The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation. By JaHyun Kim Haboush (William J. Haboush and Jisoo M. Kin, with Sixiang Wang, Hwisang Cho, and Ksenia Chizova-Kim, eds.) (New York, Columbia University Press, 2016) 221 pp. $60.00 cloth $59.99 e-book

The author’s family, colleagues, and former students collaborated to produce this book, which lays out the major study on which she was working before her death in 2011. Haboush analyzes texts to trace the early seventeenth-century Korean “discourse of nation” produced during and after the 1592–1598 Japanese invasion and the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636/7. “Letters of exhortation” were first issued in 1592 by local elites, the yangban, who organized volunteers to resist the invaders when the royal army collapsed. Addressed to patriots in other villages, these letters appeal to love of native place, express pride in Korea’s cultural heritage, and voice outrage against the brutal killing, raping, and looting of the “barbarians.” Breaking the state’s monopoly on coercive violence, this spontaneous grassroots patriotic movement, sparked by national crisis, peaked in the anxious months before Ming intervention in early 1593 shifted the military balance against Japan. The desire...