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

by Samuel Hawley

  With these crucial appointments out of the way, it was time to apportion blame for the crisis. The brunt of it fell upon Kim Song-il, the envoy who had returned from Japan in 1591 with assurances that war would never come. Kim, now serving as Kyongsang Right Army commander, was arrested for making a false report to the throne, a charge that carried an almost certain sentence of death. He was being transported to Seoul, bound as a prisoner, when his close friend Yu Song-nyong petitioned the king for a pardon and secured his release. Kim would be sent back to Kyongsang Province as a recruiting officer to raise civilian troops. He would fall sick and die there the following year.[183]

  The Koreans had a good idea how the Japanese would march north. Because their kingdom was so mountainous (a local joke has it that if Korea were ironed flat it would be as big as China), long-distance traffic was necessarily confined to prepared routes that snaked through the labyrinthine valleys and cut across the otherwise impenetrable mountain ranges that crisscrossed the peninsula. There were three such routes linking Pusan and Seoul of which the Japanese were known to be aware: the eastern road through Kyongsang Province, the western road through Chungchong Province, and the central road, the most direct route to the capital, running up the middle of the peninsula. With these three routes in mind, the following defensive plan was accordingly drawn up. General Yi Il would head south along the crucially important central road to meet the Japanese advance while it was still in the southern province of Kyongsang. General Sin Ip would position his forces farther north along the central road in the town of Chungju, there to meet the Japanese if they managed to get by Yi Il. The county commanders, meanwhile, would fan out across the south to hold various strategic points: General Pyon Ki was charged with defending Choryong, “Bird Pass,” a narrow defile in the Sobaek mountain range on the central road between the towns of Sangju and Chungju. General Yu Kuk-ryang would make a stand farther north at Chuknyong, “Bamboo Pass,” a short distance south of Seoul. General Cho Kyong was sent south to meet any Japanese force that ventured up the western road through Cholla Province near the Yellow Sea coast, and General Song Ung-gil down the eastern road along the peninsula’s opposite side. Commander in Chief Kim Myong-won, finally, would remain in Seoul for the time being to oversee defensive preparations there.[184]

  All these generals had difficulty mustering armies to lead to the south. The military lists of soldiers stationed in and around the capital proved useless, for the vast majority of these men were absent, many excused due to sickness or for the prescribed two-year mourning period for a deceased parent. The company of three hundred supposedly crack troops assigned to Yi Il, for example—a miserably small force to begin with—turned out to consist in large part of hastily recruited students and clerks pulled out of government offices. Ordered to depart immediately for the south, General Yi decided to leave this useless rabble behind and set out with a guard of just sixty mounted men he knew he could rely upon. With this small “army,” plus others he hoped to pick up along the way, General Yi was expected to halt the Japanese advance.[185]

  The situation was only marginally better for Yi’s superior, Sin Ip, who headed south from Seoul the following day. King Sonjo was on hand to see him off, together with a large portion of the capital’s anxious population. In a brief ceremony the king presented Sin with an old and valuable sword symbolizing the military authority that was now being bestowed upon him. You have my personal permission, Sonjo said, to call up men in the provinces to form an army, to requisition whatever weapons you need from government armories, and to execute anyone who fails to obey your commands.[186]

  King Sonjo and the people of Seoul expected great things from General Sin as they watched him depart, for he was one of the most highly regarded generals in the nation, with a distinguished career leading his vaunted cavalry against the Jurchen tribes of the north. He had expressed a great deal of confidence prior to the outbreak of the war of Korea’s ability to resist the Japanese, assuring Yu Song-nyong that even if Hideyoshi’s soldiers had muskets, “they can’t hit anyone with them.” Now that war was upon them Sin continued to talk along the same lines. The Japanese were rapidly outrunning their supply lines, he claimed, and were growing daily more vulnerable to the devastating cavalry charges he intended to unleash upon them. He vowed to stop them in their tracks, or to not come back alive. It was all brave talk, probably designed, like his earlier pronouncement on muskets, to buck up quavering government officials and nervous military men. Sin himself certainly was not foolish enough to believe it. He would have known that they were now facing something much more serious than a simple border raid.

