The Imjin War (2 page)

The lunar calendar was used in China, Korea, and Japan until the late nineteenth century, after which it came gradually to be replaced by the Gregorian calendar favored in the West. In some older English-language histories of the Far East, no attempt is made to distinguish between these two systems; the thirteenth day of the fourth month, for example, is written simply as April 13. The Western solar and Eastern lunar calendars, however, come nowhere near converging in this neat fashion, rendering such conversions highly inaccurate. The day the Imjin War began, for example, the thirteenth day of the fourth month in 1592, was in fact May 23. To avoid confusion, all Korean and Chinese lunar dates in the main text of this volume have been converted to the Western calendar using Keith Hazelton’s
Synchronic Chinese-Western Daily Calendar, 1341–1661 A.D.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Japanese lunar dates, which often vary by a day, were converted using Paul Y. Tsuchihashi’s
Japanese Chronological Tables from 601 to 1872
(Tokyo: Sophia University, 1952). In notes referring to primary sources dated using the lunar calendar, the original lunar date is given in day/month/year format, followed in parentheses by the corresponding solar date.

The situation is more complex in the matter of naming years. In
Korea alone three separate year designations were used during the Choson dynasty: the reign year of the emperor of China, the reign year of the Korean king, and the year designation according to the combined zodiacal- and element-based cycle of sixty. The year 1592, for example, was known alternately as Wanli 20, Sonjo 25, and the year Imjin. When one adds to this the different pronunciations employed by the Chinese and the altogether different emperor reign year designations used in Japan, the picture becomes even more confusing. For the sake of clarity, all years in the text of this volume will be given in Western terms and Eastern year designations will be confined to the notes.

Enraptured by the evening sunset

the boys tending cattle

on the grassy bank of the clear river

trill on their flutes

while the dragon dozing beneath the water

seems to wake and rise.
[1]

Chong Chol (1536–94)

Songsan pyolgok
(Song of Star Mountain), c. 1578

On September 23, 1543, a large Chinese junk appeared off the coast of Tanegashima, a small, finger-shaped island forty kilometers to the south of Kyushu. It carried a crew of more than a hundred men, apparently Chinese, plus a few extremely odd-looking creatures with bearded faces and long noses, the likes of which the people of Tanegashima had never seen before.

The leader of this strange assembly was a Chinese man by the name of Wu-feng—in fact the notorious pirate Wang Chih traveling under one of his many aliases. To the Tanegashima islanders this Wu-feng seemed a scholar, for although they could not understand his language, nor he theirs, he showed them that he could write Chinese characters and indicated that they could thus communicate in writing. None of the islanders clustered along the beach could understand these complicated ideographs, but they knew of a man on the island who could, a village chief on the west coast by the name of Oribe. He was therefore sum
moned to communicate with this scholar-sailor Wu-feng, a.k.a. Chinese pirate Wang Chih.

Oribe conversed with Wu-feng by tracing characters in the sand with his cane. He began by asking, “Those men on your ship—where are they from? Why do they look so different from us?”

“They are traders from among the south-western barbarians,” wrote Wu-feng in reply, meaning that they were Portuguese. “These traders visit the same places in the hope of exchanging what they have for what they do not have. There is nothing suspicious about them.”

Oribe then wrote that the island’s capital, Akaogi, was a better place to go in search of trade. It was the seat of Lord Tokitaka, master of Tanegashima, and the largest town on the island. This was arranged, and the foreign ship bearing the Portuguese strangers arrived at Akaogi on the twenty-seventh of the month.

During their stay at Akaogi, the Portuguese introduced Lord Tokitaka and his retinue to a curious and wonderful device. It was “two or three feet long,” went one contemporary description, “straight on the outside with a passage inside, and made of a heavy substance. The inner passage runs through it although it is closed at the end. At its side there is an aperture which is the passageway for fire. Its shape defies comparison with anything I know. To use it, fill it with powder and small lead pellets. Set up a small white target on a bank. Grip the object in your hand, compose your body, and closing one eye, apply fire to the aperture. Then the pellet hits the target squarely. The explosion is like lightning and the report like thunder. Bystanders must cover their ears.”

