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The Imjin War, Japan's invasion of Korea (and fantasies of conquering China & India from there) under Shogun Hideyoshi was a rather aberrant episode in Japan's history.

It is explained not only in terms of Hideyoshi's ambitions for his own glory, but as a "solution" for the "problem" of a vast warrior caste, the Samurai, rendered unemployed by the establishment of internal peace under Hideyoshi and his predecessor Shogun, Oda Nobunaga. "What do y'all do when you unite and stop killing each other?" Go off to fight other nations seemed to be Hideyoshi's answer.

However, after the last gasp of aggression against Korea in 1598, Hideyoshi and then Tokugawa suspended the policy of foreign aggression for nearly 3 centuries. The arguably parasitic samurai class remained in existence in those centuries, employed in neither internal nor external wars for the most part. They spent their time gambling, writing poetry, decorating, gardening and turning their various methods of fighting into elaborate, artsy-fartsy, combat ineffective "martial arts". Meanwhile the Shogunate increasingly repressed Christianity and established a tight regime to control external trade by the middle 1600s

Could Hideyoshi have simply taken this latter approach of internal pacification without external aggression throughout his rule?

What effects would/could this have had in Japan? Would internal order be any more difficult to keep? I do not know what casualties the Japanese lost in the Imjin War, but was it significant in percentage terms of the Japanese Samurai class? Was it necessary or sufficient for the Edo Shoguns to "cull" potential troublemakers?

How would Japan's economy have evolved differently with less expenditure of blood and treasure, but also without Korean booty and slaves. Did Japan obtain cultural inputs from its war in Korea that it did not have as much access to through peacetime trade?

Lack of an Imjin War would affect Korea even more, with its people, land and infrastructure far less damaged. What would the 1600s and 1700s and 1800s be like for an undevasted Korea, that at most has to deal with some Manchu invasions in the far north?

And what of China? The Chinese by every measure won the Imjin War and rescued Korea. However, it involved significant effort and coincided with at least two other major security crises (I think a tribal insurrection in the southwest and a rebellion in the northwest). If there is no need for a Korean expedition, how does this influence China's economy, the reign of Wanli and his successors, and the Ming Emperor's relations with the eunuch and scholarly classes?
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