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

by Samuel Hawley

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  On November 22, 1597, one month after the Battle of Myongnyang, Yi Sun-sin awoke at dawn with a curious dream still clear in his mind. He had been riding across a hillock when his horse stumbled and threw him into a stream. His youngest son, Myon, then somehow appeared, picked him up, and embraced him tightly. Yi, ever a firm believer in the portents in dreams, could not determine what this one meant. Later that same day he found out. Toward evening he received a letter from his family home in Asan, which he had just learned had been burned to the ground by the Japanese during their march of destruction back toward the south. At the very sight of it, Yi wrote in his diary, “my bones and flesh shuddered and my head became dizzy.” He tore open the envelope to find a letter inside from his second son, Yol, with the characters “With Weeping” brushed on the front. The admiral knew at once that Myon was dead, struck down by the Japanese when he attempted to defend his home. Pouring his broken heart into his diary late into the night, he wrote these words to his departed son: “I should die and you should live. That is the natural order! Now you are dead and I am alive!...My son, where have you gone, leaving me behind?...I wish to follow you to the grave, to stay and weep together, but if I do, your brothers and sisters and your mother will have no one to support them. Thus I endure, with live body but a dead soul.”[705]

  Yi fell into a deep depression after that. His health also began to suffer, dragged down no doubt by his emotional state and the meager diet he imposed upon himself for the duration of his mourning. Some time later he had a dream in which Myon beseeched him in tears to avenge his death. “Father,” Myon cried, “kill the Japanese who killed me!” Upon waking, Yi asked his staff officers what the dream might mean. Someone suggested that the spirit of his son was perhaps disturbed by a recently captured Japanese soldier who was in custody aboard Yi’s own ship. Yi ordered the man interrogated under torture, and not surprisingly extracted a confession that he was the very one who had killed his son, some three hundred kilometers to the north.[706]

  It is written in the Chinese military classics: “If you flog a person’s back, brand his ribs, or compress his fingers in order to question him about the nature of his offense, even a state hero could not withstand this cruelty and would falsely implicate himself.”[707] If Yi Sun-sin was not specifically aware of this passage, his common sense surly told him as much. The fact that he went ahead and acted as he did is an apt reminder that, despite his many achievements, Korea’s supreme naval commander was not an infallible superhero, but a flesh-and-blood man. Succumbing to his need to find someone to punish for his son’s death to ease his troubled mind, Yi accepted as true the confession that had been forcibly extracted from the Japanese prisoner, even though it was unlikely he was guilty of the offense.

  The man was executed by having his flesh peeled off his body.

  CHAPTER 27

  Starvation and Death in a “Buddha-less World”

  October 1597 had not been a good month for the Japanese army in Korea. On the sixteenth its northern advance had been blunted by a small Ming force at Chiksan, seventy kilometers south of Seoul. Ten days later its fleet was blocked by the Korean navy from entering the Yellow Sea. Despite these setbacks, however, Japanese losses remained fairly light: a hundred or so men killed in the assault on Namwon, another six hundred in the Battle of Chiksan, and thirty-one ships lost to Yi Sun-sin at Myongnyang. In fact, considering that several thousand Chinese and Korean soldiers had been killed so far, plus civilians numbering in the tens of thousands, it has to be concluded that Hideyoshi’s army was a long way from being beaten.

  Why then did the Japanese decide to withdraw and return south to their forts? First, Hideyoshi ordered them to do so. There is evidence to suggest that he never intended his armies to retain control of the territory they marched through. According to two separate reports from Japanese soldiers captured and interrogated at or shortly after the Battle of Chiksan, the taiko instructed his commanders at the start of the offensive to rampage through the southern part of Korea, killing everyone in their path, then fall back to the south.[708] These reports support the supposition that Hideyoshi never had designs on conquest in his second invasion of Korea, but only a desire to punish the Koreans, impress the Chinese, and in so doing vent his spleen and save some face.

