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

by Samuel Hawley

  And at Haengju to the west lay the biggest thorn of all: twenty-three hundred Koreans under Cholla Province Army Commander Kwon Yul, holed up in a wooden stockade on a bluff overlooking the Han River.

  Kwon Yul was a fifty-five-year-old civil servant of middling rank from a family of note in Kyongsang Province. Before the war he had served, on Yu Song-nyong’s recommendation, as magistrate of Uiju on Korea’s border with China, and later as magistrate of Kwangju in the southwestern province of Cholla. Immediately following Hideyoshi’s invasion he raised troops in the Kwangju region and led them north in a failed attempt to halt the Japanese advance before it reached Seoul. He then returned south and participated in the defense of Cholla Province, which the sixth contingent of the Japanese army under Kobayakawa Takakage was threatening to overrun. Kwon distinguished himself by defeating Japanese units in two engagements, the Battles of Ungchi and Ichi, in the second week of August. Recognizing his ability, the government appointed him army commander of Cholla Province in the following month.

  By this time Kwon had come to the conclusion that the Japanese were too skilled in warfare to be defeated on open ground, and that the Koreans should therefore fall back on their traditional strength of fighting from behind walls.[427] He would make his first attempt at this in October of 1592 from a base at Toksan, a mountain redoubt two days’ march south of the capital, overlooking the main road from Pusan to Seoul. From an ancient Paekche dynasty fortress that they strengthened and enlarged, Kwon and his men attacked enemy foraging parties and small units passing along the road and generally proved troublesome enough that the Japanese high command in Seoul sent a company south to besiege the fortress. The effort, we are told, was soon abandoned. According to one report, Kwon fooled the Japanese into giving up and returning to Seoul by having a horse rubbed down with rice grains until its coat sparkled in the sun. To the Japanese watching in the distance it appeared that the animal had just been washed, a sign that the Koreans within had ample stores of water to withstand a lengthy siege.[428]

  Early in 1593 Kwon Yul led his men farther north in preparation for the anticipated allied attack on Seoul. Incorporating a unit of monk-soldiers under the priest Choyong into his ranks, he set to work strengthening a dilapidated fortress on a hill outside the village of Haengju on the north bank of the Han River ten kilometers west of the capital. It was a highly defensible position, protected at its rear by a steep drop-off down to the Han. If an attack came, it would have to be made uphill and from the north, straight into the Koreans’ concentrated fire.

  With the retreat of the Ming army, Kwon Yul’s fortress at Haengju emerged as the greatest immediate threat to the Japanese in Seoul. On March 14 they decided to do something about it. Some hours before dawn, the west gate of the city was opened and a long line of troops filed out and turned toward Haengju, marching along the north bank of the Han to the accompaniment of drums and horns and gongs. The daimyo on horseback in the lead constituted an all-star cast from the Korean campaign. There was Konishi Yukinaga, leader of the first contingent that had spearheaded the invasion, recently back in Seoul after the retreat from Pyongyang. There were third contingent leader Kuroda Nagamasa, and Kobayakawa Takakage, hero of the Battle of Pyokje. There were Hideyoshi’s adopted son Ukita Hideie, the young supreme commander of all Japanese forces in Korea, and the veteran Ishida Mitsunari, one of the overseers sent from Nagoya to help him. Accompanying them were more than half the troops garrisoning Seoul, a total of thirty thousand men.[429]

  The twenty-three hundred Korean troops and monk-soldiers within Haengju fortress, crowded together with thousands of civilians who had fled their villages to seek shelter within the walls, watched the noisy approach of this enemy multitude with growing trepidation. When the Japanese arrived at the base of their hill in the soft light of dawn, the Koreans observed that each soldier had a red-and-white banner affixed to his back, and that many wore masks carved with fierce depictions of animals and monsters and ghosts. Panic was now hovering just beneath the surface, held in check by the calm authority of Commander Kwon Yul. As the Japanese busied themselves below with their pre-battle preparations, he ordered his men to have a meal. There would be no telling when they would have a chance to eat again.

