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

by Samuel Hawley

  and exhibit slight proof of personal valor,...but put the same men behind walls...[and] they are more than brave, their courage is sublime, they fight to the last man and fling themselves on the bare steel when the foe clears the parapet. The Japanese of 1592 looked upon the Korean in the field as a kitten, but in the castle as a tiger. The French [who attempted to take Kanghwa Island] in 1866 never found a force that could face rifles, but behind walls the same men were invincible.[373]

  * * *

  One week after the successful defense of Yonan, a force of Korean government troops scored an important and interesting victory with the retaking of Kyongju far to the south. Kyongju, the capital of the Silla dynasty and during Choson times the administrative center of Kyongsang Province, had been captured by Kato Kiyomasa’s second contingent during the early days of the war, when Kato, Konishi, and Kuroda were all racing to be the first to reach Seoul. A small force of Koreans had attempted to stave off the Japanese at that time, but their hastily assembled defenses had been easily smashed. Three thousand people were put to the sword in the reprisals that followed, and many of the city’s historic buildings were burnt to the ground. In the consolidation of the south that subsequently occurred, the city was garrisoned by troops from the fifth contingent from Shikoku, under a commander named Tagawa Naiki. Tagawa’s men enjoyed several weeks of uneventful occupation. Then, toward the end of September, a large force of Koreans appeared from the west.

  This native army consisted of five thousand government troops under the command of recently appointed Kyongsang Left Army Commander Pak Jin. (His predecessor in the position, Yi Kak, who had proved so ineffectual in the face of the initial Japanese assault, had been reassigned elsewhere.) The first round went to the Japanese. Tagawa, taking the offensive early against the numerically superior Koreans, sent a body of men out of the city from a back gate to circle around and attack from the rear, a bold and entirely successful gambit that sent Pak and his men into a precipitous retreat.[374]

  They soon returned—and this time they brought with them a secret weapon. It was called the pigyok chincholloe (flying striking earthquake heaven thunder), translated by one writer as the “flying thunderbolt.”[375] In the early hours of October 12, under the cover of darkness, Pak sent a group of soldiers up to the base of the walls of Kyongju where they set up and fired the weapon, hurling a mysterious ball of iron into the midst of the enemy camp. “It fell to earth,” a Japanese chronicler tells us, “and our soldiers gathered about it to look. Suddenly it exploded, emitting a noise that shook heaven and earth, and scattering bits of iron like pulverized stars. Those who were hit dropped dead on the spot. Others were knocked down as if by a powerful wind.”[376] Only thirty-odd men were killed in the blast, but it so panicked Tagawa’s garrison that it abandoned the city and fled to Sosaengpo, leaving Kyongju and a large store of rice to the Koreans.[377]

  The pigyok chinchollae would be employed on other occasions in the Imjin War, notably at the First Battle of Chinju in November 1592, and at the Battle of Haengju in March of the following year. It was invented some time earlier in the reign of King Sonjo by Yi Chang-son, head of the government’s firearms department, probably as an adaptation of the catapult-fired pi li hu pao (heaven-shaking thunder) bomb previously developed in China and used against the Japanese in the failed Mongol invasion in 1274. Unlike the pi li hu pao, however, the pigok chincholloe was shot with gunpowder from a mortar, making it the world’s first mortar- or cannon-fired explosive shell. It was manufactured in various sizes, from a twenty-one-centimeter version fired from the Korean’s largest mortar, the daewangu, down to ten-centimeter models shot from the medium-sized chungwangu. The projectile itself was a hollow cast-iron sphere packed with gunpowder and pieces of shrapnel, with a delayed action fuse inserted through an opening in the top, consisting of a length of cord wound around a screw-like wooden core in turn inserted in a sleeve of bamboo. After the mortar was charged with gunpowder, the sphere was placed in the mouth, the end of the fuse protruding from its top was lit, and then the mortar was fired, hurling the device over a distance of five to six hundred paces. After it landed its fuse would continue to burn, spiraling down through the center of the sphere until it reached the base of the bamboo sleeve, ignited the gunpowder, and exploded the shell.[378]

  * * *

  The last major battle of 1592 occurred at the city of Chinju on Korea’s southern coast, west of the Japanese stronghold at Pusan. The fortress here was reputed to be one of the most unassailable in all of southern Korea, a claim that may have been true earlier in the Choson dynasty, when it was still a compact hilltop citadel, the sort of fortification that the Koreans excelled at building and defending. The government’s prewar building program, however, had compromised Chinju’s defenses. By greatly lengthening its walls to accommodate more of the local population, the cardinal rule of fortress-building, “keep it small,” was forgotten, and Chinju rendered more difficult to defend.