It was of course a gun, in particular an arquebus, a lightweight form of matchlock musket that could be fired from the shoulder without need of the supporting rest that heavier muskets required. It consisted of an iron barrel set in a wooden stock, with an S-shaped brass serpentine affixed to the right side. Several feet of saltpeter-soaked wick, or “match,” were needed for the weapon to remain useable for any appre
ciable length of time, for example throughout the course of a battle. The arquebusier would thread one end of this match through the serpentine, light it, and keep it constantly smoldering; the rest he would wind around the stock of the weapon, or around his arm. When he wished to fire he raised the weapon to his shoulder, slid back the brass cover to expose the gunpowder, then took aim and pulled the trigger, sending the serpentine down into the firing pan like a bird pecking the ground. After a moment’s pause, the match glowing at the end of the serpentine would ignite the gunpowder, sending a lead bullet exploding out the end of the barrel with a tremendous kick and a cloud of black smoke.

Lord Tokiaki was immensely impressed by this simple but highly effective instrument. Still communicating through the Chinese pirate Wu-feng by means of written characters, he asked the Portuguese traders to tell him its secret. “The secret,” came the reply, “is to put your mind aright and close one eye.”

Tokiaki found this somewhat confusing. “The ancient sages have often taught how to set one’s mind aright,” he said. “If the mind is not set aright, there is no logic for what we say or do....However, will it not impair our vision for objects at a distance if we close an eye? Why should we close an eye?”

To this the foreigner replied, “That is because concentration is impor
tant in everything. When one concentrates, a broad vision is not necessary. To close an eye is not to dim one’s eyesight but rather to project one’s concentration farther.”

“That corresponds to what Lao Tzu has said,” replied the delighted Tokiaki. “‘Good sight means seeing what is very small.’”

Disregarding the high price the Portuguese were asking for these wonderful weapons, Lord Tokiaki purchased two specimens and devoted his every waking hour to mastering their use. Soon he was able to hit the target almost every time. He also had one of his retainers learn from the barbarians how to prepare the powder mixture that was clearly so essential.

Following the departure of the traders, Lord Tokiaki ordered his craftsmen to make copies of his two prized firearms. What they pro
duced resembled the foreign weapons outwardly, but would not fire, for they did not know how to close the barrel at the weapon’s shoulder end. This problem was solved in the following year, 1544, when a second foreign ship arrived at Tanegashima. There was among the crew this time an ironworker whom Lord Tokiaki’s craftsmen sought out for advice; one story has it that a blacksmith even offered his daughter in exchange for lessons. In any event the problem of closing the end of the barrel was soon solved, and within little more than a year the Tanegashima craftsmen had produced twenty or more working copies of the original barbarian gun. Lord Tokiaki then set his retainers to work learning how to use them, until they too could to hit the target almost every time.
[2]

*
          *          *

These lightweight muskets introduced into
Japan by Portuguese traders in 1543 were not the first firearms to arrive on those shores. A variety of gunpowder-based weapons had already been imported from China, the birthplace of gunpowder, over the previous two centuries, first bombs and flame-spewing tubes, then cannons, and finally handheld guns. None of these Chinese imports, however, were ever widely used by the Japanese in warfare, for they were too crude and clumsy and ineffective to rival the bow and arrow, sword, and spear. The amazement that Lord Tokiaki and the people of Tanegashima evinced at their first sight of a Portuguese musket was therefore probably more a reflection of the isolation of their small island than of the actual state of knowledge then prevailing in Japan. To the more worldly leaders on the main islands, the musket would have seemed a more familiar weapon, an improvement on existing technology that transformed the handheld gun from an interesting but impractical oddity into an effective killing machine.
[3]

Within a few years of its arrival on Lord Tokiaki’s remote southern island, the technology to manufacture Portuguese muskets, referred to at first as
tanegashima
, spread to the main island of Kyushu, where a number of gunsmiths who had gained reputations for themselves opened “schools” and began training apprentices. These apprentices then moved elsewhere to open businesses of their own, crafting muskets in the distinctive style of their master—the same design, the same weight, the same caliber. In this way gunsmithing shops and factories spread all across Kyushu and then onto Honshu, where Sakai, near Osaka, and Kunitomo, just south of present-day Tokyo, became major production centers.
[4]

By the 1560s muskets were being turned out throughout most of
Japan at a rate of at least several thousand per year. These weapons were as good as those being manufactured in Europe at that time and had the important advantage of greater standardization. In Europe there was virtually no standardization in the caliber of firearms; each gun needed its own bullet mold. This meant that if a soldier ran out of bullets in the heat of battle or if his little bag of lead slugs slipped from his belt and was lost, his weapon was rendered useless. He could not borrow bullets from a fellow soldier, for they would not fit his barrel. Nor could he run to a nearby supply wagon and grab a handful. In Japan the existence of gunsmithing schools did much to alleviate this problem. The different schools produced guns of widely varying caliber,
[5]
so it was not possible to equip an entire army with one standard weapon. But it
was
possible to equip a smaller corps of men with guns of a standard caliber simply by purchasing weapons from the same factory, and thus from the same school. This increased the utility of the Japanese musket and made the men who wielded them that much more effective.
[6]

*
          *          *

The first Portuguese muskets arrived in
Japan during a time that Japanese familiar with Chinese history called
sengoku
, “the age of warring states,” after the period of civil war preceding China’s own emergence as a single, unified state some seventeen hundred years before. It was a 130-year period, from the 1460s until 1590, when the entire country was in constant upheaval.

