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

by Samuel Hawley

  It is interesting to note that King Sonjo and his ministers, while clearly angry over what they regarded as Yi Sun-sin’s failure to obey orders, decided for the sake of stability only to take away a portion of his command. There was no talk at this time of throwing him into prison. The pressure for sterner punishment would come from further down the hierarchy of power. It was here, among ambitious young officials with much to prove and far to climb, that factional fighting typically was most energetically pursued. This was particularly true of the Censorate, the collection of three highly influential government organs tasked with scrutinizing the conduct of the government and military. Many a fledging official had got his start here, using the power of remonstrance to bring down factional opponents and advance his own career.

  It was now a protest from one of these organs, the Office of the Inspector-General, that sealed the fate of Yi Sun-sin. On March 21, six days after the court resolved merely to reduce Yi’s command, the OIG sent a letter to King Sonjo questioning the decision. Yi Sun-sin, the letter asserted, had failed to do his duty and had disobeyed a direct order, and thus should not be left in command of anything at all. He should be removed from office and thrown into prison.[611] The OIG’s protest had its intended effect. Two days later King Sonjo dispatched an official south to Hansan Island to arrest Yi and bring him to Seoul, and at the same time install Won Kyun as commander of Korea’s naval forces in the south. The official reached Yi’s base on April 12. The transfer of command was made that same day, the supplies, weapons, and gunpowder that Yi had so painstakingly stockpiled over the years being handed over to the man he most despised. Yi was then bound with rope, placed in a cage on the back of a cart, and sent north to the capital to be imprisoned and interrogated regarding the charges brought against him: that he had refused to obey orders; that he had betrayed his country by allowing an enemy to escape; and, in a nod to Won Kyun, that he had claimed credit for victories and services that should rightly have gone to others. These were serious accusations punishable by death.[612]

  While Yi Sun-sin awaited his fate in a prison cell in Seoul, a war of words was waged between the Eastern and Western factions over his fate, the former trying to save their man, the latter intent on having him killed. In an attempt to shed more light on the affair, the government sent an investigator south to Hansan Island to look into the matter and examine Yi’s conduct. This investigator’s sympathies clearly lay with the Westerners. After a brief tour of the south that did not even include a stop at Hansan-do as ordered, he returned to Seoul with a conveniently damning story to further vilify Yi. According to unsubstantiated reports, the investigator said, Kato Kiyomasa’s ship had run aground on an island offshore while en route to Pusan, stranding the commander for seven days, an easy target for the Korean navy if Yi Sun-sin had only taken the trouble to attack him. This tale was regarded by some with justifiable suspicion. Government minister Kim Myong-won, former commander in chief of the armed forces and now back in the civil service, remarked to King Sonjo that he considered it “ridiculous” for anyone to suggest that “born sailors” like the Japanese would be stranded like this for seven whole days. Many others, however, were only too willing to believe anything that served to further blacken Yi’s name.[613]

  In the end it was a personal appeal to King Sonjo from Minister Without Portfolio Chong Tak that saved Yi Sun-sin’s life. The seventy-year-old Chong, esteemed by the king for his wisdom and age, eloquently argued that, while the charges against Yi were indeed grave, his service to the nation in 1592–93 merited serious consideration. This advice was eventually accepted, and an almost certain sentence of death was commuted to loss of position alone. After a month of confinement and several harsh interrogations that possibly included torture, Yi was released from prison and sent south under guard to Kyongsang Province to report to his new post. Henceforth the fifty-two-year-old former naval commander would serve as a common soldier of the lowest rank in the army of Commander in Chief Kwon Yul.[614]

  * * *

  First day, fourth moon: Clear. I came out from the prison cell, and entered the house of a servant of Yun Kan’s outside the South Gate (Seoul).... Governor Yun Cha-sin came to comfort me, and the Section Chief of the Border Defense Council Yi Sun-ji came to see me. I could not keep back my unhappy feeling. The Governor went out and returned in the evening with wine. (Yun) Ki-hon also came. They comforted me....Chief State Councilor Yu Song-nyong sent me his servant, Privy Councilor Chong Tak, Minister Sim Hui-su, Left State Councilor Kim Myong-won, Vice Minister Yi Chong-hyong, Chief Censor No Chik, Deputy Councilors Ch’oe Won and Kwak Yong, each sent someone to inquire about my health.[615]

  An understandably bitter Yi Sun-sin was released from prison on May 16, 1597. He was immediately surrounded by friends and supporters, plying him with wine to boost his spirits. On the following day he met with his friend and mentor Prime Minister Yu Song-nyong, and in a talk that lasted all through the night heard much of the recent happenings surrounding his case. Then, on May 18, he began his long journey south to Kyongsang Province to enter the service of Kwon Yul as a common soldier.

