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

by Samuel Hawley

  Shen Weijing reached the town of Uiji on Korea’s northern border in September, and in an audience with King Sonjo announced that seven hundred thousand Ming troops would soon be on the way. Sonjo, who evidently recognized hyperbole when he heard it, said that even six or seven thousand soldiers might be able to stop the Japanese if they were sent immediately to Korea. If Beijing delayed much longer, however, even a much larger army would have a difficult time in driving the enemy back.

  “Your’s is a genteel country,” replied Shen smoothly, “so you do not understand the ways of war. These things cannot be rushed. The Liaodong army has just completed a campaign elsewhere in the empire, and its strength is depleted. We need to build this force up before we send it here.” When Sonjo continued to press for immediate aid, Shen tried a different tack. “The relief army needs to consider three things,” he said, “the portents of heaven, the lay of the land, and the people. These were not considered prior to the first battle of Pyongyang, and that is why we lost.”

  The meeting ended with Shen presenting King Sonjo with a supply of silver coins, a gift from the emperor in Beijing. He offered to have the coins weighed to show that none had been pilfered en route. The king declined, indicating that he trusted the Ming envoy. But he did not. The day after this meeting, Sonjo is reported to have said, “It is hard to believe what Commander Shen says.” This mistrust of Shen would remain with Sonjo and his ministers until the end of the war.[329]

  From Uiju, Shen Weijing proceeded south to the headquarters of the Korean army at Sunan, a short distance north of Pyongyang. From here he sent a letter on into the city asking for a meeting with the Japanese commander. A parley was arranged for October 4. Shen left the Korean camp and proceeded to Pyongyang with just three aides and no military escort, displaying a degree of courage that impressed both the Koreans and the Japanese. “Not even a Japanese,” Konishi Yukinaga would later compliment Shen, “could have borne himself more courageously in the midst of armed enemies.”[330]

  Upon arriving at the occupied city, Shen sat down in a cordial atmosphere with Konishi, Tsushima daimyo So Yoshitoshi, and the monk Genso, who could read and write Chinese. The Japanese took the same approach they had tried with the Koreans during their prewar negotiations, a request for seemingly small concessions that might serve as the thin edge of the wedge leading to eventual domination. All Japan wanted, wrote Genso, was friendly relations with China and Korea. They had attempted to establish a cordial connection with the Koreans and had gone to great trouble to send embassies to Seoul over the previous few years to achieve this end. But the Koreans had unreasonably refused to reciprocate these well-intentioned gestures and send embassies of their own to Japan. Hence the present invasion had come about. Similarly, Genso went on to explain, all Hideyoshi really wanted from China was friendly relations, honest trade, and an exchange of embassies, something Beijing would undoubtedly have granted before now had the Koreans not stubbornly stood in the way.

  All this talk of friendly relations was completely disingenuous coming from the leaders of an army that had just slashed its way 650 kilometers up the Korean Peninsula, slaughtering thousands along the way. But it nevertheless struck a receptive cord with Shen. As he had explained to officials in Beijing prior to his departure, negotiations with the Japanese should be conducted with an understanding that what they really wanted was trade. Shen had previously come to this conclusion because what he knew of Japan came from a man who had been captured by Japanese wako pirates, for whom trade was the overriding concern. The evidence confronting Shen now of course told a very different story. From what the Koreans told him, and from what he could see with his own eyes, the Japanese were clearly intent on conquest, not on establishing trade relations. This uncomfortable fact, however, left no room for negotiation, and if there was one thing Shen wanted it was to return to Beijing with a settlement in hand—any sort of settlement, something to take him one step closer to the riches and noble title that the Wanli emperor had promised. So he readily accepted the benign intentions that the Japanese fed him and responded with assurances that he would encourage the Chinese government to extend a friendly hand. A fifty-day armistice was signed to give Shen time to bring this about. During this period he would convey the Japanese position back to his superiors in Beijing and return with a high-ranking envoy, plus hostages as a sign of goodwill. Then they would all sit down again in Seoul and draw up a lasting peace.[331]

