chinese name
Traditionally 萬曆 朝鮮戰爭
Simplified 万历 朝鲜战争
Pinyin wànlì cháoxiǎn zhànzhēng
Japanese name
Japanese 文 禄 ・ 慶 長 の 役
Hepburn Rōmaji Bunroku-Keichō no Eki
Korean name
Hangeul 임진 왜란
Hanja 壬辰 倭 亂
Revised Romanization Imjin Waeran
McCune-Reischauer Imjin Waeran
Imjin War (invasion of Korea by Japan)
date May 23, 1592 to December 24, 1598
place Korea
output Victory of Korea and China; Japan withdraws from Korea
Parties to the conflict

Flag of the king of Joseon.svg Joseon Dynasty
Ming Dynasty

Go-shichi no kiri crest.svg Toyotomi regime

Commander

Flag of the king of Joseon.svgKing Seonjo
Emperor Wanli

Go-shichi no kiri crest.svg Toyotomi Hideyoshi

Troop strength
40,000 (at the start of the war) 150,000 (1592)
300,000 (1597)
losses

Two million (20% of the total population of Korea)

Hundreds of ships, tens of thousands of soldiers

The seven-year war of invasion (1592 ( Japanese Bunroku 1) to 1598 (Japanese Keichō 3)) by Japanese forces in Korea is referred to as the Imjin War . It was named after the year of the Japanese invasion, 1592, which was called imjin in the Korean calendar . In Japan the event is called the Bunroku-Keichō War ( 文 禄 ・ 慶 長 の 役 , Bunroku-Keichō no eki ).

prehistory

While the Joseon Dynasty of Korea had close ties to China, the relationship with Japan, which was currently in a civil war ( Sengoku period ), was distant. Throughout the 16th century, Korean efforts were focused on containing the incursions of the Wokou pirates. King Seonjo had not only strengthened the coastal defense, but also opened the ports of the cities of Che, Yŏm and Busan to Japanese merchant ships; the latter on the assumption that Japan will also act to protect its trade against piracy.

In Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi succeeded in unification of the empire and the end of the civil war. But the local daimyo were still restless and a constant threat to Hideyoshi's government. It was therefore in his interest to employ these princes with a military enterprise on the mainland. After defeating the last renegade daimyo, Hideyoshi therefore decided in 1590 to conquer China and distribute the land to the princes. In addition to economic interests (China had refused to negotiate with Hideyoshi), according to most historians, personal megalomania also played an important role.

In the same year Hideyoshi sent embassies to Korea with the request to allow the Japanese troops to march through to China. The Korean government refused to do this, however, because it feared a simultaneous annexation of Korea and also did not want to oppose the Chinese court. A Korean embassy to Japan was supposed to gather information about Hideyoshi's plans in 1591. However, the ambassadors came to different conclusions. The head of the embassy became convinced that Hideyoshi really intended a war; however, the deputy envoy believed in his peacefulness. The latter had more supporters at the Korean court and therefore enforced his assessment. The result was that Korea rejected the Japanese demands, but did not prepare for an armed conflict either.

The military situation in Korea

Land troops

Korea used a military bureaucracy system at the time of the Imjin War, which in an extreme case like this proved to be extremely inefficient. For one thing, the Koreans did not have a standing national army at the time. Citizens were generally only called to arms in emergencies, and even then age limits were set because men had economic duties in the prime of their manhood, and therefore a very large proportion of the available soldiers were very young or very old recruits. For these and other reasons, recruits were usually untested on the battlefield, poorly trained, and often lost discipline under the pressure of battle.

Another aggravating factor was that local officials generally had no authority to take action against an attack with their own associations on their own. First, a high-ranking general appointed by the king had to go to the affected area, where he then took over the supreme command. As a result, if he arrived in time at all, such a general would often have to fight in unfamiliar terrain and would not have complete knowledge of the local resources available to him. Such generals also often came from a different branch of the military apparatus, which required completely different knowledge than the tasks assigned to them in this way; For example, Yi Sun-sin and Won Gyun were originally cavalry officers before they were given command of the country's naval forces. In addition, there were personal mistakes such as arrogance and gross miscalculations by some generals (such as Shin Rip during the Battle of Chungju , or on the part of Won Gyun at the Sea Battle of Chilchonryang ), which cost unnecessarily huge amounts of human lives in their own ranks .

Furthermore, the Korean fortifications were poorly constructed throughout. The walls were often too low to be a serious obstacle to forced attack, and there were no towers or other fortified positions that would have given much more opportunity for defensive combat.