  Yi Sun-sin’s journey south was a slow and unhappy affair.[616] He stopped first as his family’s home at Asan in Chungchong Province. Here he was greeted by the sight of blackened stumps surrounding his ancestors’ graves: a forest fire had recently consumed the site. Then, after a few days spent visiting friends and relations, Yi received word that his eighty-year-old mother had passed away. Earlier in the war she had moved south to Yosu to be near her son. She died while en route by boat back north to Asan.

  As so often happened with Yi, the event of his mother’s death was preceded by signs. On the morning of May 26 he awoke from a confusing and upsetting dream. He described it to his two sons Tok and Yol, but they could make nothing of it. There was clearly meaning in it, however; to a sixteenth-century Korean virtually every dream had meaning. Then suddenly Yi thought of his mother, “and hot tears rolled down my cheeks.” He sent a messenger to the coast to meet the boat and inquire after her health. Two days later the sad news arrived: his mother was dead. “I jumped up in surprise,” Yi writes, “then tumbled over. How could the sun in heaven be so dark?” Over the following days Yi accompanied his mother’s body to the family home at Asan for burial. “I wept as if my bowels were torn to pieces with grief. How can I express all of the emotions I have had? On reaching home we placed her casket in a room...until the funeral day. It rained in torrents. As I was exhausted with grief and the order to present myself at the southern military camp weighed on my mind, I could not but cry aloud. All I could conceive was that I had better die soon.”[617]

  After the funeral rites were complete, Yi, now clad in the white clothes of mourning, was obliged to resume his journey south. Upon reaching Kyongsang he established himself and his two sons in a modest house in the mountains above Kwon Yul’s camp. He would remain there for the rest of the summer, ostensibly serving Kwon as a guard in this remote outpost, but in fact left to his own devices, cared for by a small staff of servants while he waited for the tide of opinion against him to turn.

  PART 5

  THE SECOND INVASION

  No ruler should put troops into the field

  merely to gratify his own spleen;

  no general should fight a battle simply out of pique.[618]

  Sun Tzu Ping Fa (Master Sun’s Art of War)

  4th century B.C.

  CHAPTER 24

  “Water, Thunder, and Great Disaster”

  Hideyoshi’s objective in his second invasion of Korea was completely different from the first. In 1592 he had his sights set on China. Korea was merely the highway to the prize, to be traversed as quickly as possible so that the real battle could be joined, the battle for Beijing. By 1597 Hideyoshi had given up this plan. To be sure, he continued to make sporadic references to expanding his empire across the whole world. His orders launching the second invasion, for example, included the following bold words: “First Korea a
nd its eight circuits [provinces], then Great Ming and its more than four hundred provinces, South Barbary, the Kirishitan Country and all beyond, down to the distant islands and as far as the fortunes of war continue, all will be subjugated by the force of Hideyoshi’s reputation.”[619] But this was only bluster. The taiko now understood that China was too vast and too distant for even a great conqueror like himself to subdue. This time Korea itself was his target, or more precisely the southern half of the peninsula.

  And what were Hideyoshi’s designs for the southern half of Korea? The answer is clouded by the fact that he and his field commanders did not share the same objectives. The subsequent course of events makes it clear that daimyo like Kato Kiyomasa, Konishi Yukinaga, and Kuroda Nagamasa planned to conquer the southern three provinces of Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong and transform them into a province of Japan. This would satisfy Hideyoshi by expanding his empire and glorifying his name, and more important would open up vast new territories for redistribution to those daimyo who had subdued it—the promise of larger, richer fiefdoms in return for risking life and limb. Hideyoshi himself, however, does not seem to have had designs on conquest. At the start of the second invasion he in fact would forbid his commanders from marching on Seoul. They were simply to rampage through southern Korea for a month or two, he ordered, then return to the coast. The purpose of this was to save face after the humiliating outcome of the first campaign and subsequent negotiations with Beijing. If the taiko’s armies were to return to Korea and devastate half the kingdom before returning home, it would serve to punish the Koreans for daring to stand against him, and demonstrate to the Chinese that Hideyoshi still had the power and resolve to challenge them any time he wished.

