The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China
Page 65
* * *
Supreme Commander Yang Hao, who had been sacked for the controversial losses he had suffered at Tosan, remained in retirement for a decade before being restored to official favor and recognized for his service in Korea. His return to command lasted until 1619, when he led his army into an even greater defeat in the campaign to deal with the Manchu threat. The official estimate put Yang’s losses at a staggering 45,890 men. This time he was arrested and thrown in prison. Nine years later he was put to death.[843]
* * *
In 1599, the year following his death, Toyotomi Hideyoshi was enshrined as a kami, a native deity, to be worshiped according to the rituals of Japan’s ancient Shinto religion. It was common practice in Japan for local communities to worship their own ujigami, or group deity, that watched over them. The great clans had personal ujigami as well. The formerly powerful Ashikaga and Genji houses, for example, worshiped the kami Hachiman. The house of Toyotomi, conversely, had none; it had only recently been established and thus lacked any sort of pedigree and the kami that came with it. Hideyoshi therefore decided to become a kami himself after his death, a deity with the power to protect his vulnerable son and family group and influence events in their favor. The instructions he left behind were followed to the letter, and he was accordingly enshrined as the deity Toyokuni daimyojin.[844] He is still worshipped in Kyoto to this day, at Toyokuni Shrine, next to the National Museum. During the festival that is held here every year on September 18, the anniversary of the taiko’s death, a tea ceremony is performed, and a cup is offered to his spirit.
The gate standing in front of Toyokuni Shrine, moved here in 1880 when the site was restored, is one of the few original structures from Hideyoshi’s once magnificent Fushimi Castle that can still be seen today. (The buildings on the site where Fushimi once stood just outside Kyoto are reconstructions dating from 1964.) Another surviving remnant are the floorboards from the castle’s main hall. On September 8, 1600, as Fushimi was about to fall to rival forces during the struggle for power that followed Hideyoshi’s death, 380 samurai loyal to Tokugawa Ieyasu committed mass suicide inside this building, covering the floor with their blood. When Tokugawa subsequently ordered Fushimi razed, these stained boards were carefully preserved, and were later distributed for use in seven Kyoto-area temples. The best place to see them today is at Genkoan Temple just north of the city center. If you look up you can see the stains on the boards of the ceiling, darkened with age but still clear after more than four hundred years. Here and there hand- and footprints can be discerned in the blood.
PART 6
AFTERMATH
COMING HOME AFTER A WAR
I couldn’t bear the home-sickness,
So I sped my donkey a thousand leagues.
Spring is in its prime as of old,
But I find no man in the streets.
The storm has swept over the whole land,
Even the sun and moon are eclipsed.
All the prosperity that grew here is gone:
It is a chaos as at the world’s dawn .[845]
Chang Hyon-gwang (1554–1637)
CHAPTER 30
What Came Next
Hideyoshi’s armies returned to Japan at the end of 1598 with little to show for their nearly seven years of war. True, they had taken many Korean slaves who were subsequently put to work in the fields back home or sold for cash in the markets. They had captured Korean potters with advanced skills who would enrich Japan’s own ceramics industry. They had brought back a large supply of hand-crafted movable type, invented by the Koreans two centuries before, a prerequisite for the brief efflorescence in Japan’s own publishing industry that would follow.[846] Thousands of valuable books were looted and hauled back to Japan, and with them all the knowledge they contained; many would be incorporated into a library founded by Tokugawa Ieyasu. Paintings, scrolls, and religious artifacts were also taken, even stone pagodas and unusual trees. It was in reference to these captured items that the Japanese would subsequently come up with such names for Hideyoshi’s invasion of the mainland as the War of Abduction, the Pottery War, and the War of Celadon and Metal Type.[847] All these cultural enrichments, however, were poor compensation for the tens of thousands of Japanese troops who lost their lives in the conflict (a reasonable estimate is seventy to eighty thousand men, some killed in the fighting, most the victims of hardship and disease), and the untold wealth and resources that had been sucked out of Japan’s economy to support the entire affair. Nothing less than the conquering of vast new lands could have justified such a tremendous expense, and that Hideyoshi’s armies had failed to do. So it was that the Japanese came up with yet another epitaph for Hideyoshi’s ambitious war to seize all of Asia: ryoto-jabi, the “Dragon-head Snake-tail Campaign,” the war that began with grand designs that petered out to nothing.[848]
* * *
For Korea the Imjin War had been a great deal more. It remains to this day the worst calamity that has ever befallen the nation, to be rivaled only by the Korean War of 1950–53 for devastation and loss of life. The number of Koreans killed outright in Hideyoshi’s invasion of 1592–98, the soldiers who lost their lives in battle and the civilians who were slaughtered, easily ran into the hundreds of thousands. When one adds to this the people driven from their homes who subsequently died of starvation and disease, plus those taken as slaves to Japan never to return, the figure rises possibly as high as two million—approximately twenty percent of the kingdom’s population.[849]
