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

by Samuel Hawley

  * * *

  A state of wary peace descended upon Japan for more than a year after the end of the Korean campaign. Toyotomi Hideyori, the taiko’s five-year-old son and heir, remained with his mother Yodogimi in seclusion at Osaka Castle, under the protection of the Five Regents and Five Commissioners, foremost among them Tokugawa Ieyasu and Maeda Toshiie, the senior daimyo Hideyoshi had appointed to run the country and safeguard the lad’s inheritance until he came of age. Signs soon began to appear, however, of instability behind the scenes. First the governmental structure that Hideyoshi had set in place began to fall apart as individual regents and commissioners and numerous other daimyo left the capital region to take care of affairs in their own domains during this time of potential upheaval. Then, in 1599, Maeda Toshiie died. Maeda was the only senior daimyo with experience and power enough to rival Tokugawa Ieyasu. His stature was further raised by the fact that he made his residence alongside Hideyori at Osaka Castle and was thus the regent most directly responsible for the well-being of the helpless young heir. Maeda’s passing left Tokugawa the single most powerful daimyo in Japan, a position he used in early 1600 to move from Fushimi Castle near Kyoto into Osaka Castle to take Hideyori under his domineering wing. During the following months the fifty-eight-year-old regent continued to profess in words his loyalty to Hideyoshi and in turn Hideyori, but his actions made it increasingly clear that, after thirteen years of patient allegiance to the house of Toyotomi, he was out to seize power for himself.

  The battle lines for a civil war now began to be drawn. On the one side was Tokugawa Ieyasu, backed by a growing number of daimyo who saw him as the most powerful force in post-Hideyoshi Japan and thus the most advantageous camp to join. Most of these men were based in eastern Japan where Tokugawa’s own domain was located. Joining them were such Korean war veteran commanders as Kuroda Nagamasa, Nabeshima Naoshige, So Yoshitoshi, and Hideyoshi stalwart Kato Kiyomasa to name but a few. (Kato’s siding with Tokugawa is a good example of how daimyo loyalty was directed toward Hideyoshi’s person, and thus quickly evaporated following his death.) Standing opposed to this pro-Tokugawa faction was a loose federation of daimyo, mainly from western Japan, centered on Ishida Mitsunari, one of the Five Commissioners. Ishida, like Tokugawa, claimed that his sole concern was safeguarding the legacy of Hideyoshi, but in fact he had ambitions of his own for seizing the reins of power. He was joined by Korean war notables Ukita Hideie, one of the titular heads of both the first and second invasion and since his return to Japan one of the Five Regents sworn to protect Hideyori; Mori Terumoto, another of the regents, formerly a naval commander who had fought against Yi Sun-sin; Konishi Yukinaga, the Christian daimyo from Kyushu who had spearheaded both invasions and guided much of the diplomatic maneuvering between; Shimazu Yoshihiro, victor of the Battle of Sachon where so many noses had been taken; and Kobayakawa Hideaki, the adopted heir of Kobayakawa Takakage, the Kyushu warrior who had bested the Ming army at Pyokje in 1593. Old Takakage had died childless in 1597 at the age of sixty-five.

  On October 21, 1600, after half a dozen preliminary engagements, the combined armies of the two contending factions, one from eastern Japan and the other from the west, met in a narrow valley near a village called Sekigahara, a hundred kilometers northeast of Kyoto, to determine the course of the history of Japan. It was an enormous battle involving a reported 150,000 men: a disciplined 70,000-man army of easterners under Tokugawa Ieyasu against a tenuous coalition of 80,000 westerners led by Ishida Mitsunari. Ishida met Tokugawa’s army with the main body of his force at eight o’clock in the morning as a heavy fog began to lift. He left Kobayakawa Hideaki’s contingent in reserve on a nearby hill, with the intention of summoning it to attack when the time was right. Several hours of pitched battle ensued without result. Finally Ishida lit the signal fire calling Kobayakawa Hideaki’s forces to attack. Kobayakawa did not respond. Unbeknownst to Ishida, the twenty-three-year-old daimyo had secretly switched sides, wooed sometime earlier to the Tokugawa cause by Kuroda Nagamasa. He hesitated for a time, then led his men in an attack against Ishida’s own force. This last-minute defection turned the tide of the battle in Tokugawa’s favor, breaking the western army and sending it into retreat.

