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

by Samuel Hawley

  In anticipation of this coming rout, King Sonjo dispatched orders south to Cholla Left Navy Commander Yi Sun-sin to “intercept passage of the enemy retreating by sea and annihilate his...transports and war vessels.”[437] If Yi could ambush and destroy the ships attempting to ferry the retreating Japanese back home from Pusan, the Koreans could still snatch the total victory that they so craved, the total destruction of every hated “robber” and “dwarf” who had had the temerity to set foot on their soil.

  Yi Sun-sin received these orders on March 7. He put to sea the very next day, leading his battleships east into the channel between Koje Island and the coast, where he had beaten the Japanese navy in the Battle of Hansan-do in August of the previous year. Here he rendezvoused with the Kyongsang Right Navy under Won Kyun, a man that Yi was coming thoroughly to despise for his incompetence, cowardice, and love of drink. Soon after Yi arrived, Won launched into a tirade against Yi Ok-ki, the absent commander of the Cholla Right Navy. Where was Yi Ok-ki? Won wanted to know. Why was he late for the rendezvous? If he didn’t appear soon Won would go ahead and lead his ships east to fight the Japanese by himself. Yi Sun-sin tried to calm his volatile colleague with assurances that Yi Ok-ki had farther to come than either of them, and that he would soon arrive. And sure enough, at noon the next day, the Cholla Right Navy hove into view—although Yi Sun-sin was disappointed to count fewer than forty ships.

  For the next two days heavy rains kept the hundred-odd vessels of the combined Korean fleet riding at anchor in the sheltered channel off Koje Island. Then, as the weather cleared on March 12, they continued east to the waters between Kadok Island and the mainland where the Japanese, Kato Yoshiaki and Wakizaka Yasuharu among them, had established defenses and stationed ships to protect the approaches to Pusan. Here, Yi wrote in his dispatch to the throne, “we waited for the evacuation of the Japanese major units before the big drive of the Ming Chinese army.”[438] For the next several days he sent small groups of vessels back and forth in full view of the enemy positions overlooking the channel at Ungchon, hoping to lure their ships into open water, near to where the bulk of the Korean navy, including at least two turtle ships, lay waiting. On the twentieth they had some luck: ten Japanese vessels took the bait and charged out of the neck of the inlet to attack, and were soon surrounded by the Korean navy. Yi’s men “poured down arrows on the shrieking Japanese, who fell dead in countless numbers and had their heads cut off by the score.”[439]

  After that the Japanese at Ungchon became more cautious. They kept their ships moored close to shore at the head of the narrow inlet and their men ensconced in fortifications along the beach and in caves in the surrounding hills. Yi Sun-sin therefore decided to replace his traditional “lure into ambush” strategy with something more aggressive: a coordinated attack from both the sea and the land. He first contacted Kim Song-il, now high commissioner for Kyongsang Province, urging him to send government troops against enemy shore positions so that they would be driven onto their boats and out to sea, where Yi and his battleships could destroy them. (Kim, it will be recalled, was the vice-envoy of the Korean mission who came back from Japan in early 1592 assuring everyone that war would never come. He would become infected with plague and die in a little more than a month.) Kim replied that he was unable to oblige; he was too busy preparing for the arrival of the Chinese army and had few troops to spare. He instead offered the services of “Red Coat General” Kwak Jae-u and his small guerrilla army. This did not suit Yi’s plans, so he instead went ahead and organized a combined land and sea operation with his own forces, replacing the idea of a land-based assault with an amphibious landing by groups of monk-soldiers and uibyong civilian volunteers under his command.[440]