The scorched-earth policy pursued by the Japanese in the latter part of the war, coupled with the flight of farmers from their fields, additionally dealt a serious blow to Korea’s economy, a blow that fell most heavily on the breadbasket provinces of Kyongsang and Cholla in the south. In the survey of 1601, the first conducted in the wake of the war, it was found that only 300,000 kyol of cultivated, tax-paying land remained in the kingdom, down from the 1.5–1.7 million kyol assessed just prior to the war in 1592.[850] This loss of four-fifth’s of Korea’s farmland meant not only a tremendous drop in the amount of food being produced, but also a huge reduction in the amount of taxes the government could collect, taxes that were now desperately needed to fund the nation’s rebuilding. It was a blow from which Choson Korea would never fully recover. One hundred years after the war, the amount of land under cultivation still had not returned to prewar levels. Two hundred and fifty years after the war, Kyongbok Palace in Seoul, the residence of the king and thus the center of the kingdom, still remained a burned-out shell. The government lacked the funds to rebuild it.[851]
In addition to all this death and destruction, the Imjin War plunged Korea into a period of profound social and political upheaval. To begin with, a significant portion of Korea’s slave population—according to census data a third of all Koreans were slaves at this time[852]—was able to assume commoner status, for with numerous slave registers having been destroyed during the course of the war, either by the Japanese or by opportunistic slaves, slave ownership was consequently impossible to prove. This did not result, however, in any significant decline in the size of Korea’s slave population; that would not occur for another hundred years, culminating with the abolition of slavery in 1894. What likely occurred was that the slaves who escaped to commoner status during the confusion of the war either slipped back into slavery at a later date, or were replaced by commoners who became slaves themselves. This latter group would have done so of their own volition as a way to escape starvation and an inability to pay the heavy taxes that the government was forced to impose, signing away their freedom and the freedom of their descendants to the most influential local family that would take them. For a typical peasant this entailed entering into a sharecropping arrangement, scratching out a meager livelihood on a small patch of ground on which he paid a fixed rent.[853]
Changes were also taking place at the opposite end of the social scale. The government, its tax revenues down to a mere fraction of prewar levels, was forced to sell up
per-class yangban status and official titles to the highest bidder to raise desperately needed funds. The number of yangban in Korea accordingly increased, and with it the number of individuals eligible to serve as public officials. This in turn intensified the factional fighting that resumed once peace was restored, for there were now more men competing for a fixed number of government posts. The same political infighting that had so divided the Korean government prior to the Japanese invasion would thus reach a peak of intensity in the years 1600–1650 and would continue until the closing days of the Choson dynasty, leaving the government embroiled in an endless series of obscure political wranglings, blind to the changes taking place in the outside world.
* * *
While Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea and attempt to conquer China failed to achieve even one of its objectives, it contributed to the downfall of the Ming dynasty in ways the taiko never could have foreseen. In sending armies to Korea to block Hideyoshi’s advance, Ming China, which had been in poor financial shape to begin with, was forced to expend more manpower and wealth than it could possibly afford, ultimately weakening itself to the point where it would be unable to respond effectively to threats arising elsewhere. It has been estimated that ten million taels—368,550 kilograms—of silver were spent to send the first expeditionary army to Korea in 1593–95, and another ten million in the second campaign of 1597–98, a total of 737,100 kilograms of the precious coin.[854] Another estimate puts the total cost of the war for the Ming at twenty-six million taels, just under a thousand metric tons of silver.[855] Such a tremendous outflow of wealth had drained the imperial treasury by the end of the war, a fact that would have a profound impact on China’s ability to defend itself, for by the late sixteenth century its armies were composed largely of mercenary soldiers, men who served only when they received payment every month. No silver, therefore, meant no national defense.
The situation was exacerbated by the generally weak state of the Chinese empire at the start of the war, a weakness manifested notably in its inability to maintain an army large enough to meet its considerable needs. With a limited number of troops available, the only way Beijing could respond to Korea’s call for help was to strip forces from other parts of the empire, weakening its defenses in one place to build them up in another. This shifting about of China’s armed forces would have the greatest impact on the northeast frontier, where the Middle Kingdom ran into Manchuria. It had traditionally been a trouble spot that required careful guarding, for mounted Jurchen tribesmen—they would later call themselves “Manchus”—were in the habit of launching raids across the border wherever counterbalancing forces were not stationed to hold them back. By the last decade of the sixteenth century these scattered tribes had become a serious threat, for they were now united under a chieftain named Nurhaci who was intent on creating a state of his own. Beijing saw this threat emerging. With its armed forces tied up in Korea, however, there was little it could do but try to co-opt Nurhaci with court titles and opportunities for tribute trade. The Jurchen warrior remained obliging for a time, consolidating his position and building up his strength as the Chinese looked helplessly on, knowing what was coming but lacking the resources to stop it.