Naval forces

In contrast to the ailing condition of the land troops, however, the Korean navy was very well developed. Through earlier, sustained pirate attacks on their coastal regions, the Koreans had been able to collect far-reaching developments in shipbuilding, especially in the military sector, and in the defense against such attacks. Korean warships were consistently of an extremely stable construction and equipped with entire cannon batteries, which gave them an enormous range advantage over Japanese ships, which due to their light construction and the Japanese lack of experience in the development and use of heavy artillery, at most a small number of cannons with them. The development of the Geobukseon under the command of Yi Sun-sin represents the pinnacle of Korean ship design during the war.

But as with the land forces, the Korean Navy suffered from an impractical military bureaucracy. The fleet was divided into different divisions along the coast, of which the Left Jeolla Division (under Yi Sun-sin), the Right Jeolla Division ( I Eok-gi ) and the Right Gyeongsang Division (Won Gyun) during the war Gained notoriety. There was no effective central authority that would allow coordinated action by the Korean naval units in the first phase of the war. Only after his great successes against the enemy Japanese fleet was Yi Sun-sin for the first time such a specially newly created rank, the " Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of the Three Provinces" ( Kor. 삼도 수군 통제사 , 三 道 水 軍 統制 使 , Samdo Sugun Tongjesa ) , awarded.

First invasion

Hideyoshi decided in 1591 to force the route across the Korean Peninsula due to the Korean government's refusal . He issued instructions to the daimyo to make appropriate war preparations. Base of Japanese operations, in today was Karatsu location Nagoya Castle in northern Kyushu .

On April 14, 1592, a 160,000-strong Japanese army with 700 ships landed in Busan without encountering serious resistance. Favored by the impractical organization of the Korean military apparatus , the Japanese army was able to advance quickly and reached the capital Hansong after just 20 days . The provinces of P'yŏngan-do and Hamgyŏng-do came under Japanese control. The Korean royal court fled first to Pyongyang , then to the border river Yalu in the city of Uiju. Part of the Japanese army stayed in Seoul while the other advanced further north. After taking the fortress city of Pyongyang, the Japanese stopped the advance to wait for supplies.

In the meantime, however, the Korean fleet, under the command of Admiral Yi Sun-sins , had won decisive victories over the Japanese fleet. Today these are mainly attributed to the use of novel turtle ships ; but mainly they owed it to the strategic skill of Yi, who knew how to more than compensate for the numerical inferiority of his own forces with the exploitation of the local topographical conditions. Nationwide, the Korean population, especially from the Yangban class , organized loyal armies that supported the government forces in the fight against the Japanese, but these improvised armies had little to oppose the war-trained samurai in open combat. In addition, about a quarter of the Japanese troops were equipped with arquebuses , which had been introduced into Japan by the Portuguese in 1543 and were known as Tanegashima .

Also Ming -China supported Korea military because it could threaten his vassal state does not allow - but only after much hesitation because Emperor Wanli had come because of the rapid advance of the Japanese to first consider King Seongjo cooperating with the invaders. In addition, because of the angry Ningxia rebellion at the time, the Chinese were initially unable to dispense with large contingents of troops, but instead sent a small auxiliary force in the summer of 1592, which, however, suffered a severe defeat . At the beginning of 1593, Wanli finally sent a large Chinese army under General Li Rusong, who pushed the Japanese back south, and in the autumn of the same year the Korean government was able to move back into the capital.

Now there were tough negotiations between Japan and China. Hideyoshi demanded a Chinese princess to be the wife of the Japanese emperor, the division of Korea into a Chinese and a Japanese part, and free trade between Japan and China itself. When Emperor Wanli finally rejected these demands, this was the cause of another Japanese invasion Korea.

Major battles

1592

1592-93

Second invasion

Sino-Korean allied troops attacking the Japanese fortress at Ulsan.

Japan began a new invasion in 1597 with about 140,000 soldiers. This time, the Japanese troops in search of fresh booty moved mainly through Jeolla Province to the west of Chosun, which had so far been spared the worst effects of the war due to the efforts of the Korean Navy and guerrillas.

At first the Japanese were successful in the siege of Namwon and the battle of Chiksan , but then the war took another catastrophic turn for Hideyoshi's army. Yi Sun-sin, the man who played a major part in the failure of the first attempt at invasion, fell victim to an intrigue among his enemies at the Japanese and Korean courts in 1597 and was removed from his command. His successor, Won Gyun , suffered a defeat in his first battle in which almost the entire Korean fleet was destroyed. Pardoned by the king, Yi Sun-sin again took command of the remaining 13 Korean warships and triumphed with them over a Japanese fleet of 133 warships and 200 troop and supply ships in the battle in the Strait of Myongnyang . With this achievement he regained the supremacy of the Koreans over the coastal waters of their country and at the same time brought the supply of the enemy land troops across the sea to a complete standstill.

