EURO IMJIN · European Literature and the “First East Asian War” of 1592-1598 (EURO-IMJIN)

European Literature and the “First East Asian War” of 1592-1598 (EURO-IMJIN)

Outline and main questions: The main objective of the EURO-IMJIN project is to locate, transcribe, translate, and analyze European accounts of the East Asian War of 1592-1598 (“The Imjin War”), connecting European and East Asian research on the war and opening new horizons from both regions to stimulate further interdisciplinary research. EURO-IMJIN challenged the following questions: 1. When exactly did Europe perceive the Imjin war? 2. How did this image of the Imjin war change the Europeans’ status? 3. How, and to what extent was the nature of the Imjin war integrated mentally in the works of the European Renaissance? Why is this project important? The Imjin war began when the Japanese hegemon Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded the Korean peninsula; the first step in his plan to conquer China. During its six-year period (1592-1598), the Imjin war involved an estimated number of up to 500,000 combatants from China, Korea, and Japan. The war was rarely written about in the West; however, we know that numerous European observers, religious institutions, and commercial enterprises involved in the conflict and its consequences wrote accounts of the war and its aftermath. With this in mind, the Imjin war has received strikingly little attention in Western scholarship so far. Adding to this, the copious research in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean language is inaccessible for international scholars, with only a few Asian researchers using sources outside their own language specialization – and European primary sources on the war are largely unknown to them. This is why EURO-IMJIN has become an important project for society: this project used data, in particular chronicles of the war, drawn from correspondence between Europeans (mainly travelers, merchants, and missionaries) and the East Asian proto-nations (Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines) to unlock a new path for future researchers in this field. Overall aims: EURO-IMJIN aimed to search diverse archives for European primary sources, with a special focus on historiographical accounts, and to make these sources easily available by transcription, interpretation and translation. By means of disseminating and exploiting the results of this project, EURO-IMJIN was able to open a new study field that invites future parallel investigations on the war in order to gain an even more detailed overview of the European image on the Imjin war.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union