The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush

Focusing on royal edicts issued in the Korean vernacular, these chapters contain the volume's most original material. 3 Chapters 3 and 4 constitute what can be considered the second part of the book. It draws from Epistolary Korea, Haboush's 2009 compilation of Chŏson-era epistles. The first part, comprising chapters 1 and 2, is about the activities of the ŭibyŏng-the 'righteous army,' or assemblage of irregular guerrillas, that arose to resist Hideyoshi's armies. Haboush believes that the war created a new discursive landscape in Korea, and this is the meta-theme that holds together the five chapters of the book, which can be divided conceptually into three parts. A great regret of mine is that The East Asian War, 1592–1598, my edited collection of English-language articles by leading Korean and Japanese scholars, appeared only in 2015, too late for Haboush to consult for elaboration and context to support her study. Another is Kim Si-dŏk's innovative comparative work on the memory of the war in literature and art. One notable work on the subject is Thomas Quartermain's survey of private diaries, which examines political rhetoric about the state and tracks the development of competing identity-building processes by Chosŏn elites from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. Even fewer studies in any language address the rhetoric of the war, or what Haboush calls the 'war of words' (p. The East Asian War of 1592–1598 has been extensively examined in Korean and Japanese, but we have few studies in English. Haboush, and we owe them our appreciation. Bringing this unfinished manuscript to press was a labor of love by her close friends, her loyal students, and her widower, William J. I cherish at least two delightful memories of her: peering together through the fading light at Ch'ŏnji (the crater lake atop Mount Paektu) in 1988 and enjoying several days of spirited debate in Oxford in 2001 at an invitational conference on the East Asian War of 1592–1598. JaHyun Kim Haboush was a colleague and friend to many of us.

Reviewing this posthumous book is a heavy burden, because I will not have the pleasure of discussing it with the author herself.

Xenophanes of Colophon, Fragment 22 (570–478 BCE) 1

The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush