Posted: 13 March 2005 at 4:27am | IP Logged

Knights and Samurai - Brothers in Arms?

by Stephen Turnbull

In my book Men-at-Arms 105: The Mongols I made the comment that, because of the vast extent of the Mongol conquests, the Teutonic Knights of Germany and the samurai of Japan had in fact fought a common enemy, even though it was to be three more centuries before the two martial societies became aware of each other's existence.

This epic first meeting between the cultures that had produced knights and samurai happened in 1543, when a Portuguese ship ran aground off the Japanese island of Tanegashima. The crew were saved, along with a number of arquebuses, the first ever seen in Japan. The arrival of these weapons is commonly regarded as having sparked a military revolution in Japan, and it is interesting to note that by this time Europe was already going through a military revolution of its own, during which the introduction of firearms was an important factor in bringing about the demise of the mounted knight. On opposite sides of the world, and over several centuries, two distinctive military cultures therefore developed with no contact between them until both traditions were nearly over.

The two societies of samurai and knight naturally show many cultural differences, but there are also many fascinating similarities and parallels. Why should this be? Was there something about being an aristocratic warrior that transcended localised culture and led to something universal? Were the ideals of chivalry and bushido really the same, and when the two traditions faced similar challenges from developments in military technology, did the innovations have the same impact and elicit the same response?

The Cult of the Individual Warrior

Some similarities between knights and samurai are apparent from even the most cursory glance. Both were elite, aristocratic warriors who visibly proclaimed their status on the battlefield by the possession and use of a horse, and drew their status from the huge emphasis both societies placed on a warrior's individual prowess. The samurai may have wielded a bow in place of the knight's lance, yet throughout history both groups valued most highly the act of single combat against a worthy opponent, even if this was an ideal that was not often realised. Most samurai would also have responded approvingly to the recommendation in Federico Fregoso's 16th-century work Il Cortegiano, that 'A knight ought to work the matter wisely in separating himself from the multitude, and undertake notable and bold feats which he hath to do, with as little company as he can, and in the sight of noble men.' Even in the new situation of huge armies of disciplined infantry, the aristocratic sentiment seems to have been that the larger your army, the greater your need to stand out from the crowd. For example, when sombre and practical battledress armours became universally adopted in Japanese armies of the late 16th century, so their equally robust and sensible helmets became embellished with all sorts of weird and wonderful crests and adornments, from huge wooden buffalo horns to plumes of peacock feathers, all of which are regularly noted as being worn in the heat of battle.

The Charge of the Takeda samurai at the battle of Nagashino 1575. (© Osprey Publishing Limited, artwork by Howard Gerrard from: Nagashino 1575 (Campaign 69) by Stephen Turnbull)

There is an equivalent tendency towards exaggerated display in the written accounts of the period. Records of individual exploits are as plentiful as in an earlier age, and in Japan the accounts of notable and bold feats 'performed in the sight of noble men' produced as late as the Korean War of 1592-98 would not have disgraced the hyperbole of the war tales of the 14th century such as the Heike Monogatari. With a stunning contempt for the reality of contemporary warfare, personal achievement and single combat are cited and praised, and for every description of a commander carefully marshalling his arquebus squads there are a dozen describing individual prowess. For example, Okochi Hidemoto led a mixed unit into Namwon castle in 1597, but the greatest emphasis in the chronicle is laid on his reaction to having killed a Korean warrior in single combat:

Graciously calling to mind that this day was the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, the day dedicated to his tutelary kami [Hachiman] Dai Bosatsu, he put down his bloodstained blade and, pressing together his crimson-stained palms, bowed in veneration towards far off Japan.

In both Europe and Japan the acquisition of individual glory included the personal involvement in battle of a country's leaders, or of its would-be leaders. The exploits of Henry V at Agincourt are well known, and at the battle of Marignano in 1515 the king of France owed his life to the soundness of his armour, as did the young Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1564 when, on returning from the battle of Azukizaka, he stripped off his armour and three bullets fell out of his shirt. In 1576 Oda Nobunaga was wounded in the leg while conducting operations against the Ikko sectarians of Ishiyama Honganji, three years after his great rival Takeda Shingen had been mortally wounded by a bullet fired from the besieged castle of Noda. In 1511 Europe had even witnessed the unique sight of an armoured Pope, when Julius II fought his anti-French campaign, and a Venetian ambassador in 1598 commented on the exploits of King Henri IV of France in terms that would have done credit to any contemporary daimyö (the equivalent of feudal lords): 'When it comes to making war ... which is the real calling of a great captain and King ... he moves freely under arquebus and cannon fire without giving it a thought and as gaily as if he were going to a wedding, and he often takes greater risks than he should.'

In Japanese warfare the most prestigious individual exploit of all was the accolade of being the first into battle. At the second battle of Uji in 1184 two samurai vied for the honour of being the first to swim his horse across the river and into action, which one won by telling the other that his saddle girth was loose. In 1592 Hosokawa Sadaoki threatened to decapitate any foot soldier who dared to join him and thus overload the bamboo scaling ladder he had placed against the wall of Chinju castle. In 1600 the attack on Gifu castle was delayed while two commanders argued over who should lead the vanguard, a matter that was finally resolved by one agreeing to attack the front gate while the other assaulted the rear. So desperate was the rivalry that on occasions the standard bearers would throw their banners into a castle ahead of the attacking troops.

The Impact of Firearms

Improvements in military technology from the 1500s onwards produced immense challenges in both cultures, and forced both knight and samurai to make a response. In most cases the response was positive, in vivid contrast to the popular view which states that the demise of the European knight may be blamed almost totally on the invention of firearms. After all, does not Don Quixote lament, 'Those diabolical engines, the artillery, whose inventor I firmly believe is now receiving the reward for his devilish invention in hell; an invention which allows a base and cowardly hand to take the life of a brave knight.' Fiction aside, Blaise de Montluc, who was wounded in the face by an arquebus ball in 1562, expressed identical sentiments when he wrote of many valiant men 'being slain for the most part by the most pitiful fellows, and the greatest cowards.'

English Knights cross the Somme via the Blanchetaque ford on their way to the battle of Crécy 1346. (© Osprey Publishing Limited, artwork by Graham Turner from Crécy 1346 (Campaign 71) by David Nicolle)

It may however be argued that the knight was obsolete long before the introduction of gunpowder, the English longbowmen at Crécy having shown how vulnerable he was to a missile attack from massed ranks of lower class troops. But anachronistic or not, the knight took three centuries to die from his obsolescence, because improvements in plate armour gave renewed protection against arrows until challenged afresh by the arquebus. In Japan, however, instead of facing massed ranks of archers, the Japanese samurai were the archers, and spent many hours practising the discharge of bow from a horse's back, skills that survive today in the traditional martial art of yabusame. The foot soldiers usually carried only naginata (glaives), and it is not until the mid-15th century, when armies were swelled by casual recruitment, that we read of foot soldiers acting as missile troops.

The result of these different traditions was that the battle of Cerignola in 1503, where volleys of European arquebuses pierced knightly armour for the first time, was effectively a repeat of the Crécy and Agincourt experience using stronger weapons of offence and defence. However, the battle of Nagashino in 1575, which was Japan's Cerignola, was far more of a radical change because mounted samurai had never had to contend with any sort of missile volleys. François de la Noue, an experienced Huguenot commander, wrote in 1598 that 'Arquebusiers, shooting within twenty paces just in the face of the horse, in my opinion will maim the whole first ranks of the squadron', a remark that could almost be a comment on Nagashino, where Nobunaga's 3,000 arquebusiers did precisely that to the mounted Takeda samurai.

Nevertheless, the arquebus had considerable drawbacks. A slow rate of fire, a certain inaccuracy and a woeful inability to work at all when rain soaked its smouldering match begged the question why such a weapon should have supplanted the longbowman, who could launch fifteen arrows a minute. Yet all these handicaps could be overcome through training and the development of organised volley firing, a technique that was first used in Japan by Oda Nobunaga in 1554 at the battle of Muraki. This was an attack on a castle, where Nobunaga used relays of arquebusiers firing from the edge of the moat, producing similar effects to those that prompted the comments of the Englishman Robert Barret, who noted a 'vollie of musket or hargebuze goeth with more terrour, fury and execution, then doth your vollie of arrows'.

The volley firing at Nagashino also illustrated the need to progress from a form of warfare that emphasised individual fighting to one that involved group actions and cooperation between arms. This alone was a challenge to the pride of a knight or a samurai who had been steeped in an elite and individualistic tradition. However, both societies met the challenge. At Agincourt the English knights and archers realised that they had to work together to secure the victory, just as when, a century later, it became apparent that arquebusiers were very vulnerable to attack from unbroken cavalry if they stood alone. At Riberac (1568) a tight unit of arquebusiers were scattered by a charge of knights after they had fired, and four years later in Japan a devastating mounted assault by the Takeda samurai performed a similar feat at Mikata ga hara. The solution to the problem in Europe was to combine the arquebusiers in some way with that other great innovation, the hedge of pikes. The Swiss are associated particularly with the perfecting of tactics involving this otherwise clumsy weapon, with which they won a series of victories until being overcome themselves at Marignano in 1515. This defeat, however, merely acted as a spur towards the combination of the two arms. As Matthew Sutcliffe put it in 1593, 'The charge of horsemen against shot ... is mortall if they be not either garded with pikes, or have the vantage of ditches, or hedges, or woods, where they cannot reach them.'

It is therefore not surprising to find both solutions of polearms and field fortifications reflected in the Japanese experience. The famous fences of Nagashino that protected the ashigaru arquebusiers were only half the story. Standing beside them were hundreds of other foot soldiers armed with 5.6 metre long nagae-yari, pikes in all but name. Waiting behind them were the samurai, ready to go in with spear and sword, and willing to defer their moment of individual glory until the moment was right in this classic illustration of the combination of arms.

Cannon and Castles

The experience of the two military revolutions diverges somewhat with the development of gunpowder weapons of a larger size. The psychological shock of cannon fire against a densely packed arquebus and pike phalanx was almost as devastating as were its physical effects. A single cannon ball could take out more than twenty men, and at the battle of Ravenna in 1512 one shot is alleged to have killed thirty armoured knights. At the battle of Fornovo in 1495 the Swiss packed 3,000 men into a 60 metre square. At Bicocca in 1522 their formation consisted of several rectangles each containing 7,500 men standing side by side, so a cannon ball could hardly miss, but the samurai were spared such torment. Field artillery was never developed as a specialist arm, and in any case the typical Japanese field formation was a much looser arrangement from which defence could be quickly converted into lively offence. The way in which a Swiss pike square could make its steady and crushing advance while keeping formation also bears little resemblance to a typical Japanese army's advance, where the word 'charge' is the most frequently used verb in contemporary battle descriptions.

A further common aspect of the two military revolutions was the development of fortifications. In the popular view the heavy cannon of Europe merely blasted the medieval walls into redundancy. The fall of Constantinople to Turkish heavy artillery in 1453 sent shockwaves round Christian Europe, and the Reconquista of the Spanish kingdom of Granada was to a large extent an artillery war, the siege of Malaga in 1487 being the last recorded occasion in Europe of the use of trebuchets. Old-style castles were very vulnerable to gunfire because the high and thin walls of medieval fortresses had been built in this way as a protection against scaling ladders and siege towers. The fortress revolution involved the use of artillery and the building of lower, thicker walls, which were not always of stone: fortifications of earth, which absorbed the cannon shot, could be built at a fraction of the cost. Cannon were also found to be as useful for defending castles as they were for attacking them, hence the evelopment of artillery walls and gun emplacements. The result was the emergence of what is known as the trace italienne, a complex, low-walled fortress characterised not by tall towers and curtain walls but by triangular artillery bastions located behind wide ditches.

The Japanese parallels are very interesting. The earlier yamashiro style of castle, whereby a hill was stripped of its forest cover and then literally carved up into a series of horizontal baileys, each allowing a clear field of defensive fire, took on a more formidable aspect with the construction on the surfaces of these slopes of the huge stone walls that are such a feature of Japanese castle design. Having little to fear from long-range artillery, these fortresses were designed to repel assault and allow counter-attack, but their squat, angular walls and deep ditches bear a strong resemblance to contemporary European designs. In both cases these fortresses provided a barracks and a refuge for large armies commanded by members of the knightly class.

In conclusion, the introduction of firearms did not automatically bring about the abolition of either knights or samurai. Instead both knights and samurai adapted to the changed circumstances, and used the military innovations for their own benefits in the achievement of victory and personal glory. Why else is it that on the bas-relief on the wall of the palace of Charles V in Granada there is the depiction of a mounted knight in full armour accompanied by a cannon? Artillery even had its own patron saint, Saint Barbara. If the way to fight was by using volleys of arquebusiers then their leaders would enthusiastically embrace the technique, if for no other reason than that the result of their endeavours would be to lay an enemy open to the glorious samurai spears or the noble knightly lance. Even the horse, that quintessential badge of both knight and samurai, could be temporarily discarded, because if conditions dictated that mounted warfare was inappropriate then both knight and samurai would dismount, and again saw no disgrace in it. The English knights dismounted at Agincourt, as did the Japanese samurai at Tennoji in 1615. Young noblemen of Venice often served on fighting galleys, and during the Granada Wars Spain's 'Great Captain', Gonzalo de Cordoba, donned an infantryman's helmet and led attacks on Moorish forts, gaining great glory the while. Anything could be adapted, adopted and improved, particularly if it enhanced the warrior's individual stature and preserved the aristocratic status quo.