  What has been called “the greatest transfer of landholding in Japanese history” took place in the wake of the Battle of Sekigahara, when the fiefs of eighty-seven daimyo who had fought against Tokugawa were confiscated and handed over to men more fortunate in their choice of sides.[860] Many of these dispossessed daimyo, including western army leader Ishida Mitsunari, were either killed or committed suicide in the approved manner by slitting open their bellies. Konishi Yukinaga, a Christian who viewed suicide as a mortal sin, declined this way out and was beheaded. It is said that it took his executioner three blows of the sword to completely sever his head. Others who had opposed Tokugawa but now displayed a willingness to submit were in most cases stripped of their lands but allowed to live. Ukita Hideie, for example, was dispossessed and banished to the tiny island of Hachijojima, where he would live, forgotten, until the age of ninety. Shikoku daimyo Chosokabe Morichika, son of Korean invasion commander Chosokabe Motochika who had died the previous year, similarly lost everything. So did Tachibana Muneshige. Mori Terumoto was one of only three anti-Tokugawa daimyo who were allowed to keep some land, retaining a third of his formerly huge holdings in the vicinity of present-day Hiroshima. Those daimyo who had actively sided with Tokugawa, meanwhile, received correspondingly handsome rewards, in some cases doubling the size of their domains. Benefiting most was Kuroda Nagamasa. In recognition of the crucial service he had performed in winning Kobayakawa Hideaki over to the Tokugawa side, thereby tipping the scales in the Battle of Sekigahara, the thirty-two-year-old daimyo was moved to a new fief centered on Fukuoka Castle, a domain more than four times as large as the one he had previously held. Kato Kiyomasa, who had shared Higo Province on Kyushu with Konishi Yukinaga, was given his rival’s domain and thus made master of the entire province. Maeda Toshinaga, the eldest son of recently deceased regent Maeda Toshiie, received the confiscated lands of his brother Toshimasa, who had broken with Toshinaga and sided with Ishida. Others who had sworn allegiance to Tokugawa without participating in any of the fighting were merely confirmed in possession of their present fiefs. So Yoshitoshi, brother-in-law of the now dead Konishi Yukinaga, was among this group. His domain on Tsushima Island, the stepping-stone that Hideyoshi’s expeditionary forces had used to invade Korea, would remain under So family control for two and a half centuries to come.

  During the course of this unprecedented upheaval, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s son Hideyori was left untouched. He retained control of the formidable Osaka Castle, plus a surrounding domain valued at 650,000 koku—only a third of the land his father had left him but still one of the largest fiefs in the country. Tokugawa Ieyasu understood that the time was not yet ripe to move against the boy—not with the imposing memory of Hideyoshi still gripping the psyche of Japan. To attempt to crush the house of Toyotomi now, just two years after the taiko’s death, would put the still-tenuous allegiances that Tokugawa had recently won to a severe test, one that would almost certainly drive some of his allies to rebel and side with Hideyori. After winning the Battle of Sekigahara and establishing himself as military dictator or shogun, Tokugawa thus patiently waited for the next fourteen years.

  * * *

  In the meantime, Tokugawa began making attempts to restore diplomatic relations with Korea as a means of legitimizing his new regime. Tsushima daimyo So Yoshitoshi welcomed the order to reestablish contact, for his agriculturally poor island traditionally derived much of its livelihood from the special trade privileges granted to it by the Koreans, and was suffering now with those links cut. The first few envoys sent to Korea from Tsushima were either taken captive or sent packing the moment they arrived at Pusan—not surprising, considering the enmity the Koreans felt toward the Japanese; in the immediate aftermath of the war there was even talk in Seoul of sending a puni
tive expedition against Tsushima to punish it for what was seen as its recent betrayal. This closed-door policy, however, did not last long. In 1601 a fourth Tsushima envoy succeeded in getting his message delivered to Seoul and returned home with a reply. If Japan really wanted peace, the letter from the Choson government said, then it must return the Korean citizens it had taken captive in the war. This opening of communications led to the dispatch of a Korean envoy to Tsushima in 1602 to investigate the sincerity of Japan’s desire for peace, and of a second mission in 1605 that traveled all the way to Kyoto for an audience with Tokugawa Ieyasu. As a result of this mission, led by the venerated monk Yujong, who had commanded an army of warrior-monks during the war with Japan, more than five thousand Korean captives were repatriated—scarcely a tenth of the total number taken, but enough to appease the Koreans and keep the diplomatic game alive.[861]

