The Imjin War (35 page)

Shen Weijing arrived back in
Beijing to find that the government no longer seemed interested in negotiating with the Japanese. This change in attitude had been brought about by the recent conclusion of the Ordos Campaign on the Mongolian frontier. The campaign had ended in spectacular fashion, with the rebels besieged by Ming troops at their stronghold of Ningxia and with the Ordos Mongols to the north making repeated attempts to come to their aid. As roving Chinese divisions beat back these successive Mongol incursions, the besiegers at Ningxia set about constructing a dike eighteen kilometers long all around the city. When it was finished, water from a nearby river was diverted into the space between the dike and the city walls, and slowly began to eat away at the rebels’ defenses. Finally, in the middle of October, the walls were breached and the city taken. Those rebel leaders who had not already committed suicide were rounded up and killed.
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With the Ordos Campaign over,
Beijing was at last able to turn its full attention to the conflict in Korea. An army of thirty-five thousand men was drawn together, mainly from units returning from the fighting in the northwest. Overall command was given to Li Rusong, a forty-three-year-old army officer from the Korean border province of Liaodong, the eldest son in a family that had immigrated to the region from Korea six generations before, during the early years of the Ming dynasty. Li was not universally liked. A number of his contemporaries regarded him as arrogant, and his superiors had previously accused him of being a lone wolf who ignored orders and acted on his own. In October of 1592, however, Li’s star was on the rise. Earlier that year he had led the first body of reinforcements in the Ordos Campaign in Shenxi Province, and had subsequently served with distinction in fending off Mongol attacks and crushing the Ningxia rebels. For this good service he was promoted to the lofty rank of chief military commissioner and given charge of the expeditionary force that was to be sent to Korea. He was also admonished by the Wanli emperor to henceforth obey all commands from his superior, who in the coming Korean campaign would be sixty-two-year-old Vice-Minister of War Song Yingchang, supreme civil administrator of all military affairs in the border regions threatened by the Japanese advance.
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With the northwestern frontier once again under control, the Ming government had grown less interested in tying up the Japanese with talk. Upon his return to Beijing from his meeting with Konishi Yukinaga, negotiator Shen Weijing was thus brushed off and referred to Song Yingchang for further instructions. Song in turn ordered Shen to return to Pyongyang and tell the Japanese that no further talks would take place until they had withdrawn their forces all the way back to Pusan. Shen, with absolutely nothing now to offer the Japanese, turned around and retraced his steps south, arriving at Pyongyang on December 23, 1592, a month past the expiration of the fifty-day armistice he had previously arranged. He met with Konishi a second time and relayed Vice-Minister of War Song’s conditions, which were flatly refused. The Japanese nevertheless tried to keep the game alive. They would not retreat one inch, they told Shen, unless the Chinese first provided a guarantee that Japanese trade ships would be allowed to enter the harbors of Zhejiang Province on the central Chinese coast.
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This counter-offer surely would not have pleased Hideyoshi. He had sent one of the largest invasion forces in history to the continent to obtain more than trading rights. Nor did it hold any attraction to the Chinese. When Shen Weijing returned with it to China in January 1593, Li Rusong’s army of thirty-five thousand was poised in Manchuria, ready to march.

The significance of recent setbacks in the Korean campaign, in particular the failure of his navy to enter the Yellow Sea and move reinforcements north, surely had not escaped the notice of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He was, after all, one of the premier military strategists of the age, and had made the Yellow Sea supply route the lynchpin in his invasion plan. The growing realization that he was to be denied access to this route by an unexpectedly strong Korean navy must therefore have forced him for the first time to question his ability to take Beijing and conquer China. Hideyoshi did not openly acknowledge any such misgivings in his correspondence from this time; throughout the autumn of 1592 he continued to speak of crossing to Korea and taking personal command of his armies there for the next big push to the north. There is evidence, however, that he had privately begun to scale back his plans with regard to China.

