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

by Samuel Hawley

  The growing conservatism of the Tokugawa shogunate also manifested itself in policies designed to regulate Japan’s contacts with the outside world, in particular with the West. Moves were taken starting in 1614 to stamp out Christianity, now viewed as subversive and a danger to the state. In 1635 foreign travel was prohibited on pain of death. Four years later the Portuguese were expelled and all contacts severed with the Catholic nations of Europe. Next to be prohibited was the ownership of oceangoing vessels. Henceforth the shogunate would pursue a policy of sakoku, or “seclusion,” a policy that would see foreign commerce rigorously controlled, and infrequent diplomatic relations maintained with just the neighboring kingdoms of Korea and the Ryukyu Islands.

  With its emphasis on stability, peace, and seclusion, it was perhaps inevitable that the musket, the Western innovation that had played such an important role in the wars to unify Japan and the subsequent invasion of Korea, would come to be rejected. It did not disappear from the scene as completely as is sometimes stated; there were an estimated 200,000 firearms in Japan at the start of the Tokugawa period and roughly the same number at the end.[866] With no wars left to fight, the musket was simply placed in the closet, so to speak, copied and refined by generations of gunsmiths but not fundamentally changed—an instrument of technological interest and artistic achievement akin, perhaps, to the costly daimyo clocks that were then finding their way into the homes of the elite. The samurai, who had rarely carried muskets into battle to begin with, relegating them instead to lower-class foot soldiers, came once again to focus on the sword, bow, and spear, the preferred weapons of the past, when combat was a affair of honor fought by men standing face to face.

  In an interesting footnote, when the American survey ship Vincennes landed in 1855 on Tanegashima, the island off the south coast of Kyushu where Portuguese traders first introduced the musket into Japan back in 1543, the vessel’s captain noted in his report to Washington that “These people seemed scarcely to know the use of firearms.”[867]

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  The Tokugawa period was a time of rapid urbanization, economic growth, and prosperity for Japan. No longer burdened with supplying manpower and wealth for wars of national unification and continental conquest, farmers were left to their farming and merchants to their trade. The amount of land under cultivation doubled. Cities expanded, none more so than the shogunate’s capital at Edo, which exploded from an insignificant fishing village into a sprawling metropolis that would later be renamed Tokyo. Living standards improved, the population soared, and the nation as a whole grew increasingly rich, thanks to the shogunate’s emphasis on stability and peace.

  Its policy of seclusion, however, would eventually prove its undoing. By the early nineteenth century ships from Europe and the United States were beginning to appear in Asian waters in increasing numbers—trade ships and whalers and survey vessels mapping the coasts. With all this sea traffic now in the area, ships inevitably began landing on Japan’s shores in search of water and fuel. The shogunate, alarmed by these incursions, issued orders in 1825 to all daimyo with coastal domains to drive away any foreign ship that approached the shore and to arrest and execute any foreign seamen who attempted to land. The incidents of hostility that followed angered the nations of the West, where offering aid to sailors in need was regarded as a fundamental duty expected of all nations and a basic law of the sea. Japan’s unwillingness to open itself to international trade was also considered unacceptable in the atmosphere of expansion that was then so pervasive in the West. In the end it was the Americans who came to kick down the door. In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with a fleet of “Black Ships” in Edo Bay to demand that Japan open to trade and navigation. The Tokugawa shogunate, knowing that it could not resist the technologically advanced West with its own withered armed forces and sixteenth-century guns, had no choice but to sign a treaty with the Americans when Perry returned for an answer the following year.

  The Tokugawa shogunate’s inability to stand up to American gunboat diplomacy, its first sign of weakness in more than 250 years, caused nationwide humiliation, discontent, and agitation. Cries went up for change on two fronts: first the expulsion of all foreigners from Japan, and second the restoration of the emperor, since the twelfth century little more than a figurehead controlled by a succession of strongmen like Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and now the Tokugawa shoguns. The movement eventually became a groundswell that brought the shogunate to an end and ushered in the Meiji era (1868–1912), named after the emperor who occupied the throne. It would be a time of reform and modernization under such slogans as “independence and self-respect.”[868] Western education was promoted. Industries were set up and train lines built. Western fashions were adopted. Modern buildings were constructed. And modern armies and navies were established, equipped with the latest guns and ships.