The Fate of the Vanquished Greater differences between knights and samurai arise when we turn from the technology of the military revolution to its more personal expression. Medieval Europe espoused the great tradition of ransom, and the high prices that could be asked for a captured nobleman made the wholesale slaughter of knights an economic nonsense. When the King of France was captured at Poitiers in 1356 he was almost crushed to death in the scrum of Englishmen eager to claim him as a prize, and his eventual redemption almost bankrupted his kingdom. Yet by the beginning of the 16th century this tradition was beginning to fade. The mass and often anonymous slaughter by arquebus and cannon made the capture of a particularly valuable individual a difficult matter. Prisoners of high rank also tended to be claimed by the government rather than his actual captor, so the rewards were much less when filtered down through the hierarchy. With such incentives gone, savagery could flourish, and when the Swiss castle of Grandson was tricked into surrendering to the Burgundians in 1476 the entire garrison were either drowned in the lake or hanged from the walnut trees on its shore. When the Swiss took their revenge no quarter was either asked or expected. The Burgundian garrison of the recaptured Grandson were all flung to their deaths from the battlements except for one nobleman who pleaded that he was worth trying to ransom. Ransom for money was unknown in Japan, and the closest parallel to it was the practice of hostage taking, although warriors defeated on a battlefield were rarely taken captive. Instead the hostages were usually members of a lord's family, whose throats could be cut at the least sign of resistance, and peace was frequently concluded by an exchange of family prisoners. With the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate something resembling a national hostage scheme was set up when the daimyôs' families were required to reside in the Shogun's capital as a guarantee of good behaviour. When battles occurred in Japan the samurai collected heads rather than living bodies, severed heads being the time-honoured proof of duty done and the finest invoice for payment to present to one's lord. Yet here too the Sengoku Jidai (the 'Age of War', i.e. the 16th century) saw changes. Instead of beheading the defeated the Japanese began to recycle them. The hoary myth of a samurai's undying and unflinching loyalty to his lord, which had a basis in solid fact, ran into difficulties when that lord was either defeated or dead, or both. Contrary to the popular view, samurai warfare rarely ended with acts of either mass slaughter or mass seppuku (suicide). Defeated daimyô were often encouraged to surrender their territories for the guarantee of having their original holdings returned to them in exchange for a pledge of allegiance. A good example is the process by which Takeda Shingen expanded his domains. Rivals such as the Sanada of Shinano were first defeated then absorbed, and their leaders took their places among the Takeda 'Twenty-Four Generals', Shingen's most trusted retainers. When the Takeda were defeated in their turn in 1582, many of their number passed over into the service of the victorious Tokugawa. There were, however, many times in Japanese warfare when the demands of personal glory or the need for security made the absorption of an enemy impractical, and in these conditions head collecting still continued with undiminished fervour. A good example is found in the account of the taking of the Korean castle of Namwon in 1597 by Okochi Hidemoto. After scaling the walls the Japanese assault party were faced with a counter-attack from mounted men, yet even in all this confusion and danger personal achievement was all important, in particular over the samurai obsession with taking one's opponent's head: Using his two shaku one sun blade Okochi cut at the right groin of the enemy on horseback and he tumbled down. As his groin was excruciatingly painful from this one assault the enemy fell off on the left hand side. There were some samurai standing nearby and three of them struck at the mounted enemy to take his head. Four men had now cut him down, but as his plan of attack had been that the abdominal cut would make him fall off on the left, Okochi came running round so that he would not be deprived of his head. Okochi Hidemoto' s master, Ota Kazuyoshi, is also honoured as follows during the siege of Ulsan in 1598: Afterwards they performed the head inspection ceremony for the men's eleven meritorious heads. Kato Kiyomasa's men had taken one head. Asano Nagayoshi's men had taken one head, but Ota Kazuyoshi's men had taken a total of nine heads. Everyone inside the castle noticed this and praised him, saying, 'While Kiyomasa owns half of Higo province, and Nagayoshi owns the whole province of Kai, they only took one head each, yet Kazuyoshi is a person of low degree and has taken nine heads. Indeed, he conducts himself as a fine, brave samurai.' Yet even the practice of head collection is not without its parallels in Europe. The Venetians employed Albanian light cavalrymen, called stradiots, as mercenaries and paid them one ducat for every enemy head they brought back. At the battle of Fornovo in 1495 one stradiot, despairing of being able to find a French head for his reward cut off instead the head of a local priest and claimed it as a warrior's. The Treatment of Civilians In all ages war has brought death and destruction to those unfortunate enough to be caught up in its wake. The Black Prince's chevauchée raids caused terror in 14th century France. In 1544 the Earl of Surrey said to Henry VIII that 'Edinburgh had been well burnt', and in Ireland in 1593 Sir Arthur Chichester recorded the following about a raid along Lough Neagh: 'We have killed above one hundred people of all sorts, besides such as were burnt, how many I know not. We spare none of what quality or sex soever, and it has bred much terror in the people, who heard not a drum nor saw not a fire there for a long time.' The depredations sometimes inflicted upon the inhabitants of a defeated or surrendered town could be much worse. The sack of Antwerp by the Spanish in 1576 was an orgy of rape and plunder which led to the loss of 7,000 lives, and when Maastricht fell in 1579 one-third of the city's women and children were slaughtered on the spot or died from the brutalities inflicted upon them. A comparison with Japan, however, throws up a very different claim with respect to the samurai tradition. This belief states that because nearly all their wars were civil wars, then not only were the samurai no worse than their European counterparts, they were actually much better. As the oppressed peasant could easily cross a provincial border to till the fields of an enemy, so the argument goes, there was no cruelty against civilians. The samurai, therefore, were immune from the tendency to random violence and economic devastation inherent in contemporary Europe. This is a considerable claim to make, and in support of this view it must be admitted that the most dramatic example of a peasant uprising against a cruel daimyô occurred two decades after the civil wars had ceased. This was the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637 to 1638, directed against the tyrant Matsukura Shigemasa, who was given to tying peasants inside straw raincoats and setting fire to them. From this it may be argued that if Matsukura had lived at a time when one's neighbour was by definition one's rival then self-interest alone would have prevented him from acting in such an outrageous manner. The behaviour of Japanese forces abroad during the 20th century is then seen as an aberration of the samurai tradition, and not in any way as its consequence. It is indeed difficult to tease out much evidence of deliberate civilian casualties from contemporary Japanese writings, though this may simply be that the compilers did not think that such matters were worth recording. In the early war tales we read of civilian houses being set on fire as an act of war by the ruthless rebel Taira Masakado, and similar acts occur during the Gempei Wars, but these incidents tend to be portrayed as the actions of a maverick. When Takeda Shingen was repulsed before Odawara castle in 1569, he burned the town of Odawara before retiring, but when Toyotomi Hideyoshi took Kagoshima in 1587 and Odawara in 1590 there was nothing that remotely resembled the sack of a European town. By contrast, civilian deaths are implied in the accounts of wars conducted against peasant armies, such as Nobunaga's campaign against the Ikkô sectarians or the Shimabara Rebellion, where the distinction between soldier and non-combatant was blurred and the rebels took shelter in fortresses along with their families. The fall of Osaka castle in 1615, where the castle walls surrounded a city, inevitably led to many civilian deaths. However, the Korean campaign added a different dimension. Here the fortified town often replaced the isolated castle as a battle site, and many civilian deaths must be inferred from the huge number of heads taken at such conflicts as Chinju and Namwon. But the most powerful evidence comes in the form of a unique and little known document. We noted above how Ota Kazuyoshi had taken along with him to Korea the chronicler Okochi Hidemoto. Ota Kazuyoshi, however, was accompanied not by one chronicler, but by two, because he had also taken along as personal physician and chaplain a Buddhist monk called Keinen. Keinen kept a diary in which he recorded his observations and emotions about the human suffering inflicted on the Korean population. So critical was Keinen that the diary remained unpublished in Japan until 1965. Keinen's diary entries covering the fall of Namwon castle in 1597 make very different reading when compared to Okochi's account of the same siege. When the castle fell he left the town and saw dead bodies lying near the road like grains of sand. 