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

by Samuel Hawley

  Baek was the only one among these three officials with a military background. As the Japanese neared the fortress it was thus to him that everyone inside looked for leadership. They were sorely disappointed. When Baek saw the odds arrayed against them, 27,000 Japanese warriors against no more than a few thousand Koreans, many of them civilians, he led his family to a secluded part of the fortress, lowered them on a rope over the wall, and stole away into the trees. When his disappearance was discovered any determination to hold Hwangsoksansong quickly drained away. As the Japanese surrounded the fortress, Nabeshima on the west, Kuroda on the east, Kato on the south, the people inside ran to Kwak Jun in a panic, pleading with him to lead them in an escape. Kwak refused. Although he knew they could not withstand the coming onslaught, he would not accept the ignominy of flight. This, he said, is the place I will die.

  The Japanese attacked Hwangsoksansong on September 26. They took it that same day. Most of the civilians jumped over the walls and attempted to flee when the fighting began, leaving Kwak and his few hundred militiamen to defend the fortress alone. Kwak died trying to stave off the final assault. His two sons were cut down as they cradled his body and wept. The Japanese then flooded into the fortress, killed almost everyone and started collecting noses. The final tally was 353 Korean soldiers killed within the fortress itself, plus several thousand civilians in the valley below.[673] Among the dead were Cho Chong-do and his entire family, and the son-in-law of Kwak Jun. When Kwak’s daughter heard of her husband’s death, she grew despondent and hanged herself.[674]

  Shortly after they captured Hwangsoksansong, word reached the Japanese that the Left Army had already taken Namwon. With this objective no longer available to them, Kato, Nabeshima, and Kuroda set out instead for Chonju, fifty kilometers farther north. By the time they arrived the city had been deserted by both civilians and troops: upon receiving news of the fall of Namwon, Chinese general Chen Yuzhong had withdrawn with his two thousand men and retreated north toward Seoul. Kato and his compatriots thus marched into Chonju on September 30 without a fight, where they were soon joined by a portion of the army that had taken Namwon. After garrisoning the city, this forward army fanned out west toward the coast and northeast toward Kumsan to subdue the northern half of Cholla Province. Nabeshima Naoshige led his forces farther north to take Kongju, the main city in Chungchong Province. Kato Kiyomasa’s contingent headed northeast to occupy the town of Chongju. Kuroda Nagamasa, finally, ventured farthest north into Kyonggi-do, the province bordering Seoul.

  By the beginning of October the Japanese army therefore seemed well on its way to achieving its objective of seizing the southern half of Korea as Hideyoshi’s consolation prize. They had been in much the same position five years before, however, only to see their initial gains slip away due in part to unremitting Korean resistance. Breaking this resistance was now a prime concern of the daimyo commanders. They intended to do so by terrorizing the local population. A good example of this is seen in the proclamation Ukita Hideie issued to the people of Cholla Province in September, reiterating the hard-line policy on resistance that the Japanese army had first announced upon returning to Korea earlier in the year. It was a standard announcement that was being made by all commanders throughout the south:

  Farmers will return to their villages and concentrate on farming.

  Officials and their families will be killed, and their homes burned.

  A reward will be paid to anyone providing information on the whereabouts of officials in hiding.

  Henceforth farmers [who heed this proclamation] will be spared. Those who remain in hiding in the mountains will be killed and their homes burned.

  Report any instances of Japanese troops killing or mistreating [law-abiding] Korean farmers.[675]

  Ukita and his fellow daimyo were deadly serious in their demand for compliance. From the start of the offensive their campaign to pacify the provinces of Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong was accompanied by the most horrific atrocities perpetrated against the region’s civilian population. People were killed almost daily well outside the time frame of any significant battle, and their noses hacked off by the hundreds, even the thousands. We know this because the units responsible, ever mindful of recording the proof of their valor, kept meticulous records and receipts, some of which have survived to this day:

  To: Kuroda Nagamasa

  Noses from 23 enemy dead slain in battle taken and duly recorded.

  1597, 8th month, 16th day

  Kumagai Naomori, Kakimi Kasunao, Hayakawa Nagamasa

  To: Nabeshima Katsushige

  Noses taken yesterday and today in lieu of heads verified as 90.

  1597, 8th month, 21st day

  Kumagai Naomori, Kakimi Kasunao, Hayakawa Nagamasa

  To: Nabeshima Katsushige

  Noses taken today verified as 7.

