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

by Samuel Hawley

  It was Korean commander in chief Kim Myong-won’s intention to make a stand against the Japanese as they attempted to cross the Han. It was a good position to mount a defense. Kato’s men would not be able to cross such a wide expanse of water in force without a large number of boats. At best they would be able to straggle across in small groups, which could be cut down by a relatively small body of defenders as they attempted to wade ashore. Unfortunately for Kim, he had only about fifty officers and a thousand men with which to do the job. He had been ordered by the king to defend the capital, however, so he led his small force out Seoul’s South Gate and on to the north bank of the river. They would not remain there for long.

  Kato’s forces arrived at the Han opposite what is now Seoul’s Yongsan district on June 11. The absence of boats does not seem to have fazed the determined daimyo at all. He had his musketeers lob fusillades across the water at the Koreans on the other side—they were too far away to hit, but the noise seems to have shaken them badly—then set his troops to work cutting down trees from the surrounding hillsides and lashing them together to make rafts. The sight of this force, so much larger than his own, so fiercely attired, so well armed, and so clearly determined to get across the river, unnerved Kim Myong-won entirely. Ignoring the protests of one of his officers, he stripped off his armor and donned civilian clothes, then mounted his horse and sped away, leaving the men in his command to scatter to the four winds. When the Japanese finished their construction work later that day, they were thus able to begin ferrying troops across the river unopposed. The operation continued on into the night. Finally the entire second contingent was on the north bank of the Han with not a single Korean soldier in sight. The walls of Seoul now lay only an hour’s march ahead.[204]

  Kato Kiyomasa arrived outside Seoul’s South Gate sometime before dawn on June 12. The city was quiet. Yi Yang-won, who had been charged with defending the walls while Commander in Chief Kim Myong-won went forward to meet the Japanese at the Han, had sensibly chosen to evacuate with his handful of men upon hearing of Kim’s own hasty retreat. Any mounting elation Kato may have felt, however, was instantly snuffed out by his first clear view of the walls. For there were the banners of first contingent leader Konishi Yukinaga, and raised high among them his family symbol of the pharmacist’s bag. The reviled tradesman had beaten him to the prize. The first contingent in fact had reached Seoul’s East Gate just a few hours before. They had found the entrance closed and barred. After scouting about for a time in the darkness, a floodgate through the wall was discovered and pried open by a samurai named Kido Sakuemon, using a number of musket barrels tied together as a lever.[205] It was a small victory for Konishi, a besting by moments in a long and arduous race. The capture of Seoul, moreover, was only the first step in Hideyoshi’s grand scheme; there would be more enemies to defeat and more glory to win before the conquest of Asia was complete. Still, Kato must have felt a good deal of resentment at being beaten again, and at being initially denied entry to the city by the men Konishi had assigned to guard the South Gate. In the coming months these two commanders would go their separate ways in the campaign to take the north. But the animosity between them would continue to simmer, and would resurface later.

  It had taken Konishi and his first contingent just twenty days to cover the 450 kilometers from Pusan to Seoul, traveling at an average speed of nearly twenty-three kilometers per day. Kato’s second contingent, starting five days after Konishi’s, had done it in fifteen days, maintaining an average pace of over thirty kilometers per day. Three hundred and fifty years later, at the start of World War II, the Germans would marginally improve on this blistering pace during their blitzkriegs into Poland, Belgium, and France. But they did so with trucks and tanks and trains and had the advantage of reasonably smooth roads. That the Japanese in 1592 nearly equaled them on foot, over rough, circuitous dirt tracks and rocky mountain passes, is a testament to the power of Hideyoshi’s expeditionary force. Against such a juggernaut it seemed the Koreans could do nothing at all.