'My emotions were such that I could not even glance at them.' As he walked further on he found more bodies in nearby houses, 'and this went on into the fields and mountains'. The bodies were of innocent men, women and children. To the samurai chronicler of the Wakizaka family, however, the slaughter was just a further stage of the military operation: From early dawn of the following morning we gave chase and hunted them in the mountains and scoured the villages for the distance of one day's travel. When cornered, we made a wholesale slaughter of them. During a period of ten days we seized 10,000 of the enemy, but we did not cut off their heads. We cut off their noses, which told us how many heads there were. By this time [Wakizaka] Yasuharu's total of heads was over 2,000. Herzog Hans zu Sachsen, a 16th century knight about to enter the lists to partake in the German 'Gestech', a variant of jousting. (© Copyright Osprey Publishing Limited, artwork by Angus McBride from Knights at Tournament (Elite 17) by Christopher Gravett) The collection of noses in lieu of heads was to become a horrid characteristic of the second Korean invasion of 1597–98. The Japanese dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was growing increasingly insane, insisted upon proof of his soldiers' loyalty and achievements like the reward-giving generals of the ancient civil wars, but the process was hampered by the logistical problems of shipping heads. Hideyoshi therefore began to receive a steady stream of noses, the ghastly trophies being pickled in salt and packed into wooden barrels. Each one was meticulously enumerated and recorded by the yokome-shû (inspectors unit) before leaving Korea. In Japan they were suitably interred in a mound near Hideyoshi's Great Buddha, and there they remain to this day inside Kyoto's least mentioned and most often avoided tourist attraction, the grassy burial mound that bears the erroneous name of Mimizuka, the 'Mound of Ears'. In spite of there being several references in the diaries of the Korean Admiral Yi Sun-sin to the practice of sending severed Japanese ears to the Korean Court, the practice from the Korean side was confined to soldiers on the battlefield. Keinen's diary, and several other samurai chronicles, confirms that the Japanese carried out the practice on non-combatants. The chronicle of a certain Motoyama contains the stark and unambiguous statement that men and women, down to the newborn infants, everyone was wiped out, no one was left alive. It is also strange to read in Keinen's diary his evidence of the cruel treatment meted out by the samurai to the Japanese labourers press-ganged into the invading army to complete the building of Ulsan castle. They were forced to work alongside Korean captives and treated equally badly. Their fate stirred Keinen to pity. While recognising that everyone in the Japanese army was involved in the desperate construction programme 'from those who are in the arquebus squads or who wear horô (i.e. the samurai), down to the boatmen and the labourers', Keinen noticed a very different attitude being shown to those who were soldiers and those who were not. 'To prevent carelessness heads are cut off,' he writes, 'but blame is not shared, and to the sorrow of the peasants it is their heads that they cut off and stick up at the crossroads.' In the intense pressure to have the walls of Ulsan finished before the Chinese army arrived, the labourers were clearly regarded as expendable, and were worked until they dropped. The astonishing thing is that these peasants would be expected to till the lands of these same samurai overlords when they returned to Japan. But in the unreal atmosphere of the Korean campaign there was no thought for the future other than the immediate short-term goal of completing the defences. 'With no distinction being made between day and night,' writes Keinen, 'men are made to exceed their personal limits. There are beatings for the slightest mistake in performing a task such as tying knots. In many cases I have witnessed, this is the last ever occasion on which the person gets into trouble,' and in his diary entry for 23 December he makes one of his most despairing statements of all: 'I am fearful of these things. Hell cannot be in any other place except here.' Such observations remind us that both the samurai tradition and the knightly tradition had a very dark side. It may well not have been evident at home, but it was certainly the prevailing image abroad to those who were its victims. Thanks to Keinen, we now know that the samurai may have been no worse than their European counterparts, but they were certainly no better. Chivalry and Bushido Being faced with such horrors on a daily basis, and with the ever present likelihood of one's own death, it would be foolish to think of either breed of military aristocrats as blind to the reality of their calling. As well as glorifying the individual warrior, Froissart's Chroniques and Heike Monogatari also performed a similar function in making the practice of war into something noble, as both societies responded to the realities of their profession by a similar mixture of group solidarity, nostalgia and snobbery. In Europe it was called chivalry. In Japan in the early years of the Edo Period it was to be called bushido, but the foundations were there centuries before in the loyalty and bravery that tradition demanded from the lowliest samurai. The code itself may have been unwritten, but the exploits of one's ancestors provided sufficient case studies for its precepts to be thoroughly understood, even if they could not always be realised. It is very tempting to look back from our modern world and see the cults of chivalry and bushido as ways of coping with the horrors of war, or even of assuaging guilt by sanitising its profession on pages where civilians never appear. To counter this view it has to be noted that the contemporary world did not feel the need for this, because the samurai appear to have had no guilty feelings whatsoever about what they did, including the massacres in Korea. In Yoshino Jingoza'emon's account of the fall of Pusan in 1592, Japan's first victory of the war, he writes of an orgy of slaughter during which the frenzied samurai even cut the heads off dogs and cats. But it is all reported in a very matter of fact way. One is driven to the conclusion that if there was any 'reality of war' from which the chroniclers felt a need to shield their readers, then it was no more than the reality that wars were actually fought between anonymous groups of vulgar soldiers in an obscuring fog of cannon smoke, a concept that may indeed have held real terror for the proud individual samurai. The greatest element of unreality that appears in the chronicles of bushido and chivalry is that romanticised descriptions of battles had the effect of promoting an ideal of warfare that rarely existed. Studies have shown that both the Chroniques of Froissart and the battle sections in Heike Monogatari, which were both written at about the same time, were not eyewitness accounts but an expression of 'how warfare should have been' to an author looking back through rose-tinted spectacles. The exploits of Minamoto Yosh*tsune in Heike Monogatari, and Kusunoki Masashige in Taiheiki, therefore set impossible and largely fictionalised standards of conduct to which later generations might aspire. For example, the early Konjaku Monogatari reminds its readers that 'To overcome timidity, you must forget entirely about yourself and your wife and children.' This theme crops up later in the Heike Monogatari, which says, 'In battle, even though a parent or child is struck and killed, the eastern warrior rides over the body and keeps on fighting.' The same sentiment is then repeated almost word for word in the Taiheiki, where it states that, 'although lords and vassals were killed, they paid no heed to the number but rode over the bodies,' a good example of an idealised tradition growing with every repetition. The result was that although Japanese battles in the Warring States Period were won through a skilful if unglamorous combination of samurai, foot soldiers and artillery, it was nostalgia and an appeal to precedent that still ruled supreme in the samurai mind. Thus it was that the capture of Ch'ungju, a particularly bloody struggle in Korea, was compared romantically to the battle of Ichi no tani in 1184, and the decision whether to attack at the battle of Chiksan in 1597 took into account the similarity of its situation to Nagashino. Even ancient Chinese chronicles were pressed into service for providing glorious examples and parallels from the past. Heike Monogatari has many passages describing such idealised warfare, where hostilities begin with chivalric challenges to single combat, and all fights are conducted cleanly, nobly and with enthusiasm. Yet in both cultures these idealised examples of battlefield behaviour sometimes needed a little extra help. At the battle of Mauron in 1352, according to Baker's Chronicle, the French 'set up their position with a steep mountain slope behind them so that they could not fly. Their purpose was to increase their zeal for fighting by knowledge of the impossibility of flight.' At the siege of Chokoji in 1570 Shibata Katsuie deliberately smashed all the water storage jars before leading his men in a desperate sally out of the castle that succeeded in driving the enemy away. This was the harsh historical reality of warfare, as was the widespread recognition that a surprise night attack, often to the accompaniment of burning buildings and mobs of foot soldiers, provided a better guarantee of victory than an openly declared challenge. When Minamoto Yoriyoshi burns Kuriyagawa, the chronicler Mutsu Waki has him exclaim, 'Let a mighty wind repay the loyalty of an old minister. Send the wind! Kindle the flames!' The European experience was very similar, and Denifle, the French historian of the Hundred Years War, wrote that 'fire was the constant ally of the English'. So frequent are the references to the use of fire as a weapon in Japan that many a samurai could have expressed in terms of their own culture the sentiments of the Margrave of Brandenburg, who wrote that fire 'gave glory to war in the same way that the Magnificat illuminated Vespers'. One major difference between chivalry and bushido is the total absence of courtly love from the Japanese version. The European knight, fighting with his lady's sleeve affixed to his helmet and dashing off a quick sonnet when there