  * * *

  As General Sin was setting out on his journey south to halt the enemy advance, the second contingent of the Japanese invasion force was arriving at Pusan. After a maddening delay waiting for favorable winds, it finally managed to make the crossing from Tsushima Island on May 28, five days behind the vanguard of Konishi Yukinaga. The second contingent consisted of 22,800 men, like Konishi’s first contingent exclusively from the southern island of Kyushu, and was under the overall command of Kato Kiyomasa, the thirty-year-old lord of Kuma-moto Castle in Higo Province.

  Kato’s second contingent, composed entirely of Buddhists of the Nichiren sect, came ashore near Pusan under a banner emblazoned in red with the mantra namu myoho renge kyo: “Glory to the Holy Lotus.” The sect had been founded by the evangelical monk Nichiren, who had inspired the Japanese to stand firm against the Mongol invasions two hundred years before. Nichiren’s adherents were now returning to the launching point of those invasions, Korea, to exact their long-awaited revenge.

  Kato and his men would have cut a striking appearance as they waded and were ferried ashore. Kato himself was easily identifiable by the high-crowned helmets he favored. Painted in silver or gold, they were intended to look like the headgear worn by courtiers in the imperial court; to the modern Western eye they resemble an elongated shark’s fin or stylized dunce cap. Unlike most other daimyo commanders and samurai warriors, he also sported a full beard, reportedly to ease the discomfort of his helmet cord, and carried a three-bladed lance, his favorite weapon for running down and skewering his enemies. Kato’s higher-ranking subordinates sat astride horses in exquisitely made suits of armor, wide-brimmed, horned helmets, and snarling war masks. His foot soldiers wore plainer armor and simple iron-bowl helmets, and had identifying sashimono banners affixed to their backs bearing the image of a ring, Kato’s family crest. They carried spears and swords and arquebuses, the dog-leg weapon the Koreans were coming to fear.[187]

  Kato would have been in an impatient mood that day. There was no more ambitious commander in Hideyoshi’s army, and the fact that his rival Konishi had had the honor of being the first into battle must have chagrined him greatly. But now they were both in the field, and their chances for glory henceforth would be equal. Konishi may have been first to Pusan. But Kato intended to be first to Seoul.

  But where were Konishi and his army? Where was the prima donna daimyo now? His first contingent was supposed to wait at Pusan for the arrival of Kato’s second contingent and Kuroda’s third, after which they would race north simultaneously along the central, eastern, and western routes. Where was the Christian “Augustin” that Hideyoshi had such an inexplicable affection for?

  The answer was a shock. Konishi, he was told, was gone. He had not waited for the arrival of the second and third contingents as per the plan, but had forged ahead for Seoul as soon as Pusan and Tongnae had been taken and was already several days’ march to the north.

  Kato was furious. For Konishi to steal a march on him and capture Pusan was one thing. For him to then race ahead and take Seoul as well was quite another. That was a degree of glory hogging that Kato would not allow. Mustering his forces for an immediate pullout, he struck north at a punishing pace along his pre-assigned eastern route. He stormed through Ulsan first, encountering no resistance. At Kyongju, capital of the ancient Silla dynasty, he easily smashed
through the hastily assembled defenses, torched the city’s thousand-year-old buildings and temples, and put three thousand people to the sword. Next it was Yongchon’s turn, then Sinnyong’s and Kumi’s. His men must have been tired by now, but Kato did not relent. He pushed them on, marching day and night, determined to catch up to and pass his rival Konishi before he reached the gates of Seoul.

  Kuroda Nagamasa’s third contingent was the next army in the Japanese invasion force to arrive from Tsushima, very likely aboard some of the same ships that had ferried Konishi Yukinaga’s first contingent across the strait to Pusan. They landed at the port of Angolpo, twenty kilometers west of Pusan, on May 29, one day behind Kato and six behind Konishi. Kuroda’s troops were recognizable by the black disk on their sashimono banners, a visual representation of their commander’s family name, which means “black field.”[188] At twenty-three Kuroda was somewhat younger than both Konishi and Kato, and as such did not participate fully in the rivalry that so shaped the prickly relationship between those two. He came to Korea fully expecting glory, but not necessarily the largest portion of it.

