Konishi Yukinaga

May 25, 1592 · 8,500 total casualties

Korea had not fought a real war in two centuries; Japan had just finished fighting one for a hundred years. The gap showed instantly. Every Japanese soldier who landed was a veteran of the Sengoku wars and a third of them carried arquebuses, a weapon the Korean army had essentially no answer to. Within three weeks the Japanese would be in Seoul.

June 7, 1592 · 8,000 total casualties

The one chance to stop the invasion at a mountain pass, thrown away for a cavalry battle that gunpowder had already made impossible. It is Korea's Pavia, seventy years later and with the same lesson. The road to Seoul was open, the court fled north, and the capital fell five days later without a fight.

June 12, 1592 · 500 total casualties

The speed is the story: 450 kilometres in three weeks against a state that had been at peace for two hundred years. But the burning of the slave registers by Koreans, before any Japanese soldier arrived, says something else — the dynasty had lost its people's loyalty before it lost its capital. Seonjo's flight nearly ended the Joseon dynasty then and there, and he was still considering crossing into China when the news came from the sea.

January 8, 1593 · 12,000 total casualties

The moment the war became a world war. The Ming came because Korea was the shield of Beijing — Hideyoshi had announced he was coming for China and they believed him. Chinese artillery answered Japanese arquebuses, and the strategic balance flipped. It also nearly bankrupted the Ming: the campaign cost roughly ten million taels, a debt the dynasty never recovered from and which historians still cite among the causes of its collapse fifty years later.

March 14, 1593 · 6,000 total casualties

One of the three great Korean victories of the war and the one that proved the land war was not lost. Ten to one, and the fort held — because the ground was steep, the hwacha were murderous at close range, and Gwon Yul had prepared the position properly. The Japanese abandoned Seoul within weeks and withdrew to a chain of coastal fortresses in the south.

December 16, 1598 · 12,000 total casualties

The last battle of the war, fought over an enemy who was already leaving, and it killed the man who had won it. Yi Sun-sin fought at least twenty-three engagements and never lost one, against a navy that outnumbered him at every turn, for a government that had imprisoned and tortured him. He is Korea's national hero without qualification, and the Japanese admirals who fought him said so too — Tōgō, who destroyed the Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905, reportedly refused comparison with him.