  The signing of the fifty-day armistice, which they had been allowed no say in, left the Koreans feeling angry and somewhat betrayed—particularly when work units of Japanese soldiers began filing out of Pyongyang to harvest crops in the neighboring fields, confident they would not be attacked. Some of the Korean commanders complained that they did not have enough provisions to keep their men idle for fifty days and that if they were going to attack they should to do so at once. But an attack now was out of the question. As untrustworthy as Shen Weijing seemed, the fact remained that he was an envoy of the imperial Ming court. The terms of the truce he had negotiated therefore had to be respected.[332]

  Shen Weijing arrived back in Beijing to find that the government no longer seemed interested in negotiating with the Japanese. This change in attitude had been brought about by the recent conclusion of the Ordos Campaign on the Mongolian frontier. The campaign had ended in spectacular fashion, with the rebels besieged by Ming troops at their stronghold of Ningxia and with the Ordos Mongols to the north making repeated attempts to come to their aid. As roving Chinese divisions beat back these successive Mongol incursions, the besiegers at Ningxia set about constructing a dike eighteen kilometers long all around the city. When it was finished, water from a nearby river was diverted into the space between the dike and the city walls, and slowly began to eat away at the rebels’ defenses. Finally, in the middle of October, the walls were breached and the city taken. Those rebel leaders who had not already committed suicide were rounded up and killed.[333]

  With the Ordos Campaign over, Beijing was at last able to turn its full attention to the conflict in Korea. An army of thirty-five thousand men was drawn together, mainly from units returning from the fighting in the northwest. Overall command was given to Li Rusong, a forty-three-year-old army officer from the Korean border province of Liaodong, the eldest son in a family that had immigrated to the region from Korea six generations before, during the early years of the Ming dynasty. Li was not universally liked. A number of his contemporaries regarded him as arrogant, and his superiors had previously accused him of being a lone wolf who ignored orders and acted on his own. In October of 1592, however, Li’s star was on the rise. Earlier that year he had led the first body of reinforcements in the Ordos Campaign in Shenxi Province, and had subsequently served with distinction in fending off Mongol attacks and crushing the Ningxia rebels. For this good service he was promoted to the lofty rank of chief military commissioner and given charge of the expeditionary force that was to be sent to Korea. He was also admonished by the Wanli emperor to henceforth obey all commands from his superior, who in the coming Korean campaign would be sixty-two-year-old Vice-Minister of War Song Yingchang, supreme civil administrator of all military affairs in the border regions threatened by the Japanese advance.[334]

  With the northwestern frontier once again under control, the Ming government had grown less interested in tying up the Japanese with talk. Upon his return to Beijing from his meeting with Konishi Yukinaga, negotiator Shen Weijing was thus brushed off and referred to Song Yingchang for further instructions. Song in turn ordered Shen to return to Pyongyang and tell the Japanese that no further talks would take place until they had withdrawn their forces all the way back to Pusan. Shen, with absolutely nothing now to offer the Japanese, turned around and retraced his steps south, arriving at Pyongyang on December 23, 1592, a month past the expiration of the fifty-day armistice he had previously arranged. He met with Konishi a second time and relayed Vice-Minister of War Song’s conditions, which were flatly refused.
The Japanese nevertheless tried to keep the game alive. They would not retreat one inch, they told Shen, unless the Chinese first provided a guarantee that Japanese trade ships would be allowed to enter the harbors of Zhejiang Province on the central Chinese coast.[335]

  This counter-offer surely would not have pleased Hideyoshi. He had sent one of the largest invasion forces in history to the continent to obtain more than trading rights. Nor did it hold any attraction to the Chinese. When Shen Weijing returned with it to China in January 1593, Li Rusong’s army of thirty-five thousand was poised in Manchuria, ready to march.

