The Imjin War (11 page)

Such was the case in the early 1580s when Sonjo spearheaded a drive to renew interest in the study of the classics. If he could only refocus the attention of his officials on the wisdom of the past, he thought, they would see the error of their ways and end their petty feuds. The initiative failed. The problem was that Sonjo’s officials already knew the classics too well. They were experts at molding the musings of Confucius and Mencius and Chu Xi into clever moral arguments to support or condemn almost anything they chose. As the eminent Neo-Confucian scholar Cho Kwang-jo observed in his treatise “On the Superior Man and the Inferior Man”:

when an inferior man attacks a superior man, he may point at him and call him an inferior man. Or someone may say that a man’s words and actions are incon
gruous, or that he is fishing for fame....Even when a superior man who fears that an inferior man might attain his purpose argues back and forth about the inferior man’s motives, perhaps during a royal lecture, if the ruler does not like goodness with a sincere mind, he will not listen and make use of the superior man’s words. On the contrary, he will be misled by the inferior man and doubt the superior man.
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King Sonjo undoubtedly liked goodness with a sincere mind. But that was not enough. Factionalism was too pervasive in his government to allow him to consistently separate superior men and their wise council from inferior men and their faction-driven lies. Instead he was misled. Time and time again.

And so the battle between the Easterners and the Westerners contin
ued unabated into 1589, the one hundred ninety-eighth year of the Choson dynasty and the twenty-second year of King Sonjo’s own reign. Feud lines deepened, resentments grew, and the two camps expanded to involve virtually every member of the government and much of the yangban upper class. For the moment the Westerners had the upper hand and were doing everything in their power to consolidate their gains and settle old scores. The Easterners were striking back where they could and were searching, always searching, for ways to turn the tables on their foes. And through it all the affairs of the kingdom were left to drift.

It was into this tumultuous political arena that an envoy appeared at the southern
port of Pusan bearing a message from a largely unknown Japanese warlord named Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

To take by force this virgin of a country, Ming,

will be [as easy] as for a mountain to crush an egg.
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Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japan, 1592

A small Japan that attacks the Great Ming Empire

resembles a little snail that climbs a big rock.

It is like a bee that stings the back of a turtle.
[80]

King Sonjo, Korea, 1592

By 1587 Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s dream of a unified Japan with himself as its undisputed lord and master was almost a reality. He had claimed much of the main island of Honshu soon after succeeding his usurped master Oda Nobunaga in 1582. The island of Shikoku had been subdued in 1585. Earlier in 1587 the southern island of Kyushu, stronghold of the Shimazu family, had fallen to him, the offshore island of Tsushima thrown in almost as an afterthought. The only work that remained to be done was to break the resistance of the Hojo family in the vicinity of present-day Tokyo and to bring the northern hinterlandprovinces of Dewa and Mutsu into line. Neither posed a particularly great obstacle; their subjugation was assured. It was simply a question of how long it would take Hideyoshi to bring his overwhelming power to bear upon them.

In 1587, therefore, the reunification of
Japan was nearly complete and a new era of peace about to begin. The thought must have been somewhat unsettling for Hideyoshi. He had known nothing but war for his entire adult life. He excelled at war. He prospered in war. War had made him the unparalleled success he was. But how would he fare in peacetime?

Hideyoshi had no intention of finding out—at least not yet. Like Oda Nobunaga, he viewed the unification of
Japan as only the first step in a much grander scheme: the conquest of Asia. Hideyoshi’s ambition was that vast, his self-assurance that complete. He thought it only right that his power should extend beyond the confines of his small island nation to encompass the entire world as it was known to him. In his correspondence with foreign nations he would refer frequently to this as being his destiny; that it was preordained at his birth that he would conquer nations.

Political considerations at home may also have served to turn Hideyoshi’s attention overseas, considerations that made a campaign of foreign conquest seem unavoidable following the completion of the unification of
Japan. Unlike Nobunaga, Hideyoshi did not conquer Japan simply by crushing his opponents. He relied just as much upon appeasement and generosity as military strength. Rival daimyo who swore allegiance to him were usually allowed to keep much or even all of their lands and could then “earn” even more by helping Hideyoshi build greater armies to send against other daimyo. It was a compelling combination of stick and carrot that made many eager to serve him, allowing Hideyoshi to extend his authority throughout all sixty-six provinces in a remarkably short time. But this strategy had its drawbacks. Hideyoshi’s vassals became accustomed to his generosity; they came to regard ever greater land holdings and incomes as their just reward for serving him. This was fine so long as there were areas of Japan left to conquer and spoils to divide. By the late 1580s, however, these were dwindling and would soon be gone. The next step would almost certainly be dissention among the daimyo. With no further battles to fight, no further riches to claim, and time on their hands, these idle veterans would begin to plot and scheme and form secret alliances in a bid for more power and more land. Hideyoshi did not intend to give them the chance. If they needed war to keep them busy and additional lands to keep them happy, then he could give it to them. As soon as he possessed all of Japan, he would send them to Korea, and after Korea, China. These far-flung lands would give his pyramid scheme of conquest an almost unlimited base, with Hideyoshi and the house of Toyotomi secure at the top.