  If Hideyoshi did not wish to conquer the southern part of Korea, many of his commanders certainly did. They had no intention of risking life and limb for the sake of their master’s wounded pride. They wanted something tangible, like conquered lands and larger fiefs, to show for their effort. In November of 1597, however, Hideyoshi’s order to withdraw coincided with their own strategic interests. It was now evident that the Chinese were again committed to providing military aid to Korea. The presence of Ming troops at Namwon and Chiksan was concrete evidence of this, and intelligence reports indicated that these were but advance units of a much larger force being amassed somewhere to the north, a force said to number 100,000 men or more. If the Japanese were to attempt to hang on to all the territory they had seized in Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong Provinces with this huge army bearing down upon them, particularly with winter coming on and with it the promise of scant supplies, their widely distributed garrisons would be easy targets to be picked off one by one. There was only one sensible course of action to meet this looming threat: fall back and consolidate in the string of forts around Pusan.

  As the Japanese proceeded with their withdrawal to the south they continued to inflict still more cruelty upon Korea’s civilian population. Noses hacked off the faces of the massacred were submitted by the thousands at the nose collection stations set up on the way, where they were carefully counted, recorded, salted, and packed.

  To: Kikkawa Hiroie

  Number of noses taken verified as 437.

  1597, 9th month, 11th day

  Hayakawa Nagamasa

  To: Nabeshima Katsushige

  Number of noses taken verified as 1,551.

  1597, 9th month, 13th day

  Hayakawa Nagamasa

  To: Kuroda Nagamasa

  300 noses taken.

  At Kaeryong, 1597, 9th month, 19th day

  Takenaga Gensuke

  To: Kikkawa Hiroie

  10,040 noses from the dead were taken by units at Chinwon and Yanggwang.

  1597, 9th month, 26th day

  Kakimi Kasunao, Kumagai Naomori, Hayakawa Nagamasa

  To: Akana Hisauji

  A total of 365 noses were delivered to the Nose Collection Officer.

  1597, 10th month, 2nd day

  Kikkawa Hiroie[709]

  In addition to collecting noses from the slain, the retreating Japanese took captives. The priest Keinen traveling with Kato Kiyomasa’s contingent recorded the following description of the horrors he witnessed as civilians who survived the massacres were rounded up and marched south. “Among the many kinds of merchants who have come over from Japan,” he wrote, “are traders in human beings, who follow in the train of the troops and buy up men and women, young and old alike. Having tied these people together with ropes about the neck, they drive them along before them; those who can no longer walk are made to run with prods or blows of the stick from behind. The sight of the fiends and man-devouring demons who torment sinners in hell must be like this, I thought.”[710] Some of these unfortunates would be put to work building fortifications along the south coast in preparation for the anticipated Ming advance. A good number of them would be worked to death, or have their heads cut off when they became too exhausted to be of any more use. Others, 50,000 Koreans or more,[711] were transported back to Japan. After spending a few days or weeks in prison camps on Kyushu and Shikoku,[712] many were put to work as farmers, laborers, or artisans in the fief of their daimyo owners, where they were left in relative freedom to rebuild their lives as best they could. Others were sold to other daimyo and resettled elsewhere. Few would ever see Korea again. After what was undoubtedly a period of severe bitterness and heartache, these unwill
ing immigrants had no choice but to accept their fate and be gradually absorbed into Japanese society.