was a lull in the fighting, has no samurai equivalent. In the Gikeiki, a life of Minamoto Yosh*tsune, there is a scene where the hero seduces a young woman, but his underlying motive is the acquisition of a Chinese military scroll possessed by her father! When women appear in the accounts of samurai heroism it is usually in a self-immolating role as they commit suicide when a castle falls, such as the wife of the keeper of Sakasai castle who lifted the castle's bronze bell on to her shoulders and drowned herself in the moat. However, a factor common to both codes was the emphasis placed on a willingness to die for one's lord or for the cause. In Japan the ultimate expression of this was the committing of seppuku, otherwise known as hara kiri, the act of ritual suicide that was admired by friend and foe alike. In Europe the rare mentions of suicide after a battle are invariably the result of panic and terror, and are never seen as a noble deed. In 1333 many Scots drowned themselves in the sea after their defeat at Halidon Hill, because they anticipated correctly what would be the fate of any captives. Samurai killed themselves to avoid the disgrace of capture or to make amends for an error. But no European knight could have understood the attitude of Yamamoto Kansuke, who killed himself at the battle of Kawanakajima in 1461. When he perceived that his battle plan had gone disastrously wrong, he took responsibility for the failure in this most dramatic fashion. Suicide also offered a way to follow one's lord in death. The account of Ulsan in Taikoki tells of a certain Reizei Motomitsu, who, 'wielded his naginata [glaive] like a water wheel, slaying fifteen or sixteen of the nearby enemy', before being cut down, to the great distress of his followers. Because Shiromatsu Zen'emonnojo, Igazaki Matabeinojo and Yoshida Tarobei were by chance somewhere else, they regretted that they had not been there with him to be killed in battle. So when they took possession of Motomitsu's corpse they performed the ritual cutting open their bellies in the shape of a cross on that very spot. The greatest similarity between chivalry and bushido lies in the area of self-belief, because the mere existence of warriors' codes reinforced their perception of themselves as an elite. When Kato Kiyomasa attacked the Jurchens of Manchuria in 1592 his sole motivation was 'to show the savages the mettle of the Japanese'. In reporting the siege of Namwon, Okochi Hidemoto refers to foot soldiers as 'our inferiors', and when Lord Rivers, a veteran of the battle of Bosworth, went to Spain to assist in the Reconquista, a Spanish author could comment about the English knights that, 'Though from a remote and somewhat barbarous island, yet they believed themselves to be the most perfect men on earth.' Senior English Knights of the latter stages of the Hundred Years War. (© Osprey Publishing Limited, artwork by Graham Turner from Henry V and the Conquest of France 1416–53 (Men-at-Arms 317) by Paul Knight) From Knight to Cavalryman So what of the ultimate fate of our two archetypal figures, the knight and the samurai? The developments that made up the two 16th century military revolutions changed the nature of warfare in both societies, but in neither case did they lead to the abolition of their aristocratic military class. Instead of disappearing in the quixotic smoke of gunpowder both knight and samurai survived and prospered, and instead of being overcome by a military revolution, each joined in with enthusiasm in a military evolution. The only caveat placed on this development was that the innovations should be controlled in such a way as to leave the aristocratic and leadership aspects of their calling very much intact. It was only when this was no longer possible in reality, and heroic chronicles could no longer sustain it even in fiction, that the knightly role declined, and it is in the knightly decline, as the 16th century passed into the 17th, that we find the widest variation between the two military cultures of Europe and Japan. The triumph of the Tokugawa family at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 eventually led to over two centuries of peace, but it was peace enforced by a totalitarian regime that closed its doors to European contact from 1639 onwards. This meant that the knight and the samurai would once again tread separate paths of development. In Europe the innovations of the military revolution continued to be expanded by men such as Gustavus Adolphus and Oliver Cromwell, and over the next century knights became transformed into cavalry. In this complex process the lance and the mace gave way to the pistol and the sword, but even if the knight discarded his armour, he lost little of his elite status. The aristocratic cavalry officer in his unspeakable finery was the direct heir of the medieval ideal, and the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava illustrates a particular aspect of arrogant knightly behaviour that would not have been out of place, nor any more sensible, at the battles of either Crécy or Nagashino. From Samurai to Swordsman In Japan things were somewhat different, because, in vivid contrast to the turmoil of Europe's Thirty Years War, the 'Pax Tokugawa' made Japan look back with nostalgia on an idealised samurai past, which a combination of politics and popular culture then began to transform into an equally idealistic samurai present. With no battles to fight the impetus of Japan's military revolution was quickly lost, and the Shimabara Rebellion, when a peasant army held out against the Shogun's forces, was a portent of a long, slow decline. Military technology continued to develop, but, shorn of purpose, it was a form of progress that was constantly looking over its shoulder with increased nostalgia. The result was the growth of a samurai tradition that became more and more separated from the actual practice of warfare, and the handling of large, well-disciplined armies was forgotten in a bizarre development of the cult of the individual warrior. While the European knight became the practical, modern, yet still aristocratic cavalryman, the mounted samurai warrior became transformed into the samurai swordsman, of which the most important feature was the way in which the hitherto little-regarded Japanese sword acquired a new life of its own as the classic samurai fetish. The above remark requires some clarification, because, although Japanese craftsmen were producing the world's most technically perfect swords from the 12th century onwards, prowess in a warrior had been measured by his skill at mounted archery, not by his reputation as a swordsman. The earliest expression equivalent to bushido is 'The Way of Horse and Bow', never 'The Way of the Sword', and most instances of single combat in Heike Monogatari are settled with a dagger rather than a sword. Even in the 16th century it was the spear, wielded from horseback or on foot, that was the samurai's primary weapon, not the sword. At one stage the arquebus almost became the samurai's weapon of choice, and there exists an impassioned letter from Asano Nagayoshi pleading that all troops coming to join him in the Korean campaign, including samurai, should be armed with guns. However, as we have seen, the revelation of the power of the arquebus when used for volley firing worked against this trend, and, because the wheel-lock pistol was developed in Japan after wars had ceased, the caracole of pistol-armed cavalry with which Europe became familiar was never seen on a Japanese battlefield. The long years of peace therefore ensured that into the place of a samurai tradition that had once taken pride in the skilful use of group fighting stepped the figure of the lone swordsman, and the sword, the 'soul of the samurai', began to reign supreme. It was both weapon and symbol, forged as a religious act and wielded with superhuman skill in a way that the battles of the Sengoku Jidai, with their firearms and hedges of spearmen, seldom witnessed. None the less it became a theme so dominant that one author, unaware of the tremendous arsenal possessed by the Tokugawa Shoguns, could actually write of Japan 'giving up the gun'. Japan may not actually have given up the gun, but circumstances meant that she had given up using it, and the nostalgia for an idealised and largely mythical samurai past, where individual swordsmen fought each other on battlefields, became transformed into an equally idealised samurai present. On many occasions the myths of the past fed into a brutal everyday reality, because the absence of battles to fight had resulted in a large number of unemployed samurai. Some were engaged as teachers of martial arts, some became Zen monks, but enough individual swordsmen, made desperate by boredom, avarice or poverty, ended up fighting each other at crossroads to ensure a steady supply of plots for the Japanese theatre. The re-enactment of such activities on the stage then ensured that a formerly exclusive and aristocratic samurai tradition entered popular Japanese culture as well, and was transmitted through kabuki plays, ukiyoe prints and on into the films of Akira Kurosawa, whose Seven Samurai is for many people all we know on earth of the samurai tradition, and all we need to know. By this time the knight and the samurai had long since gone their separate ways. These brothers in arms had for centuries developed similarly yet apart as aristocratic elites. They had then come together for a brief century when they faced similar challenges from new technology and responded in similar ways, only to part company dramatically, each to develop its own culture and sustain its own myths, which grew steadily more glorious with every year that passed. Further Reading Black, Jeremy (ed.), European Warfare 1453–1815 (UCL Press, 1999) Parker, Geoffrey, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the rise of the West 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1996) Turnbull, Stephen, Nagashino 1575 (Campaign 69) (Osprey, 2000) Turnbull, Stephen, The Samurai Sourcebook (Cassell, 1998) Turnbull, Stephen, Samurai Warfare (Cassell, 1996) Previous page (© Osprey Publishing. Article taken from Osprey Military Journal 3.1, Knights and Samurai - Brothers in Arms? Part 2)

