Book excerpt: This book is divided into two parts. One is the state of trade in East Asia before and after the collapse of the tributary system to the Ming Dynasty, and the other is the war of aggression in which Toyotomi Hideyoshi of Japan sent a large number of troops to the Korean Peninsula with a view of conquering China at the end of the sixteenth century. With regard to East Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the contributors in this book share a problem awareness in terms of using trade and war as subjects to clarify multi-ethnic, borderless, and multilayered situations. Although there are many chapters related to Japan, this book tries to grasp the interaction between Japan as a region of East Asia and neighboring countries from a global perspective, not the one singular national history.