The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China

by Samuel Hawley

  According to Japanese records, 8,500 Koreans were killed in the fall of Pusan and 200 prisoners were taken. Among the dead was Chong Pal’s eighteen-year-old concubine, Ae-hyang. Her body was found lying beside the fallen commander. She had taken her own life.

  Kyongsang Left Navy Commander Pak Hong, based at Kijang a short distance to the east, witnessed this battle from the top of a nearby hill. His nerve had been badly shaken the previous day, watching the arrival of the hundreds of ships comprising the Japanese armada. Now, as he witnessed the seemingly indomitable enemy take Pusan Castle and slaughter the defenders within, it broke entirely. He did not rush to his ships to fight the Japanese, whose intentions now were clear. Nor did he attempt to move his vessels to safer waters. Instead he ordered his entire fleet scuttled, a total of one hundred vessels, including fifty or more panokson battleships. He also had all his weapons destroyed and provisions burned so they would not fall into enemy hands. He then deserted his post and fled north all the way to Seoul, leaving behind thousands of bewildered soldiers and sailors who naturally followed his example and drifted away. [174]

  So it was that the Kyongsang Left Navy, the strong left arm of the Korean navy and the first line of defense on the nation’s south coast, self-destructed on the second day of the war. Pak Hong’s ships did not sail a mile or fire a shot. They simply disappeared quietly beneath the waves. It was a tremendous gift to the Japanese, particularly to first contingent leader Konishi Yukinaga, who had taken a considerable gamble in coming to Pusan without the protection of warships. The sight of all those Korean ships wrecked in the harbor must have been heartwarming indeed for the ambitious Christian daimyo, visual confirmation that bold, swift action was what was needed to quell the Koreans, who were clearly unprepared for war.

  The day after taking Pusan Castle and the garrison fort at Tadaepo, Konishi recombined his forces and marched on the fortress at Tongnae ten kilometers to the northeast on the main road to Seoul. This was the strongest fortification in the area, a stoutly walled citadel on a hilltop in front of Mt. Kumjong. It was by this time bursting with twenty thousand Koreans, a crush of ill-equipped soldiers, untrained conscripts, and a mass of panicked civilians. In overall command was Tongnae prefect Song Sang-hyon, a forty-one-year-old government official who in the coming hours would provide the Japanese with another lesson in just how badly Hideyoshi had miscalculated in thinking that the Koreans would ever willingly give passage to his armies and “lead the way to Ming.”

  As they had at Pusan, the Japanese gave Song Sang-hyon and the defenders of Tongnae one last chance to surrender before launching their attack, erecting a large sign outside the castle’s south gate that read, “Fight if you want to fight. Or lay down your arms and let us pass.” Song Sang-hyon wrote an unequivocal reply on a piece of wood and threw it over the wall: “Fighting and dying are easy,” it read. “But letting you pass I cannot do.”

  Song knew the situation was hopeless, that the Japanese would inevitably breech the wall and take the fort just as they had at Pusan. His servant told him of a gap he had spied in the Japanese lines and urged him to flee before it was too late. Song refused. He would do his duty and die at Tongnae. His only regret was the pain this would cause his parents, so in the lull before the attack he sat down to write a final note to his father; one account adds the dramatic flourish that he bit the end of his finger and wrote the message in blood. “Our fortress is now under siege,” it said, “surrounded by a multitude of enemy soldiers. There is no chance of rescue. The other garrisons are sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the danger we face. It grieves me to leave you, but a subject’s duty to his king must come before a son’s devotion to his father.”

  Song then turned to his servant. “When the fighting is over the bodies will be piled high. I have a mole the size of a small bean on my lower back. Remember that when you’re looking for my corpse.”

  The Battle of Tongnae began at eight o’clock in the morning. According to Korean accounts it lasted twelve hours; the Japanese say it was over in four. The besieged Koreans, women included, fought with desperate ferocity, flinging arrows and spears and then stones at the attacking Japanese as Song Sang-hyon beat the great drum from an upper pavilion of the castle to urge his soldiers on. But once again the backward weapons the Koreans possessed proved no match for Japanese muskets. One by one the defenders were picked off by the deadly fire of the ashigaru. When resistance began to falter, the Japanese threw bamboo ladders against the fort’s high walls and swarmed over the top, Konishi at the fore, sword in hand. A final crescendo of hand-to-hand fighting followed. And then it was over. Song himself was captured alive by a group of soldiers who tried to force him to bow before them. When he resisted they hacked him to death.

