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

by Samuel Hawley

  Konishi Yukinaga and the men of the second contingent anchored the western end of this fortress chain at the town of Sunchon on the coast of Cholla Province. Tsushima daimyo So Yoshitoshi and the thousand men under his command stationed themselves on the island of Namhae, inside the border of Kyongsang Province thirty kilometers to the east. Next came Sachon, a fortified town just south of Chinju. Fifth contingent leader Shimazu Yoshihiro and his son Tadatsune initially set up camp in the town’s existing castle, then erected a new fortress on more defensible ground a little farther to the south, on a tongue of land extending into Chinju Bay. Continuing farther east, Tachibana Muneshige held Kosong, the former headquarters of Commander in Chief Kwon Yul; Yanagawa Tsunanobu was encamped with one thousand men on the northern end of Koje Island; Nabeshima Naoshige’s twelve thousand-man contingent was divided between the fortress town of Changwon and the nearby island of Chuk-do; the crucially important harbor at Pusan was garrisoned by the eighth and ninth contingents from western Honshu, a massive force of forty thousand men commanded respectively by Mori Hidemoto and Ukita Hideie; Kuroda Nagamasa’s third contingent was positioned north along the coast in the fort at Sosaengpo.

  Anchoring the eastern end of the fortress chain at Ulsan, finally, was Kato Kiyomasa. After leading his forces back south the previous month—stopping to burn the city of Kyongju and nearby Pulguk Temple en route—Kato set his lieutenant Asano Yukinaga[722] to work erecting a fortress on a hill named Tosan just east of the town, situated in a fork in the Taehwa River with convenient access to Ulsan Bay and the open sea beyond. Time, they knew, was short. With the allied Chinese-Korean army on its ponderous way south, it would take all the energy the Japanese could beat out of their workers to prepare the walls and defenses necessary to make an effective stand.

  Work proceeded without halt at Tosan from early in the morning until late at night. “From all around,” wrote the priest Keinen, “comes the sound of the hammers and the blacksmiths and the workmen, and the swish and scraping of the adze. With the dawn it grows more and more terrible, but if it means we will not be defeated I can put up with the banging I am being subjected to even in the middle of the night.”[723] Korean slaves and conscripted peasants shipped over from Japan were sent into the nearby mountains under heavy guard to fell trees and prepare the thousands of meters of lumber needed to build the fort. Others were put to work hauling stones and digging trenches and moats. Anyone deemed to be careless immediately had his head cut off, Korean and Japanese alike. When supplies ran short Asano’s captains cut the laborers’ rations, then drove some of them, including their own countrymen, into the mountains to starve.[724]

  The fortress that began to take shape in the bitter cold of the Korean winter consisted of an outer earthen rampart around an inner enclosure, which in turn had a citadel tucked up in the back with stone walls ten to fifteen meters high. Tosan, then, was a fortress within a fortress, affording Asano and his men a fallback position should the outer walls be breached. If they could complete construction before the Chinese and Koreans attacked, they would make them pay a terrible price.[725]

  * * *

  Seven hundred kilometers to the east in Kyoto, casks containing the salted noses of the slain in Korea were beginning to pile up. Hideyoshi received them gratefully, dispatching congratulatory letters to his commanders in the field acknowledging receipt of the evidence of their martial valor and thanking them for their service. He then ordered the relics entombed in a shrine on the grounds of Hokoji Temple, and set Buddhist priests to work praying for the repose of the souls of the hundreds of thousands of Koreans from whose bodies they had come—an act that chief priest Saisho Jotai in a fit of toadyism would hail as a sign of the taiko’s great mercy and compassion.[726] The shrine initially was known as the hanazuka, “Mound of Noses.” Several decades later this would come to be regarded as too cruel-sounding a name, and would be changed to the more euphonious but inaccurate mimizuka, “Mound of Ears,” the misnomer by which it is known to this day.[727]