  A vast conceptual gulf still existed between the two nations. First there was the gulf between how each side viewed the war: a Japanese defeat in the eyes of the Koreans, a victory of sorts to the Japanese because they had “punished” Korea and in turn demonstrated their power to the Ming. There was also a serious difference between how each side regarded the diplomatic exchanges currently taking place and, most important, how they viewed their respective positions in the world. The So family of Tsushima, through whose hands all diplomatic correspondence passed, worked energetically to remove as many of these conceptual impediments as they could by amending some documents and forging others outright. In 1606, for example, they sent a forged letter to Seoul in which Tokugawa Ieyasu referred to himself as “King of Japan,” thereby acknowledging to the satisfaction of the Koreans the primacy of the Ming emperor and in turn Japan’s secondary status in a China-centered world. More commonplace changes undertaken by the So included converting dates on Japanese documents to the Chinese system so as not to offend the Koreans. To satisfy Edo in turn, the So similarly doctored Korean documents to give them the sort of subservient spin that the Tokugawa shogunate desired. Both sides were aware that some sort of diplomatic sleight of hand was taking place on Tsushima, but both chose to overlook it for the sake of furthering relations. The more outrageous lies, however, would never have been condoned; the Koreans had no intention of appearing even the slightest bit subservient, while the Tokugawa shoguns regarded themselves as above the Chinese, not below. The ruse finally ended in the early 1630s when a power struggle within the So house brought the whole affair into the open, obliging Edo to intervene. Starting in 1635, Zen priests well versed in written Chinese, the language of Asian diplomacy, were dispatched to Tsushima to oversee all correspondence and contact with Korea. In the same year the problem of finding a diplomatically inoffensive name for the shogun that would be acceptable both to the Koreans and the Japanese was solved with the creation of the title Nihonkoku taikun, “Sovereign Lord of Japan,” from which the English word “tycoon” is derived.[862]

  It is clear why the Tokugawa shoguns wanted to restore diplomatic relations with Korea: it served to legitimate their recently established regime. But why were the Koreans willing to resume relations so soon after the war? The policies then being formulated in Seoul were influenced in part by a report entitled Kanyangnok (Record of a Shepherd), written by Imjin War captive Kang Hang and presented to the government upon his repatriation in 1600. In Kanyangnok Kang Hang made no secret of his feelings toward the Japanese. He loathed them. They were, he wrote, “a horrid people,” “a mortal enemy” to the Koreans, and Japan itself “a lair of dogs and pigs.” But they were also too dangerous to be ignored. This, Kang pointed out, was where Korea had made its greatest mistake. Throughout the sixteenth century the government had blithely adhered to its traditional policy of guarding its northern borders more assiduously than the south, failing to recognize that Japan’s increasing militarism coupled with its expertise in the use of firearms had made it a greater threat than Manchuria’s Jurchen tribes. Henceforth, Kang advised, “the defense on the [southern] border must be increased one hundred times.” Kang Hang also recommended establishing relations with whatever regime was in power in postwar Japan. Failure to do this, he suggested, might lead to renewed Japanese aggression within the space of several decades. But “as the Japanese nature puts emphasis on an alliance, if we ally [with Japan] perhaps we will keep [about] one hundred years’ peace.” To forge such an alliance Kang urged a return to the prewar expedient of funneling all contact between the two nations through the island of Tsushima and its lord So Yoshitoshi. The duplicitous So, however, should henceforth be kept on a much shorter leash, for it was now clear that he had used his prewar role as intermediary to manipulate affairs to his own advantage and ultimately betray Korea. He and his descendants should be appeased with strictly supervised opportunities to trade to make them dependent upon and loyal to Korea, as was commonly done to pacify border tribes. In being granted access to Korea, however, they should be confined to a single trading station on the south coast. This would serve to deny the Japanese any opportunity to gather intelligence on Korea’s road networks and inland defenses, which they had put to such good use in planning their invasion in 1592. “To handle the Japanese,” Kang concluded, “is firstly to handle Tsushima, and to handle Tsushima there is no other means than this.”[863]

