The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean NationThe Imjin War (15921598) was a grueling conflict that wreaked havoc on the towns and villages of the Korean Peninsula. The involvement of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean forces, not to mention the regional scope of the war, was the largest the world had seen, and the memory dominated East Asian memory until World War II. Despite massive regional realignments, Korea's Chosn Dynasty endured, but within its polity a new, national discourse began to emerge.