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

by Samuel Hawley

  In the same memorial another writer observed that “beasts and birds that damage grain are certainly chased away because they harm the people. Yet even though beasts and birds eat the people’s food, they are nevertheless useful to the people. The Buddhists, however, sit around and eat, and there has not yet been a visible profit.”[72] The kings of Choson got the message. Over the coming decades they instituted increasingly harsh measures to “chase the Buddhists away,” measures that went far beyond anything attempted in Ming China. Buddhist temples were ordered closed. The number of sects was severely limited. Religious buildings and images were destroyed. Property was appropriated. Monks were forced to grow their hair and lead “productive” lives. It was mainly thanks to the efforts of a handful of devotees hidden away in remote mountain monasteries that Buddhism was able to survive at all in Korea into the modern age.

  As Choson Korea’s suppression of Buddhism went beyond anything seen in China, so too did its emphasis on moralistic righteousness. To enter and rise in government service, ambitious Korean males, like their Ming counterparts, had to acquire a Neo-Confucian education with a solid grounding in the classics, pass the government’s triennial examination, and remain highly virtuous and moral. Of these three steps the third was the trickiest. A single charge of impropriety could ruin a man’s career or derail it at the very start. Particular care had to be taken not to run afoul of the censorate, an overseeing body charged with criticizing public policy and scrutinizing the conduct of government officials, the yangban upper class, and even the king himself. One negative word from it and an official might find himself tossed out of office or up on charges for which the penalty could be death.

  In the latter part of the fifteenth century this censorate came to be manned by a large number of young scholars of an extremely moralistic, intolerant, and uncompromising bent. They were virulent in their criticisms of what they perceived as the shortcomings of others, particularly of the senior officials then dominating the reins of power. In 1498 these embattled officials struck back. Using as their weapon an obscure countercharge of slander against a long-dead king, they succeeded in having five of the censorate’s most prominent members put to death and two dozen others exiled or dismissed. This bloody backlash, however, did not have the intended effect. It lent the survivors within the censorate even greater moral authority, which they subsequently used to mount a counterattack. Other purges followed in 1504, 1519, and 1545, but they were of no real use. The censorate, originally intended as an instrument of moral oversight, emerged as a branch of government wielding a power all its own, while talk of morality and virtue became the language of politics, a sword of words used by ambitious men to strike out at their opponents.[73]

  By the middle of the sixteenth century these developments, coupled with the increasing competition for a fixed number of government posts, had made the political arena a dangerous place. Even genuinely virtuous men had to watch their backs and count their friends. Newcomers to government office consequently sought to align themselves with influential senior men for protection, usually someone from their own county or clan. Senior officials maintained followings of faithful juniors to back them in times of trouble and to lend a hand in attacks. The result, of course, was factions. The year of their appearance is usually given as 1575, when two clearly defined camps arose known as the “Easterners” and the “Westerners,” after the locations of the homes of their respective leaders, one in Seoul’s east end and the other in the west. Neither side promoted any particular ideology or point of view. Their struggle was of a more personal nature, each side striving to advance its own members in government service by discrediting its opponents or driving them out, typically in a war of words centered on some obscure point of ritual observance or moral nicety.

  Figure 3: Korea, 1592

  The career of Chong Chol, author of the poem “Song of Star Mountain” quoted at the beginning of Part One in this book, is a good example of what life was like for a government official in these politically tumultuous times. Born into the higher reaches of the upper class, Chong saw his elder brother killed and his father exiled in the purges of 1545—all before he was ten years old. He went on to achieve the top place in the civil service exam in 1561 and rose to high government office over the course of the next fifteen years. Then, in 1575, his career entered a permanently rocky stretch. As one of the more outspoken and intransigent leaders of the emerging Western faction, Chong became the target for many of the attacks launched by the competing Easterners and found it necessary to resign and retire to the countryside in 1578. He returned to office in 1580, but after just one year was impeached again for being too uncompromising. He came back for a three-year stretch in 1581, then was run out of office again, this time on charges of being too fond of wine. He managed to get reinstated yet again in 1589 during a period of supremacy of the Western faction and rose all the way to Minister of the Left in the State Council before being once again unseated in 1591. The bone of contention this time was which of the king’s sons should be named crown prince and heir. In a sly bit of backroom intrigue, Eastern faction head Yi San-hae encouraged Chong to recommend a son that they considered more worthy, but who was not the king’s first choice. Yi then dropped his support at the last minute and took a conciliatory stand, leaving Chong all alone in opposing the king. He was sent into exile again for that, this time into the desolate far north, leaving the Easterners behind in Seoul to reestablish themselves in power.[74]