  The Japanese arrived at Seoul to find it largely deserted and a number of its buildings and palaces already reduced to smoldering ruins. Even the king’s own Kyongbok Palace was gone, the only sign of its existence the blackened stone foundation pillars of its Kyonghoe-ru banquet hall, the Hall of Happy Meetings. Later Korean writers have dated this destruction to coincide with the arrival of the Japanese.[206] But this is not so. The work had been done by the Koreans themselves three days earlier, in the anarchy that followed the fleeing of their king. The Japanese had certainly burned other towns and cities on their drive north. They had done so to punish any resistance to their advance. Kyongju had resisted, and had been burned. Sangju and Chungju had resisted, and had been burned. But Seoul had not resisted. Konishi and Kato found its walls undefended, its gates open, and its few remaining inhabitants quiet and compliant. There was thus no reason to mete out punishment here. The capital of Japan’s newest province could be left intact.

  Kuroda Nagamasa and his third contingent arrived in Seoul four days later, on June 16. With him came Ukita Hideie’s eighth contingent, a force of ten thousand men from Bizen Province on western Honshu; the two groups had met at Kumsan during the advance to the north and had proceeded on together. The remaining five contingents of Hideyoshi’s 158,800-man invasion force, contingents four and six from Kysuhu, contingent five from Shikoku, and contingents seven and nine from Honshu, were by this time all on Korean soil, mostly in the vicinity of Pusan. The Japanese navy, meanwhile, had completed its ferrying operations—some of Hideyoshi’s ships likely had to make two or three crossings of the strait before the task was done—and was free to begin probing west along Korea’s southern coast.

  The first order of business for the Japanese army in Korea was to finish the job of subduing the country. Once the peninsula was firmly in hand, its people, its rice, and its wealth could then be marshaled for the coming push to Beijing. Japanese soldiers and supplies could also be moved north more easily in preparation for the China campaign, by ship up the west coast from Pusan to the Han River and Seoul, then to the Taedong River and Pyongyang, and finally to the Yalu River in the far north that marked the Chinese border. Establishing this seaborne supply line was in fact essential. Without it, every soldier would have to walk the one thousand kilometers from Pusan to the Yalu, and every bag of gunpowder and sack of grain would have to be carried overland.

  The subjugation of Korea was to proceed as follows. After a couple of weeks of rest in Seoul, Kuroda was to march north and take the west coast province of Hwanghae; Konishi would proceed beyond that into the far northeastern province of Pyongan, up to the Yalu River and the Chinese frontier; Kato would subdue the far northwestern province of Hamgyong, which extended to the Tumen River marking Korea’s border with Manchuria. The other daimyo generals would in the meantime fan out across the peninsula and secure Japan’s hold on the remaining provinces: Mori Terumoto and his thirty thousand-man seventh contingent would hold the southeastern province of Kyongsang; the sixth contingent under Kobayakawa Takakage would take the southwestern province of Cholla, which had been bypassed during the push to take Seoul; Fukushima Masanori’s fifth contingent, the Shikoku division, would take the central west coast province of Chungchong; the fourth contingent under Shimazu Yoshihiro and Mori Yoshinari would quell the remote east-coast province of Kangwon; and Ukita Hideie’s eighth contingent would hold Seoul itself and the neighboring province of Kyonggi. Ukita, one of Hideyoshi’s adopted sons and the husband of his adopted daughter Go-Hime, was to serve as interim commander in chief of Japanese forces in Korea until Hideyoshi himself arrived to take charge. It would thus fall to him to keep the other daimyo in line and on task, a daunting responsibility for a young man of nineteen.

  The arrival of the Japanese in Seoul proved much more peaceable than the Koreans had feared. They announced disingenuously that they had come to Korea to save the people from their oppressive king, and had no intention of harming
anyone so long as they were compliant and obeyed the rules. Those who did not, those deemed to be criminals and looters and agitators, were dealt with harshly, burned at the stake in front of the Great Bell at Chongno that remains on the spot to this day. Law-abiding Koreans, however, were according to Hideyoshi’s orders not to be harmed in any way and were encouraged to go about their business. Over the coming weeks the citizens who had fled into the hills, particularly the shopkeepers and trades people, thus drifted back into the city, reopened their businesses, and tentatively resumed their lives, seeking to accommodate themselves to life under the Japanese. Some even managed to prosper, for the invaders were willing to pay for the things they needed, giving rise to a lucrative trade supplying the enemy.[207]