In the late summer of 1592 the bad news from
Korea was overshadowed for Hideyoshi by the death of his mother, known to us only by her noble title of Lady O-Mandokoro. Hideyoshi had been extremely close to his mother throughout his life, and in her declining years had taken to worrying and fussing incessantly about her—increasingly so after a serious illness laid her low in 1588. At that time the taiko is said to have begged the heavens to spare her “for three years, or two years, or if that is not to be then only for thirty days.”
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Lady O-Mandokoro was spared for four years. In Hideyoshi’s private correspondence from this time one senses a melancholia at the inevitability of loss and at times an almost desperate desire to make his mother well again, or at least as comfortable as possible until the day came when she would have to leave him. In a typical letter from 1589 to a lady-in-waiting he wrote, “If O-Mandokoro is kept in a small place, she may begin to feel depressed, and so please take care of her for the time being. But if [she is in a large place and] there are draughts, she will catch a chill in such surroundings and so you must not do that.”
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And again, in a letter addressed directly to his mother in 1590, “Go to some place and thus amuse yourself—and, please, become young once more. I beg you to do this.”
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It is clear that family was extremely important to Hideyoshi. The personal glimpses we get of him from his private correspondence reveal a man who delighted in being in the company of his wife, his concu
bines, and his adopted children, and who pined for them when the business of war took him away from home. Indeed, the greatest pleasure he seems to have derived from being a dictator did not come from wielding power, but from taking care of family and friends—a fact revealed in his choice of family name, Toyotomi, meaning “Bountiful Minister” or “Abundant Provider.”

In August 1592 Hideyoshi became anxious about his mother’s health, and on the thirtieth of the month he left his invasion head
quarters at Nagoya to pay her a visit at her mansion in Osaka on central Honshu, a journey of many days to the northeast. He arrived only to find that Lady O-Mandokoro had passed away on the very day he had left Nagoya. The news is said to have caused him to faint with grief.
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Hideyoshi remained in the vicinity of
Osaka and Kyoto for several months after that, in mourning for his mother, close to the remnants of his shrinking family circle, particularly his first wife O-Ne (Lady Kita-no-Mandokoro) and his favorite concubine, twenty-five-year-old Yodogimi. It was not until near the end of the year that he finally returned to Nagoya and resumed active oversight of the Korean campaign.

By the time he returned to
Nagoya, Hideyoshi viewed the conquest of China in a different light. It is unlikely that the death of his mother in itself caused this change; more immediate strategic concerns, in particular the failure of his navy to open a supply route to northern Korean via the Yellow Sea, must have been foremost in his mind. O-Mandokoro’s passing, however, and Hideyoshi’s subsequent hiatus in Kyoto, proved to be a turning point in the Korean campaign, a period of transition from the heady early days of the invasion, when everything was going better than expected, to a grittier phase where the Japanese war machine began slowly to veer off course. Hideyoshi understood the significance of this change. We know this because he began construction of a castle at Fushimi.