  It was during his various stints in the political wilderness that Chong Chol found the time to write the many poems for which he is now most famous. One theme he frequently returned to was the anguish and disillusionment he felt from his experience in government service:

  Pine-tree rising beside the road,

  what is it makes you stand there?

  Relax for a little while

  and stand down into the ditch:

  Every rope-gird peasant that carries an axe

  will want to cut you down. [75]

  * * *

  The year was now 1589. In Europe the Elizabethan navy under Lord Howard and Sir Francis Drake had just defeated the armada of Spain, signaling the decline of Spanish power and the beginning of the rise of England. Cervantes was in the prime of life. Peter Paul Rubens was learning to paint. John Donne was a teenager. Shakespeare and Galileo were twenty-five years old. John Calvin and Michelangelo were twenty-five years dead. The potato, introduced from South America, was becoming a staple. The smoking of tobacco was catching on. The spring-driven clock had just been invented, allowing for more accurate navigation at sea. The life insurance policy was five. Shorthand was four. The microscope was still being developed for its debut in the following year. And a fellow by the name of Bernard Palissy was condemned to the Bastille for suggesting that fossils were the remains of living things. He would die there.

  On the other side of the world it was the year Wanli 11 in China—the eleventh year of the reign of the Wanli emperor. Senior Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng had been dead for seven years and most of his reforms undone, returning the Celestial Empire to its former inefficient ways. Qi Jiguang, the Ming dynasty’s most successful general, the man who had quelled the wokou pirates on China’s eastern seaboard and kept the Mongols in check along her northern frontier, had died the year before, penniless and forgotten. The twenty-six-year-old Wanli emperor was into his recalcitrant stage, ignoring criticisms, shirking his duties, and amassing a personal fortune while his ministers fretted and fumed.

  Japan was just emerging from the throes of sengoku civil war under Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The “Bald Rat” had issued his “sword hunt” edict the year before, removing all weapons from the hands of farmers in preparation for the coming peace. His impressive castle at Osaka was newly completed after five years of labor involving thirty thousand men. Plans were being drawn up for a second castle far to the south at a place called Nagoya (modern-day Karatsu) on the island of Kyushu. Hideyoshi soon would be spending a
great deal of time there.

  And in Korea a fox sat on the throne in Seoul’s Kyongbok Palace. The furry little creature had somehow found its way into the place and was discovered by horrified retainers actually sprawled on the royal seat. This was a very bad omen, for in Korea the fox was considered a sinister apparition, worse than a black cat in the West. Nor was this portent the only worrisome sign. Reports of strange occurrences throughout the kingdom had been accumulating for years, each laden with hidden meaning that seemed to point to some lurking evil or looming disaster. The Chongchon River had suddenly dried up and ceased to flow for many months. The planet Mars glowed blood-red in the night sky. Meteor showers blanketed Onsong in the far northeast. A flock of sparrows on Chiri Mountain in the south reportedly divided into two groups that fought each other until every bird was dead.[76]

  What evil thing did these signs foretell? Some thought they warned of the rise of factions in Korean politics. King Sonjo’s dying prime minister had in fact warned him at the beginning of his reign in 1569 that “opposing factions will arise and that in their train great evils will follow.” In 1579, four years after the appearance of the Eastern and Western camps, Sonjo was again warned that “All the people have taken sides in this senseless war and even a man be a criminal there are plenty who will defend him. This means the ultimate destruction of the kingdom, and the King should act as a peacemaker between the factions.” [77]