  Commander in Chief Ukita Hideie took up residence at Chongmyo, the only palatial compound in Seoul that had survived the fires set in the wake of King Sonjo’s flight. The surrounding area was turned into a military camp. To the Koreans this was a terrible insult, for Chongmyo was to them a sacred place, the ancestral temple where the royal lineage tablets of the Choson dynasty had been stored up until their removal just a few days before. Ukita’s occupancy, however, did not last long. Soon after his arrival, strange things started happening in the middle of the night that left him spooked. Then his soldiers began dying for no apparent reason, struck down, it was said, by the spirits of the ancestors that resided in the place. According to the Korean annals, it was these supernatural goings-on that drove Ukita to burn Chongmyo and move his headquarters to the Nambyol-gung, the mansion where emissaries from China were traditionally housed, on the site of what is today the Westin Choson Hotel in the heart of downtown.[208]

  The burning of Chongmyo was but one of many examples of a ham-fisted approach to empire building guaranteed to alienate the Koreans. The Japanese would act in much the same way three hundred years later when they returned to colonize Korea, and again in the early 1940s when they tried to forge an Asia-wide “Co-Prosperity Sphere.” They arrived to occupy Seoul in 1592 with a clear understanding of the mechanics of how to reorganize the country to fit into Hideyoshi’s grand scheme; of the administrators that would have to be appointed, the regulations imposed, and the vast land surveys that would need to be conducted to parcel up the peninsula for redistribution to worthy daimyo lords. What they did not understand was how to win over the Korean people to accept this new system of rule. Hideyoshi’s generals had vague notions of prodding them into accepting their new role as subjects of the taiko, into following Japanese customs, and even in time into speaking Japanese. But how did they propose to achieve this end? The burning of Chongmyo demonstrates that Ukita and his fellow daimyo really did not know. For every step they took to win over the Koreans, they took two missteps such as the burning of Chongmyo that served only to alienate them further.

  This lack of finesse does not change the fact, however, that it was Hideyoshi’s intention in the summer of 1592 to co-opt Korea, not lay waste to it, an intention he made clear in an order issued prior to the invasion prohibiting disorderly conduct and harsh treatment of Koreans.[209] This was how the taiko liked to conquer new lands: subdue your enemy with an overwhelming show of force, take his oath of loyalty, then co-opt him quickly and get him onto your team. In 1585 he had cowed the Chosokabe clan of Shikoku into submission with a mighty invasion army and had then rewarded them for their submission with a sizable domain and handsome income. The Chosokabe were then incorporated into the next step of national unification, the conquest of Kyushu. Events on Kyushu in the period 1587–92 unfolded in much the same way. An enormous invasion army forced the dominant Shimazu family on that island to swear allegiance to Hideyoshi. They were treated well after that, and set to work preparing for the taiko’s invasion of Korea.

  Now it was Korea’s turn to join the fold. Hideyoshi’s armies had already demonstrated his overwhelming power with their twenty-day march on Seoul. If everything continued according to plan, the kingdom would soon cease its resistance to Hideyoshi’s benevolent rule, accepting its role as the first acquisition of the Japanese empire and the staging area for the conquest of Ming.

  CHAPTER 9

  Hideyoshi Jubilant

  News of the stupendous success of his armies in Korea filtered back to Toyotomi Hideyoshi at his Nagoya headquarters just days after the start of the invasion. First came word of the fall of Pusan and Tongnae and the rapid advance north. Next to arrive were reports of the taking of Taegu and Kyongju and of the rout of the Koreans at Sangju. Then came the heartening news of the decisive battle at Chungju, where Konishi’s first contingent wiped out the only sizable force the Koreans had been able to muster. The campaign was progressing more favorably than even Hideyoshi had hoped. If he had embarked on the enterprise with any secret doubts, they must have fallen away now. It no longer seemed a question of if he would succeed in conquering Korea and then China, but only a matter of when.