  1597, 8th month, 22nd day

  Kakimi Kasunao, Kumagai Naomori, Hayakawa Nagamasa

  To: Nabeshima Katsushige

  Noses taken today in lieu of heads verified as 264.

  1597, 8th month, 25th day

  Kumagai Naomori, Kakimi Kasunao, Hayakawa Nagamasa

  To: Todo Takatora

  346 noses taken.

  1597, 8th month, 26th day

  Oda Kazuyoshi

  To: Kikkawa Hiroie

  Total number of noses taken verified as 480.

  Hayakawa Nagamasa

  1597, 9th month, 1st day

  To: Kikkawa Hiroie

  Total number of noses taken verified as 792.

  Hayakawa Nagamasa

  1597, 9th month, 4th day

  To: Kuroda Nagamasa

  Total number of noses taken verified as 3,000.

  1597, 9th month, 5th day

  Hayakawa Nagamasa[676]

  * * *

  With the Japanese now rapidly advancing toward Seoul, panic seized the populace. Citizens packed their possessions and prepared to flee into the countryside, and the Korean government began discussing plans for its own evacuation. It was immediately decided that Crown Prince Kwanghae and the queen should be sent northwest into the rugged province of Hamgyong, to safeguard the future of the monarchy and rally the people there once again to resist the Japanese. Government ministers then sat down with King Sonjo to consider options for his own safety. No mention was made of his remaining in Seoul. Although Sonjo bemoaned the fact that he had been considered a coward ever since fleeing the capital the first time in 1592, flight once again seemed the only reasonable alternative. The only questions were whether to travel by land or by sea, and what town to head to in the far north.[677]

  The Ming forces that had abandoned the south were no more resolute. General Yang Yuan, badly wounded and borne on a stretcher, arrived in the capital on October 4 with the tattered remnants of his army, a total of scarcely one hundred men. He was greeted outside Seoul’s South Gate by King Sonjo, who wept at the sight of the general’s wounds. After receiving Sonjo’s thanks for having suffered so much trying to defend Korea—the heartfelt exchange reduced everyone including Yang to tears—the general and his men resumed their journey north toward the Yalu River and China beyond.[678] Yang would later be tried and beheaded for his failure at Namwon. As for General Chen Yuzhong, he received one hundred strokes of the rod as punishment for abandoning Chonju and retreating north without a fight, and was sent back home in disgrace.[679]

  Commander in Chief Ma Gui had in the meantime also developed cold feet. Arriving in Seoul with a thousand crack troops in the middle of August, he had initially planned to march his forces south to Kongju to meet the Japanese advance. He changed his mind after learning of the decimation of Yang Yuan’s army. Concluding that the Japanese could not be stopped with the limited forces at his disposal, Ma dispatched a message north to his superiors recommending that Korea be abandoned and all Ming forces amassed along the north bank of the Yalu River to defend China’s own territory should it come under attack.[680]

  Ma’s superior Yang Hao
did not agree. Upon hearing of the defeat at Namwon, the supreme Ming commander of military affairs in Korea journeyed south to Seoul from his headquarters at Pyongyang to take charge of the situation and quash any talk of retreat. After criticizing Ma and his fellow commanders for their lack of determination, Yang gathered all the Chinese troops on the scene, those who had abandoned the south plus reinforcements recently arrived, a total of eight thousand men, and sent them south under Ma into the hills of Kyonggi Province to ambush the Japanese when they drew near Seoul. This was all done in secret. Yang told the Koreans nothing of his plans, presumably to prevent word of the ambush from leaking to the Japanese.[681]

  This Ming army, a combination of foot soldiers and mounted troops, took up positions along the main road seventy kilometers south of the capital, just past the garrison town of Chiksan, near what is today Pyongtaek City. Selecting a place where the passage between the mountains was narrow and rough, the Chinese divided into three sections, one remaining by the road and the other two branching to the left and right. They then hid themselves well and sat down to wait.