  Fortunately for the Koreans, the thirty-eight hundred defenders of Chinju were led by a courageous and able commander named Kim Si-min who had been appointed magistrate of the city the month before. About seventy of Kim’s men were also equipped with muskets, the first batch of such Korean-manufactured weapons to see service in the war. The Japanese were thus in for a surprise. (The Koreans had known of muskets since at least 1589, when Japanese envoy So Yoshitoshi presented one to the court as a gift. Government minister Yu Song-nyong had urged at the time that it be adopted by the army as a standard weapon, but it was only after the start of the war that production was authorized.)[379]

  The Japanese arrived outside the walls of Chinju on November 8, a body of 15,570 men from the seventh contingent from western Honshu under the leadership of Kato Mitsuyasu, Hasegawa Hidekazu, Nagaoka Tadaoki, and Kimura Shigeji. They advanced to within firing distance; then the ashigaru gunners leveled a thousand muskets at the walls and let loose with a thunderous volley. Their intention was probably to see if the defenders within could be frightened into retreat by a mere show of force, a gambit that had been successfully employed against the Koreans before. The ploy did not work at Chinju. Inside the city, Kim Si-min had his men under firm control. He had placed them at strategic points all along the walls of the fortress, with strict orders to keep their heads down and to hold their fire until the Japanese had advanced to the walls. The initial Japanese fusillade thus met with no response. The pall of gun smoke slowly cleared, but still nothing came flying over the parapets from the Koreans. All remained quiet, as if the city was deserted. Later that night Kim sent a musician up to the top of the fortress to play his flute, to impress upon the Japanese that he and his men were unafraid and calm.

  Having failed to shake the defenders of Chinju with their initial display of musket fire, the Japanese set to work preparing for an all-out assault on the walls. Erecting an enclosure to hide their activities from the Koreans, the men of the seventh contingent lashed together a three-story-high siege tower, plus scaling ladders of pine and bamboo, high enough to reach the top of the walls and wide enough to accommodate half a dozen men on each rung. The Koreans within the fortress, meanwhile, were making preparations of their own. They added to their stock of arrows and melted lead into musket balls. They placed piles of rocks at convenient intervals around the walls and kept kettles of water on the boil. They bundled straw around packets of gunpowder to make crude incendiary devices. They drove spikes through heavy planks, then sharpened the iron points.

  And so the First Battle of Chinju began. The Japanese opened fire from the top of their siege tower, using the height of the construction to lob shots over the wall and into the city, keeping the heads of the Koreans down while the scaling ladders were moved into place. The first wave of assault troops then ran forward and attempted to climb up the walls and storm over the top. There soon were so many warriors jostling to be ichiban nori, “first to climb in,” that the ladders nearly collapsed under the weight. Samurai leader Hosokawa Sudaoki wa
s among them, the Taikoki tells us, “accompanied by foot soldiers on ladders on his right and left. [He] strictly ordered ‘Until I have personally climbed into the castle this ladder is for one person to climb. If anyone else climbs I will take his head!’ [T]hen he climbed. Because of this the ladder did not break and he got up, and the men who saw him were loud in his praise....[B]ut when he tried to make his entry from within the castle, spears and naginata were thrust at him to try to make him fall, and lamentably he fell to the bottom of the moat.”[380]

  Other warriors followed Hosokawa. Thousands of them. They were driven back by a hail of arrows and musket balls, stones and red-hot chunks of iron. Those who were not killed or knocked to the ground by these projectiles had their upturned faces scalded by showers of boiling water or were impaled with spears or by spiked boards dropped on their heads. Some ashigaru fell to the ground in pairs and small groups, all nailed together on the same heavy plank.

