This study investigates the impact of warfare on nuptial patterns, focusing on the trends and characteristics of age differences within marriage. Specifically, it explores the socio-demographic outcomes of the Imjin War (1592–1598) and post-war reconstruction in Korea, using the earliest extant Chosŏn household registers, compiled between 1606 and 1630. Individual-level microdata were derived involving 2,336 married couples based on 11,749 entries in these registers, covering four administrative districts located in the southeastern region of the Korean peninsula severely devastated by the war. Factors such as status, property, warfare, social practices, and legal regulations influenced spousal age differences. First, social rank and family wealth played pivotal roles, with age gaps widening as a husband's socio-economic status increased. Second, females born after 1580, whose first marriages were affected by the Imjin War and post-war circumstances, experienced an average marital age gap of about ten years. Third, this effect was further complicated by the imposition of socio-legal rules on remarriage; that is, the yangban entailed a pronounced age difference owing to the Neo-Confucian norm of chaste widowhood. This study enriches the understanding of historical marriage customs in Korea and offers insights for studies on age disparity in marriage.

This article examines the care provided for the welfare of soldiers by the three combatant countries – China, Korea and Japan – during the East Asian War of 1592–8. Also known as the Imjin War, this large-scale military conflict can also be understood as an encounter between different state cultures and strategies of military medicine. This study focuses on cold-induced injuries, epidemic outbreaks and external wounds suffered during the war. I illuminate provision of prophylactic measures against cold by the Ming state, as well as attempts by the Sino-Chosŏn medical alliance to manage epidemics and treat wounded soldiers. I contrast these measures with the lack of similar centralised support for the Japanese forces, and examine the effect these differences had upon on military outcomes during the war. The difference in the amount of time, efforts and resources that the three combatant states devoted to sick and injured soldiers has implications not only for our understanding of the war but also for illuminating the early modern history of military medicine in East Asia. By exploring East Asian military medicine during and after the Imjin War, this article responds to recent calls for more detailed examination of histories of military medicine in premodern periods and non-European regions.

This study examines the practice of ‘alternate attendance’ (sankin kōtai), in which the daimyo lords of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) marched with their retainers between their home territories and the shogunal capital of Edo, roughly once a year. Research on alternate attendance has focused on the meaning of daimyo processions outside their domains (han), along Japan's highways and in the city of Edo. Here I argue that, even as daimyo embarked upon a journey to pay obeisance to the shogun, the ambiguous nature of sovereignty in early modern Japan meant that alternate attendance could also be used for a local agenda, ritually stamping the daimyo's territory with signs of his dominance, much like what has been highlighted in the study of royal processions in world history. I focus on the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, providing a case study of visits made by the Shimazu family, lords of Satsuma domain, to a village of Korean potters within their territory, whose antecedents had been brought as captives during the Imjin War of 1592–8. During daimyo visits, a relationship of mutual benefit and fealty between the Shimazu and the villagers was articulated through gift-giving, banqueting, dance and displays of local wares. This in turn was used to consolidate Shimazu power in their region.

Challenging the myth of premodern Korea as ethnically homogenous, this study focuses on immigrant marriages in Chosŏn Korea following Japanese invasions (Imjin War, 1592–1598). By examining household registers and genealogies, I investigate the status of women who married into the families of Japanese and Ming Chinese immigrants and the social consequences of such marriages. The results unexpectedly indicate that immigrant families rarely intermarried, preferring integration with local families. As a means of acquiring social and cultural capital, Korean brides from elite families were vital to the success of immigrant families in forming social networks and in producing candidates for the civil service examinations, with failure to obtain such a bride proving a potential long-term obstacle to social advancement. There is a noticeable difference between families of Chinese and Japanese origin in this context due to the preference shown by Korean families for the descendants of Ming generals over Japanese defectors. Contributing to a growing number of studies that question whether the Korean family was fully “Confucianized” in the seventeenth century with a consequent decline in the status of women, this study argues that women possessed social and cultural capital and held particular value for immigrant families.

This article explains why the Chosŏn government and the military in particular expanded state control over forests in the seventeenth century and analyzes the implications of forest administration in a preindustrial polity. From 1592 to 1598, the Chosŏn dynasty suffered invasions from Japan that displaced much of the Korean population and devastated the economy and environment. The crucial role of the navy during the war, along with a dire postwar situation, heightened government anxieties about deforestation and timber scarcity. Thus, in the seventeenth century, the Chosŏn government expanded administration over forests, particularly pine forests, across the coasts and islands of southwestern Korea. The key vehicle for the expansion was the military. Due to wartime and postwar exigencies, the military became the late Chosŏn state's primary organ for management of wood resources for state purposes. Furthermore, the growth of pine-centric state forests and shifts in military priorities would significantly reshape Korean ecologies.