A History of Korea (46 page)

9

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The Great Invasions, 1592–1636

CHRONOLOGY

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 Chos
n 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 S
njo, 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, W
n 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-Chos
n ideological conflicts among the throne and high officials (
Chapter 7
) to a system, ironically institutionalized in King S
njo’s reign, of hereditary political affiliation. Perspectives on Chos
n 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 Chos
n 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 S
njo 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 W
n 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, W
n’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-Chos
n 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.