  Then flaming bundles of straw came flying over the walls. They landed in the midst of the Japanese clustered at the base of the ladders, waiting to get a foot on the first rung. They seemed innocent enough, harmless little fires providing a bit of warmth on a chilly autumn day. But then the flames reached the packet of gunpowder nestled within and the flaming bundle exploded, killing or maiming anyone nearby.

  The Japanese assaulted the walls of Chinju in wave after wave throughout that day—and the next day, and the next, and the next. The Koreans, under the steady hand of General Kim, held their ground. Eventually bands of civilian volunteers arrived to aid the defenders. One group, too small to attack the Japanese directly, climbed to the top of a nearby hill and beat drums and lit torches so that the enemy would think that they had been flanked by a large Korean force. They were soon joined by a second band of two hundred men, sent by the “Red Coat General,” Kwak Jae-u. Kwak’s men scrambled up the slopes above the Japanese camp and roared, “The Red Coat General is mustering soldiers from all over the south, and will soon be arriving with a huge army!” Then came news that a large group of civilian volunteers, numbering some two thousand, was on its way to relieve Chinju, obliging the Japanese to divert a portion of their force away from the walls to guard the approaches to the city.

  The Battle of Chinju raged for five days. The final assault occurred in the early morning hours of November 13. On one side of the city the Japanese extravagantly illuminated their camp with torches and made a show of packing up their gear and preparing to leave, all within full view of the wary Koreans. Then, at a given signal, the torches were extinguished and an all-out attack was launched against the far side of the city, one group of ashigaru laying down a screen of covering fire, forcing the Koreans away from the parapets above, while a second group attempted one last time to storm over the top of the walls. The defenders within by this point were in desperate straits. There was scarcely a stone remaining inside the city to hurl at the attackers, and the wood and thatch roofs of all the buildings had been reduced to ash by Japanese fire arrows, leaving the city a patchwork of blackened and smoldering heaps. But the Koreans stuck to their walls and fought on. At one point in the battle Kim Si-min himself was mortally wounded in the forehead by a musket ball, but this was kept from his men so they would not lose heart. They did not, and the defenses of Chinju held. In the end Kato Mitsuyasu and his fellow commanders halted the attack, and did not venture another. With their losses growing alarmingly high (by some accounts nearly half their force), and increasingly anxious about counterattack from the rear, it was decided to lift the siege and withdraw. This was done under the cover of a sudden downpour. The Koreans did not attempt to pursue.[381]

  The Japanese would return to Chinju the following summer, driven by a fury that would see it burned to the ground and all its inhabitants killed. For the time being, however, the city was saved.

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  It was native Korean resistance such as this, both on land and at sea, that brought Hideyoshi’s drive to conquer Asia grinding to a halt. Because of Korean naval commander Yi Sun-sin, the taiko was denied the supply route through the Yellow Sea that he so desperately needed to transport reinforcements to northern Korea to continue the advance on Beijing. And now, because of a groundswell of native resistance from civilian volunteers, monk-soldiers, and reassembled government troops, simply hanging on to Korea itself was proving a troublesome task. Inevitably, the frustrations that this caused the Japanese in the field would lead them to ignore Hideyoshi’s prewar imperative to treat the Koreans kindly in order to win them over, and to rely instead on violence and terror to beat them down. Fifteen ninety-three, the second year of the war, would thus come to be dominated by atrocities on the part of the Japanese, atrocities that would in turn serve only to deepen the hatred of the Koreans and steel their determination to resist. At any cost.