  King Sonjo agreed. He understood, apparently better than most of his ministers, that when men allowed factional interests to guide their actions, the kingdom as a whole was poorly served. Unfortunately, there was not a great deal he could do. Unlike the emperors of Ming China and Japan, he did not claim any sort of divine authority. This had been the case with the kings of Korea for centuries past, resulting in a particularly turbulent history in which the throne was fought over, manipulated, attacked, and usurped. Korean kings, in short, sat on a tenuous perch, and Sonjo was no exception. He did not wield enough real power or instill enough fear to command an end to factional strife; such an order might well have led to his being usurped and exiled to some remote place. No, the best he could do was to suggest and cajole, and to lead by good example.

  Such was the case in the early 1580s when Sonjo spearheaded a drive to renew interest in the study of the classics. If he could only refocus the attention of his officials on the wisdom of the past, he thought, they would see the error of their ways and end their petty feuds. The initiative failed. The problem was that Sonjo’s officials already knew the classics too well. They were experts at molding the musings of Confucius and Mencius and Chu Xi into clever moral arguments to support or condemn almost anything they chose. As the eminent Neo-Confucian scholar Cho Kwang-jo observed in his treatise “On the Superior Man and the Inferior Man”:

  when an inferior man attacks a superior man, he may point at him and call him an inferior man. Or someone may say that a man’s words and actions are incongruous, or that he is fishing for fame....Even when a superior man who fears that an inferior man might attain his purpose argues back and forth about the inferior man’s motives, perhaps during a royal lecture, if the ruler does not like goodness with a sincere mind, he will not listen and make use of the superior man’s words. On the contrary, he will be misled by the inferior man and doubt the superior man.[78]

  King Sonjo undoubtedly liked goodness with a sincere mind. But that was not enough. Factionalism was too pervasive in his government to allow him to consistently separate superior men and their wise council from inferior men and their faction-driven lies. Instead he was misled. Time and time again.

  And so the battle between the Easterners and the Westerners continued unabated into 1589, the one hundred ninety-eighth year of the Choson dynasty and the twenty-second year of King Sonjo’s own reign. Feud lines deepened, resentments grew, and the two camps expanded to involve virtually every member of the government and much of the yangban upper class. For the moment the Westerners had the upper hand and were doing everything in their power to consolidate their gains and settle old scores. The Easterners were striking back where they could and were searching, always searching, for ways to turn the tables on their foes. And through it all the affairs of the kingdom were left to drift.

  It was into this tumultuous political arena that an envoy appeared at the southern port of Pusan bearing a message from a largely unknown Japanese warlord named Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

  PART 2

  PRELUDE TO WAR

  To take by force this virgin of a country, Ming,

  will be [as easy] as for a mountain to crush an egg.[79]

  Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japan, 1592

  A small Japan that attacks the Great Ming Empire

  resembles a little snail that climbs a big rock.

  It is like a bee that stings the back of a turtle.[80]

  King Sonjo, Korea, 1592

  CHAPTER 5

  “By fast ships I have dispatched orders to Korea...”

  By 1587 Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s dream of a unified Japan with himself as its undisputed lord and master was almost a reality. He had claimed much of the main island of Honshu soon after succeeding his usurped master Oda Nobunaga in 1582. The island of Shikoku had been subdued in 1585. Earlier in 1587 the southern island of Kyushu, stronghold of the Shimazu family, had fallen to him, the offshore island of Tsushima thrown in almost as an afterthought. The only work that remained to be done was to break the resistance of the Hojo family in the vicinity of present-day Tokyo and to bring the northern hinterlandprovinces of Dewa and Mutsu into line. Neither posed a particularly great obstacle; their subjugation was assured. It was simply a question of how long it would take Hideyoshi to bring his overwhelming power to bear upon them.

