The Japanese landing
on Busan
CHRONOLOGY
1590 Dispatch of
Korean diplomatic mission to Japan to gage Japanese leader’s intentions
1592 Japanese
invasion of Korea; Chinese entrance into the war in Korea’s defense
1597 Second
Japanese invasion
1598 Retreat of
the Japanese; end of the war
1601 Establishment
of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan
1623 Overthrow of
the Korean king by pro-Chinese monarch
1627 First Manchu
invasion of Korea
1636 Second Manchu
invasion
1644 Manchu
conquest of China
THE RETURN TO DUTY OF ADMIRAL YI SUNSIN, 1597
Though little known outside of Asia, the East Asian war of
1592–8 stands as one of the major events in world history. For the first time
since the aborted Mongol invasions of Japan in the thirteenth century, the
major civilizations of East Asia became embroiled in a single conflict, with
consequences that would far exceed any other in this region’s history until the
late nineteenth century, perhaps indeed until the Pacific War of 1937–45. Begun
through the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592 in a bid to conquer Ming dynasty
China itself, this war, fought exclusively in Korea, brought together all three
countries in a fierce seven-year period of conflict. The destruction was enormous—to
the Chinese who sent huge armies in Korea’s defense, and even to the Japanese.
In Korea, the scale of the devastation can scarcely be imagined: hundreds of
thousands killed, millions injured or uprooted, and a poisoning of relations
with Japan that would never disappear.
That Korea survived this onslaught is itself a miracle. The
most common Korean perspective relates that the country was rescued by its
greatest military hero, Admiral Yi Sunsin, who helped staunch the destruction
in 1592 by leading the Korean naval forces to key victories over their Japanese
counterparts. Not long after his heroics, however, Admiral Yi found himself in
a Seoul jail, awaiting judgment on charges of treason and incompetence. When,
after four years of stalemate, peace talks collapsed and the Japanese sent
another invasion force in 1597, Admiral Yi was freed and ordered back to the
Korean coast to coordinate his command with the Chinese allies. This helped
bring the conflict to an end in 1598. But the significance of this conflagration,
albeit different in each country, would extend both geographically and
temporally thereafter. It may have even paved the way a few years later for the
rise of the Manchus, who also launched destructive invasions of Korea. For the
Koreans, these wars exposed grave problems in the Chosn polity, but they
eventually provided also an opportunity for sharpening their national identity
and reassessing their civilizational standing in the northeast Asian region.
PROBLEMS IN THE KOREAN RESPONSE
Although some Korean officials had suspected trouble brewing
in Japan and even anticipated a conflict, the utter scale and catastrophic
force of the Japanese assault in the spring of 1592 came as a shock: a landing
force of hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of soldiers. The county
officials of Tongnae, now part of the city of Pusan in the southeastern corner
of the peninsula, managed to send messengers immediately on horseback to Seoul
before the siege overwhelmed the Tongnae fortress. But the samurai soldiers,
taking two invasion routes northward, tore through the country so quickly that
within two weeks they were at the gates of the capital. After much
hand-wringing with every report of the collapse of the country’s defenses, the
Korean monarch, King Snjo, took the advice of his ministers urging him to
abandon Seoul and flee northward. Along his path of evacuation, common Koreans,
who enjoyed no such option, pleaded with him not to forsake his duties of
protecting the capital, but clearly any attempt to withstand the barrage would
have proved suicidal.
With the failure of its land defenses, the Korean court had
to turn to its formidable navy, sending the two naval commanders for the
southernmost provinces, Wn Kyun and Yi Sunsin, to engage the Japanese within a
few days of the invasion. Admiral Yi Sunsin, in particular, enjoyed tremendous
successes in these battles, destroying much of the Japanese fleet and thereby
managing successfully to cut off Japanese supply lines along the coast. He is
credited in particular with skillful deployment of smaller, highly maneuverable
attack ships, including the famed “turtle boats” that were protected by a
spiked armored shell. These breakthroughs proved sufficient to hold off the
invaders until the Ming dynasty forces, sent by the Chinese emperor at the
request of the Korean monarch, arrived to halt the Japanese advance in the
decisive Battle of Pyongyang. The combined Korean–Chinese army pushed the
invaders gradually southward, and as the Japanese retreated to fortresses along
the southern end of the peninsula, negotiations began for a peace settlement.
Meanwhile, in spite of the recognition of his heroics
accorded him by the court, Admiral Yi found himself embroiled in the factional
struggles among high officials over responsibility for the stunning failure to
prepare for, then counter, the invasion. Factionalism, a form of party
politics, had evolved from the early-Chosn ideological conflicts among the
throne and high officials to a system, ironically institutionalized in King
Snjo’s reign, of hereditary political affiliation. Perspectives on Chosn
dynasty factionalism have varied widely among historians, while the Japanese
who colonized Korea in the early twentieth century cited factionalism as
another example of the debilitating Korean political system.