  The Japanese suffered one hundred killed and four hundred wounded in the Battle of Tongnae. Korean deaths totaled five thousand. Upon hearing that Song Sang-hyon was among the fallen, So Yoshitoshi, who had been hospitably treated by the prefect during his prewar missions to Korea and was thus anxious to see him spared, ordered a funeral held and wrote a epitaph for his grave mound: “A Loyal Subject.” Song was buried on the mountain behind Tongnae, in a grove of chestnut trees. His final letter eventually found its way north to his parents. Two years later, in 1594, a family member went to Tongnae to claim his body and carry it home.[175]

  * * *

  Kyongsang Right Navy Commander Won Kyun was approaching a state of panic at his base on Koje Island. The initial reports he had received of the appearance of the Japanese armada at Pusan to the east were followed in quick succession by news of the fall of Pusan Castle, then word of the events at Tongnae. Finally, in what was undoubtedly a confusing welter of facts and rumors, Won learned of the desertion of his colleague Pak Hong and the self-destruction of the Kyongsang Left Navy. With that any thoughts he may have had of resisting the invaders disappeared entirely. His only concern now was to flee. His retreat appears to have begun in an orderly fashion, with Won attempting to lead his fleet west to safety. But he soon panicked at the sight of a group of fishing boats in the distance that he mistook for the Japanese navy and, just like Pak Hong, ordered his ships scuttled and his weapons destroyed. He was himself preparing to abandon his flagship and run into the hills when two of his more stalwart subordinates reminded him of the consequences of flight. How would he be able to justify his actions, they asked, if he were to be accused of deserting his post? It would be better to stand his ground and send for reinforcements from Cholla Left Navy Commander Yi Sun-Sin. In the end a chastened Won decided to stay and fight. But there was little good he could do now. Of his original fleet of more than one hundred vessels, he had only four ships left.[176]

  The fleets of both the Kyongsang Left and Right Navies were now gone, a total of some two hundred ships, two-thirds of the entire Korean navy, destroyed by their own commanders. All that remained in the south to resist the Japanese at sea were the fewer than one hundred ships of the Left and Right Navies of Cholla Province to the west. Fortunately for Korea, the commanders of these two navies, Yi Sun-sin and Yi Ok-ki, were made of sterner stuff than their Kyongsang counterparts.

  * * *

  Figure 5: The First Invasion, 1592-93

  After taking Pusan and nearby Tongnae and establishing a beachhead for the invasion, Konishi Yukinaga did not wait for the arrival of Kato’s second contingent and Kuroda’s third before beginning the march to Seoul. This was a change in the invasion plan. Konishi may have secretly intended all along to push ahead of his rivals and claim the glory of seizing the capital solely for himself. Or perhaps the idea came to him with the surge of confidence he surely felt after taking Pusan, Tadaepo, and Tongnae in the space of just two days. Or perhaps he was anxious to break out of the Pusan beachhead and be on his way before the Koreans could mount a counterattack.[177] Whichever the case, on May 26, the third day of the invasion, Konishi, So Yoshitoshi, and the bulk of the first contingent set out on the long march to the Choson capital, 450 kilometers n
orth over mountainous terrain. They traveled by the central route, up the middle of the peninsula, at an average speed of more than twenty kilometers per day, a blistering pace considering the skirmishes and battles they would fight on the way.

  The first town they came to was Yangsan, which they found deserted. The magistrate and most of the population had fled into the hills. The route then took them up to the Chakwon Pass, where they were momentarily slowed by a hastily organized force of defenders. Their muskets soon swept this obstacle aside and they passed down to the town of Miryang, leaving three hundred dead Koreans in the mountains behind.