Sengoku was caused fundamentally by a lack of central authority. It was a problem with roots extending back into the twelfth century, when the emperor in
Kyoto began to slip from his position of undisputed power. A line of military dictators known as
shogun
arose to fill the resulting power vacuum. At first they governed the country under the ostensible authority of the emperor. By the early thirteenth century, however, the imperial throne had become so powerless that even this pretense was dropped, and the shogun’s capital in Kamakura became the real seat of government.

In 1333 the
Kamakura shogunate, weakened by its fight against the invading Mongol armies of Kublai Khan, fell to a new line of military dictators known collectively as the Ashikaga shoguns. The Ashikaga, never very strong to begin with, would undergo a slow decline over the next hundred years. This probably explains why the third shogun in the line, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, resumed Japanese relations with China after a long period of quiescence by sending a tribute mission to the court in Beijing in 1401. The title “King of Japan” that the Ming emperor bestowed upon him lent authority to the Ashikaga’s shaky rule, and the substantial income derived from the de facto trade that occurred during tribute missions provided much-needed wealth for maintaining armies, supporting regal lifestyles, and running the country.

But even this was not enough for the Ashikaga shoguns. Their decline was inexorable. By the early sixteenth century they no longer had the military power or financial clout to effectively control the country. And so there arose yet another power vacuum in
Japan. But this time there was no one to fill it.

The inevitable result was civil war. With neither the shogun nor the emperor able to guarantee property rights or the rule of law, ambitious men began to take charge. The sixteenth century opened with hundreds of regional lords and small groups all vying for each other’s territory and all arming to protect their own. Slowly, through conquest and the formation of alliances, these factions began to coalesce. By the middle of the sixteenth century the entire nation was in the hands of feuding war lords called
daimyo
, each holding his own private domain, none beholden to any central authority.

It was at this time that the musket first appeared in
Japan. Prior to this, warfare not just in Japan but in the Western world as well had remained substantially unchanged for nearly two thousand years, each generation going to battle with essentially the same bows and swords and arrows and spears. Indeed, as military historian Gwynne Dyer has observed, “competent professional armies chosen at random from anywhere between 500
B.C.
and
A.D.
1500 would stand a roughly equal chance in battle against each other—and that span of years could probably be pushed all the way back to around 1500
B.C.
(the time of Megiddo) if the earlier armies were allowed to exchange their bronze weapons for iron ones.”
[7]
The introduction of the musket into sengoku
Japan challenged and ultimately shattered this longstanding equilibrium. To survive the Darwinian rigors of the age required absolute pragmatism on the part of every daimyo intent upon survival, a determination to use any and every means at his disposal to crush the enemy and take his land before being similarly crushed in return. The musket’s value as a killing machine was therefore quickly recognized. Muskets were not expensive to produce; the more affluent daimyo could afford to have them turned out by the thousands. They did not require carefully crafted arrows, only simple lead balls. Their range and striking power was also superior to those of any traditional weapon. A musket, for example, could lob a slug nearly half a kilometer, compared to a maximum range of 380 meters for the heaviest—and most difficult to use—Japanese composite bow; at the closer distances at which most battles were fought, it could pierce iron armor that an arrow could only scratch. Finally, and most important, a musket was easy to use. This more than made up for its major weakness, its slow rate of fire. Even with practice it took nearly a minute to load and fire a musket, a period of time that would be only marginally reduced by the later introduction of pre-measured powder charges. A skilled archer, in contrast, could fire at least six well-aimed arrows in a minute. Skilled archers, however, took many years to train, they needed great muscular strength to wield the heaviest and in turn most dangerous bows, and they were therefore rare and expensive in sengoku Japan. The skills necessary to handle a musket, on the other hand, could be taught to anyone in just a few weeks. Adding a corps of musketeers to one’s army was thus considerably more cost- and time-effective than adding a corps of archers. All one needed was the cash to buy the weapons and a supply of able-bodied men.
[8]