Regardless of its ultimate significance in explaining Chosn
dynasty politics as a whole, factionalism did play a central role in this
period of major invasions from 1592 to 1637, as partisan disputes became
entangled in formulating the court’s responses. One key example of this
phenomenon came in the two years preceding the Japanese attack, when the Korean
monarch sent a diplomatic mission to Japan to gage the intent of Toyotomi
Hideyoshi, the Japanese leader who would later launch the invasions. The
embassy’s report to King Snjo showed a division among its top two officials,
members of rival factions. In implementing a response, one official’s warnings
of an imminent Japanese invasion lost out to the reassurances of peace by the
second official, whose faction enjoyed the upper hand in court. The court’s
fateful decision not to mobilize the country in preparation for war proved
disastrous. And, once again, partisan politics inserted itself into the
government’s handling of crisis amidst the Japanese war, as Admiral Wn Kyun,
who, in contrast to Yi Sunsin, had largely failed in his efforts to defeat the
enemy at sea, blamed Yi for not carrying out orders to support him. As a
stalemate in the war ensued, Wn’s factional ties to those in power in Seoul
produced the amazing scene of Admiral Yi’s becoming incarcerated for
insubordination and incompetence, and indeed of even being sentenced to death.
The scramble to save his life by a few top officials was enough to prolong the
stay of execution until the second Japanese invasion of 1597, which highlighted
the folly of locking up Admiral Yi. Freed from prison and reinstated to his
command, he immediately turned his attention to the southern coast. Alas, his
leadership appears to have been critical to the conclusion of the war in 1598,
as the joint Ming-Chosn forces, buoyed by news that Hideyoshi had died, chased
the remaining Japanese soldiers off the peninsula—though not before a stray
bullet killed Admiral Yi.
NARRATIVES OF HEROISM
Admiral Yi’s death in a blaze of glory has served as the
integral conclusion to the great narrative of heroism centered on this figure,
whose feats of bravery and skill in the face of impossible odds are commonly
recounted by Korean schoolchildren. By all viable historical accounts, Yi
Sunsin was indeed an accomplished soldier, gifted strategist, and charismatic
commander. From a prominent aristocratic family that had produced mostly
civilian officials, he chose another path in his youth and, after passing the
military examination with honors, soon ascended the ranks of the military
officialdom. As naval commander of Chlla province, he stood as one of the few
officials who foresaw the danger from Japan, and his preparations appear to
have served him well once he engaged in battle, as chronicled in his diary-like
official reports to the court. These sources, as well as other eyewitness
accounts and government records, all point to Yi’s great deeds. But perhaps the
source that contributed most to the mythologizing of Yi Sunsin as Korea’s
greatest war hero was the Book of Corrections (Chingbirok), written by Yi’s
staunchest supporter in the upper echelons of government officialdom, Yu
Sngnyong. Yu had acted as one of Yi’s early patrons before the outbreak of war,
and the Book of Corrections, in reference to the lessons that must be learned
from the country’s failures in the Japanese invasion, likened Yi to a great
spiritual force who almost single-handedly saved Korea. And Yi’s stoic
righteousness in the face of factional injustice only heightened the impression
of his purity.
In the modern era, another source of heroism has gained
prominence in the conventional perspective on the Japanese war: the “Righteous
Army” guerilla bands mobilized throughout the country to attack the invaders
and obstruct the Japanese lines of communication and supplies. In the North
Korean account of this war, for example, it is the Righteous Armies,
representing the mass of the common, downtrodden people, who came to the rescue
when the upper classes, including the monarchy, utterly failed to protect the
nation. Such a populist perspective has become more accepted in South Korea as
well, but, as scholars have pointed out, these bands, for all their
effectiveness, appear to have been led by local aristocrats and thus replicated
the hierarchies of society at large. To what extent these militias played a
decisive role in the war’s outcome remains a point of contention. But
regardless of the precise impact of these guerilla units, it seems
fitting—given who suffered the brunt of the Japanese invasions—that they would
be featured prominently in the national memory of the war. Indeed, their deeds
lingered in the popular imagination thereafter, as seen in the reprisal of the
“Righteous Army” moniker for ragtag militias that formed in the early twentieth
century to resist, once again, the Japanese. In this sense, the prominence of
the Righteous Armies in the narratives of national struggle reflects the
intensification of Korean identity in opposition to Japan.
There remains, however, one final major factor in the war’s
outcome that, in Korea at least, has not been readily highlighted: the Chinese.