  Taegu was next. General Yi Kak, the Left Army Commander for Kyongsang Province who had retreated from Tongnae soon after the Japanese landing, attempted to regroup his scattered forces at this fortress town in the center of the province. Reinforcements were also summoned from the town of Sangju farther north. But it was all too late. The Japanese were upon the city before any sort of defense could be mounted. Taegu fell on May 28.

  The Koreans were now beginning to feel the full might of the Japanese onslaught. The enemy seemed invincible. Unstoppable. Indeed, was there any point in trying to stand against their muskets with mere arrows and swords and spears? The governor of Kyongsang Province, Kim Su, had issued a call to arms immediately after the start of the invasion and attempted to lead a force south to meet it near Pusan. He had not gotten very far on his march, however, when he learned that Tongnae had fallen as well. With that he gave up any further thought of resistance and effectively rescinded his previous call to arms with a proclamation urging the people of the province to flee for their lives.

  By May 29, one week after their landing at Pusan, it was beginning to look as if the Japanese army would cover the entire length of Kyongsang Province, fully half the distance from Pusan to Seoul, without encountering any serious resistance. They simply could not be stopped. As royal emissary Yi Ik reported to Seoul on May 31 from Mungyong on the province’s northern border, “We face today an enemy equipped with divine power and skill. We have nobody to cope with them. I myself have no alternative but to meet death.”[178]

  For the Koreans there was perhaps a sense of déjà vu in all of this. In the twelfth century their armies had encountered a similar sort of enemy that had left them equally baffled and incapable of mounting any sort of effective defense. Then it had been the Jurchen tribesmen of Manchuria, who were expert horsemen. Their lightning-fast cavalry units galloped rings around the inexperienced foot soldiers of the Koryo army, dashing in to strike and then flying away again before the Koreans could respond. As one contemporary succinctly observed, “The enemy rode. We walked. We were no match for them.”[179]

  In 1592 the name of the game was no longer horses. It was guns. And the Koreans were shaking their heads over the new but somehow familiar refrain: “The enemy has muskets. We have arrows. We are no match for them.”

  * * *

  News of the Japanese invasion began to filter west to Yosu, home port of Cholla Left Navy Commander Yi Sun-sin, at sunset on May 25. First to arrive were confusing reports from Kyongsang naval commanders Pak Hong and Won Kyun of an armada of Japanese ships that had arrived in Pusan harbor. Although it was still not clear what was happening, Yi sent dispatches to the five ports under his command ordering them to full alert and had his own warships form a battle line at the mouth of Yosu harbor to defend it against possible attack. He also sent dispatches west to Usuyong, home port of Cholla Right Navy Commander Yi Ok-ki, inland to provincial governor Yi Kwang, and north to the court in Seoul.

  The gravity of the situation became clear the next day, with the arrival of further reports that the Japanese had landed and taken Pusan Castle. Then, on the twenty-eighth, came word of the fate of Tongnae.[180]

  And then the bombshell: both the Kyongsang Left and Right Navies were gone, scuttled by their own commanders, Pak Hong and Won Kyun. Pak had fled his post and was now far inland. Won was hiding somewhere along the coast to the west of Koje Island, with just four ships remaining from his hundred-ship fleet, pleading for Yi to send reinforcements.

  Yi Sun-sin did not now rush headlong into battle. Two and a half weeks would pass before he would finally lead his fleet eastward from Yosu to meet the Japanese. One reason for the delay was a lack of orders. Prior to the outbreak of war the government in Seoul had not given its commanders in the south the authority to act as they saw fit in the event of an emergency. Each commander was charged simply with defending his assigned territory. For Yi this was the eastern coast of Cholla Province. To sally forth to Kyongsang Province and Won Kyun’s aid would thus have been tantamount to abandoning his post.

  It would also have been foolhardy, and Yi Sun-sin most certainly was not that. As he would later urge his captains before going into battle, “Don’t act rashly! Be deliberate and calm, like a mountain!” In the coming months of the war these words would prove to be Yi Sun-sin’s genius. He was coming to understand the power of the Japanese. But he remained confident that, with careful planning and judicious action, they could still be beaten at sea. The sea, after all, was where Korea’s strength lay with regard to the Japanese. It was where it had beaten the wako pirates in the fifteenth century. And it was where it could beat them again, if cooler heads prevailed.