  These recommendations would form the basis for Korea’s postwar policy toward Japan. Contact between the two countries was confined to the limited trade access granted to the daimyo of Tsushima and to congratulatory missions dispatched in either direction to commemorate the ascension of each Korean king and each shogun in Japan. The Tokugawa shogunate welcomed the arrival in Edo of these occasional goodwill embassies—indeed, they requested them—for they could be portrayed to the public as tribute missions from a subservient Korea and in turn of the long reach of the shogun’s arm. The Koreans were likewise glad of the chance to travel to Japan, for it gave them an opportunity to gather intelligence about the country and ascertain whether it was preparing for war. The Japanese for their part, however, never sent formal missions in turn to Korea; the Koreans would not have received them if they had. All diplomatic correspondence from Edo arrived in Korea in the hands of envoys from Tsushima, the only Japanese the Koreans would allow to set foot on their soil. Once in Korea, moreover, every Tsushima delegate was confined to the immediate vicinity of Japan House, a walled compound just outside Pusan, and kept under constant surveillance. No one was allowed to travel north to Seoul.[864] The Japanese would occasionally complain of these restrictions, and certain daimyo lords, eager to join the So family in trading with Korea, would assert that Seoul should open itself more to commerce with Japan. But nothing ever came of it. The situation remained unchanged until the early nineteenth century when, after more than two centuries of stability and peace, the two countries allowed their infrequent diplomatic exchanges to cease altogether and their trade links through Tsushima to sink to new lows.

  * * *

  At the onset of winter in 1614, Tokugawa Ieyasu led an army of 194,000 men against Osaka Castle to finish off Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s son and heir Hideyori, now a young man of twenty-one. The task proved more difficult than Ieyasu had foreseen, for Hideyori commanded a force of some 90,000 men, most of them ronin (masterless samurai, literally “men of the waves”) led by dispossessed former daimyo, the vanquished detritus of Sekigahara who had gravitated to Osaka during the intervening years. After attacking the castle for one month and laying siege to it for a second, Tokugawa determined that the edifice would not fall to brute force, so he approached Hideyori and concluded a truce. Tokugawa promised to lift his siege and leave, while Hideyori agreed in part to allow some of the outer fortifications of his castle to be leveled as a sign of his desire for peace. With that the conflict seemingly came to an end, and Tokugawa’s army made a grand show of marching away.

  But not everyone left. A contingent of Tokugawa’s men remained behind and set to work making the alterations to the outer defenses of Osaka Castle, ostensibly as st
ipulated in the truce. It quickly became evident that their work was far exceeding anything Hideyori had agreed to. By the time his protestations reached Tokugawa and demolition work was halted, the outer and inner moats had been filled in and many key walls knocked down, severely weakening the once impregnable castle—just as Tokugawa had planned. Five months later, in May 1615, the wily old warrior returned to Hideyori’s now vulnerable stronghold with a second great army, and this time succeeded in destroying the place. Hideyori and his mother, Yodogimi, committed suicide in the flames. Hideyori’s eight-year-old son was subsequently beheaded to end his line.

  With the destruction of Osaka Castle and with it the house of Toyotomi, Japan fell completely under the sway of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Ieyasu himself, now in his seventy-fourth year and anxious to ensure a smooth succession, had already passed on the title of shogun to his son Hidetada and begun to work behind the scenes formulating the policies that would make the Tokugawa shogunate “the most enduring regime in Japanese history.”[865] It would be enduring because Ieyasu, unlike his predecessors Hideyoshi and Oda Nobunaga, established the post of shogun rather than his own person at the center of the web of political allegiances binding the nation together. These allegiances, and in turn the peace they ensured, would therefore remain in place long after Ieyasu was gone.

  The Tokugawa shogunate under Ieyasu’s son Hidetada and his successors became increasingly conservative in its drive for stability and peace. One of their first concerns was to keep the nation’s formerly restive daimyo obedient and in place. The confiscation and redistribution of fiefdoms that took place after Sekigahara and the fall of Osaka Castle—a process known as “smashing the daimyo”—had already done much to achieve this. The promulgation of new laws completed the task. Henceforth, for example, daimyo lords were prohibited from constructing new castles; even repair work on existing defenses had first to be reported and approved. Ieyasu’s heirs also had to come up with something for Japan’s samurai warrior class to do other than wage war. The answer was found in the Neo-Confucian ideas that had been filtering into the country for the past few centuries from the Asian mainland, most recently in the person of Kang Hang, the Korean scholar official taken captive during the Korean campaign. Over the following decades Japan’s samurai gradually came to be “civilized” into a political and intellectual elite similar to the scholar-official upper class of China and Korea. The nation’s social order meanwhile was frozen into an unchangeable hierarchy, farmers and merchants at the bottom lorded over by the privileged samurai class, with the shogunate at the top wielding absolute control. Had Hideyoshi been born into this Tokugawa world, he would have remained an unknown farmer from the cradle to the grave.