  CHAPTER 14

  A Castle at Fushimi

  The significance of recent setbacks in the Korean campaign, in particular the failure of his navy to enter the Yellow Sea and move reinforcements north, surely had not escaped the notice of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He was, after all, one of the premier military strategists of the age, and had made the Yellow Sea supply route the lynchpin in his invasion plan. The growing realization that he was to be denied access to this route by an unexpectedly strong Korean navy must therefore have forced him for the first time to question his ability to take Beijing and conquer China. Hideyoshi did not openly acknowledge any such misgivings in his correspondence from this time; throughout the autumn of 1592 he continued to speak of crossing to Korea and taking personal command of his armies there for the next big push to the north. There is evidence, however, that he had privately begun to scale back his plans with regard to China.

  In the late summer of 1592 the bad news from Korea was overshadowed for Hideyoshi by the death of his mother, known to us only by her noble title of Lady O-Mandokoro. Hideyoshi had been extremely close to his mother throughout his life, and in her declining years had taken to worrying and fussing incessantly about her—increasingly so after a serious illness laid her low in 1588. At that time the taiko is said to have begged the heavens to spare her “for three years, or two years, or if that is not to be then only for thirty days.”[336] Lady O-Mandokoro was spared for four years. In Hideyoshi’s private correspondence from this time one senses a melancholia at the inevitability of loss and at times an almost desperate desire to make his mother well again, or at least as comfortable as possible until the day came when she would have to leave him. In a typical letter from 1589 to a lady-in-waiting he wrote, “If O-Mandokoro is kept in a small place, she may begin to feel depressed, and so please take care of her for the time being. But if [she is in a large place and] there are draughts, she will catch a chill in such surroundings and so you must not do that.”[337] And again, in a letter addressed directly to his mother in 1590, “Go to some place and thus amuse yourself—and, please, become young once more. I beg you to do this.”[338]

  It is clear that family was extremely important to Hideyoshi. The personal glimpses we get of him from his private correspondence reveal a man who delighted in being in the company of his wife, his concubines, and his adopted children, and who pined for them when the business of war took him away from home. Indeed, the greatest pleasure he seems to have derived from being a dictator did not come from wielding power, but from taking care of family and friends—a fact revealed in his choice of family name, Toyotomi, meaning “Bountiful Minister” or “Abundant Provider.”

  In August 1592 Hideyoshi became anxious about his mother’s health, and on the thirtieth of the month he left his invasion headquarters at Nagoya to pay her a visit at her mansion in Osaka on central Honshu, a journey of many days to the northeast. He arrived only to find that Lady O-Mandokoro had passed away on the very day he had left Nagoya. The news is said to have caused him to faint with grief.[339] Hideyoshi remained in the vicinity of Osaka and Kyoto for several months after that, in mourning for his mother, close to the remnants of his shrinking family circle, particularly his first wife O-Ne (Lady Kita-no-Mandokoro) and his favorite concubine, twenty-five-year-old Yodogimi. It was not until near the end of the year that he finally returned to Nagoya and resumed active oversight of the Korean campaign.

  By the time he returned to Nagoya, Hideyoshi viewed the conquest of China in a different light. It is unlikely that the death of his mother in itself caused this change; more immediate strategic concerns, in particular the failure of his navy to open a supply route to northern Korean via the Yellow Sea, must have been foremost in his mind. O-Mandokoro’s passing, however, and Hideyoshi’s subsequent hiatus in Kyoto, proved to be a turning point in the Korean campaign, a period of transition from the heady early days of the invasion, when everything was going better than expected, to a grittier phase where the Japanese war machine began slowly to veer off course. Hideyoshi understood the significance of this change. We know this because he began construction of a castle at Fushimi.

