Toyotomi Hideyoshi

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 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.

July 27, 1593 · 63,000 total casualties

The worst atrocity of the war and one of the deadliest single events in Korean history: the fortress was taken purely to erase an insult, during peace negotiations, with no strategic object. It is remembered alongside the kisaeng Non'gae, who is said to have embraced a Japanese commander at the victory banquet and thrown them both off the cliff into the Nam river.

December 1597 – January 1598 · 20,000 total casualties

The war's condition in miniature by 1598: both sides dug into the southern coast, neither able to finish the other, everyone starving. The Japanese held a chain of coastal fortresses they could not break out of; the allies could not break in. It would have gone on indefinitely, and the thing that ended it was not a battle at all — it was a death in Kyoto.