  It is likely that Hideyoshi was also intent on bolstering his reputation at home when he sent his armies back to Korea in 1597. The Ming emperor’s refusal to treat him as at least an equal, coupled with the Koreans’ refusal to send him even a prince as a hostage as he had demanded, marked the first time in the taiko’s career that he had been unable to force or otherwise coerce an adversary into a position of his choosing. Hideyoshi could not afford to let such an outcome stand, for it carried with it the taint of weakness, the first sign that the aging dictator, now past sixty and in unmistakable physical decline, was no longer the indomitable force he once had been. Seen in this light, Hideyoshi had little choice but to reinvade Korea. He had to do so to demonstrate to his own people that he remained their master, a benevolent provider when served without question, but a terrible conqueror when resisted or crossed. He needed to remind them of this not just for his own sake, but also for the sake of his heir and only natural son. Hideyori was just four years old in 1597, a long way from being able to defend his right to rule should his father pass away. By reasserting himself in Korea, Hideyoshi thus was sending a message not just to the Chinese and to the Koreans that he was not to be trifled with. He was also sending a message to his own daimyo, the headstrong barons he had so recently brought under his sway: the house of Toyotomi was strong and determined and would brook no challenge. Anyone attempting to resist it would be made to pay a terrible price.

  * * *

  By the time negotiations had fallen apart in the latter part of 1596, Japanese troop withdrawals from Korea to appease the Ming envoys had reduced their forces there to just a few thousand. In the months that followed, this tenuous toehold on the peninsula was strengthened to 20,390, still all clustered in the vicinity of Pusan. Kobayakawa Hideaki, the adopted son of Kobayakawa Takakage, the hero of the Battle of Pyokje who had died of natural causes earlier that year, commanded a garrison of 10,390 men at Pusan itself. Five thousand men under Tachibana Munetora were stationed fifteen kilometers west at the port of Angolpo. One thousand men under Takahashi Saburo were offshore on Kadok Island. Asano Chokei was at Sosaengpo, near the town of Ulsan to the north, with 3,000 men, and Kobayakawa Hidekane, brother of Takakage, was on the island of Chuk-do in the Naktong River delta with 1,000.[620] No offensive movement was undertaken at this time. The job of these various units was to reestablish a beachhead in preparation for the arrival of the main invasion force.

  On March 19, 1597, Hideyoshi issued orders mobilizing an additional 121,100 men for his second Korean campaign. Nearly half of this force, 56,700 men, originated from Kyushu. The remainder came from Shikoku (24,400) and western Honshu (40,000).[621] They joined the 20,390 troops already stationed in and around Pusan, bringing the total strength of Hideyoshi’s second invasion force to 141,490—not much smaller than the 158,800-man army he had sent to Korea in 1592. They were for the most part first-class troops, virtually all of the samurai commanders and many of the men having experienced combat and hardship during the first invasion. They were stronger for it. But they were also warier. They returned to Korea with little of the optimism of 1592, the assumption that the trek to China would be a romp. This time they knew they would be facing an implacable foe, the Koreans weak but bitter and hating, the Chinese army large and strong. This time they knew that the war they were entering would be a deadly conflict, one that would see many of them killed before an end was reached, whatever that end might be.