  Luckily for Ma and his men, the Japanese force approaching from the direction of Chonju was not particularly large. It was the vanguard of Kuroda Nagamasa’s five thousand-man force,[682] pressing into Kyonggi Province to establish the northernmost edge of Japan’s new holdings in Korea while their colleagues secured the territory to the south. The two sides met on the morning of October 16. Korean accounts state that Kuroda’s force was caught off guard; the first indication they had that something was amiss was the clang of cymbals issuing from the trees signaling the Chinese attack. According to the Japanese, Kuroda’s men saw the assembled Ming troops from some distance away and charged at them despite being badly outnumbered, intent on holding them on the low ground until their comrades arrived. Things went badly for the Japanese at first. But, as they had hoped, Kuroda’s main force soon raced to the scene, drawn by the sound of gunfire. With the balance of forces now even, the fighting continued without resolution until the end of the day, with heavy casualties on both sides. The rival forces then drew apart, gathered their dead and wounded, and made camp for the night. Sometime in the evening the Ming commander summoned his officers and said, “Judging from the determination the Japanese showed today, they will probably fight to the death tomorrow. So we must do the same.”

  The Japanese tried to take the upper hand at dawn, advancing against the Chinese in crane-wing formation, attempting to crush them within two enveloping wings. They failed. The Chinese, although hard pressed by musket fire, eventually drove Kuroda’s men back with arrows and light cannons and muskets of their own, then charged and sent them scattering in retreat back toward the south. An additional force of two thousand cavalrymen sent from Seoul by Yang Hao arrived on the scene just in time to swing the balance and join in the chase. While Ma’s exhausted men sat down to rest, these fresh cavalrymen galloped down the road after the retreating Japanese, adding a few more enemy heads to the tally before finally turning back. When it was all over the total number of Japanese dead was estimated at between five and six hundred. Chinese casualties likely ran into the hundreds as well.[683]

  * * *

  The Battle of Chiksan had not been a crushing defeat for the Japanese. They lost no more than six hundred men and inflicted significant casualties in return upon the Ming Chinese. The battle nevertheless marked the turning point in Hideyoshi’s second invasion of Korea, the point of his army’s farthest northern advance before turning back toward the south. It was not a rout, but rather a carefully considered strategic retreat. The Japanese fell back at their own pace, taking time as they went to inflict still more death and destruction on the Korean people as neither the Choson nor the Ming army made a serious attempt to pursue. They were prompted to turn back mainly by the now-certain knowledge that a large Ming army was assembling in the north and would soon be moving their way. To take on this expeditionary force in their present situation, the Japanese knew, would be foolhardy, spread out as they were in towns and cities all across the provinces of Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong. There was also the approaching Korean winter to consider and the attendant difficulty of obtaining supplies, a difficulty that would be further exacerbated by the Korean navy under a reinstated Yi Sun-sin, which was about to deny Japanese ships access to the supply route north through the Yellow Sea. Taking these considerations together, there was only one sensible course of action for the Japanese army to take: they had to fall back toward the south.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Seek death and you will live; seek life and you will die”

  Yi Sun-sin was halfway through his tour of inspection of Korea’s southern coastal defenses when the messenger from Seoul caught up with him, bearing the royal order reappointing him supreme naval commander of Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong Provinces. The date was September 13, 1597. At the time of Yi’s removal from office, Korea’s navy had consisted of at least two hundred warships manned by disciplined crews. In the course of his inspection tour Yi now found that nothing of this force remained. Thanks mainly to the poor leadership of his replacement, Won Kyun, almost the entire navy had been destroyed in the Battle of Chilchon Strait on August 28, leaving the sea route west entirely unguarded.

  Yi could easily have given up at this point without too much loss of face. After all, with no fleet to command or men to lead what good could he possibly do? A great deal, as it turned out. The next six weeks would be in fact the finest hour in this Korean naval hero’s already illustrious career. Equipped with just thirteen ships and armed with little more than a fierce reputation and unshakable courage, Yi Sun-sin would take on a Japanese armada of two hundred ships, and stop it in its tracks.