  The commitment of large numbers of Ming troops to the war effort in early 1593 would add tremendously to the impetus that would ultimately drive Hideyoshi’s forces back toward Pusan. It must be stressed, however, that China’s coming contribution to the effort would not make the difference between victory and defeat, but would rather hasten what was already an inevitable outcome. By the end of 1592 the Koreans had overcome their initial shock at being invaded, and had pieced together a haphazard campaign of grassroots resistance that would ultimately make their country ungovernable for the Japanese. Hideyoshi’s armies were by no means beaten by December of 1592. But attrition was starting to eat away at their strength. Of the initial force of 158,800 that had landed on Korean soil in the late spring and early summer of 1592, fully one-third would soon be gone, casualties of battle, victims of hunger and exhaustion and disease. Korean losses would be many times higher. But they were willing to bear the sacrifice. The Japanese were not. It would probably have taken several years of guerrilla warfare before the Koreans wore the Japanese down to the point where they were forced to leave the peninsula altogether. But this they would have done—with or without the help of the Ming Chinese.

  CHAPTER 16

  Saving History

  In August of 1592 a unit of Japanese soldiers began advancing on the walled town of Chonju, the administrative center of the southwestern province of Cholla, with the intention of occupying the place and laying claim to the region. The provincial governor, Yi Kwang, was desperate to save the town, and joined with Yi Chong-nan, an elderly official formerly in charge of the city’s repository of historical records, in mounting a defense. A force of civilian volunteers was first sent ahead to stop the Japanese at a mountain pass leading to the town. The defenders erected a wooden barrier across the pass and fought bravely to hold it, but the Japanese were too strong for them and they were pushed aside. In front of Chonju, meanwhile, Yi Kwang and Yi Chong-nan had organized the local citizenry in erecting banners by day and torches by night, so that when the Japanese approached they would be tricked into thinking that a formidable force was encamped there and determined to defend the town. The ruse worked. When the Japanese drew near Chonju and spied the torches and banners in the distance, they assumed that a large Korean army was waiting to meet them, and prudently decided to withdraw and leave Chonju for another day.[382]

  The defense of Chonju was in itself a relatively insignificant affair involving few defenders and little loss of life, a minor episode lost amid the greater conflicts and conflagrations of the opening months of the Imjin War. For the Koreans, however, what happened outside the walls of that town in the summer of 1592 had a deep and enduring significance. For in turning back the Japanese, Yi Kwang, Yi Chong-nan, and the citizens of Chonju had not just saved their town, they had saved the very history of Korea.

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  There was not a people anywhere in the pre-modern world with a greater regard for history than the Koreans. From as early as the Silla dynasty virtually every event occurring during the reign of each king, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, was painstakingly recorded and preserved so that future generations could benefit from the les
sons learned. The Koreans were of course greatly influenced in this by the Chinese, who were themselves great historians. By the second century of the Choson dynasty, however, Korea’s record keepers had come to surpass their Middle Kingdom counterparts. In terms of completeness, accuracy, and objectivity, the multi-volume sillok (“true record” or “annals”) that was compiled for the reign of each Choson king marked a pinnacle in the recording of history in the world up to that time.

  The sources used in the compilation of the true record of the Choson dynasty were many and varied. First and most important were the records kept by the court historians. These included the transcripts for every royal audience as written down by the two officials who sat to the left and right of the king, one charged with recording his words, the other his actions. The court historians also kept diaries of all the happenings in the capital and elsewhere that they deemed important. Other valuable sources included the records kept by the various ministries of government, the diaries and journals of key ministers, and the tens of thousands of dispatches that arrived in Seoul from officials posted throughout the land.

  In keeping a record of the affairs of state, great emphasis was placed on objectivity. In this respect the Koreans seem to have been superior to the Ming Chinese. The court historians in particular were expected to write with impeccable honesty. Even the king was not to be exempt from their critical gaze. In 1456, for example, King Sejo himself enjoined his court historians to write about his reign warts and all. “What I do right and wrong,” he said, “all people see. It is not right that anything should be hid. The historical officers should record in detail what actually happens.” In 1508 King Chungjong similarly instructed the historians to record “exactly what the King did, whether it be right or wrong, without hesitation.”[383] Indeed, the fact that Korean accounts of the Imjin War are so replete with tales of cowardly commanders and self-serving officials is not due to some sort of national weakness of character on the part of the Koreans. It is because the Koreans of the Choson dynasty kept such a candid record of their times, recording for posterity their weaknesses as well as their strengths.