  After completing his landing and taking the nearby fort at Kimhae (his men cut off a thousand heads), Kuroda struck north by his pre-assigned route up the western side of the Korean Peninsula. It would take him through Changnyong, Songju, Chongju, and Suwon, and then on to the Han River and Seoul beyond.

  There were now three Japanese armies en route to the Korean capital.

  * * *

  On June 2 Korean General Yi Il and his force of sixty cavalrymen from Seoul passed through Choryong Pass and descended to the town of Sangju in northern Kyongsang Province. He found no soldiers there to reinforce him; they had all been called away to defend the provincial capital of Taegu, eighty kilometers farther south. In a desperate bid to increase his force, Yi used grain from the local government storehouse to hire peasants to serve in his army, bringing his total strength to about eight or nine hundred men. It was an unruly and untrained mob, but Yi figured he would have a week, maybe longer, to whip them into shape before the enemy arrived.

  He had scarcely a day. Konishi Yukinaga’s first contingent had already taken Taegu by this point and was nearing Sosan, a few kilometers to the southeast. When a locally recruited peasant soldier brought this news to Yi, the general refused to believe it, and had the unfortunate man beheaded for spreading malicious rumors. It was simply too fantastic that an army could fight its way all the way from Pusan to Sosan, half the distance to Seoul, in just ten days. The man’s report must have been corroborated, however, for on the following morning, June 3, Yi deployed his force on the slopes behind Sangju and prepared to do battle with the Japanese. He sat on his horse at the front of the army, resplendent in fine armor, his general’s flag raised high. In front of him to the south was a small river and a heavy cover of forest. Beyond that lay Sangju.

  Konishi’s first contingent, meanwhile, had split into two groups five kilometers southeast of Sangju. Ten thousand men under Konishi and Matsuura Shigenobu headed straight for the town and took it without a fight. The remaining force of 6,700 under So, Omura, and Goto swung north and then west, bypassing Sangju to strike directly at General Yi’s small force, which they had learned was awaiting them on the hill behind the town.

  The Japanese approached the Korean army through the forest. Their scouts led the way, emerging from the trees in full view of the waiting Koreans, but well beyond the range of their bows—which in the hands of untrained farmers would not have been very far. Yi’s officers observed the movement, but remembering the beheading of the man the day before, they held their tongues. They did not want to be accused of spreading malicious rumors.

  Then smoke was seen rising from beyond the forest in the direction of Sangju. General Yi did not yet know it, but the town had already fallen. He ordered one of his officers south to investigate. The man apparently was reluctant to go, for as Yu Song-nyong relates in his Chingbirok, “The officer mounted his horse, two foot soldiers took the bit, and they went off very slowly.” As they neared the bridge to cross the river, a shot rang out, the officer toppled off his horse, and a Japanese soldier ran out from beneath the bridge and hacked off his head.

  Suddenly a mass of enemy soldiers appeared from the forest and proceeded to form up into three groups, a vanguard unit in the center backed by units on the left and the right. It was a standard Japanese battle array, the most effective way for organizing troops to have emerged from a century of civil war. The three units then began to advance in a wide and imposing arc, musketeers to the front, swordsmen and spearmen to the rear. When the distance between the two armies had closed to less than a hundred meters the musketeers began to fire into the crowd of Koreans waiting to meet them on the slopes ahead. A few more paces and the volleys began to tell, felling scores of General Yi’s untrained men as they struggled to return fire with bows they scarcely knew how to use. At fifty meters they were staring straight into the muzzles of the Japanese guns, the air was filled with cries of pain and death was all around. For most of the Koreans, simple farmers and tradesmen who had never seen a battle, it was too much. They cast down their weapons and began a panicked retreat—the signal for the swordsmen and spearmen at the rear of the Japanese formations to rush forward and finish them off. Within minutes Yi Il’s hastily organized army was reduced to heaps of headless corpses and blood-streaked peasants fleeing in terror through the trees.[189]