  * * *

  When Yi Sun-sin arrived in southern Cholla Province from Kyongsang he found the region in panic and turmoil. The roads were filled with refugees. When they saw Yi passing they greeted him like a savoir, crying out, “Our Admiral is come again! Now we can be safe!” Local officials everywhere were in hiding or had fled into the hills, desperate to escape what the Japanese proclamations promised would be certain death for them. Near Sunchon Yi found three officials cowering in a warehouse. Sunchon itself was completely deserted. The local army commander there had run off as well, leaving behind an unguarded armory full of weapons. Yi hastily organized a squad of monk-soldiers to bury the weapons. Elsewhere Yi was angered to find that fleeing officers and officials had burnt armories, food stores, and government offices—the latter presumably to prevent any evidence of who they were from falling into enemy hands—and was particularly astonished to hear of an army garrison that had knocked down the walls of its own mountain fortress rather than risk inflaming the ire of the advancing Japanese.[684]

  As he made his circuitous way west, Yi attempted to restore order by posting guards at armories and warehouses that had not already been destroyed, reprimanding officials for cowardice, flogging officers and men guilty of dereliction of duty, and punishing civilians for any crime. One staff officer received eighty blows for failing to obey an order to ship weapons west to safety from the naval port of Yosu; a provisions inspector was beaten for stealing the grain in his care; two abalone divers had their heads cut off and publicly displayed for attempting to make off with some cattle by first creating a panic with shouts of, “The Japanese thieves have come! The Japanese thieves have come!”[685] In this way Yi Sun-sin reestablished what classical Chinese military doctrine termed his “awesomeness,” that combination of fear and respect that a leader needed to instill in his people if he were to effectively govern or command. “If by executing one man the entire army will quake, kill him,” advised the fourth-century B.C. treatise T’ai Kung’s Six Secret Teachings. “If by rewarding one man the masses will be pleased, reward him.... When punishments reach the pinnacle and rewards penetrate to the lowest, then your awesomeness has been effected.”[686]

  It was the conduct of Kyongsang Navy Commander Bae Sol that Yi Sun-sin found mos
t reprehensible and deserving of punishment. Bae, it will be remembered, had fled at the start of the Battle of Chilchonnyang when the Korean navy had been destroyed, thus saving himself and the twelve ships under his command. “Being told of the terror-stricken flight of Bae Sol,” Yi wrote in his dairy on September 22, “I was thoroughly indignant and disgusted. Having flattered the clique in power he was promoted...beyond his capacity, thus gravely threatening the national defense. Yet the Royal Court does not look into the matter. What a mistake!”[687]

  On September 28 Yi Sun-sin arrived at the port of Hoeryongpo on the southwestern corner of Korea, where he had previously arranged to meet Bae Sol and resume command of the fleet. Bae was late to the rendezvous, and then behaved badly when he finally arrived, absenting himself from the ceremony where the royal decree restoring Yi Sun-sin to command was displayed for all the captains to bow to, formally acknowledging his authority. Outraged by this impertinence, but unable to punish the Kyongsang commander directly because of his lofty rank, Yi resorted to the customary practice of indirect punishment: one of Bae’s officers was tied down and beaten in his place, receiving a total of twenty strokes. This set the tone for future relations between Yi and Bae. Two weeks later the disgraced Kyongsang commander sent a message to Yi stating that he was ill and requesting that he be excused from office to recuperate on land. After receiving Yi’s approval, Bae left the fleet and ran away. He would not serve in the navy again.[688]

  The Korean fleet of which Yi Sun-sin resumed command was a sorry force indeed. Bae Sol brought just ten ships to Hoeryongpo; he had escaped the Chilchonnyang battle with twelve ships, but two of these had somehow gone astray by the time he joined up with Yi. Two more vessels, both of them in poor condition and undermanned, arrived a week later under newly appointed Cholla Right Navy Commander Kim Ok-chu, then a third was produced from some other quarter, giving Yi a total of just thirteen warships with which to hold back the Japanese.[689] As for manpower, Yi started the month of October with some one hundred and twenty men, most of them demoralized after their recent defeat and apt to flee at the first sight of the Japanese. To make the most of this modest force, Yi is said to have ordered that all his vessels be fitted out like turtle ships, with stout timber sides and spiked roofs to protect the crews within. Considering the limited time and resources available, this construction work must have left his ships looking like rough-hewn floating forts. Yi also set to work bolstering the courage of his shaken men. He knew that the only way to withstand the coming Japanese onslaught would be for each man to fight like a cornered tiger—and the only way to get a man to fight like that was first to talk him out of his fear. “We are under orders of the King,” Yi said in one of many stirring talks to his men. “Since the situation has reached this extremity we must resolve to die together. Why should we hesitate to repay the royal bounty with our glorious deaths? There is only one choice for us now to make: victory or death!” After stirring up the fighting spirit of his men, Yi led them in swearing a solemn oath: they would meet and defeat the Japanese or die in the attempt.[690]