  Of all the Korean prisoners taken to Japan, none would have a more visible impact on that nation’s culture than artisans skilled in the manufacture of ceramics. Prior to the war Korean methods of ceramic production were more advanced than those employed in Japan, and Korean pottery in great demand. One of the few benefits that the Japanese derived from Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea was the acquisition of this technology by capturing Korean potters and sending them back to Japan—evidently on such a large scale that Korea’s own ceramic industry was thrown into a severe postwar decline.[713] Shimazu Yoshihiro, for example, sent at least seventeen potters to his fief in Satsuma on the island of Kyushu. Mori Hidemoto similarly resettled potters in the area around Yamaguchi on the western tip of Honshu. The house of Hosokawa had not sent a contingent of its own to Korea, but nevertheless managed to acquire Korean potters to staff kilns in Tango Province just west of Kyoto. Despite their evident unwillingness to be in Japan—the Korean head of the Hosokawa production line attempted to escape more than a dozen times—the techniques these Koreans brought with them revolutionized the Japanese ceramic industry, leading to the development of such ceramic types as Satsuma ware, Karatsu ware, Agano ware, Hagi ware, and Arita ware. It is for this reason that Hideyoshi’s Korean campaign is sometimes referred to by Japanese historians as yakimono senso, “the pottery war.” [714]

  The vast majority of Koreans taken captive during the second invasion were uneducated and illiterate, and thus unable to leave behind a written record of what they experienced as prisoners in Japan. But there were a few exceptions. No In was a well-educated, upper-class Korean who was wounded and captured at the Battle of Namwon in September 1597. He was kept in Korea for a time, then shipped to the island of Shikoku in Japan, where he discovered Koreans were being bought and sold as slaves. Although he heard many tales of misery from other Korean captives, No himself was treated quite well by the Japanese because of his status and education. He even became something of a celebrity, with samurai and monks paying him to write poems and calligraphy in Chinese characters and to critique their own efforts at classical composition. No nevertheless remained desperately unhappy; concern over the fate of his parents troubled him particularly. In February 1599 he therefore tried to escape. The attempt failed, but it resulted in his fortuitous transfer to the port of Sakai near Kyoto, where he met travelers from China who agreed to take him home with them. Thanks to these Chinese seafarers, and to the considerable degree of freedom the Japanese seem to have accorded him, No eventually reached the Chinese mainland and from there made his way back to Korea. He arrived only to learn that his parents had died two years before.[715]

  Chong Hui-duk had much the same experience during his own time in captivity. He and his family were chased down by Japanese naval forces on November 6, 1597, as they were attempting to sail westward to safety. With capture imminent, Chong’s mother, wife, sister, and sister-in-law all jumped into the water and drowned themselves rather than risk the dishonor of being raped. The rest of the family was taken alive. Chong’s sick father and his children were released three days later. Chong Hui-duk and his brother were sent together with about one hundred other prisoners to Shikoku, where they spent a miserable winter in close confinement, exposed to the weather and wracked by hunger and fever. As an example of the brutal treatment captives often received, Chong wrote of witnessing the Japanese hacking at the corpse of a dead Korean to test the sharpness of their swords. Once Chong was identified by his captors as an educated man, however, his life greatly improved. He was given more freedom than most other captives and was allowed to earn money copying books and working as a ghostwriter. Finally, in mid-1599, he was given permission to return to Korea. He arrived home during the harvest season to find his entire village burned to the ground.[716]

  The third and final scholar to leave behind an account of his captivity in Japan is also the most famous. His name was Kang Hang. Kang, born into a distinguished family in the southern province of Cholla, was raised to a life of scholarship and passed the civil service examination at the young age of twenty-one. During the first invasion of 1592–93 he remained in Cholla-do, working to supply the nation’s army. He served in various government posts in Seoul after that, then returned home to Cholla in 1596 to begin what he thought would be a quiet life of teaching and study.