  For the next three days strong winds lashed the southern coast, forcing the Korean navy to shelter in a cove. Then, on the twenty-fourth, Commander Yi led his navy once again to the waters off Ungchon and put his planned operation into effect. Two groups of vessels filled with warrior-monks and civilian volunteers separated from the main fleet, one to the east and the other to the west, to make landings on either side of the Japanese positions. As expected, this threw the Japanese shore defenses into confusion and drew out a number of enemy ships from their inaccessible inlet anchorages to repel the invaders. Soon a large portion of the Japanese fleet lay exposed in open water, presenting Yi with the opportunity he had been waiting for. The order went out to lean to the oars and the Korean navy raced to the attack. While the bulk of Yi’s battleships concentrated on the Japanese vessels milling about in the bay, blasting away with cannons and “giving them a terrible beating with wholesale slaughter,” fifteen other ships made a run against those enemy vessels still riding at their moorings, burning them where they lay with showers of fire arrows. The land assault, meanwhile, came off without a hitch. “[O]ur valiant monk-soldiers jumped up with brandishing swords and thrusting spears and charged into the enemy positions, shooting guns and arrows from morning till night until the enemy fell back, leaving behind countless war dead and wounded.” This land attack resulted in the release of five Korean prisoners of war, who reported that for the past month some sort of contagion had been sweeping through the Japanese camp—one more piece of good news to cap an already successful day.[441]

  The day was not without setbacks for the Koreans. At one point two of Yi’s battleships, their captains overeager to win honors, broke formation and darted forward to attack only to collide with each other, capsizing one, seriously damaging the other, and causing several deaths. For Yi, accustomed to inflicting heavy enemy losses at little or no cost to himself, the episode was mortifying. The captains of these two ships, Yi wrote in his dispatch to the throne, had forgotten one of the cardinal rules of battle: that too much disdain for the enemy can bring defeat just as surely as too much fear. But the fault, he concluded, was his own; it was due to his own lack of control.[442]

  The day also brought yet another example of Kyongsang commander Won Kyun’s unwillingness to fight. In his diary Yi wrote that when a Korean battleship came to be surrounded and attacked by Japanese vessels, Won Kyun and his nearby Kyongsang contingent made no attempt to help. “[He] looked the other way as if [he] did not notice the scene.” Yi had words with Won after the battle about his “disgusting cowardice,” but his colleague seemed to think nothing of it, and “showed no sense of disgrace.”[443]

  On April 5 Commanders Yi Sun-sin, Yi Ok-ki, and Won Kyun received word from the north that Commander in Chief Li Rusong had retreated back to Pyongyang, and that the southward push by the Chinese army would not be materializing as soon as they had expected.[444] This was disappointing news, for it meant that the Japanese would not take to their boats any time soon and attempt to return to Japan. The hoped-for decisive battle would therefore have to wait.

  For the next month naval activity along Korea’s southern coast virtually ceased. The Korean navy maintained its vigilance in the waters west of Pusan and ran down the occasional boat that unwittingly crossed its path. But no further attacks were launched against the Japanese holed up on shore and the ships they had secreted in sheltered coves and narrow inlets. To continue to target Japanese craft, Yi decided, would only deprive the enemy of a means of escape when the big Ming push finally came, and the Koreans in turn of the chance to send them all to the bottom of the sea.

  On April 23 a small fishing boat was stopped in nearby waters and the two Japanese on board, a twenty-seven-year-old calling himself Sogoro who “could read and write a little,” and a forty-four-year-old illiterate named Yosayemon, were arrested on suspicion of being spies. The two were brought before Yi Sun-sin, who interrogated them through an interpreter. This is what they said:

  We are natives of Izumo, Japan. On the 18th of this month [April 19] we put out to sea in a small boat for fishing and were caught while adrift before a storm. We don’t know very much about the daily activity or the way of espionage of the Japanese soldiery, but we heard that an order arrived from the homeland for evacuat
ion of the Japanese armed forces from Korea before Third Moon [April] regardless of victory or defeat, because during two years’ stay in a foreign land the Japanese army suffered so many casualties. Therefore, the Japanese army here will go home as soon as its friendly battalions from the north will come to join it.

  Commander Yi, finding their words “cunning and vague,” had them tortured, but no additional information could be extracted. He then ordered their arms and legs torn from their bodies. Finally they were put out of their misery by having their heads chopped off.[445]

  These long weeks of campaigning necessarily brought the three commanders of the Korean navy into close and constant contact. Yi Sun-sin welcomed this opportunity to spend time with his respected younger colleague and friend, Cholla Right Commander Yi Ok-ki. The two men met often on ship and shore to talk, eat, play chess, and compete at archery. Being around Kyongsang Right Commander Won Kyun, on the other hand, was for Yi Sun-sin a trial and aggravation. In his war diary he wrote witheringly of Won’s incompetence as a commander, of his cowardice in the face of the enemy, of his “viciousness and malice,” and of the constant drinking that made everything worse.[446] There was no one that Yi despised more who was not Japanese.