The inevitable finally happened in 1616: Nurhaci broke with Beijing and established an independent empire of his own, one that covered all of Manchuria right up to China’s northeast border. He called his new state Chin, “Gold,” after the regime that had ruled that area in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries before succumbing to the Mongols of Kublai Khan. Then he began to spread his reach, sending his armies into Chinese territory to seize cities near the border, forcing Beijing to respond. Straining its resources to the limit, the Ming government scraped together an expeditionary force of 90,000 men, which it sent north in 1619 under reinstated Commander in Chief Yang Hao in the hopes of crushing Nurhaci and reasserting its control. As a tributary state, Korea was expected to contribute to the enterprise. Seoul obliged with a 10,000-man army, but it did so with reservations, for it was clear that the Ming dynasty now was weak and might not emerge the victor. The two Korean commanders appointed to lead the force (one of them was Kim Ung-so, who had figured prominently in the war with Japan) were accordingly ordered to hold their men back when the fighting began, and to surrender if things went badly—which they did. The final confrontation in April of 1619 was a disaster for the Chinese. As the Koreans delayed their advance as per orders from Seoul, Nurhaci’s massed cavalry took on the four separate Ming columns one by one, killing a total of 46,000 Chinese troops and two commanding generals, including “Big Sword” Liu Ting. A third general who escaped the initial carnage died in a later engagement. The fourth general, Li Rubo—the same Li who had served in Korea back in 1593 in the expeditionary force commanded by his elder brother Li Rusong—committed suicide when charges were subsequently leveled against him. Commander in Chief Yang Hao, who was held responsible for the debacle, languished in prison for nine years before being put to death.
With the Ming now in peril, Korea’s king Kwanghae, who had succeeded his deceased father Sonjo in 1608, together with the support of an Eastern splinter faction called the Great Northerners, tried to shift the government from its traditional pro-Ming stance to one of nonalignment, balancing his kingdom between the sinking Ming and the rising Chin. The effort would prove Kwanghae’s undoing. The Western faction, which had been biding its time in the political wilderness, seized on the issue and used it to oust Kwanghae from the throne in 1623, to be replaced by his nephew, crowned King Injo, and a return to unwavering Ming support. Behind the self-serving political motives involved, the move was a testament to the loyalty the Koreans felt toward the Ming. Many of the men in power sincerely believed that Korea owed Beijing an undying debt for the aid it had provided in the war with Japan. Unfortunately for them, it also gave the state of Chin, now ruled by Nurhaci’s son Abuhai, a reason to invade the peninsula, first in 1627 and then again in 1636 when the Koreans continued to resist. When King Injo finally surrendered and the Manchu troops went home, they left behind a large stone tablet on the banks of the Han River, an inscription carved in Manchu on one side and Chinese characters on the other: “God gives frost as well as dew; behold his severity as well as his loving kindness.”[856] As a sign of their supplication, the Koreans were required to send two of their princes as captives to the Manchu court, make regular tribute payments, and provide troops for the ongoing campaign to conquer the Ming, which by that time was almost complete.
One of the last acts of the dying Ming dynasty was to send a request for military aid to—of all countries—Japan. In 1649 Ming loyalists, driven out of Beijing in 1644 by the Manchus and sheltering on islands offshore from what is now Shanghai, mingling with pirates with Japanese connections, sent an envoy to Nagasaki bearing a copy of the Buddhist Tripitaka as a gift to elicit soldiers from Japan. The mission was a failure. The authorities at Nagasaki were interested in the Buddhist scriptures and offered to buy them for a substantial amount of silver. They refused, however, to receive the Ming envoy as a representative of a superior court, nor did they have any interest in talk of military aid. After a discouraging week in the port, the Ming envoy concluded that it would be “inappropriate to sell the court’s imperial possession like a peddler,” and so re-boarded his vessel and sailed back to China with his priceless cargo intact. The Tripitaka was returned to its monastery, and the Ming dynasty disappeared.[857]
The fall of the Ming dynasty and the rise of the Qing (Pure) was not as traumatic as many previous dynastic changes. It has even been called “the least disruptive transition from one major dynasty to another in the whole of Chinese history.”[858] It was so because in the end the Ming were weakened to the point where a power vacuum effectively existed in the region around Beijing, one that the Manchus simply had to march into and fill. Once in power, moreover, the Manchus left things largely as they were, for they admired Ming culture and society and had no desire to change things (beyond requiring th
at everyone wear Manchu dress and that males shave the top of their heads and braid their hair in back into a long Manchu-style queue). Indeed, the Manchus portrayed themselves as protectors of a great tradition that the enfeebled Ming were no longer able to preserve. Other than the initial resentment caused by the imposition of the queue, the Qing dynasty thus would not be regarded by the Chinese so much as a time of “suffering under barbarian domination,” as had been the case during the Yuan dynasty, when China was ruled by the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan. Many Chinese in fact welcomed the stability that the Manchus brought.
Nostalgia for Ming times nevertheless remained an enduring theme in China for centuries to come, and in Korea men continued to speak with emotion of the brotherly relationship that had formally existed between their two nations, and of the undying debt that Koreans owed to the Ming for their help in the Imjin War. “Our Emperor Shen-tsung [the Wanli emperor],” wrote one Korean scholar in 1865, “mobilized the troops of his empire and exhausted the material of his empire in driving out the wicked invaders and restoring the rivers and mountains of our ruined country of 3,000 li. Not one blade of grass, not one hair did the Emperor spare.... People of olden times have never been able to forget [the need] to repay this debt.... As long as it takes mulberry fields to be changed into the sea, the obligation will never be forgotten.”[859]