  From the beginning of the Meiji era the thoughts of powerful men began to turn to conquest overseas. This was something new for Japan. Apart from the invasion of Korea in 1592–98, which was itself an aberration, the result of Hideyoshi’s personal agenda rather than a national desire to expand, Japan’s leaders had always been content to remain within the confines of their island domain. Why, then, the change? First, the Western powers that Meiji Japan was now striving to emulate were then in the midst of a period of colonial expansion of their own, one that would see a quarter of all dry land on the face of the earth seized and divided up between the late 1870s and the start of World War I. As part of its drive to become a great power, Japan became eager to claim territory for itself. The Japanese were also motivated by a desire to restore national self-confidence and prestige after their humiliating inability to resist the gunboat diplomacy of the United States. To assuage their pride, they needed to prove themselves equal to the West. That meant they had to modernize. They had to build up their strength. And they had to acquire colonial possessions, just like every other major power.

  In 1869, after Tokyo’s first approaches to Seoul to initiate modern diplomatic and trade relations had been curtly rebuffed—it was still Korean policy to funnel all Japanese contact through Tsushima—leading Meiji statesman Kido Takayoshi wrote in his diary that Japan “should determine without delay the course our nation is to take, then dispatch an envoy to Korea to question officials of that land about their discourtesy to us. If they do not acknowledge their fault, let us proclaim it publicly and launch an attack on their territory to extend the influence of our Divine Land.”[869] Kido was not alone in his views. A punitive expedition against Korea was considered by many to offer several advantages. It would occupy Japan’s rebellious former samurai, who had lost their status with the demise of the Tokugawa shogunate; it would secure for Japan a foothold on the peninsula before the Western powers beat them to it; it would establish Japan as a leading Asian power; and it would avenge the failure of Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea nearly three centuries before.

  Nothing came of this initial expansionist talk. In 1871 fifty top Meiji government officials, including Kido Takayoshi, were sent on a two-year “learning mission” to the United States and Europe, bringing back with them a deeper understanding of where Western power came from and how empire building worked. With these newly returned statesmen back at the helm, talk of invading Korea was deemed premature, a move that would set Japan against China and Russia before it had the industrial and military might to take them on. For its first expansionary step Japan instead opted for a less confrontational “formalizing of its border,” annexing the Kuril Islands in 1875 and the Ryukyu Islands in 1879, officially claiming those regions traditionally considered in Tokyo to be culturally, if not politically, Japanese. Renewed approaches were also made to Korea, but in a more sophisticated way. After the Koreans obligingly attacked a Japanese survey ship that approached Kanghwa Island in 1875—the vessel had been provocatively accompanied by gunboats—Tokyo sent an emissary to Beijing to request that it pressure its tributary state to accept the inevitable of opening to the outside wo
rld. China, which had itself been open to the West since its defeat by the British in the Opium Wars of 1839–42, was anxious to avoid any sort of international conflict and duly instructed Korea to enter into negotiations with Japan. The result was the Treaty of Kanghwa in 1876 establishing modern diplomatic and trade relations between Tokyo and Seoul—all carefully weighted to the advantage of Japan.