  For Won, writhing in insecurity in the shadow of the more competent Yi, the feeling was mutual. The fact that his ranking superior had fewer years of military service than Won himself only heightened his resentment. It appears that he was not shy about venting his frustrations to those around him; this may have been what Yi was referring to in writing of Won’s “viciousness and malice.” Nor was the Kyongsang commander’s pen idle. In his own dispatches to the throne he hinted that Yi was a coward, that he refused to follow orders and did not revere the king. In the factionalized Korean government there were plenty of officials willing to believe these accusations and file them away, for Yi Sun-sin owed his position to his childhood friend Yu Song-nyong, a leader of the ascendant Easterner faction. He was thus himself an Easterner if only by default, and in turn an enemy to every Westerner who walked the halls of power. Yi for the moment was relatively safe, for with a war on, factional strife had been for the most part subsumed by more immediate concerns for national survival. The Japanese, however, were now on the defensive, and it was beginning to look like peace would be restored within the next several months. When that happened the eclipsed Westerners would surely return to the offensive against the Easterners in the never-ending fight for power. They would not attack Yu Song-nyong directly; that would be too dangerous. They would proceed in the tried and true manner of targeting the appointees and supporters of the man at the top, thereby undermining his power—men like Cholla Left Navy Commander Yi Sun-sin.

  By the beginning of May Yi Sun-sin and Yi Ok-ki decided that it would be pointless and even dangerous to remain any longer in the waters off Pusan. The anticipated southward push by the Ming army, and in turn the putting to sea of the Japanese fleet, was coming no time soon, so there was little they could accomplish there. Some sort of contagion, possibly typhoid, had also begun to sweep through the ranks and was threatening to carry off the entire Korean navy if the fleet did not soon disperse.

  There was also the practical matter of the season to consider. With the time for planting already well upon them, it was imperative that the men of the Korean navy, mostly farmers, be allowed to return to their fields to sow the year’s crops. Otherwise there would be no harvest in the fall. The two Yis accordingly agreed to give their men leave in turns, and to put their vacated warships on “maintenance status” until the Chinese resumed their drive to the south and the time finally came for the decisive battle at sea.

  On May 3 Yi Sun-sin returned to his home port of Yosu and Yi Ok-ki to Usuyong farther west, and the bulk of the Korean navy headed off to the fields.[447]

  * * *

  On May 7, 1593, Commander in Chief Li Rusong arrived back in Kaesong with Shen Weijing. Li was undoubtedly glad he had spared Shen’s life earlier in the year, for the negotiator was now going to prove his worth in achieving the removal of the Japanese from Seoul without the loss of a single life. Not everyone supported Li’s intention to negotiate a quick settlement so that he and his army could return home. Li’s own superior, Song Yingchang, the government official charged with overseeing military operations in Korea from his headquarters in Liaodong, had reprimanded him for retreating to Pyongyang following the debacle at Pyokje and now urged him to resume the offensive. The Minister of War in Beijing, however, who was in turn Song’s superior, supported the idea of a peace settlement. From his perspective on the home front there was simply not enough money left in the imperial treasury to pay for further fighting. Commander Li was thus able to ignore Song’s instructions, and proceeded with his plan to bring the war to an end.[448]

  The Koreans, meanwhile, were fuming over Li’s unwillingness to fight. They were also becoming fed up with his condescending attitude and his obvious desire to keep them in the dark as to his true intentions, telling them whatever he thought they wanted to hear just to keep them quiet. In early May, for example, in response to a plea from National High Commissioner Yu Song-nyong to attack the Japanese in Seoul, Li penned some soothing words about how he too wanted nothing more than to wipe the enemy out, when in fact he was at that very moment preparing to send Shen Weijing south to negotiate a truce.[449]