  The battle began shortly after dawn. The Japanese, so numerous that they could not all rush at the ramparts at once, divided into groups and prepared to take turns in the assault. Their strength must have seemed overwhelming to the Koreans. For once, however, the muskets of the Japanese were of only limited use, for in having to fire uphill they were unable to effectively target the defenders holed up within. Their lead balls simply flew in an arc over the fort and into the Han River beyond. The advantage was with the Koreans, firing down upon the attacking Japanese with arrows and stones and anything else that came to hand. They had a number of gunpowder weapons as well, including several large chongtong cannons and a rank of hwacha (fire carts), box-shaped devices built onto wagons that fired up to one hundred gunpowder-propelled arrows in a single devastating barrage. Alongside these more traditional weapons was an oddity that employed a spinning wheel mechanism to hurl a fusillade of stones. It was called the sucha sokpo, the “water wheel rock cannon.”

  Konishi Yukinaga’s group led the Japanese assault. Kwon Yul waited until they were within range, then beat his commander’s drum three times to signal the attack. Every Korean weapon was fired at once, bows, chongtong, hwacha, and rock cannons, raking Konishi’s ranks and driving his men back. Ishida Mitsunari was the next to the attack. His force too was driven back, and Ishida himself was injured. Next up was Kuroda Nagamasa, the Christian commander of the third contingent, otherwise known by his baptismal name Damien. He had been thwarted once before by Koreans fighting behind walls, at the Battle of Yonan the previous year. This time he took a more cautious approach, positioning musketeers atop makeshift towers so that they could fire into the fortress while the rest of his force held back. A fierce exchange of fire ensued; then Kuroda’s men too were forced to retreat.

  The Japanese had now attacked Haengju three times and had failed even to penetrate the fortress’s outer palisade of stakes. Young Ukita Hideie, determined to make a breakthrough in his, the fourth charge, managed to smash a hole in the obstacle and got near the inner wall. Then he was wounded and had to fall back, leaving a trail of casualties behind. The next unit to attack, Kikkawa Hiroie’s, poured through the gap Ukita’s forces had opened and was soon attacking Haengju’s inner wall, the last line of defense between the Japanese and Kwon Yul’s troops. The fighting now was at arm’s length, with masked warriors attempting to slash their way past the defenders lining the barricades, while the Koreans fought back with everything they had—swords, spears, arrows, stones, boiling water, even handfuls of ashes thrown into the attackers’ eyes. As the fighting reached its peak no sound came from Kwon Yul’s drum. The Korean commander had abandoned drumstick and tradition in favor of his sword and was now fighting alongside his men. At one point the Japanese heaped dried grass along the base of Haengju’s log walls and tried to set them ablaze. The Koreans doused the flames with water before they could take hold. In the seventh attack led by Kobayakawa Takakage, the Japanese knocked down some of the log pilings and opened a hole in the fortress’s inner wall. The Koreans managed to hold them back long enough for the logs to be repositioned.

  As the afternoon wore on the Korean defenders grew exhausted and their supply of arrows dwindled dangerously low. The women within the fort are said to have gathered stones in their wide skirts to supply the men along the walls. This traditional type of skirt is still known as a Haengju chima (Haengju skirt) in remembrance of this day. But stones alone were not enough to repel the Japanese for long. Then, when all seemed lost, Korean naval commander Yi Bun arrived on the Han River at the rear of the fortress with two ships laden with ten thousand arrows. With these the defenders of Haengju were able to continue the fight until sundown, successfully repelling an eighth attack, then a ninth.[430]
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  Finally, as the sun dipped below the horizon out beyond the Yellow Sea, the fighting petered out and did not resume. The Japanese had suffered too many casualties to continue. Their dead numbered into the many hundreds, and their wounded, including three important commanders, Ukita Hideie, Ishida Mitsunari, and Kikkawa Hiroie, were many times more. They had in fact been dealt a terrible defeat, the most serious loss on land so far at the hands of the Koreans. Throughout the evening the survivors gathered what bodies they could, heaped them into piles, and set them alight. Then they turned around and walked back to Seoul. One Japanese officer in the disheartened assembly would later liken the scene beside the Han River that day to the sanzu no kawa, the “river of hell.”[431]

  When they were gone, Kwon Yul and his men came out and recovered those bodies that the Japanese had been unable to retrieve, cut them into pieces, and hung them from the log palings of their fort. These grisly trophies were an indication of how much had changed for the Koreans since the beginning of the war, of how the previous ten months had transformed them from shell-shocked, indecisive “long sleeves” into bloodthirsty warriors, bent on revenge. The Japanese would not be able to hold their ground for long against such grim determination, not with their dwindling numbers and growing problems with supplies. Hemmed in by a foe of evidently growing strength, willing to endure enormous hardship and loss to drive them out, the withdrawal of the Japanese from Seoul became certain, with or without the intervention of the Ming Chinese.