  In 1587, therefore, the reunification of Japan was nearly complete and a new era of peace about to begin. The thought must have been somewhat unsettling for Hideyoshi. He had known nothing but war for his entire adult life. He excelled at war. He prospered in war. War had made him the unparalleled success he was. But how would he fare in peacetime?

  Hideyoshi had no intention of finding out—at least not yet. Like Oda Nobunaga, he viewed the unification of Japan as only the first step in a much grander scheme: the conquest of Asia. Hideyoshi’s ambition was that vast, his self-assurance that complete. He thought it only right that his power should extend beyond the confines of his small island nation to encompass the entire world as it was known to him. In his correspondence with foreign nations he would refer frequently to this as being his destiny; that it was preordained at his birth that he would conquer nations.

  Political considerations at home may also have served to turn Hideyoshi’s attention overseas, considerations that made a campaign of foreign conquest seem unavoidable following the completion of the unification of Japan. Unlike Nobunaga, Hideyoshi did not conquer Japan simply by crushing his opponents. He relied just as much upon appeasement and generosity as military strength. Rival daimyo who swore allegiance to him were usually allowed to keep much or even all of their lands and could then “earn” even more by helping Hideyoshi build greater armies to send against other daimyo. It was a compelling combination of stick and carrot that made many eager to serve him, allowing Hideyoshi to extend his authority throughout all sixty-six provinces in a remarkably short time. But this strategy had its drawbacks. Hideyoshi’s vassals became accustomed to his generosity; they came to regard ever greater land holdings and incomes as their just reward for serving him. This was fine so long as there were areas of Japan left to conquer and spoils to divide. By the late 1580s, however, these were dwindling and would soon be gone. The next step would almost certainly be dissention among the daimyo. With no further battles to fight, no further riches to claim, and time on their hands, these idle veterans would begin to plot and scheme and form secret alliances in a bid for more power and more land. Hideyoshi did not intend to give them the chance. If they needed war to keep them busy and additional lands to keep them happy, then he could give
it to them. As soon as he possessed all of Japan, he would send them to Korea, and after Korea, China. These far-flung lands would give his pyramid scheme of conquest an almost unlimited base, with Hideyoshi and the house of Toyotomi secure at the top.

  In 1587 Hideyoshi began to act. Neighboring Korea was his first target. His initial weapon was the pen rather than the sword. As Adrian Forsyth has observed with regard to the animal kingdom in A Natural History of Sex, “It pays to advertise your strength to your rivals, otherwise you will waste much in the process of affirming it.”[81] Hideyoshi accordingly drafted a letter to the Koreans calling upon them to submit to him or be invaded. “By fast ships I have dispatched [orders] to Korea,” he wrote to his wife and confidant O-Ne, “to serve the throne of Japan. Should [Korea] fail to serve [our throne], I have dispatched [the message] that I will punish [that country] next year.”[82]

  The “fast ships” had in fact been sent by Hideyoshi’s newest vassal, So Yoshishige, daimyo of the island of Tsushima. So had sworn allegiance to Hideyoshi earlier that year together with Kyushu’s Shimazu Yoshihisa and was now responsible for Japan’s relations with Korea. Tsushima’s proximity to and long relations with Korea made the So family the logical choice for this diplomatic role. But it put them in a difficult position. The So themselves were eager to restore good relations with Korea, for these ties had been the source of considerable wealth for them over the past century and a half. Indeed, the So would have liked nothing better than for trade relations between Korea and a unified Japan to once again flourish, with themselves levying handsome fees on every cargo passing through their “Tsushima gate.” Hideyoshi, however, was not concerned at this point with trade with the Koreans. He wanted to possess that country. He preferred to bully the kingdom into submission with threatening letters and thereby avoid a costly war, a technique that had worked well in the past in bringing many Japanese daimyo to heel. But if they did not submit his armies would sail.