  General Yi for his part made good his escape, discarding first his horse and then his armor in his scramble up the mountain behind the killing field. His retreat soon brought him to Choryong Pass. The county commander sent south from Seoul to defend the pass had either never arrived or had already fled—a monumental error, for Choryong presented all sorts of strategic advantages, a narrow gap in the mountains that even a small band of men could have held if they were determined and well equipped. Nor did General Yi attempt to mount any sort of defense. He raced over the crest of the mountain and down the other side, continuing his flight north to Chungju to join his superior, General Sin Ip, and leaving Choryong behind him entirely unguarded.

  General Sin had assembled a sizable force at Chungju, a total of eight thousand men, mainly officers and soldiers who had fled the south in the face of the Japanese advance, augmented by units he had led down from Seoul. Sin’s original intention had been to march this force up to Choryong Pass to make a stand, where the rocky terrain and the narrowness of the pass would work to their advantage. The unexpected appearance of a bedraggled Yi Il, shorn of his horse, his armor, and his army, caused him to change his mind. With Sangju fallen, Yi’s army annihilated, and the Japanese already marching on Choryong Pass, General Sin decided to remain at Chungju. He would do battle with the Japanese here, in an open field, not in the mountains above the town. One of his lieutenants urged him to abandon this plan and take up a position in the surrounding hills. Sin brushed the advice aside. “Our cavalry is useless in the rough terrain of the hills,” he replied. “So we must make our stand here, in the field.”[190]

  At midday on June 6, as the Japanese were descending the mountain road from Choryong and drawing near Chungju, General Sin Ip accordingly arrayed his forces outside the town on a stretch of flat ground beside a hill called Tangumdae. In hindsight it seems a dreadful choice, a deathtrap offering no chance of retreat, hemmed in by the South Han River behind and Tangumdae to the right. Sin has been often criticized ever since for choosing to make his stand here. His decision is regarded as a fatal symptom of his overconfidence, and of his misguided determination to use his much-vaunted cavalry units. Perhaps so. There is, however, another dimension to the coming battle that needs to be understood before Sin Ip’s measure can be fairly taken.

  Tangumdae was indeed a death trap, affording the Korean army no possibility of retreat. This fact has been clear to every historian who has subsequently written about the battle. It would have been even clearer to General Sin himself. Indeed, this is possibly why he chose it. Pla
cing troops in a hopeless situation with no avenue of escape was a long-established Chinese military strategy that had over the millennia resulted in a number of remarkable victories against seemingly insurmountable odds. It worked on the principle that a man with no hope of escape will instinctively fight for his life with the desperate ferocity of a cornered animal, and in so doing would become an almost unbeatable warrior. As one of Korea’s few seasoned generals and as a literate man, Sin would have known of this tradition from a reading of the Chinese military classics of Shang Yang, Sun Tzu, and others, and from the histories of the ancient dynasties of Han and Qin and Tang that educated Koreans studied so diligently. He would have known that in certain desperate situations, the Chinese strategy called “fighting with a river to one’s back” was sometimes the only option a general had.

  One of the earliest recorded examples of “fighting with a river to one’s back” occurred in the second century B.C., when the Han Chinese commander Han Hsin positioned his troops in the bottom of a gorge with their backs to a river to meet the opposing army of the Chao. With no possibility of retreat, his men were forced to fight for their lives and in the end won a great victory. After the battle, Han’s officers asked him to explain his unusual strategy, observing that in The Art of War Sun Tzu clearly stated that battles should be fought with hills behind and water in front.

  “This is in The Art of War too,” replied Han Hsin. “It is just that you have failed to notice it! Does it not say in The Art of War: ‘Drive them into a fatal position and they will come out alive; place them in a hopeless spot and they will survive? Moreover, I did not have at my disposal troops that I had trained and led from past times, but was forced, as the saying goes, to round up men from the market place and use them to fight with. Under such circumstances, if I had not placed them in a desperate situation where each man was obliged to fight for his own life, but had allowed them to remain in a safe place, they would have all run away. Then what good would they have been to me?”[191]