  Sooner or later, Hideyoshi’s troops would have to march south.

  CHAPTER 18

  Seoul Retaken

  Spring—arguably the most beautiful season in Korea. After a harsh winter of ice and snow and cold north winds, the warming weather and first green shoots come as a welcome relief. Clusters of cosmos rise up long-stemmed from the earth, painting country lanes across the land in pastel shades of lavender and pink. The forsythia bloom, and the magnolia trees too, their white flowers so smooth and creamy they look good enough to eat. The farmers head back to their fields to begin another cycle of planting and promise, while yangban gentlemen look on with pen in hand from their shaded stoops, trying to encapsulate in a few choice lines the sublimity of it all.

  The spring of 1593 was different. Korea was now into its second year of war, and for many of its citizens the world as they knew it had come to an end. Cities and towns lay in ruins from Pusan to Pyongyang. Families were scattered, children abandoned, the weak and the elderly left behind. Refugees, driven either by the loss of their homes or terror of the Japanese, wandered from place to place in search of food. But there was little for them to find, for fields had been abandoned throughout the land, and cultivation had almost ceased. Starvation gripped the peninsula, and soon a full-fledged famine.

  The Japanese army was suffering as well. The long, cold winter, so much harsher than anything the men of Kyushu, Shikoku, and western Honshu had experienced before, had taken its toll through exposure, frostbite, and fatigue. Garrisons throughout the country were chronically short of food. Little could be sent from Japan due to the blockade of the Korean navy, while guerrilla activity made it increasingly dangerous for foraging parties to venture into the countryside in search of food. At garrisons from Pusan to Seoul, Japanese soldiers were hungry and disheartened, and wanted to go home.

  The situation was nowhere worse than in the capital of Seoul, now the most northerly point on the peninsula occupied by the Japanese, connected to the south by a tenuously held corridor of territory along the main road. No fewer than 53,000 men were encamped there, no fewer than 53,000 mouths to feed. But food was running short. The situation became critical when a small unit of Chinese and Korean commandos launched a covert operation against the large warehouse complex at Yongsan, just south of the city wall on the banks of the Han River, and succeeded in burning it to the ground. The loss of grain suffered in this raid left the Japanese with food for less than a month and little choice but to commandeer grain from local citizens to keep themselves alive.[432]

  In addition to the prospect of starvation, the Japanese in Seoul were also faced with a pestilence that was beginning to decimate their already depleted ranks, the spread of which was no doubt encouraged by the bloated corpses of civilians and livestock that had come to litter the streets. The Buddhist monk Zetaku, a member of second contingent daimyo Nabeshima Naoshige’s entourage, recorded the following passage in his diary from these desperate days: “Although corpses of men, women, oxen and horses were piled up in the same place, no one bothered to bury them. The odor filled the heaven and the earth. We Japanese were obliged to stay under these circumstances from March to April [i.e., the third and fourth months of the lunar calendar]. The air became stale with the odor as the heat of the weather increased. Consequently, a great number of men came to be attacked by fever and died.”[433]

  At invasion headquarters at Nagoya, Toyotomi Hideyoshi received news of the stalled offensive with dissatisfaction. Not fully appreciating the difficulties facing his armies, he ascribed the lack of progress to lack of enthusiasm on the part of his commanders, and wrote urging them to shake off their inertia. In any event he himself would soon be crossing over to Korea to “take charge of everything personally, and then make a triumphal return.”[434] Since postponing in July of 1592 his planned departure for the mainland, Hideyoshi had consistently spoken of the third month of 1593—April by the Western calendar—as the time when he would set sail, for he had been told that the seas between Kyushu and Pusan would be calm then and safe to cross. In early 1593 he sent two representatives ahead to Seoul to remind his field commanders of this, assuring them that he would soon be on his way with 200,000 reinforcements under such daimyo luminaries as Tokugawa Ieyasu, Asano Nagamasa, Gamo Ujisato, and Maeda Toshiie.

