The University Record, February 22, 1999 By John Woodford News
and Information Services During Koreas two Imjin Wars against
Japanese invadersin 1592 and 1597the Korean people endured
incompetent leadership, famine, the destruction of their
villages and bloody assaults that resulted in a mountain of
pickled noses and ears of 38,000 Koreans placed on display in
Osaka, Japan. The Imjin invasions and earlier and later
oneschiefly the Mongolian in 123170, the Japanese of 191045, and
the Korean War of 195053have profoundly shaped Korean history
and literature, Kichung Kim said in his Jan. 20 lecture Survival
and Abduction: Documentary Literature of the Imjin Wars
(159298), but the most brutal were the Imjin Wars. Kim,
professor of English and American studies at San Jose State
University, told an audience at the International Institute that
diaries and memoirs of those who survived in Korea and those
abducted to Japan provide the main documentation of Koreans
efforts at self-definition in the Imjin period. The Kor