In 1587 Hideyoshi began to act. Neighboring
Korea was his first target. His initial weapon was the pen rather than the sword. As Adrian Forsyth has observed with regard to the animal kingdom in
A Natural History of Sex
, “It pays to advertise your strength to your rivals, otherwise you will waste much in the process of affirming it.”
[81]
Hideyoshi accordingly drafted a letter to the Koreans calling upon them to submit to him or be invaded. “By fast ships I have dispatched [orders] to
Korea,” he wrote to his wife and confidant O-Ne, “to serve the throne of Japan. Should [Korea] fail to serve [our throne], I have dispatched [the message] that I will punish [that country] next year.”
[82]

The “fast ships” had in fact been sent by Hideyoshi’s newest vassal, So Yoshishige, daimyo of the
island of Tsushima. So had sworn allegiance to Hideyoshi earlier that year together with Kyushu’s Shimazu Yoshihisa and was now responsible for Japan’s relations with Korea. Tsushima’s proximity to and long relations with Korea made the So family the logical choice for this diplomatic role. But it put them in a difficult position. The So themselves were eager to restore good relations with Korea, for these ties had been the source of considerable wealth for them over the past century and a half. Indeed, the So would have liked nothing better than for trade relations between Korea and a unified Japan to once again flourish, with themselves levying handsome fees on every cargo passing through their “Tsushima gate.” Hideyoshi, however, was not concerned at this point with trade with the Koreans. He wanted to possess that country. He preferred to bully the kingdom into submission with threatening letters and thereby avoid a costly war, a technique that had worked well in the past in bringing many Japanese daimyo to heel. But if they did not submit his armies would sail.

What were the So to do? They would have been far better informed than Hideyoshi of the nature of things in
Korea, namely that it was a fiercely loyal tributary state of Ming China and looked down upon Japan. The So consequently would have known that their master’s blunt demand for surrender would not have the desired effect. At this early date, moreover, there may have been some question in their minds whether Hideyoshi actually meant what he said. Was he really prepared to send his armies across the strait if the Koreans failed to heed his warnings? Or was his message just a lot of bluster, a cheap attempt to subjugate the Koreans with empty threats? If that was the case then he would succeed only in alienating them further, and in the process damage the So’s longstanding relationship with the Choson court.

It was considerations such as these that prompted So Yoshishige to alter Hideyoshi’s first message to the Koreans in 1587. Hideyoshi’s letter demanded that
Korea submit to him and that it send a “tribute mission” to Japan as a sign of its obeisance. So softened this into a more palatable request for a “goodwill mission.” He also decided not to deliver the message in person, probably in an attempt to distance his family as much as possible from Hideyoshi’s still inflammatory demands. He sent a family retainer instead, a man by the name of Yutani Yasuhiro.

Sending Yutani was a mistake. He was a big man of about fifty with graying hair and beard, rough and hardened from years of civil war. He could command armies, lead assaults on enemy castles, and hack a man in two with his sword. But he knew little of diplomacy and next to nothing of how to win over the Koreans.

The trouble began soon after his arrival on the peninsula. On his way north to Seoul he made a habit of loudly demanding the best room in every inn. To the Koreans that was very bad form. When the men of Indong gathered along the road with spears in hand to demonstrate Korea’s military power—a long-established custom—he laughingly observed, “The staffs of your spears are short indeed!” This was a simple statement of fact; Korean spears
were
short compared to the five-meter-long pikes favored in Japan.
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The comment nevertheless had the ring of an insult. At Sangju, as the aging local prefect wined and dined him at considerable expense, Yutani commented on his host’s gray hair, wondering why a man who had never seen battle, but whiled away the hours with music and dancing girls, would ever turn gray.
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The insults and boorish behavior continued in
Seoul, confirming all the deep-seated prejudices that the Koreans had about the Japanese: they were ignorant; they were arrogant; they did not know the ways of civilized men. But, like this warrior Yutani, they were also dangerous. They had to be tamed with the greatest of care. Yutani therefore was not run out of Seoul as many a Choson official would have dearly loved to do. He was comfortably housed and well fed, but kept firmly at arm’s length while the Koreans debated how best to proceed.

