First database on the Imjin War launched

The premier war in the environment all through the 16th century took spot in Asia in 1592, when Japan invaded the Korean peninsula and China sent troops to help its loyal vassal state. The war lasted 6 years and involved far more than five hundred,000 combatants. The conflict proceeds to have a cultural influence all through East Asia now, but there is relatively small Western scholarship written about this celebration. There is on the other hand a good total of product in Korean, Japanese and Chinese, as effectively as some major resources in European languages, which altogether help to fully grasp the aftermath of the war from a regional viewpoint.

Rebekah Clements, ICREA researcher at the Office of Translation and Decoding and East Asian Scientific studies at the UAB, has been in demand of coordinating the launch of the very first big bibliographic database on the Imjin War, with documents compiled in different languages from both Asian and European secondary resources. The task, entitled AFTERMATH, has received funding from the European Analysis Council, and incorporates facts on over 400 journal posts, textbooks, book chapters, and dissertations written in nine languages: Chinese, Korean, Japanese, English, German, French, Italian and Portuguese, all in an on the web bibliographic database which aims to help in being familiar with the aftermath of this East Asian war.

“Our aim is to help scholars lookup for documents in different languages and empower upcoming collaborations amid scholars of Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Western backgrounds”, Rebekah Clements states. “Our goal is not so a lot the examine of the conflict alone, but of the effects and impacts it has experienced on the modern heritage of East Asia”.

The database handles a broad vary of facets of the Imjin War, these kinds of as facts on prisoners, pottery produced all through that period, Christianity, worldwide relations, economics, the environment, Europe, identities, literature, armed service heritage, migrations, social heritage and trade. It permits analysing the human facet of war, presented that tens of countless numbers of Koreans ended up captured and bought to Japan as slaves, and numerous Japanese soldiers fell into the fingers of the Chinese military and never returned to their nation of origin. The task examines the trajectory of these men and women and how they ended up integrated into their new societies.

The war also caused common economic and environmental devastation in Korea, with big extensions of crop fields destroyed. The database offers facts for the analysis of the effects on farming, on the well being of men and women and livestock, and the effects this experienced on the later drop of China’s Ming dynasty. And lastly, the database favours the analysis of other collateral facets of the war, considering the fact that the conflict assisted to disseminate East Asian engineering and techniques amid the nations battling against every single other, in phrases of weapons used, processes these kinds of as printing, pottery and metallurgy, and even references to the examine of Confucianism.

The task Aftermath of the East Asian War of 1592-1598 has received funding from the European Analysis Council (ERC) beneath the European Union’s Horizon 2020 study and innovation programme (grant settlement No 758347).

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