  In overall command was Kobayakawa Hideaki, a fifteen-year-old nephew of Hideyoshi’s on his wife O-Ne’s side. Young Hideaki had as a child been adopted first by the taiko with the name Hashiba Hidetoshi, and later by first invasion veteran Kobayakawa Takakage, who had no sons of his own. It is doubtful that this lad would have wielded much real power. He was more a figurehead, a representative in the field of his uncle Hideyoshi. Under Hideaki came twenty-three-year-old Ukita Hideie, supreme commander of the first invasion army, and beside him eighteen-year-old Mori Hidemoto, replacing his cousin Terumoto, who had served in Korea in 1592–93. Kuroda Yoshitaka, the father to Kuroda Nagamasa and a Christian like his son (his baptismal name was Simeon), served them as a sort of chief of staff. This fifty-year-old veteran likely did much to guide the hands of these younger men who ostensibly outranked him.

  It is remarkable that men so young as Kobayakawa Hideaki, Mori Hidemoto, and to a lesser extent Ukita Hideie should have been entrusted with such lofty positions of command. One reason for this may have been that they would have been a more compliant conduit for Hideyoshi’s orders and thus more useful to him in such positions than older, more ambitious men. It should be borne in mind, moreover, that they were not “generals” or “commanders in chief” in the sense that existed in China and Korea, and indeed in modern armies today. Hideyoshi’s second invasion force was still very much controlled by the daimyo commanders of its individual units. Each was in effect an independent army, coming together in loose collaboration to achieve a common goal. This fact had resulted in a good deal of in-fighting and working at cross-purposes in the first heady months of war in 1592, as some of Hideyoshi’s more headstrong commanders competed for personal honors in what they initially assumed would be an easy war. There would be less of this in the second invasion. The daimyo that returned to Korea in 1597 were better disciplined and more willing to work together. It has been suggested that this was because they were placed under tighter discipline.[622] With a fifteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old in command, this is questionable. A more plausible explanation is that Hideyoshi’s commanders knew better this time what they were up against and thus disciplined themselves. They returned to Korea with a better sense of the strength of the enemy, of their own vulnerability, and thus of the need to work together if they were to succeed.

  The Japanese started returning to Korea at the beginning of March 1597. On the first day of the month Kato Kiyomasa, at the head of ten thousand men aboard two hundred ships, landed at Chuk Island at the mouth of the Naktong River, where a small body of troops was already garrisoned. They encountered no resistance. Kato dispatched a message to Seoul from his master Hideyoshi, presumably threatening Choson with destruction and demanding compliance.[623] Then he sent a ship first east to Pusan and then north to Sosaengpo to post the following announcement
to the citizens of Kyongsang: “The Japanese army of Kato Kiyomasa, having received the command of his Excellency the Taiko, has crossed the sea again and returned to this place. A representative has already been sent to Seoul. While awaiting his report, the people of Kyongsang Province shall not doubt the validity of this announcement, nor shall they attempt to run away in fear.”[624]

  On March 2 Konishi Yukinaga arrived at Pusan with his seven thousand troops. He then sailed fifteen kilometers west to Angolpo, where he proceeded to collect timber to repair and strengthen the fortress he had evacuated the year before. In the coming campaign Konishi would serve initially as something of an overseer to the navy, an assignment that Hideyoshi perhaps hoped would make his fleet more cohesive and effective following its disappointing performance in 1592–93. Over the next several months Konishi would be joined at Angolpo by naval commanders Todo Takatora, Kato Yoshiaki, and Kurushima Michifusa, all from the sixth contingent, and by Wakizaka Yasuharu from the seventh, making this port to the west of Pusan the invasion force’s main naval base.[625]

  From early March until the middle of August additional forces continued to arrive on Korea’s south coast. Shimazu Yoshihiro reinforced Kadok Island with ten thousand men. Kuroda Nagamasa, Mori Yoshimasa, and others settled at the port of Anpo. Nabeshima Naoshige and his seventeen-year-old son Katsushige made for the island of Chuk-do with twelve thousand men, while Mori Hidemoto’s gargantuan thirty thousand-man force and the ten thousand men under Ukita Hideie joined young Kobayakawa Hideaki at Pusan.

  This buildup of forces was a slow and methodical affair. There was no intention this time as in 1592 of making a lightning thrust northward and slashing a route to Seoul. Hideyoshi’s commanders instead spent several months massing their forces and strengthening their defenses in a string of camps on the peninsula’s southeastern tip, establishing a beachhead from which they could extend their reach west into Cholla Province and north into Kyongsang. They had returned to Korea to seize and hold territory, not merely to pass through.