  The arrival of Hideyoshi at the head of a 200,000-man army, so eagerly anticipated in the opening weeks of the war, was viewed with apprehension by the Japanese high command in March of 1593. On the twenty-ninth of the month Supreme Commander Ukita Hideie called a meeting of all the daimyo in Seoul to discuss their concerns. It was generally agreed that the dispatch of additional troops to Korea at this time would only exacerbate an already bad situation, for if they were unable to feed the men currently serving there, how could they accommodate an additional 200,000 mouths? A letter to the taiko was accordingly drafted and signed by all the daimyo present, asking him to delay his planned April crossing in light of the critical shortage of supplies. In Seoul, Hideyoshi was informed, troops were subsisting on gruel made from scraps of anything that could be found. They could hold out there at best until the middle of May. Supplies were also short in Pusan, where Hideyoshi proposed to land, and the prospects for obtaining more looked poor until the Korean harvest, such as it was, had ripened and could be commandeered some time later in the year.[435]

  The back of the Korean invasion was now well and truly broken. Even Kobayakawa Takakage, one of the most hawkish daimyo in Korea, knew this, and signed his name on the letter to Hideyoshi. Kato Kiyomasa was persuaded to do likewise when he arrived in Seoul a few days later from his retreat out of the north. But what came next? They could not remain in Seoul indefinitely and wait for the situation to change. If they attempted to do so they would starve. There was only one practical course of action: they had to retreat to the south. First contingent commander Konishi Yukinaga accordingly sent a message north to Commander in Chief Li Rusong expressing a desire to negotiate a settlement. Li, who wanted exactly the same thing, replied with the demand that the Japanese evacuate Seoul and move their armies to the south. He would send envoy Shen Weijing down from Pyongyang to meet with them and work out the details.

  Ukita, Konishi, Ishida, and the other daimyo in Seoul were forthcoming in their reports to Hideyoshi about the difficulties they were facing. As usual, however, the “facts” were reported in a way that would not upset the taiko. While the bad news of food shortages and stubborn local resistance was not kept from him, the overall situation
was made to appear somewhat rosy by placing Ming China’s willingness to negotiate at the fore. As Hideyoshi was led to understand it, the Chinese had been dealt a severe blow in the Battle of Pyokje and now were ready to negotiate a settlement and make concessions. But first the Japanese would have to pull their forces back toward Pusan as a show of good faith. Hideyoshi, ever willing to avoid a fight if his ends could be achieved by less costly means, thus gave his written authorization for the withdrawal, while still continuing to believe that some semblance of victory could be achieved in Korea and that China might yet be coerced into bowing to him.

  * * *

  King Sonjo and his Korean government in exile had by this time left Uiju on the Chinese border to begin what would turn out to be a six-month journey back to Seoul. In the middle of May they would arrive at Sukchon, fifty kilometers to the north of Pyongyang. In July they would move farther south to Kangso, a short distance to the west of the city, and in September on to Hwangju and then Haeju, halfway between Pyongyang and Seoul.[436]

  Having now been relegated to the role of minor players in their own war, Sonjo and his ministers were kept in the dark by supreme Ming commander Li Rusong as to his true intentions. Most important, they were not informed that Li had decided after the debacle at Pyokje to avoid further battles and spare his troops, and that he was now intent on achieving the withdrawal of the Japanese from Korea through negotiation alone. The Koreans were certainly aware that Pyokje had shaken the Ming commander, and they could not help but notice as he retreated from Seoul all the way back to Pyongyang that he was reticent to meet the enemy in battle. The stakes were too high, however, for the Koreans to give up on this savior sent by the Celestial Throne. During the coming weeks and months they would continue to hope and to expect that Li would rouse himself again to action and lead his Chinese army in a renewed thrust south, dislodging the Japanese first from Seoul, then driving them back to Pusan and into the sea.