The remaining Korean army joined forces with the Ming Army and pushed back the northward marching Japanese after the second Japanese advance on Hansong became a retreat. Hideyoshi died in the fall of that year, and according to his last order, the general evacuation of the Japanese forces from Chosun began. Yi Sun-sin, which the Japanese perpetrated on the population chosunesischen atrocities could not forgive the Japanese fleet attacked at their escape from Noryang and destroyed most of it, but he himself fell in the battle. With this last battle the Seven Years' War ended.

Major battles

1597

1598

Effects

The Imjin War became notorious, among other things, for the cruelty with which the Japanese attacked both soldiers and civilians. Hideyoshi's orders contained, among other things, the order to collect trophies from those killed in order to be able to measure the success of his war leaders against them. In Japan it was a tradition to cut off the heads of fallen opponents, but since they would have caused logistical problems in this war due to their space requirements, it was decided to collect only the noses of the victims. To increase their standing in Hideyoshi's eyes, the invaders did not even stop at indiscriminately massacring even defenseless Korean civilians - men, women and children of all ages . The fact that the origin of the severed noses was naturally difficult to determine was a contributing factor to these atrocities. This fact was even mentioned in some reports of various Japanese military leaders and even recorded statistically. The cut noses were buried in various special shrines by order of Hideyoshi, of which the Mimizuka in Kyoto is the best known.

Among the 50,000 or so Koreans deported to Japan were numerous ceramists whose talents were drawn on by the Japanese daimyos and initiated the rise of a number of ceramics: Hagi ceramics , Takatori ceramics , Satsuma ceramics , Karatsu ceramics and not most recently the Imari porcelains exported to Europe since the middle of the 17th century .

The Koreans' major victories in the Imjin War included Yi Sun-sin's triumph off Hansan Island, Gwon Yul's success in Haengju, and the Gim Simin-led battle in Jinju. They are known to this day as the Three Great Victories . Among the generals who led the volunteer armies, Gwak Jae-U , Go Gyeongmyeong, Jo Heon, Gim Jeonil and Jeong Munbu played crucial roles.

literature

  • Marion Eggert , Jörg Plassen : Small history of Korea (= Beck'sche series. 1666). Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52841-4 .
  • Carter J. Eckert, Ki-Baik Lee, Young Ick Lew, Michael Robinson, Edward W. Wagner: Korea Old and New: A History. Ilchokak, Seoul 2002, ISBN 89-337-0209-1 .
  • John Whitney Hall : The Japanese Empire (= Fischer World History . Vol. 20). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1968.
  • Samuel Hawley: The Imjin War. Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China. The Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, Seoul; The Institute of East Asian Studies, Univ. of California, Berkeley 2005, ISBN 89-954424-2-5 .
  • Harold Hakwon Sunoo: A History of Korea. Xlibris Corporation, sl 2006, ISBN 1-4257-0948-6 .
  • Stephen Turnbull : Samurai Invasion. Japan's Korean War 1592–1598. Cassell, London 2002, ISBN 0-304-35948-3 .

Web links

Commons : Imjin War  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Remarks

  1. This is the Sino-Korean reading of the year designation 壬辰 after the 60-year cycle . It is independent of government periods and was widespread in East Asia - with identical numbers.

Individual evidence

  1. Louis G. Perez (Ed.): Japan at War. To Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara / Denver / Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-1-59884-741-3 , p. 140.
  2. Isabella Blank: Samurai. Know what is right (= Herder spectrum. 6298). Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-451-06298-8 , p. 35.
  3. ^ Sienna Kang: National Disgrace: Korea, Japan and the Imjin War. In: Columbia East Asia Review. Vol. 2, 2009, pp. 56–66, here p. 59, ( digital version (PDF; 294 KB) ).
  4. Louis G. Perez (Ed.): Japan at War. To Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara / Denver / Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-1-59884-741-3 , p. 141.
  5. ^ Korea. In: The Brockhaus in Text and Image 2003. [SW], electronic edition for the office library. Bibliographisches Institut & FA Brockhaus, 2003.
  6. ^ A b Marion Eggert, Jörg Plassen: Small history of Korea. Munich 2005, p. 79.
  7. ^ A b c John Whitney Hall: The Japanese Empire. Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. 156.
  8. Stephen Turnbull: Samurai Invasion. London 2002, pp. 17-18.
  9. Noel Perrin: Giving Up the Gun. Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879 . 3. Edition. David R. Godine Publisher, Boston 1999, ISBN 0-87923-773-2 , pp. 27 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  10. Stephen Turnbull: Samurai Invasion. London 2002, pp. 195-197.
  11. Stephen Turnbull: Samurai Invasion. London 2002, pp. 91-92.