  With the second Japanese invasion in 1597, Kang, now thirty years of age, once again went to work supplying food and weapons, this time to the allied forces garrisoning Namwon. It was not long after the fall of that city that Kang Hang and his family were captured by the Japanese. On November 2, 1597, forces under Todo Takatora stumbled upon the vessel that Kang had procured to carry himself and his family west to safety with Yi Sun-sin’s fleet. After abandoning his youngest son and daughter on the shore to die, the Japanese sent Kang and the remnants of his family eastward on a journey first to Tsushima, then on to Todo’s fiefdom of Ozu on the island of Shikoku. One of Kang’s nephews fell ill on the way and was thrown overboard; another nephew and a niece died from disease two months later. Kang himself, being a well-educated man, was at first given clerical duties in the household of the Ozu daimyo, then was transferred to Hideyoshi’s own Fushimi Castle as the extent of his knowledge came to be better appreciated. Here he was solicited by scholars, monks, and the better educated among the daimyo for advice on poetry and classical composition, and also instruction in the principles of Neo-Confucianism, which was not yet well understood in Japan. Kang Hang has indeed been identified by some Korean scholars as the main conduit for the transmission of Neo-Confucianism to Japan, an abridged and “Japanized” form of which would come to have a profound influence on that nation in the centuries to come.[717] Although this is an overstatement—the transmission of Neo-Confucianism to Japan occurred over the course of a century or more—it must be admitted that Kang Hang played a significant role in the process.

  Kang Hang, like other well-educated Koreans taken forcibly to Japan, was treated remarkably well during his period of captivity, certainly better than prisoners from the lower ranks of society. This did not prevent him, however, from thinking constantly of escape. He made two attempts to purchase a boat with his earnings and sail to Korea with his family. Both failed. Then he realized that the best way he could serve his country would be to gather intelligence about the Japanese to aid the Korean government in dealing with them in the future. The report that Kang eventually produced, completed during his journey back to Korea as part of a postwar prisoner repatriation, was initially entitled Kongorok (Record of a Criminal), a name chosen by Kang to express the shame he felt at having lived as a captive in an enemy’s land. In later years his disciples would rename it Kanyangnok (Record of a Shepherd), a reference to a Chinese officer named Su Wu whose loyalty to his king never wavered during nineteen years of captivity among the Huns in the first century B.C. As will be discussed later, this work would do much to shape Korea’s policy toward Japan in the decades and indeed the centuries following the conclusion of the Imjin War.[718]

  Not all the Koreans taken captive during the second invasion were resettled in the islands of Japan. An unknown number were sold to Portuguese and Italian traders at the slave market in Nagasaki and were transported to such far-flung places as the colony of Macao in southern China, to Goa on India’s western coast, and even to Europe on the other side of the world.

  In his early-seventeenth-century account of his journey around the world, the Florentine merchant Francesco Carletti mentions visiting a slave market in Nagasaki and seeing “an infinite number of [Korean] men and women, boys and girls, of every age, and they all were sold as slaves at the very lowest prices.” Carletti bought five of them “for little more than twelve scudos,” the equivalent of roughly 440 grams of silver. He had them baptized, and took them with him on his continuing journey west. He set four free in Goa on the west coast of India. The fifth continu
ed on with Carletti to Europe and subsequently settled in Rome, where he went by the name of either “Antonio” or “Antonio Corea,” depending on which edition of Carletti’s account one consults.[719]

  There is a family with the surname “Corea” living today in the Calabrian village of Albi on Italy’s southern tip who believe they are descended from this Imjin War captive Carletti took to Europe. One of them, named Antonio Corea like his supposed ancestor, wrote to the president of Korea in 1986 to learn more about his roots, and then visited the country in 1992 at the invitation of the Seoul government to take part in events commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the start of the Imjin War.[720] Subsequent DNA testing failed to find evidence of Asian ancestry in the genes of Antonio Corea and his Albi clan.[721]

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  Back in Korea, Hideyoshi’s forces had completed their withdrawal to the south and were now busy repairing and strengthening existing fortifications and erecting new ones. The defensive perimeter that began to take shape in November 1597 was once again centered on the port of Pusan, as had been the enclave established in 1593. This time, however, it was significantly longer, extending from Ulsan in the east all the way to Sunchon in the west, a total of fourteen fortresses spread over more than 250 kilometers.