  Apart from the sporadic orders and letters of congratulations issued in his name to his commanders in Korea, Hideyoshi by this point seems to have lost interest in his second Korean campaign. Prior to the invasion he had indicated that he might return to the headquarters he had built at Nagoya on Kyushu to personally oversee operations in Korea. But he never undertook the journey. He remained in and around Kyoto and Osaka throughout the autumn of 1597 and into the spring of 1598, overseeing repair work on Fushimi Castle, touring about the capital, relaxing with his beloved tea ceremony, and spending time with his young son Hideyori, whose security as heir was now his foremost concern. To set the vulnerable little boy up to rule after he himself was gone, Hideyoshi required his daimyo repeatedly to swear oaths of loyalty to him. He also made sure that Hideyori was equipped with all the trappings of manhood. His coming-of-age ceremony was performed in October 1597, an official title with junior fourth rank, lower grade, was bestowed upon him in the same month, and then in the following May he was promoted to a higher office with junior second rank. All this occurred before Hideyori was five years old.[728]

  It is clear from this almost frantic concern for his son’s future that Hideyoshi knew his remaining time on earth was short. He was in fact now entering his final year of life. His appetite was poor, and his face, never full at the best of times, had become alarming gaunt. His strength was ebbing as well, making it increasingly difficult for him to travel any great distance; a trip to Kyushu to oversee the Korean campaign, even if he had wanted to make it, was now more than he could do. The taiko’s mind, however, was still sharp and active, and the nation he had united still very much in his grasp. Even in his final decline he would brook no opposition—not against himself, and certainly not against his son. In a letter to Hideyori in the summer of 1598 he wrote, “I have understood that Kitsu, Kame, Yasu, and Tsushi have acted against your wishes. As this is something extremely inexcusable, ask your Mother, and then bind these four persons with a straw rope and keep them like that until your Father comes to your side. When I arrive, I shall beat them all to death.” Hideyoshi then gave the five-year-old lad some advice for holding on to power: “Should anyone try to thwart the will of Lord Chunagon [Hideyori], he must beat and beat such a man to death, and then nobody will be against him.”[729]

  * * *

  In Seoul, meanwhile, Chinese forces were steadily be amassed under Regulator of Korean Affairs Yang Hao, as forward units began moving cautiously toward the south. Commander in Chief Ma Gui, spearheading the southward advance, arrived at Chonju on November 23 to find the city free of Japanese, then proceeded farther on to Namwon. Both cities lay in ruins, Namwon from the battle two months before that had seen Ma’s colleague Yang Yuan so badly defeated, Chonju razed by the Japanese prior to pulling out. “Dead bodies are piled up like mountains,” Ma reported back to Seoul, “and not a house is left standing.”[730]

  Ma Gui’s southward advance ground to a halt as soon as he reached Namwon. He was now in close proximity to the Japanese forces encamped on the coast, this time large concentrations of them, not the relatively small unit he had faced at Chiksan. To lead his modest vanguard army any farther, he sensibly concluded, therefore would be foolhardy. There was also the problem of food and supplies to consider, which were proving increasingly difficult to obtain the further he advanced, particularly now that winter was approaching. After combining forces with other small Ming units in the area, Ma pulled back north twenty kilometers toward Chonju, established a camp, and sat down to wait for reinforcements and supplies.

  They would not be long in coming. By early December forty thousand Ming troops had arrived in Seoul from China’s Liaodong Province and regions farther west, bringing the total number of Chinese soldiers in Korea to the neighborhood of sixty thousand.[731] Xing Jie, the Ming official in overall charge of military affairs in Korea and the eastern regions of the empire, arrived soon after. He would remain in the capital for the next several months, overse
eing operations from his headquarters, known as Army Gate, and meeting frequently with King Sonjo to discuss the course of the campaign.