On June 27, 1592, with his invasion still on track and the con
quest of Korea and China seemingly certain, Hideyoshi revealed his long-term plans in a letter to the kampaku in Kyoto, his nephew and heir apparent Hidetsugu. This document listed the various appointments and shifting about of personnel that Hideyoshi planned to make once his conquests were complete. Emperor Go-Yozei, for example, would be transferred to Beijing to replace the Wanli emperor, with his son the crown prince replacing him on the throne in Japan. Hidetsugu himself was also to go to Beijing to serve as kampaku of China, with either Hideyoshi’s half-brother Hidenaga or Ukita Hideie succeeding him as kampaku of Japan. Hideyoshi did not bother to mention in this letter what he himself would do—not surprising, for the document was a list of instructions for Hidetsugu. On the same day that this letter was written, however, Hideyoshi’s private secretary sent a second letter to Hide-yoshi’s wife reiterating many of the appointments the taiko planned to make and adding that Hideyoshi himself would journey to Beijing “before the end of this year....He will at first reside in Beijing, whence he will control the national affairs of China, Japan, and Korea. After the founding of the new empire is completed, he will appoint some man of worth as his deputy at Beijing, and will establish his own permanent residence at Ningpo.”
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In the summer of 1592, then, Hideyoshi intended to live out his life at Ningpo, a seaport on the central Chinese coast offering access to
Japan, a convenient place from which to oversee the overseers of his empire. By the end of the year this plan had been abandoned. Upon his return to Nagoya from his period of mourning for his mother, Hide-yoshi began work on a permanent headquarters and retirement palace at Fushimi, in the vicinity of the capital. Kyoto governor Maeda Gen’i was entrusted with overseeing its construction. On January 13, 1593, Hideyoshi wrote to Maeda, summoning him to Nagoya. “Because I have many orders to give before I go to Korea,” he wrote, “please come over here
...
and
...
bring with you an expert carpenter who should bring a plan of Fushimi. Because the problem of
namazu
is so important for the construction of Fushimi, I would like to have the castle constructed in such a way that it will be hard to attack from the
namazu
....
I intend to have [Fushimi Castle] done very carefully, in accordance with Rikyu’s preferences and discretion.”
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Hideyoshi wanted a solid and secure retirement home, one that would not be vulnerable to earthquakes, which were popularly believed to result from the movements of the
namazu
, the mythical giant catfish that carried the Japanese islands on its back. It would be built in the style of Sen no Rikyu, the tea master whom Hideyoshi had ordered to commit suicide in 1591 for reasons unknown, a decision he now seemed to regret. Something of the essence of this “Rikyu style,” which would come to have such a profound influence not only on the Way of Tea but on Japanese culture as a whole, can be seen in the following anecdote concerning the tea master and Hideyoshi. Rikyu one summer had cultivated a garden of morning glories, a flower that at the time was extremely rare in Japan and renowned for its beauty. Hideyoshi, eager to see these flowers for himself, asked Rikyu to invite him to a tea gathering for this purpose. Rikyu agreed. On the morning of the visit, Hideyoshi arrived at Rikyu’s house expecting to find the garden bursting with morning glories. But there were no flowers anywhere. He passed through the gate and proceeded to Rikyu’s tearoom, and still did not see any flowers. Finally he entered the tearoom and there, floating in a container of water, was a single, perfect blossom.
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Fushimi Castle, then, would be significantly less grand than the Jurakutai, which Hideyoshi had ordered built a few years before. It would encompass gardens, pine groves, artlessly placed rocks, natural wood beams—a place of harmony and tranquility of which Sen no Rikyu would approve. It would mark the final step in Hideyoshi’s rise from peasant to gentleman, the step where he moved beyond the nouveau riche ostentation of his recent warlord past to ascend to the highest reaches of cultured grace.

As work began on
Fushimi Castle in late 1592, Hideyoshi continued to speak of crossing to Korea and taking command of his armies there. His anticipated date of departure, weather permitting, would be the third month—April by the Western calendar—of 1593, eleven months after the embarkation of the vanguard units of his invasion force. He would “take charge of everything personally,” he said, “and then make a triumphal return” to Japan.
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What did Hideyoshi hope to accomplish during this victorious interlude on the mainland? How did he propose to advance the stalled front now that the Korean navy had the
Yellow Sea supply route firmly blockaded, upsetting his plans for moving reinforcements north? One can only guess. His plan to retire at Fushimi rather than at Ningpo, however, would seem to suggest that he was no longer confident of being able to slash his way to Beijing.