  On June 27, 1592, with his invasion still on track and the conquest of Korea and China seemingly certain, Hideyoshi revealed his long-term plans in a letter to the kampaku in Kyoto, his nephew and heir apparent Hidetsugu. This document listed the various appointments and shifting about of personnel that Hideyoshi planned to make once his conquests were complete. Emperor Go-Yozei, for example, would be transferred to Beijing to replace the Wanli emperor, with his son the crown prince replacing him on the throne in Japan. Hidetsugu himself was also to go to Beijing to serve as kampaku of China, with either Hideyoshi’s half-brother Hidenaga or Ukita Hideie succeeding him as kampaku of Japan. Hideyoshi did not bother to mention in this letter what he himself would do—not surprising, for the document was a list of instructions for Hidetsugu. On the same day that this letter was written, however, Hideyoshi’s private secretary sent a second letter to Hide-yoshi’s wife reiterating many of the appointments the taiko planned to make and adding that Hideyoshi himself would journey to Beijing “before the end of this year....He will at first reside in Beijing, whence he will control the national affairs of China, Japan, and Korea. After the founding of the new empire is completed, he will appoint some man of worth as his deputy at Beijing, and will establish his own permanent residence at Ningpo.”[340]

  In the summer of 1592, then, Hideyoshi intended to live out his life at Ningpo, a seaport on the central Chinese coast offering access to Japan, a convenient place from which to oversee the overseers of his empire. By the end of the year this plan had been abandoned. Upon his return to Nagoya from his period of mourning for his mother, Hide-yoshi began work on a permanent headquarters and retirement palace at Fushimi, in the vicinity of the capital. Kyoto governor Maeda Gen’i was entrusted with overseeing its construction. On January 13, 1593, Hideyoshi wrote to Maeda, summoning him to Nagoya. “Because I have many orders to give before I go to Korea,” he wrote, “please come over here...and...bring with you an expert carpenter who should bring a plan of Fushimi. Because the problem of namazu is so important for the construction of Fushimi, I would like to have the castle constructed in such a way that it will be hard to attack from the namazu.... I intend to have [Fushimi Castle] done very carefully, in accordance with Rikyu’s preferences and discretion.”[341]

  Hideyoshi wanted a solid and secure retirement home, one that would not be vulnerable to earthquakes, which were popularly believed to result from the movements of the namazu, the mythical giant catfish that carried the Japanese islands on its back. It would be built in the style of Sen no Rikyu, the tea master whom Hideyoshi had ordered to commit suicide in 1591 for reasons unknown, a decision he now seemed to regret. Something of the essence of this “Rikyu style,” which would come to have such a profound influence not only on the Way of Tea but on Japanese culture as a whole, can be seen in the following anecdote concerning the tea master and Hideyoshi. Rikyu one summer had cultivated a garden of morning glories, a flower that at the time was extremely rare in Japan and renowned for its beauty. Hideyoshi, eager to see these flowers for himself, asked Rikyu to invite him to a tea gathering for this purpose. Rikyu agreed. On the morning of the visit, Hideyoshi arrived at Rikyu’s house expecting to find the garden bursting with morning glories. But there were no flowers anywhere. He passed thro
ugh the gate and proceeded to Rikyu’s tearoom, and still did not see any flowers. Finally he entered the tearoom and there, floating in a container of water, was a single, perfect blossom.[342]

  Fushimi Castle, then, would be significantly less grand than the Jurakutai, which Hideyoshi had ordered built a few years before. It would encompass gardens, pine groves, artlessly placed rocks, natural wood beams—a place of harmony and tranquility of which Sen no Rikyu would approve. It would mark the final step in Hideyoshi’s rise from peasant to gentleman, the step where he moved beyond the nouveau riche ostentation of his recent warlord past to ascend to the highest reaches of cultured grace.

  As work began on Fushimi Castle in late 1592, Hideyoshi continued to speak of crossing to Korea and taking command of his armies there. His anticipated date of departure, weather permitting, would be the third month—April by the Western calendar—of 1593, eleven months after the embarkation of the vanguard units of his invasion force. He would “take charge of everything personally,” he said, “and then make a triumphal return” to Japan.[343] What did Hideyoshi hope to accomplish during this victorious interlude on the mainland? How did he propose to advance the stalled front now that the Korean navy had the Yellow Sea supply route firmly blockaded, upsetting his plans for moving reinforcements north? One can only guess. His plan to retire at Fushimi rather than at Ningpo, however, would seem to suggest that he was no longer confident of being able to slash his way to Beijing.