  Tensions inevitably arose within the allied camp. Relations between Ming commander Li Rusong and Yu Song-nyong became particularly strained, so much so that Li at one point ordered the Korean official seized and beaten. Matters came to a head just prior to negotiator Shen’s departure for Seoul on May 8. Yu Song-nyong rode ahead into Kwon Yul’s camp at Paju, between the Imjin River and Seoul.[450] A unit of Chinese soldiers was already there, with the Wanli emperor’s banner prominently displayed. Beside the banner, Yu observed a poster announcing that negotiations would soon be commencing and that Koreans henceforth were not allowed to attack the Japanese. Yu was furious. The Chinese commander on the scene, possibly in response to the Korean official’s evident displeasure, ordered him to bow to the emperor’s banner to show proper respect. Yu refused. This banner will be carried into Seoul by the negotiators, he said, and I will bow to nothing that the Japanese bow to. The Chinese commander thundered twice more that Yu must bow. Twice more Yu refused. Then he got on his horse and rode away.

  By the following morning Yu Song-nyong’s temper had cooled enough for him to realize that he would have to go to Li Rusong and apologize. He rode to Kaesong where the Ming commander was residing and presented himself outside the city walls. A guard peered out at him, but would not open the gate—Commander in Chief Li had clearly heard the story of the previous day’s disturbance. Yu turned to the official who was accompanying him. “The commander is angry and is testing us,” he said. “Let’s wait here for a while.”

  It started to rain lightly. Someone inside came periodically to the gate to peek out and see whether the two Koreans had left. They had not. Finally, after several hours of patient waiting, the gate was opened and a damp Yu Song-nyong was ushered into the presence of Li Rusong. The apology was duly delivered and the tension eased, at least for that day.

  It quickly returned. After leaving Kaesong, Yu headed south again, back toward the Korean army’s forward camp north of Seoul. He had not gone far when he came upon a unit of Chinese cavalry. One of the horsemen blocked his way with whip in hand. “Are you the National High Commissioner?” he barked. When Yu replied that he was, the officer grabbed his horse by the reins, yanked the animal around, and started lashing it on the flanks and shouting, “Get out of here! Go back to the north!”

  There was nothing for the perplexed Yu to do but return to Kaesong. It was only the next day that he learned what had been the cause of this strange episode: one of Li’s commanders had accused Yu of removing all the boats from the crossing at the Imjin River to prevent negotiator Shen Weijing from proceeding to Seoul to meet with the Japanese. It was a false charge, but it result
ed only hours later in Yu’s arrest and his admittance for a second time into the presence of Li Rusong. This time he found Li pacing back and forth in a towering rage. The Ming commander ordered Yu stripped to the waist and tied to a plank to be given forty strokes with the paddle on his bare back.

  It was only thanks to the timely arrival of one of Li’s officers that Korea’s National High Commissioner was spared a serious beating. When Li attempted to confirm Yu’s treason with the man by inquiring about the state of the Imjin crossing, he was told that nothing had happened to the boats there and that the river could be crossed with ease. Li, realizing that Yu Song-nyong had been falsely accused, had him immediately released and apologized profusely. The order then went out for the arrest of Yu’s accuser. The man was duly arrested for making a false report and flogged into unconsciousness on the plank intended for Yu.[451]

  * * *

  In Seoul, Konishi Yukinaga and his fellow daimyo had just received orders from Hideyoshi to evacuate the capital and pull back toward Pusan. The timing was fortuitous, the order arriving just days before Ming negotiator Shen Weijing. The Japanese could thus use the dire necessity of retreat as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Ming Chinese.[452]

  On May 8 Shen and an entourage of Ming generals proceeded south from Kaesong to Seoul. They stopped along the way at the Korean army camp at Paju. Shen was accosted here by Korea’s commander in chief (dowonsu), Kim Myong-won, who expressed to him the universal disapproval among the Koreans of any talk of negotiation and compromise. “The Japanese tricked us before at Pyongyang,” Kim said, “and we let them slip away. What makes you think they won’t do it again?” But of course that was precisely what Shen intended: to talk the Japanese into marching south without a fight.