  “By now we have taken various castles in Korea,” Hideyoshi wrote to his mother in the middle of June, “and I have sent my men to besiege the capital there. I shall take even China around the 9th month [October 1592], so I shall receive [from you] the costumes for the [next] festival of the 9th month in the capital of China.... When I capture China, I’ll send someone to you in order to welcome you there.”[210] And to his wife, “We have already captured a great number of castles in Korea. I have heard that it takes about twenty days to reach the capital of Korea from the harbor that we have taken, and I have sent my men toward that capital. I expect to besiege the capital in a short time. When I have assembled the ships, I shall have my men cross over. As I expect to take China, too, I look forward to sending men [from there] to welcome you.”[211]

  On June 25 came the greatest news so far: Seoul had fallen, and without a fight. This must have left even the taiko himself astonished. During the wars of unification it had taken his armies months to subdue the island of Shikoku. It had taken months to conquer Kyushu. It had taken months to crush the recalcitrant Hojo at Odawara. But now it appeared that the entire kingdom of Korea, a land nearly as large as the whole of Japan, would be his in a matter of days. His generals were rolling up that country just as fast as they could march. Claiming China would take longer, of course, but only because it was so vast. Hideyoshi did not expect to encounter any more resistance there than he was meeting in Korea, for the Chinese in his opinion were effeminate “long sleeves” who did not know how to fight. To his military mind history clearly demonstrated this. From the fourteenth century right up into Hideyoshi’s own lifetime, wako pirates had raided China at will from their bases in southern Japan, pillaging all along the coast and at times far inland despite their often remarkably small numbers. The lesson to be learned here was obvious. If China’s supposedly great armies could not stop even small bands of audacious raiders, how could it possibly stand up to Hideyoshi’s incomparably more powerful expeditionary force?

  The victory of his armies was therefore assured, at least in Hideyoshi’s own mind. As he wrote triumphantly to Kato Kiyomasa and Nabeshima Naoshige in July of 1592, the subjugation of Korea was being “carried out as easily as dust is swept up with a broom,” and would very shortly be complete. “There is no reason why Tai-Min [China] should not meet the same fate.... [Y]ou and your men of tested military experience and courage will be able to overcome the army of Tai-Min as easily as great mountain rocks roll upon and crush eggs.” After that “India, the Philippines, and many islands in the South Sea will share a like fate. We are now occupying the most conspicuous and enviable position in the world.”[212]

  * * *

  On June 27, two days after learning of the fall of Seoul, Hideyoshi dictated a letter to his wife O-Ne, formally known as Lady Kita-no-Mandokoro, stating that he would be leaving for Korea shortly to take personal command of his forces there and that he would take with him all remaining reserve units currently encamped at Nagoya. To prepare for this sea crossing “[a]ll the transports and other vessels that are now in Korean
waters have been called back to Japan.” Assuming that the weather would not delay him—typhoon season was just beginning—Hideyoshi hoped to be in Seoul by the middle of July and in Beijing before the end of the year. After that “Her Excellency Kita-no-Mandokoro will be requested by our Lord to join him in due time. Further detail concerning this matter will be entered into at the time when our Lord sails for Korea.”[213]

  In a second letter written the same day to his nephew and adopted son and heir Hidetsugu, the kampaku of Japan then residing in Kyoto, Hideyoshi outlined in twenty-four articles how he planned to organize the overseas empire that he now saw taking shape:

  1. Your Lordship [Hidetsugu] must not relax preparations for the campaign. The departure should be made by the First or Second Month of the coming year [1593].

  2. The Capital of Korea fell on the second day of this month. Thus, the time has come to make the sea crossing and to bring the length and breadth of the Great Ming under our control. My desire is that Your Lordship make the crossing to become the Civil Dictator [i.e., kampaku] of Great China.

  3. Thirty thousand men should accompany you. The departure should be by boat from Hyogo. Horses should be sent by land.

  4. Although no hostility is expected in the Three Kingdoms [Korea], armed preparedness is of the utmost importance, not only for the maintenance of our reputation but also in the event of an emergency. All subordinates shall be so instructed....

  [In articles 5 through 15 Hideyoshi gives Hidetsugu detailed instructions for how he should organize his crossing to Korea, including what provisions, arms, and armor to take, the amount of silver he should withdraw from the treasury, and how many porters he should employ on his march.[214]]