Posted: 14 March 2005 at 3:32am | IP Logged

(Introduction to turnbull's book on Korean Invasion)

Samurai Invasion

Japan's Korean War 1592-1598

Stephen Turnbull

Posted: 28 March 2005 at 7:07am | IP Logged

http://www.koreanhistoryproject.org/Ket/Idx/KETIndex1203.h tm

Under a Single Sword  • Fifteenth century Choson's prejudice against foreign trade and commerce contributed to financial problems and the suspension of trade relations with Japan.  Oda Nobunaga emerges as the strongest of Japan's daimyo, intent upon unifying the Japanese under a single ruler.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the Europeans hotly pursued trade and colonialism in India, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia, the Korean kingdom of Choson lived in relative isolation, deeply embroiled in factionalism and power politics. While Choson's neighbors sought new ways to deal with the changing nature of foreign relations in the Far East, the Yi dynasty faced disastrous economic problems at home. Political factions fought to displace or eliminate their perceived enemies and, in the process, virtually neglected the country's economic health and the people's welfare.

The rising affluence of Choson's yangban landlords in the countryside compounded the country's existing economic problems as land tenure, tax laws and the military all declined in a state of confusion. Choson royalty, addicted to lives of luxury and pleasure-seeking, contributed a great deal to the massive squandering of Choson's financial resources. Not even the royal court was immune from the capacity to drain the nation's treasury. With each new king on the throne came new appointees to an expanding Merit Subjects roster, and with each new appointee came the obligatory awards and land grants needed to support them.

The Yi government's attempts to reform Choson's economy, driven largely by an intense desire to increase revenue, led to a further increase in the already steep financial burden borne by the populace. The bureaucrats in Seoul apparently never anticipated the dramatic impact of the almost punitive level of land taxes, tribute taxes and other special levies they imposed on the country. Faced with the sudden rise in taxes, many peasants simply gave up trying to meet the demand for ever more government revenue. In frustration, or because of economic necessity, thousands of peasants unable to make a living simply abandoned their farms and property. The inevitable result was a dramatic reduction in the nation's tax base and the government had few practical alternatives to make up the loss.

In the realm of foreign relations, the early Yi dynasty maintained a vassal relationship with Ming China, but behaved as an equal partner in its relations with other nations in the region. The Confucian-oriented government in Seoul, which disapproved of private trade, conducted its foreign relations almost exclusively under the guise of tribute and gifts. Their deeply-entrenched Confucian prejudice against commerce and finance contributed much to Choson's economic trouble during this period, since it effectively inhibited the growth of foreign trade and prevented the government from deriving any significant income from a potentially rich resource. The Yi government carefully maintained this fiction of "tribute" and the "exchange of gifts" throughout most of the fifteenth century.

Despite the government's strict adherence to Confucian philosophy, numerous secret business deals and private agreements existed just beneath the surface that supported a growing volume of covert commercial trade. Japanese vessels sailed into the treaty ports of Pusanp'o (modern Tongnae), Naeip'o (modern Ungch'on) and Yomp'o (modern Ulsan), and carried away large cargos of foodstuffs and dry goods to enrich the daimyo and merchants of western Japan (Figure 1). By 1510, the volume of goods moving through this "underground" market between grew to such an extent that King Chungjong's ministers felt it necessary to impose tight restrictions to stop it. Japanese traders reacted almost immediately to the government's crackdown on trade by staging violent protests in the treaty ports. Many of these demonstrations actually developed into armed uprisings against local Choson garrison commanders and it took the use of military force to suppress them. Choson responded to furor raised by the Japanese over the trade restrictions by closing its trade ports altogether and suspending trade with Japan.

The head of the So clan on Tsushima Island, who had become quite dependent on Choson imports, voiced his indignance over this action. After numerous entreaties to the Choson government, Tsushima and Choson reached a new trade agreement two years later, in 1512. King Chungjong permitted the resumption of trade under strictly limited terms, permitting only twenty-five ships per year to visit Choson. Nevertheless, one treaty port and two of the permanent Japanese trade missions remained closed. With the lone exception of vessels sent by the Shogun, King Chungjong made no allowances for ships sailing on special missions. Even under the trade restrictions imposed by Choson however, Japan maintained fairly widespread commercial relations in the Far East.

The So clan daimyo dealt directly with Seoul in part because the Ashikaga Shogunate had been in decline for years. The authority of Japan's central government had virtually disappeared early in the fifteenth century and the former stability and power of the shogunate gradually dissipated to the point where, by mid-century, it had lost all authority and control over the provinces. Neither the shogun nor the emperor had the power to restrict, let alone control, the growth of Japan's feudal houses.

With no powerful central administration to adjudicate disputes, political newcomers moved into the resulting power vacuum. Members of small, landowning, military families, many of whom were ambitious military men, gradually surpassed provincial constables to achieve influence over entire provinces. They frequently engaged each other in armed conflict to exert the actual control over different parts of Japan. As military men fell in combat, others rushed in to fill the void. Men who realized that all they needed to join the battle was a military force surrounded themselves with strong fighting men who held similar aims. Peasant farmers, oil sellers and blacksmiths built secure fortresses atop neighboring hills from which they could defend their rice crops. Unhindered by the shogun's forces from Kyoto, these men quickly began building small provincial kingdoms of their own, hoping to make a name for themselves, a "big name" - a daimyo. That is how the majority of Japan's daimyo came into being.

The political and territorial situation in mid-fifteenth century Japan was highly volatile. Nearly 260 independent feudal domains existed across the country, each each ruled by an autonomous daimyo who maintained his own army and lorded over his own small fiefdom. It was as if Japan had become a nation comprised of some 260 separate countries. The wealthier daimyo, those who could afford the new weapons and defenses, dominated the weaker and less affluent domains. Many of the civil wars fought during the Ashikaga Shogunate were fairly small-scale battles that involved neighboring warlords choosing up sides whenever a dispute broke out over succession to a warlordship. One of these disputes however, eventually erupted into open warfare.