North Korean accounts understandably do not even mention the Ming dynasty’s
assistance, for this would run counter to their hyper-nationalist narrative of
Korean history. Even in South Korea, conventional perspectives on the war give
little credit to the Chinese assistance. As for Yu’s Book of Corrections from
the early seventeenth century, it paints the Chinese in mostly a negative
light, focusing on their abusive behavior, their commanders’ neglect of Korean
concerns in the negotiations with the Japanese, and their battlefield failures.
Other recent scholarship, however, has questioned this longstanding impression
and suggests that the Chinese forces played not only a key role in the allied
victory over Japan, but indeed an indispensable one.
THE REGIONAL ORDER REMADE
The significance of the Chinese contribution highlights the
fact that, notwithstanding Korea’s suffering, this war’s impact spread far
beyond the peninsula and may have been the most widely encompassing East Asian
regional event until the modern era. Indeed the consequences extended even to
an area originally untouched by the invasion, Manchuria. While there remains
historical debate over the precise connections between the Japanese invasions
and the conquest of Korea and China by the Manchus three decades later, the
destructive force throughout East Asia could only have had a staggering,
profound effect on the region.
Often overlooked when considering the fallout from the
Japanese invasions of Korea is the pronounced impact on Japan itself, much of
which, ultimately, was in fact beneficial. The lessons learned from the failure
of Hideyoshi’s grand scheme, not to mention the expenditures of resources and
lives, cast a long shadow over Japan’s subsequent history. Aside from
megalomaniacal delusion, Hideyoshi’s primary reason for launching the invasion
was to provide an outlet for the energies of his warrior retainers, who had
proved instrumental in his completing the project of politically reunifying
Japan after centuries of fragmentation. After his death, Japanese leaders would
not again venture beyond their borders for over 200 years. In fact, the leader
who emerged as Hideyoshi’s successor, Tokugawa Ieyasu, instituted a peaceful,
stable, and in many ways a thriving dynastic rule based partly on the policy of
“closure” to the outside world until the middle of the nineteenth century. The
salutary effects of the Hideyoshi misadventure would extend to unforeseen
realms as well: the many Korean artisans—artists, potters, smiths, ship
builders, and others—taken as war captives back to Japan appear to have made a
lasting contribution to the development of Japanese culture and technology.
As for China, the dedication of massive resources to the war
against Japan—an act, admittedly, that was not devoid of self-interest, since
Korea served as a buffer against the Japanese—could not have helped the Ming
dynasty’s increasingly fragile grip on rule. After more than two centuries, the
Ming government, having concentrated its energies on internal stability through
limited foreign adventures, found itself having to beat back not only the
Japanese, but also Chinese rebels and ultimately yet another “barbarian” group
to its immediate northeast. The Manchus, descendants of tribesmen who had
periodically organized themselves into a formidable military force throughout
East Asian history, had suddenly done so again while the rest of the region was
preoccupied with recovery from the Japanese invasion. By the 1620s, the
Manchus, following the familiar pattern of the Northmen of East Asia in
previous eras, appeared on the verge of striking Korea on their way to the big
prize of China itself. The brooding specter of this invasion instigated a major
factional struggle in Korea over how to respond, and eventually the king, who
favored a policy of accommodation with this new power, was overthrown by
Chosn’s high officials in favor of a more explicitly pro-Ming monarch. This
soon brought forth the first of two devastating Manchu invasions of Korea in
1627, to be followed by the finishing blow in 1636, when the Korean monarch
surrendered in ritualized humiliation to the Manchu emperor just outside of
Seoul. This paved the way for the Manchus’ march into Beijing in 1644 and their
takeover of China.
Despite succumbing themselves to the irrepressible Manchu
force just a few years earlier, the Koreans were completely shocked by the Ming
dynasty’s fall, which constituted, from the Korean perspective, an event on the
level of a cosmic shift. For all the diplomatic subordination that the Koreans
endured thereafter, the legitimacy of the ensuing Qing dynasty of the Manchus
was never accepted by most Korean elites, who harbored a deeply ethnicized
scorn for these “barbarians.” Indeed for well over a century Koreans openly
retained fantasies of engaging in a “northern campaign” to overthrow the Qing.
Koreans, now deprived of their long-held assumptions about civilizational
order, were forced to reconsider their larger standing Under Heaven. A belief
hardened among Korean elites that, with the fall of the Ming, only Chosn
remained as a bastion of (Confucian) civilization. This accompanied the equally
fascinating emergence of a more widespread sense of national consciousness
among lower groups of people, as seen in the expressions of popular culture
from the seventeenth century onwards. Indeed, the rallying cry of Yi Sunsin,
Righteous Army leaders, and others around the common cause of national survival
during the Japanese and, later, Manchu invasions laid the foundation for
fortifying the idea of Koreanness itself.