At this point the Choson government knew almost nothing of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the unseen power on whose behalf the uncouth Yutani had been sent. According to Yu Song-nyong, then a high-ranking official in the Board of Rites, the government office responsi
ble for hosting foreign envoys, some were of the opinion that Hideyoshi was a Chinese man who had somehow found his way to Japan, where he lived in obscurity earning a living hauling firewood. Then “one day the king, while on an outing, met him on the roadway, and as he was an unusual man, received him into his company of soldiers. Courageous and expert at fighting, he accumulated meritorious deeds and became a great officer. As a result, he became powerful. At last he drove out Minamoto and took over his position.” It was an interesting tale, but wholly untrue. Others within the Korean government asserted that “Minamoto” had in fact been assassinated by someone else and that Hideyoshi had killed the assassin and seized control of his fallen lord’s domain. After that he went on to unify all sixty-six provinces of Japan into one country. This account was closer to the mark, but only marginally. It was not “Minamoto,” for example—an apparent reference to the Ashikaga shogun who had long since sunk into obscurity—who had been assassinated, but rather Oda Nobunaga who had been usurped. In any case both versions added up to a very limited understanding of Hideyoshi and recent developments in Japan.

The contents of Hideyoshi’s letter left them with little inclination to find out more. Even after the So’s attempt to soften its message, the Koreans found it arrogant, rude, and completely lacking in diplomatic protocol and appropriate humility. Hideyoshi referred to himself through
out the document by the Chinese character
chin
, a highly honorific form of “me” reserved solely for the Son of Heaven in Beijing. He boasted in an unseemly fashion of how all of Japan “has come wholly into the grasp of me [
chin
] alone.” He expressed dissatisfaction that Korea had been so remiss in sending missions to Japan, as if Korea were some sort of wayward tributary state to those islands. And he now called on them to mend their ways and send an envoy to Kyoto.
[85]

It was on the whole such an utterly unacceptable document that the Koreans had difficulty deciding how or even if they should respond. King Sonjo himself, who was clearly still confused as to the actual course of events in Hideyoshi’s rise to power, was of the opinion that they should send the envoy away empty-handed, for he came from a country “where they had killed their own king.”
[86]
Others agreed, adding that the Japanese were beyond any hope of ever becoming civilized, and there was consequently nothing to be gained by extending a friendly hand to them. Finally, after keeping Yutani waiting for several months, the Koreans sent him back to Hideyoshi with a note explaining that Korea would be unable to dispatch the requested goodwill mission to Japan because of the length of the journey and their uncer
tainty of the way—an extremely transparent excuse.
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Hideyoshi was furious at the failure of this first mission. He charged Yutani Yasuhiro with being in league with the Koreans and had him and his entire family killed. So Yoshishige was also punished, although less severely. He was deposed as daimyo of
Tsushima and replaced by his adopted son, twenty-year-old So Yoshitoshi, who, being also the son-in-law of one of Hideyoshi’s most trusted generals, Konishi Yukinaga, was considered more trustworthy.

In late 1588 Hideyoshi ordered Tsushima’s newly appointed daimyo to dispatch a second mission to
Korea to arrange that kingdom’s submission. So Yoshitoshi personally took the lead this time. Accompanying him was an entourage of twenty-five men, including Yanagawa Shigenobu, a leading retainer in the So household, and Genso Keitetsu, a fifty-two-year-old Buddhist monk whose scholarly presence, it was hoped, would help the mission find common ground with the tetchy Koreans. The mission arrived in Seoul in February of 1589. They conducted themselves with more decorum than their predecessor, the unfortunate Yutani, and gave the Koreans less cause for offense, although So Yoshitoshi himself was negatively perceived as “young and fierce. The other Japanese all feared him. Prostrating themselves, they crawled before him, not daring to gaze upward.”
[88]
 

So delivered another letter from Hideyoshi to the Koreans:

When my mother conceived me it was by a beam of sunlight that entered her bosom in a dream. After my birth a fortune-teller said that all the land the sun shone on would be mine when I became a man, and that my fame would spread beyond the four seas. I have never fought without conquering and when I strike I always win. Man cannot outlive his hundred years, so why should I sit chafing on this island? I will make a leap and land in
China and lay my laws upon her. I shall go by way of Korea and if your soldiers will join me in this invasion you will have shown your neighborly spirit. I am determined that my name shall pervade the three kingdoms.
[89]

The Koreans found this second letter from Hideyoshi to be no better than his first: it was arrogant, rude, and almost beyond reason. It merely confirmed to King Sonjo that this warlord was too uncivilized to merit the court’s attention and that his haughty epistles should be ignored. But many of Sonjo’s officials were no longer so sure. After long discussion they came to the conclusion that Hideyoshi posed a real threat to the security of the kingdom and that friendly relations should therefore be established with him, to tame him by drawing him into the Sinocentric fold, and to take the measure of the man and gather first-hand intelligence on the situation in Japan.