  The Korean government at this time was as divided as ever by factional strife, each camp more concerned with besting its political rivals than in forming a coherent foreign policy to replace Seoul’s now-defunct reliance on isolation. There were three nodes of power on the scene: King Kojong, who came to the throne in 1864 by way of adoption into the royal house; the young man’s birth father, the Taewongun, who had served as regent until Kojong’s recent coming of age; and Kojong’s wife, Queen Min, backed by her influential family. At first the Taewongun and his group took a reactionary, antiforeign stance, pulling King Kojong in one direction while Queen Min’s promodernization, pro-Japan camp pulled him in another. This lasted until the reactionaries attacked the Japanese legation in Seoul, giving the Japanese an excuse to send troops to Korea to protect their citizens, and in turn forcing China to remove the Taewongun before his followers provided Tokyo with any further cause to intervene. By the time the Taewongun was allowed to return to Seoul in 1885, he had reversed himself to support Japan, and Queen Min had in turn become anti-Japanese, a move that would lead to her murder ten years later in a Japanese-incited palace attack. King Kojong, meanwhile, remained caught in the middle, turning alternately to the Russians, the British, and the Americans for advice.

  In 1894 the Tonghak peasant uprising gave both the Japanese and the Chinese cause to send additional forces to Korea, the Japanese to safeguard their growing interests, the Chinese in response to a call for help from Seoul. After a quarter century of modernization, Japan was now feeling confident of its position on the peninsula and of its ability to challenge Qing China, which was by this time sinking into a morass of corruption, mismanagement, and weakness. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 was the result. Mobilizing just eight thousand ground troops and twenty-one small but modern warships, the Japanese efficiently crushed Qing army units at Pyongyang, sank several Chinese ships in the northern reaches of the Yellow Sea, and went on to seize the Liaodong Peninsula on China’s eastern border. In the treaty that ended the war in April 1895, China relinquished its age-old influence over Korea by declaring the nation independent, handed over to Japan the island of Taiwan, and agreed to pay a huge indemnity, a promise that it would have to borrow heavily from the West to fulfill.

  The Sino-Japanese War placed the Qing dynasty on its final slide to oblivion. In the aftermath of the conflict, Britain, Russia, and Germany, awakened to the true extent of China’s weakness, began demanding trade concessions and territorial leases that Beijing was powerless to refuse, “cutting up the Chinese melon” into semi-colonial spheres of influence. The Qing dynasty, the last dynasty to govern China after more than two millennia of imperial rule, eventually collapsed in 1912, replaced first by a shaky republic, then by a prolonged period of civil war.

  Japan, meanwhile, emerged from the war with a tremendous surge of self-confidence and pride. It had successfully taken its first real step toward colonial expansion with the acquisition of Taiwan and had established itself as the leading state in East Asia—and in turn a rising challenge to Russia. The tsar’s empire, which during Hideyoshi’s time did not extend much beyond the Ural Mountains, now stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean, bringing Russia’s colonial ambitions into conflict with Japan. Tokyo initially sought to avoid a conflict with its giant neighbor by acquiescing to Moscow’s demand that it return the Liaodong Peninsula to China, ostensibly for the sake of preserving peace in the region. In fact Russia wanted the peninsula for itself; it needed an ice-free port on its Pacific side, and the Liaodong Peninsula had two. The issue was finally settled in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 from which Japan once again emerged the unexpected victor, thereby establishing itself as a bona fide great power.

  By this time Japan had won the admiration and respect of many in the West. It was seen as a model of Asian modernization and good government, with all the qualities necessary to lead its less developed Asian neighbors to “enlightenment” through benevolent colonial rule. In a 1904 report to Washington, American minister to Korea Horace Allen observed that “These people [the Koreans] cannot govern themselves. They must have an overlord as they have had for all time.... Let Japan have Korea outright if she can get it.... I am no pro-Japanese enthusiast, as you know, but neither am I opposed to any civilized race taking over the management of these kindly Asiatics for the good of the people and the suppression of oppressive officials, the establishment of order and the development of commerce.”[870] In the following year American journalist George Kennan added his two cents: “There is now in progress in the Far East a social and political experiment which, in point of interest and importance, is not surpassed, I think, by anything of the kind recorded in history. For the first time in the annals of the East, one Asiatic nation is making a serious and determined effort to transform and civilize another.... It is a gigantic experiment, and it may or may not succeed; but we, who are trying a similar experiment in the Philippines, must regard it with the deepest interest and sympathy.”[871]

  In 1905 Korea was made a protectorate of Japan to the general acquiescence or approval of the great Western powers. The Koreans, like the Taiwanese ten years before, tried to resist, even forming “righteous armies” as they had during the Imjin War. All such efforts were brutally suppressed by the Japanese at a cost of nearly twelve thousand Korean lives. In 1910 Tokyo annexed the peninsula outright.