Long before Hideyoshi started giving off signals in late 1592 that he was wavering in his resolve to enter China and capture Beijing, his daimyo generals in Korea were expressing more open doubts. In early July, for example, seventh contingent leader Mori Terumoto wrote a letter to a family member back in Japan stating, “It is said that this country is larger than Japan. For this reason, our current strength is not sufficient to rule this country. Besides, the language barrier makes it even more difficult for us to deal with the people here. Although the Chinese are said to be weaker than the Koreans, I wonder if we will be able to provide enough men to enter and rule that country.”
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Mori had never been very enthusiastic about Hideyoshi’s plans for mainland con
quest. The doubts he expressed in this letter, however, written scarcely six weeks into the invasion, soon came to be shared by many of his colleagues as the reality of the situation in Korea forced them to abandon any hope of conquering China and adopt a more realistic goal: the subjugation of Korea.

Hideyoshi at this point assumed that with the fall of
Seoul and the northward advance of his vanguard contingents to Pyongyang, the Korean Peninsula was already his. His commanders in the field knew otherwise. They knew that all that had really been captured was a strip of territory stretching from Pusan to Pyongyang, and a string of strategic cities and towns along the way. They knew, moreover, that the Koreans’ determination to resist had not been broken with the capture of their capital and the flight of their king. On the contrary, it was building, threatening to sever supply lines and leave tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers cut off in the north. In light of these developments it seemed foolish to attempt to advance any further toward China—even if reinforcements could be transported north via the Yellow Sea, which of course they could not, due to the blockade being imposed by the Korean navy. To advance farther would stretch Japanese positions even more thinly and would leave them even more vulnerable to Korean counterattack.

It would also be greedy. Hideyoshi’s generals had already grabbed an enormous chunk of Korean territory, enough nearly to double the size of his empire and reward everyone handsomely with a good deal to spare. Why, then, reach any further, and put everything at risk? Surely the wise thing to do would be to consolidate control over the lands through which the Japanese armies had already marched, and avoid an all-out confrontation with the Chinese, which would be difficult to win. In light of these circumstances it seemed best to adhere to the Japanese proverb asu no hyaku yori, kyou no go-ju: “Tomorrow’s one hundred [is worth] fifty today.”

As the summer heat of 1592 gave way to the coolness of autumn, the Japanese invasion force accordingly began to fan out across Korea in an effort to stamp out resistance and take possession of the land. Once this was done, they would organize and administer each region “according to Japanese rules,”
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as Hideyoshi had ordered earlier in the year. This meant that all weapons would be confiscated and the popu
lace pacified and returned to their fields. Tax assessment roles would be compiled, and co-opted or coerced officials put to work extracting the assessed sums from a compliant peasantry to finance the governance of their newly conquered province. Then fiefs would be parceled out to deserving daimyo, and Korea would become fully integrated into the taiko’s empire, just as Shikoku had been after it had fallen to Hideyoshi in 1585, and Kyushu in 1587, and the northern Honshu provinces of Mutsu and Dewa in 1591.

The nine contingents of Hideyoshi’s invasion force were each tasked with pacifying a different region of
Korea. The southeastern province of Kyongsang, the first to fall to the Japanese at the start of the invasion, was to be held by the twenty-five thousand men of Fukushima Masanori’s fifth contingent, most of them from Shikoku; neighboring Cholla Province, the “Red Country” that had been largely bypassed in the initial thrust north, went to Kobayakawa Takakage and his sixth contingent from Kyushu, a total of fifteen thousand men. The mountainous central province of Kangwon on the east coast was to be subdued by Mori Yoshinari and Shimazu Yoshihiro of the fourth contingent, at the head of fourteen thousand men. Seoul and neighboring Kyonggi Province would be held by overall invasion leader Ukita Hideie and his eighth contingent. In the north, third contingent leader Kuroda Nagamasa was responsible for Hwanghae, the central province bulging into the Yellow Sea, while Konishi Yukinaga and So Yoshitoshi remained in Pyongyang and vicinity, waiting for reinforcements so they could begin the final push north into Pyongan Province. Kato Kiyomasa, finally, was to pacify Hamgyong, the remote hinterland province in the northeast.

