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

by Samuel Hawley

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  NOTES

  PART ONE: THE THREE KINGDOMS

  [1] William Henthorn, A History of Korea (New York: The Free Press, 1971), 148.

  Chapter 1: Japan: From Civil War to World Power

  [2] From Nampo Bunshi’s early 17th century account in Teppo-ki (Story of the Gun) in Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 1, ed. Ryusaku Tsunoda, William Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 308-312; C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), chapter 1.

  [3] Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai Sourcebook (London: Cassell & Co., 1998), 128-134.

  [4] Delmer Brown, “The Impact of Firearms on Japanese Warfare, 1543-98,” Far Eastern Quarterly 7, no. 3 (May 1948): 238.

  [5] The weight of the bullet fired by these early Japanese guns varied from 10 to 110 grams (ibid., 238, n. 9.).

  [6] Stephen Turnbull, Samurai Warfare (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1996), 74-75.

  [7] Gwynne Dyer, War (Toronto: Stoddart, 1985), 30.

  [8] Ibid., 73-76; Peter Newark, Firefight! The History of Personal Firepower (Devon: David & Charles, 1989), 15-17.

  [9] Asao Naohiro, “The Sixteenth-Century Unification,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4, Early Modern Japan, ed. John Whitney Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 43-44.

  [10] This account from the Ehon Taikoki (1797-1802) appears in George Elison, “Hideyoshi, the Bountiful Minister,” in Warlords, Artists, and Commoners: Japan in the Sixteenth Century, ed. George Elison and Bardwell Smith (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1981), 223. Some sources give more precise birth dates for Hideyoshi. In his Life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, for example, Walter Dening specifies January 1, 1536. Such dates are now believed to have been invented by contemporary and Edo period biographers. No one knows for certain when Hideyoshi was born. It is possible he did not know himself.

  [11] That Hideyoshi was regarded as small even by his countrymen, who were themselves considered small by the first European visitors to Japan, would suggest that by modern standards he was very small indeed.

  [12] Elison, “Hideyoshi,” 224; Mary Elizabeth Berry, Hideyoshi (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 9 and 57.

  [13] Walter Dening, The Life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 3rd ed. (Kobe: J.L. Thompson & Co., 1930), 176.

  [14] Hideyoshi to Date Masamune, circa 1590, in C. Meriwether, “A Sketch of the Life of Date Masamune and an Account of His Embassy to Rome,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 21 (1893): 17.

  [15] A koku was equal to five bushels, or 40 gallons, or 182 liters. In 1598 small fiefdoms in Hideyoshi’s Japan consisted of 10,000-30,000 koku. Tokugawa Ieyasu, Hideyoshi’s richest vassal, controlled a domain valued at 2,557,000 koku. George Sansom, A History of Japan, 1334-1615 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), 413-414.

  [16] Hideyoshi to Gosa, 13/4/Tensho 18 (May 16, 1590), in 101 Letters of Hideyoshi, trans. and ed. Adriana Boscaro (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1975), 37-38.

  [17] Elison, “Hideyoshi”; H. Paul Varley and George Elison, “The Culture of Tea”; Donald Keene, “Joha, a Sixteenth-Century Poet of Linked Verse”; all in Elison and Smith, Warlords.

  [18] Nam-lin Hur, “The International Context of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s Invasion of Korea in 1592,” Korea Observer 28, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 691.

  [19] James Murdoch, A History of Japan during the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse (1542-1651) (Kobe: Printed at the office of the “Chronicle”, 1903), 305; Berry, 207-208.

  [20] Jurgis Elisonas, “The Inseparable Trinity: Japan’s Relations With China and Korea,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4, Early Modern Japan, ed. John Whitney Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 267.

  [21] Berry, 91.

  [22] “Wu-tzu,” in The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, trans. Ralph S
awyer (Boulder, Colo.: Woodview Press, 1993), 208.

  [23] Hideyoshi to the King of Korea, Tensho 17 (1589), in Homer Hulbert, Hulbert’s History of Korea, vol. 1 (New York: Hillary House, 1962), 347.

  [24] “The first modern army that could not have been defeated by the army of Alexander the Great [330 B.C.] was probably the army of Gustavus Adolphus [A.D. 1620].” Col. T. N. Dupuy, U.S. Army, ret’d., quoted in Dyer, 29. It was King Adolphus of Sweden, driven by a need to raise an effective army from a population of less than a million and a half, who first made firearms the dominant weapon in his army. The devastating impact of his rapid volley fire prompted other nations to quickly follow suit (Dyer, 61-62).

  [25] Bert Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 207 and 209. Spain had the largest army in Europe at this time. Throughout the latter part of the sixteenth century it averaged 60,000-65,000 men, briefly peaking at 86,000 men in March of 1574. The largest army the French could muster in the late sixteenth century was about 50,000 men; the English army in Elizabethan times hovered around 20,000-30,000, while the Dutch had some 20,000 men under arms.