For many years, Japan's two most powerful families, the Hosokawa and the Yamana, largely occupied themselves in succession disputes of other warlords, while managing to keep their own conflicts below the level of open warfare (Figure 2). In 1464 however, the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa resigned his position because it interfered with his desire to pursue personal pleasures. Yoshimasa and the Hosokawa family wanted Yoshimasa's younger brother, Yoshimi, to assume the title of shogun. Yoshimasa's wife, Tomiko, and the Yamana family wanted the shogunate to pass to Yoshimasa's son, Ashikaga Yoshihisa. As both sides maneuvered for advantage, the Hosokawa were busy interfering in a raging conflict between two members of the Hatakeyama family over who would be the new shogun's deputy, kanrei. When the Yamana asked Shogun Yoshimasa for permission to "chastise" the Hosokawa, the shogun refused. The Hosokawa tried to force the issue of succession when they took Yoshimi, occupied the shogunate headquarters in Kyoto and set up a fortified defense. Ashikaga Yoshimasa realized that if fighting broke out, the entire country would plunge into war because the shogun, occupied with a war in his own capital, would be seen as powerless to control regional conflicts.

Open warfare erupted in May 1467, as fighting broke out in the streets of Kyoto between the Hosokawa and Yamana. In late September, the powerful warlord Ouchi Masahiro joined forces with the Yamana and the fighting turned into true carnage. Little by little the raging battles slowly destroyed the capital city and reduced many of its buildings to ashes. By the end of the year much of Kyoto had been devestated and the war was largely being fought in trenches dug out of the rubble. Despite the fierce combat, no clear winner emerged. Both sides settled down for a protracted political and military fight.

In the midst of the fighting, Ashikaga Yoshimi, who was supported by the Hosokawa family, switched his allegiance to the Yamana, who supported his nephew, Ashikaga Yoshihisa. When the shogun declared his son to be a rebel, the Onin War shifted to a major conflict between the shogun (supported by the Hosokawa) and his brother (supported by the Yamana). The ten year long struggle known as the Onin War (1467-1477) spread into the provinces, where military families fought each other to extinction. The dead numbered in the thousands. In one grisly engagement at the Shokokuji monastery in 1467, Ouchi Masahiro reportedly collected over eight cartloads of severed Hosokawa heads.

The war began losing steam in 1473 when the leaders of the Hosokawa and Yamana families died. One by one, the various daimyo factions submitted to Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. The Onin War finally ended in 1477 when Ouchi Masahiro finally submitted to Yoshimasa and went home with his troops. Ten years of civil war had left the imperial city of Kyoto in ruin, virtually destroyed the Ashikaga bakufu and made the Hosokawa family puppetmasters of the Ashikaga shoguns. Although fighting had ceased in and around Kyoto, civil strife remained endemic throughout Japan, with vassals battling to overthrow their daimyo or where succession disputes began drawing in the forces of outside daimyo to shift the balance of power. For nearly three generations, numerous wars were fought for control of the puppet government of the shogunate. Although this period is commonly referred to as the Warring States Period (sengoku jidai), it had little to do with "warring states."  It was really a time of warfare among competing families and warlords.

As the daimyo grew in power, they began carving up the country into clearly defined domains over which they held complete control. In the majority of cases, daimyo built their small empires through outright usurpation. Existing military families were murdered by their subjects. Brothers, even fathers, were deposed. Daughters were traded like horses to secure alliances. Estates slowly grew in size from one hilltop fortress to two, then three, surrounding a fertile valley. Next, a neighbor's lands were seized, further expanding the territory, and so it went. One by one, estates were surrounded and captured, then they themselves were swallowed within someone else's expanding territory, until at the end there were no more lands left to occupy, and there is only one winner. Individual daimyos paid a tremendous price to play this deadly game, and a century of conflict so weakened the bulk of Japanese warlords, that by the end of the Warring States period, only a dozen or so warlord families still held power in Japan.

Each daimyo became a paternalistic and absolute ruler within his own realm. Their feudal kingdoms varied greatly in size, but each tended to be a compact, well-defined political unit, perhaps subordinate to some other local domain, but entirely independent of the emperor or shogun. Headquartered in a central castle, a class of military officers and governing officials formed a small court that assisted in ruling the territory. These men lived on the hereditary lands or the salaries their daimyo assigned them. The peasantry formed the backbone of each kingdom's economic life and served as a manpower reservoir for the military.

The warrior aristocracy furnished administrators for the government and officers for the army. The daimyo's army was manned by well-trained samurai warriors, the elite of the military class. The daimyo himself stood as the elite of the samurai. Before the arrival of the Portuguese, these armies were composed primarily of units of foot-soldiers and armed cavalry. Especially trained foot-soldiers carried the bow, the original samurai prestige weapon, and most were effective as sharpshooters.

In the struggle for national supremacy among Japan's numerous feudal kingdoms, the larger and stronger daimyo either conquered or dominated their weaker neighbors. This process exemplified the notion of gekokujo, "the low overcome the high," the savage principle of opportunistic rebellion that swept away Japan's old order. The most critical of the daimyo battles during the Onin War took place in the region between the Kanto Plain and Kyoto, an area controlled by four powerful and well-entrenched clans:  the Uesugi clan of Echigo Province, the Takeda clan in Kai Province, the Imagawa clan of Suruga Province, and the Hojo clan led by Ujiyasu, Lord of the Kanto.

Oda Nobunaga was born in 1534, to the off-shoot of an old daimyo family of south central Honshu whose hereditary fiefdom comprised some three provinces to the east of Kyoto near the modern city of Nagoya. He inherited his father's domains at the age of 15, including an "army" that may have numbered only a few hundred men. From these meager beginnings, he launched his bid for supremacy with ruthless ambition. Using his family's small kingdom as a base for further operations, he set about consolidating his power. This fast-rising daimyo used charisma, skill, and luck to subdue any combination of rivals that stood in the way of his ultimate goal in life;  to bring all of Japan "under a single sword," tenka-fubu."

A high-minded, extremely self-driven man, Oda Nobunaga's rise to power was slow, deliberate and unforgiving. This iron-fisted ruler once accused a young maid-servant of improperly cleaning a room and had her executed for no reason other than she had left a small fruit stem on the floor. Known for his ruthless vindictiveness, Nobunaga once captured a man who had taken a shot at him years earlier, had the man buried in the ground with only his head exposed, then had it sawed off.

Oda Nobunaga strongly disliked esoteric Buddhism and carried on a running battle with the secular power of the Buddhists. To their dismay, he openly encouraged foreign trade and eagerly embraced expanded contact with the West. He was fascinated with Christianity and welcomed Portugal's Jesuit missionaries to Japan. His long-standing battle against Buddhist secular power contributed in large part toward his friendly attitude toward the Jesuits, an attitude that may have played a role in the success of Christian missionary activity around the Kyoto area during this period. The loyalty that developed between Japanese Christians and a distant, alien pope however, caused many Japanese to see Christianity as a potentially subversive influence in Japan.

A bold military tactician, Oda Nobunaga shrewdly embraced Western technology—firearms, in particular. Firearms, primarily the bulky European arquebus, had been appearing in Japan since the late fifteenth century. Although these heavy, unwieldy weapons could not be used in rain or snow and had a disturbing tendency to explode when fired, Oda Nobunaga saw the promise they held as a new military weapon. He became the first Japanese to develop both offensive and defensive tactics built around the use of firearms. In addition to retraining his armies to use the new tactics, he built massive stone forts that would resist the new firearms. He was also the first Japanese leader to put iron-cladding on his warships, a modification that made them virtually unbeatable.