  The great Ming army that had been assembled in Seoul finally began to march south in the middle of December, much to the satisfaction of the Koreans, who felt the Chinese had already taken far too long to get their offensive under way. Yang Hao led the way in overall command. Beneath him were Left Army Commander Li Rumei with 12,600 men, Right Army Commander Li Fangchun with 11,630 men, and Gao Ze with his Central Army of 11,690 men.[732] At Yang Hao’s invitation King Sonjo accompanied them on horseback for the first few kilometers. The procession began in a suitably stately manner with Sonjo riding alongside Yang Hao. Then, upon exiting Seoul’s South Gate, Yang spurred his horse into a gallop, forcing the Korean king to do likewise in order to keep up. Although not a skilled horseman, Sonjo managed to race along behind the Ming commander as far as the Han River and survived Yang’s demonstration with his dignity intact.[733] What had Yang intended to prove by this? It is possible that he was annoyed at the grumbling the Koreans had been doing about the amount of time that he had taken to prepare for his advance. By challenging Sonjo to a race, Yang was perhaps driving home the point that the king and his ministers were scholars, not warriors, and thus should leave the conduct of the war to experts like him.

  After this rather unseemly beginning, Yang Hao’s army crossed the Han and began its long, cold trek toward the Japanese in the south. Upon receiving word that this force was on its way, Ma Gui’s army left its camp north of Namwon and began moving east. The two forces met at Kyongju on January 26, 1598, to form a combined Ming army of forty thousand men. They were then joined by ten thousand Korean soldiers under Commander in Chief Kwon Yul, bringing the total to fifty thousand. This enormous force then proceeded on toward Ulsan, the easternmost link in the Japanese fortress chain and, it was hoped, an easy target for Yang Hao’s vastly superior numbers.

  * * *

  The fighting commenced three days later, on January 29, as forward Chinese units neared the town of Ulsan. A feigned retreat drew the town’s Japanese garrison charging out in pursuit, straight into a larger Chinese force that was waiting to the rear in crane wing battle formation. As many as five hundred Japanese were killed in the engagement. The rest retreated to the fortress at Tosan where the bulk of the Japanese force lay, one kilometer east. After gathering the heads of the slain, the Chinese marched into Ulsan and took possession of the town, then followed the fleeing Japanese on toward Tosan and set up camp outside the walls. Throughout the rest of the day additional Ming and Korean units continued to arrive on the scene, cutting off the fortress completely on the landward side. By the following morning the situation for the Japanese at Tosan had become extremely grave. Peering over the wall in the early light of dawn, the priest Keinen, attached to the Japanese contingent as a scholar and medical practitioner, observed that “the castle was surrounded by countless troops, who were deployed in any number of rings that encircled us. There were so many of them covering the terrain that one could no longer tell apart the plain and the hillsides.”[734]

  Kato Kiyomasa by this time had resumed command inside the fort. He had arrived from Sosaengpo by boat during the night, summoned by an urgent call for help from twenty-one-year-old Asano Yukinaga, who he had left in charge at Tosan. Kato managed to slip up the Taehwa River and into the fortress from the south before the Chinese and Koreans could seal off that side. The defensive situation inside the fortress, he soon discovered, was less than ideal, for construction was not yet complete. The enemy had arrived too soon. Of greatest immediate concern were the three gates that pierced the outer wall. At least one of these was unfinished and off its hinges, leaving a hole in the fortress’s defenses. It was a weakness the allies quickly discovered and exploited when they began their attack on the following day. After a deafening dawn cannon barrage that started many fires within Tosan, Ming and Korean troops charged at the gap in the wall and began flooding into the fortress, forcing Kato and his men to fall back into the inner enclosure, abandoning their outer camp and a good deal of their supplies. The loss of much of their food, which had been scanty to begin with, would prove a severe hardship for the Japanese. For the moment, however, it bought them enough time to close and bar the gates of the inner fortress and array men along the walls, while the enemy troops outside paused to lay claim to the loot.

  After this lull in the battle, the Chinese turned their attention to Tosan’s more formidable inner citadel. They rushed at the walls in such numbers that, despite heavy losses, it seemed certain that they would clear the parapets and flood inside, using the bodies of their fallen comrades as a ramp. At one point, a Japanese account tells us, Ming forces managed to secure a large hook to the top of the wall, “and fifty or even a hundred men [took] hold of the attached rope to pull the wall down. When this happened we fired on them from the side, but out of fifty men five or ten still hung on and pulled to the end. It has to be said that they are extremely brave warriors.” Cannon fire, meanwhile, raked the top of the walls. A ball hit one of Kato’s bodyguards, cutting him in two at the waist, leaving only his legs behind.[735] Somewhere inside, the priest Keinen huddled together with one of his companions, struggling to prepare himself for what seemed imminent death. “[C]lusters of Chinamen were clinging to the walls,” he wrote in his diary, “climbing up them and into the fortress. As they burst inside, [my companion, the priest] Ryoshin said to me: ‘Today is the Saint’s Memorial Day. How happy we should be! We shall surely go to paradise on this blessed day.’ He laughed in his joyful prayer, and his words gave me strength.... But my time had apparently not come yet; or was it that Japan’s fate had not yet been sealed? The Chinamen withdrew.”[736]