  By siding with the allies in World War I, Japan was able to add a few more bits and pieces to its empire by seizing former German possessions in the Far East, the treaty port of Qingdao on China’s eastern coast, plus a number of Pacific islands. This marked the end of Japan’s first expansionist phase, when it built an empire during the age of imperialism by following the example and abiding by the rules of the West. Tokyo’s thirst for territory, however, remained unquenched. With the government coming increasing under military control, Japan went on to seize Manchuria and a large portion of eastern China in 1931–32. Then, beginning on December 7, 1941, it made a grab for the Western world’s Asian colonial possessions, bringing it first and foremost into conflict with the United States. It was a contest Japan could not, and would not, win.

  At its point of greatest wartime expansion in 1942, Japan’s empire extended across Korea, Manchuria, eastern China, Indochina, Southeast Asia, and much of the South Pacific. It was the same territory Toyotomi Hideyoshi had set out to conquer back in 1592.

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  After a period of estrangement following World War II, a myriad of economic, diplomatic, cultural, and educational ties began to develop between Korea and Japan, binding the two nations together in a relationship that is today closer than at any time in the past. Tensions, however, have not disappeared. The largest source of contention remains Japan’s occupation of the peninsula from 1905 to 1945 and its actions in World War II, when Korean men were conscripted as slave labor for wartime industries and women were forced into prostitution as “comfort women” for the empire’s troops. The Koreans want apologies and compensation, more than the Japanese are willing to give. Conflicts also regularly arise over how each nation views their shared history. Beginning in 1982, the way history was being taught to Japanese students came under harsh criticism by both the Koreans and Chinese, they charging that new textbooks introduced into the schools attempted to rationalize and sugarcoat Japan’s militaristic past, primarily its conduct in World War II, but also during Hideyoshi’s invasion of the mainland four hundred years before. Tokyo has ordered limited changes to the controversial textbooks over the years and has tried to appear more sensitive in the eyes of the world. But it has not done enough as far as the Koreans are con
cerned. They continue to urge the Japanese to acknowledge their “past wrongdoings” and to teach history “objectively through balanced descriptions which take into account the views of their neighbors.”[872] Some Japanese are sympathetic to these concerns. Others counter that Seoul is merely using the textbook issue for diplomatic and economic gain, or that the whole thing is a bugbear that Korea’s opposition leaders like to throw into the political arena to put pressure on the party in power.[873]

  Yet another source of disagreement between Korea and Japan is the mimizuka in Kyoto, the misnamed “ear tomb” where the tens of thousands of noses that Hideyoshi’s troops cut off during the Imjin War were subsequently interred. In 1990 a Korean Buddhist monk named Pak Sam-jung traveled to Kyoto and, with the support of a private local organization, conducted a ceremony in front of the tomb to comfort the spirits residing there and guide them home to Korea. Over the next six years the Japanese organization that hosted this event spearheaded a drive to get the mimizuka itself sent home, submitting a petition bearing twenty thousand signatures to Kyoto city officials, and pledging to bear the cost of excavating the contents of the tomb and shipping them to Korea, together with the nine-meter-high earthen mound and the stone pagoda on top. When Pak Sam-jung returned to Kyoto in 1996, the tomb’s return seemed imminent. “These noses were cut off as trophies of war for Toyotomi Hideyoshi,” he announced upon leaving Seoul. “They have been there in Kyoto for four hundred years. It is now our duty to see them returned to Korea to assuage the grief of the 126,000 people whose remains are buried there.”[874]