  The two and a half weeks that elapsed before Yi Sun-sin sailed into the war were thus a time of calm and deliberate preparation. First, he decided that the most effective way to counter the Japanese would be to combine his modest force (he had twenty-four panokson board-roofed battleships, fifteen mid-sized vessels, and forty-six commandeered fishing boats that he would later discard as useless) with the vessels in Yi Ok-ki’s Cholla Right Navy to create a united fleet. It is clear from his diaries and dispatches to Seoul that he had begun organizing this soon after the start of the invasion. Second, Yi needed information on the waterways of Kyongsang Province before he could act—no small consideration, for Korea’s southern coast is a maze of rocks and reefs and dangerous tides, any one of which can doom a vessel. He thus sent a request for charts to Kyongsang governor Kim Su and to Won Kyun in his refuge to the east, and when they arrived he studied them carefully.

  Finally, Yi needed time to prepare his men mentally for the battles ahead. The news of the fall of Pusan and Tongnae, the destruction of both Kyongsang fleets, and the seeming invincibility of the Japanese had had an understandably demoralizing effect on virtually every man in the fleet. To have rushed them into battle in such a frame of mind would have been disastrous, for as the fourth-century-B.C. Chinese military classic Ssu-Ma Fa observed, “When men have minds set on victory, all they see is the enemy. When men have minds filled with fear, all they see is their fear.”[181] Yi had to be confident that his men, particularly his captains, would not lose their nerve and in turn their heads at the first sight of the enemy. He needed to build up their anger and their confidence to the point where they were fully prepared to fight and win. In his diary entries for this period we thus find him holding numerous conferences with his captains, testing their resolve and leading them in solemn pledges to fight to the death. We find him questioning the magistrates of the towns under his jurisdiction to gauge their commitment to man the walls and fight. We find him offering encouragement to his men, stirring up their martial spirit, quelling their fears and imbuing in them his own grim determination to strike a telling blow against the Japanese.[182]

  This is why Yi Sun-sin waited two and a half weeks before leading his ships into battle. This is why, when Won Kyun and Kyongsang governor Kim Su urged him to come to their aid, he replied with a request for charts. He refused to act rashly. He would proceed only with calm deliberation, “like a mountain.”

  All this was lost on Kyongsang naval commander Won Kyun, holed up in a cove to the east with his remaining four ships. In his view he had sent out a call for help that Yi Sun-sin had failed to answer. It was the first of numerous complaints that an increasingly resentful Won would make against Yi. Soon the two men would th
oroughly despise each other.

  * * *

  With Korea’s beacon-fire system in disrepair, it took four days for news of the Japanese invasion to travel the 450 kilometers north to Seoul. The first dispatch came by horse and rider, sent by Kyongsang Left Navy Commander Pak Hong. Pak himself was not far behind.

  After more than a year of foot-dragging over defensive preparations, it was only now that the government appointed the generals needed to lead the nation’s armies. In 1591 Minister of the Left Yu Song-nyong had urged that these appointments be made well in advance of the outbreak of hostilities so that the generals would have time to acquaint themselves with their commands and mount an effective defense. But this went against the Choson practice of keeping generals in Seoul until the moment they were needed to lead troops into battle, and so Yu’s suggestion was ignored. Now, just as Yu had predicted, “visiting generals” would have to “gallop down to the provinces on the spur of the moment” to defend the routes north to Seoul. For the top post of dowonsu, commander in chief of the armed forces in all of Korea’s eight provinces, a fifty-eight-year-old civil servant named Kim Myong-won was selected—yet another example of the Korean idea that a classically trained government official with no military experience was capable of leading armies. Sin Ip, a bona fide army officer, was appointed to the secondary post of samdo sunbyonsa, “commander of the three provinces” of Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong. Beneath Sin came Yi Il as sunbyonsa, “provincial commander,” with responsibility for Kyongsang-do, and then a handful of pangosa, “county commanders,” charged with defending specific strategic points.