Of all the daimyo commanders in
Korea, second contingent leader Kato Kiyomasa, the “demon general” to the Koreans,
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would remain the most committed to his master Hideyoshi’s goal of pan-Asian con
quest. While many of his colleagues grew cautious as the invasion ground to a halt and effectively abandoned the plan of entering China in favor of the more modest objective of the subjugation of Korea, Kato alone remained unchanged. He continued to believe that Hideyoshi would soon arrive on the peninsula and that Beijing would then be theirs; and he continued to act with the same daring that had characterized the first heady weeks of the war, thrusting deep into Hamgyong Province, leading his troops hundreds of kilometers into enemy territory, all the way to the Tumen River and Manchuria beyond.

Kato had crossed the
Imjin River north of Seoul with Konishi Yukinaga and Kuroda Nagamasa in early July, and together they had marched into Kaesong. From this ancient walled town Kato dispatched a letter south to Hideyoshi, indicating that he was still committed to the idea of China conquest and was unhappy at the prospect of being diverted off the main line of march to Beijing. “The expeditionary force under the command of this humble subject,” he wrote, “is going to conquer Hamgyong-do, a remote province in the northeastern part of Korea. The place is located far from the territory of Ming, more than ten days’ march. If your highness wishes to cross the sea to conquer Ming, please give me an order within the earliest possible date. In that case, I will speed by day and night to your place to take the lead in the conquest.”
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The three vanguard contingents of the invasion force separated just north of
Kaesong, with Konishi and Kuroda continuing due north and Kato veering northeast toward his assigned province of Hamgyong, in company with fellow Kyushu daimyo Nabeshima Naoshige and a force of twenty thousand men. They were now leaving the central road and striking into unknown and often trackless territory, and were thus in need of guides. Two locals were dragooned for this purpose. When they attempted to plead ignorance of the route, Kato ordered one of them hacked to pieces. The second man, terrified, agreed to show the way. A Korean who could speak some Japanese was also found and pressed into service as an interpreter.
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After a week’s march over poorly marked trails, the second contin
gent entered Hamgyong proper. The province’s Southern Army commander, Yi Hoon, who should have been the first to meet them, deserted his post and fled north toward the Manchurian border. He was later seized and killed by locals in the vicinity of Kapsan. The provincial governor, Yu Yong-rip, attempted to follow suit, but the soldiers he had been assigned to lead, enraged at his cowardice, ran him down and turned him over to the Japanese.

These astonishing actions on the part of the soldiers and citizens of Hamgyong were precipitated by a deep-seated loathing for the govern
ment in Seoul, a government they felt had abused them and overtaxed them for far too long. Since the early years of the Choson dynasty, officials in the capital seemed to regard this hinterland region as little more than the nation’s beast of burden, to be worked in the fields and given nothing in return for the heavy taxes they paid. Now, with its army commanders and officials fleeing in all directions as the Japanese approached, it appeared that the unfortunate people of Hamgyong were to be abandoned as well. Why, then, should they resist the Japanese and risk almost certain death? Why not let the enemy clean out the venal officials and the cowardly commanders and rid the province of an administration that had mistreated them for so long?

Such thoughts were widespread in Hamgyong at the time of Kato’s arrival in July of 1592, and thus his march toward
Manchuria went largely unopposed. He led his second contingent northeast through the strip of populated territory that lay between the East Sea coast and the range of mountains that formed the spine of Hamgyong, through the towns of Wonsan, Hamhung, Pukchong, and Kimchaek. They traveled fast, justifying the tales already circulating throughout the province that Kato’s army moved like the wind, covering a hundred
li
(fifty kilometers) and more in a day.