  With Chinese and Korean losses approaching alarming proportions, the assault on the inner fortress was eventually called off and cannons dragged forward to batter down the walls. It was soon discovered, however, that even the largest guns could not touch the place. Since the citadel was built on high ground, the best the Chinese could do from their position lower down the hill was to level head-on shots straight into the impenetrable stone foundation or glancing blows off the more vulnerable upper walls, neither of which had any significant effect. After a steady barrage that lasted throughout the rest of the day, the effort was abandoned, and the two opposing armies settled down for the night.

  All the fighting up to this point took place before Yang Hao and Ma Gui arrived on the scene. They were still in the rear, working together with Prime Minister Yu Song-nyong and Left Minister Yi Dok-hyong to secure supplies for their huge expeditionary force. When they finally arrived outside Tosan on or about February 1, they decided to place the fortress under siege rather than expend any more men in repeated frontal assaults. If they could keep their troops fed and their lines strong, the Japanese would starve and weaken and eventually submit. Ming commander Gao Ze was accordingly ordered to spread his Central Army along the east side of the fortress, and Li Fangchun and his Right Army were sent to the hold the west. The Left Army under Li Rumei moved to the south of Tosan to the banks of the Taehwa River to block reinforcements from arriving by sea. General Po Gui, finally, guarded the road from Pusan, which the Japanese garrisons farther south would have to use in any attempted counterattack by land.[737]

  It was a sensible plan, this besieging of Tosan, for the Japanese inside the fortress were already desperately short of food. No longer able to receive supplies from outside, Kato and his men were forced to kill and eat their horses. When this source of nourishment was gone they probed the soil for roots and picked through old cooking fires for burnt grains of rice. Then they stripped the mud off the walls and ate it. Some are said to have even resorted to cannibalism. Water was also in very short supply. Whatever there was on hand at the start of the siege was issued mainly to the musketeers, who would be most needed to repel any coming attack. The rest were left to fend for themselves. According to Japanese commander Okochi Hidemoto’s a
ccount of the siege, an enterprising water seller, evidently aware of the growing desperation of the Japanese inside the fortress, approached the wall one day offering water at the astronomical price of fifteen silver coins per cup. Those few men with any money bought as much water as they could afford. The others drank the urine that these lucky few later passed.[738]

  And then there was the cold. On February 3 a stiff wind blew up and the temperature fell. The Japanese defenders, already weakened by starvation and thirst, now began to freeze. With little fuel on hand to use for fires, the men suffered terribly from frostbite, their hands and feet blackening and swelling to such a size that the flesh burst open and fluid leaked out. Many would lose fingers and toes before the ordeal was over. Some froze to death where they sat.

  As the siege progressed, the allied troops stationed outside Tosan began to kill or capture a growing number of Japanese soldiers who were driven in their desperation to steal out of the fortress at night in search of water and food. Some were cut down as they picked through the possessions of the dead that lay unburied outside the walls. Others were ambushed at neighboring streams and wells. Commander Kim Ung-so reportedly rounded up as many as one hundred enemy soldiers a night at the well he was ordered to guard. All of these men were thin and weak and unable to fight, and most only too glad to surrender.[739]

  By the fourth of February the siege of Tosan seemed well on the way to achieving success. According to Japanese soldiers who were captured or surrendered, the defenders inside the fortress were now so weakened by hunger and disease that of the original ten thousand-man force only a thousand were in any condition to fight.[740] Kato Kiyomasa and his first contingent, it seemed, were now beyond being able to help themselves. Their only hope lay with their comrades to the south.