The Japanese traversed more than half of Hamgyong-do, coming within two hundred kilometers of
Korea’s northern border, before they encountered their first serious resistance. It occurred near the town of Kilchu, outside a grain warehouse called Haejongchang. Upon receiving news of Kato’s advance, the province’s Northern Army commander, Han Kuk-ham, evidently made of sterner stuff than his southern counterpart Commander Yi, had rounded up a body of troops from the “Six Forts,” a string of army garrisons in Hamgyong’s northeast corner, and marched them south to stop the invaders. He nearly succeeded. In the ensuing battle the Koreans under Han proved more courageous and skillful than any Kato had met so far, unleashing such a barrage of well-aimed arrows upon the Japanese that they were forced to take shelter inside the warehouse of Haejongchang itself. Then Commander Han made a tactical mistake. Rather than heed his subordinates’ advice to rest his men and wait, he precipitously ordered an immediate mass attack on the building. The Japanese inside, having formed barricades from sacks of grain, were ready for them. The Koreans charged into a wall of concentrated, disciplined musket fire that decimated their closely packed ranks. Badly stung, Han retreated to his camp on a nearby mountain, planning to attack again the following day.

He would never get the chance. During the night Kato led his men out from the protection of the warehouse and quietly encircled the Korean position, being careful to leave a single opening on one side. At dawn, with the mountain slopes wreathed in fog, the Japanese raised their muskets and began to fire. The onslaught threw the unwary Han and his men into an instant panic; they had assumed that the Japanese were still holed up at Haejongchang. They turned to flee—straight through the gap that Kato had provided and into a nearby swamp. The Japanese were soon upon them and proceeded to cut them to pieces. Commander Han managed to flee with his life. He would later be captured by a band of renegade Koreans and handed over to Kato, and remain in Japanese captivity for the next several months.
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After its victory over the Koreans at Haejongchang, Kato’s second contingent broke in two. The second in command, Nabeshima Naoshige, made his headquarters in Kilchu and set to work imposing order on
Hamgyong Province “according to Japanese rules.” Garrisons were established at strategically important towns along their route of march, supplies were purchased or requisitioned, weapons were confiscated, land was registered, and a system of taxation set in place. The local population, terrified of the Japanese and in many cases resentful of their own leaders, proved for the most part submissive and compliant. Some of the tax assessment rolls that Nabeshima compiled during these months are still in existence, signed by local Korean officials who pledged to the accuracy of the information on pain of “having all our heads cut off.”
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In the meantime Kato Kiyomasa led an expeditionary force north to the
Tumen River, skirmishing and sowing terror all along the way. It was during this campaign that he stumbled on two very valuable prizes: the Korean princes Sunhwa and Imhae. They had been sent to the northeast following the evacuation of Seoul as part of the court’s effort to spread the royal presence across the far north to rally the support of the people. The princes initially took up residence in Kangwon Province and the southern part of Hamgyong, but were driven farther north by the arrival of Kato and his men. This retreat eventually took them to the remote northeastern border town of Hoeryong, on the southern bank of the Tumen River. They could not have found themselves in a more inhospitable spot, for Hoeryong was a place of exile for political undesirables and was thus home to a good many men with strong anti-government sentiments. These feelings of resentment had burst forth soon after the arrival of the Japanese in the province, with a minor government official named Kuk Kyong-in overthrowing the tenuous local authority and proclaiming himself a general, with a following of five hundred men. When Princes Sunhwa and Imhae, together with their entourage of family members and government officials, miraculously appeared in their midst, Kuk and his cohorts lost no time in seizing them and trussing them up. Kuk then sent a message south to the advancing Japanese, saying that he wanted to side with them and hand over his prize.

It was this letter that brought Kato Kiyomasa to Hoeryong. When he arrived in the town on August 30 and saw the two princes tied up like common criminals and forced to kneel in the dirt, he angrily turned to Kuk and said, “These are the sons of your king! How can you keep them tied up like this?” He then had their ropes removed and took them to his camp for a meal. Sunhwa and Imhae would continue to be well treated throughout their period of captivity, as was the Japanese custom with important hostages. The officials accompanying them would not fare so well. They were kept locked up in a small, cold room for many months, were frequently bound, and suffered considerable privations. As for Kuk Kyong-in, he was rewarded with the position of governor in the new provincial administration.
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