The introduction of matchlock rifles into Japan in 1542 by the Portuguese changed the whole character of Japan's military force. To some samurai, the rifle represented an encroachment of foreign culture onto the battlefield, the most traditional of all Japanese social arenas. They believed the use of this rather crude weapon defiled both the user and the victim, who was thereby deprived of an honorable death. Noble beliefs aside, wars were fought to be won, and the daimyo who resisted the use of firearms tended to be either very rare, or very dead. The rifle quickly became an ideal weapon, highly valued by samurai warriors. The average foot soldier needed only a minimum amount of training to be able to fire it with all the accuracy it could provide. The more creative swordsmiths in Japan became gunsmiths and produced vast quantities of the matchlock rifles.

Protected on their eastern flank by a politically beneficial alliance with Tokugawa Ieyasu, forces under Oda Nobunaga seized Kyoto in 1568, and the remnants of its imperial and shogunal courts in some twenty other provinces. He masterfully used his Western cannon and rifle-equipped army in battles against the Hojo and Takeda daimyo. At the Battle of Nagashino, Oda Nobunaga lined up three ranks of matchlockmen to face down Takeda's cavalry. Volley-firing troops virtually destroyed the hard charging horsemen on such a colossal scale that it produced a revolution in tactical thinking among the daimyo.

From as far back as Japan's medieval period, beginning after the Heike War, the monks of the Mt. Hiei monastery just outside Kyoto had played a significant role in the political and military course of Japanese history. Unlike the Buddhists at Nara, the Mt. Hiei Buddhists did not exercise direct control over their followers in the imperial court. The best students remained in the monastery, while the others graduated into official positions in the government or the imperial court. The Mt. Hiei monastery, officially known as the "Center for the Protection of the Nation," became the most influential institution in Japan. While Oda Nobunaga consolidated his position in the Kyoto region, local forces including monks from the Tendai Buddhist stronghold on Mt. Hiei arose in strong opposition.

Seeing Mt. Hiei as a "wild card" threat to the nation's future stability, Oda Nobunaga turned his wrath against the Buddhists. In 1571, he attacked the sprawling complex and university at Mt. Hiei. In the process of destroying the great monastery and burning some three thousand buildings to the ground, his warriors hunted down and slaughtered every single Mt. Hiei monk regardless of their age or innocence. Nearly sixteen hundred monks and villagers died in the terrifying bloodbath, including a number of women and children. In less than five years, Oda Nobunaga's warriors destroyed the power of the great Buddhist monasteries and forced other centers of monastic power into submission.

More than a century of incessant localized civil war had split Japan among a score or so of the leading daimyo and their domains came to represent a unified and efficient system of local government. Because of their military heritage however, most of these daimyo concentrated on developing their military strength rather than strengthening their administrative skills. In the process, the more powerful daimyo, those who ruled several provinces, built very efficient samurai armies. Oda Nobunaga confiscated the lands of those he conquered and either absorbed them into his own domain or assigned them to his vassal daimyo. He cemented the loyalty of his growing force of retainers with grants of property seized from defeated daimyo and revoked the peasantry's right to bear arms so that no daimyo could forge an instant army out of local conscripts. Through victory after victory, Oda Nobunaga established himself as the first of Japan's "super daimyo."

More Worlds to Conquer  • Toyotomi Hideyoshi continues the unification process in Japan, taking the role of Regent following the death of Oda Nobunaga.  After establishing his own supremacy over Nobunaga's remaining daimyo, Hideyoshi opened contacts with Seoul in preparation for his planned invasion of the peninsula.

When Oda Nobunaga took control of Kyoto in 1576, Japan was a nation long overdue for reunification. Despite his many accomplishments, Nobunaga never claimed suzerainty over all of Japan. Instead, he seated himself at the head of a thoroughly centralized regional power that controlled thirty-two of Japan's sixty-six provinces. On a rocky plateau overlooking the eastern shore of Lake Biwa, just east of Kyoto, he built the great Azuchi castle to control Kyoto and the surrounding lands (Figure 1). Nobunaga saw this fortress as a great symbol of his wealth and power and spared no expense to lavishly decorate the castle both inside and out. Completed in 1579 after an unprecedented effort that involved thousands of forced laborers and compulsive contributions from Nobunaga's vassals and other feudal chiefs, the castle's strong walls and armament made Azuchi both imposing and intimidating in its magnificence.

All Japan needed for true national unity was the development of some form of association or accepted leadership among the daimyo. Oda Nobunaga threw his considerable support behind Ashikaga Yoshiaki as the Shogun of Japan, but the super daimyo's rapid rise to prominence soon prompted Yoshiaki to enter into a conspiracy with Oda's enemies in an effort to check his growing power. The conspiracy gave Oda Nobunaga an excuse to move against Ashikaga Yoshiaki and terminate the shogunate. Ashikaga Yoshiaki fled to the Chugoku at the western extermity of the main Japanese island of Honshu, where he gained the support of two powerful daimyo in the region:   Mori Motonari and Uesugi Kenshin. Years earlier, samurai under Mori Motonari fought numerous battles against the Amako family, which had claimed hegemony over the Chugoku region. After attacking the Amako's headquarters at the massive Toda-Gassan castle in Chugoku, the Mori took firm control over territory formerly held by the Amako family.

Yamanka Shika-no-suke Yukimori, the "Samurai of the Crescent Moon," an Amako clan vassal, began working through the senior Amako family leadership to attempt a restoration of lost territory. He contacted Amako Katsuhisa, who had long been a Buddhist monk in Kyoto, and convinced him to bring together the scattered remnants of the Amako family. Realizing the futility of any attempt to recapture the Toda-Gassan castle, Yamanaka led a guerilla war against the Mori throughout the Chugoku. In 1578, Yamanaka went to Kyoto to seek an alliance with the most powerful daimyo in Japan, Oda Nobunaga, and appealed directly for help to restore the Amako. At the time, the Mori and Oda families were already on a head-on collision over the fact that the Mori were openly supportive of fanatical armed leagues, ikko-ikki, of Buddhist monks opposing Oda Nobunaga and were shipping guns to the Buddhist fortress at Osaka.

A direct assault against the Mori on their home ground would be difficult, since the Mori controlled most of the shipping on the Inland Sea and could easily thwart any overland assault into western Honshu. Oda Nobunaga saw Yamanaka's appeal as an attractive proposition, since having an ally in the midst of Mori territory was very attractive. Furthermore, samurai warriors commanded by Hideyoshi, one of Oda's most able field generals, were already in the heartland of the Mori laying siege to the Kozuki castle in Harima province. Using a tactic favored among contending warlords, Hideyoshi had already inflicted a hellish defeat on two of the Mori castles by literally starving the defenders to death. Once Kozuki was taken, Oda Nobunaga assigned the fortress to Amako Katsuhisa and Yamanka Shika-no-suke Yukimori. Almost as soon as the two men established themselves behind the castle walls, a massive 30,000-man Mori army put Kozuki under seige.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi ranks as one of the most colorful figures in the whole bright pageant of Japanese history. He came from such humble origins that he carried no family name by birth and lacked a last name until the emperor conferred one on him as a reward for services. First known as Kinosh*ta Tokichiro, he came from a family of foot soldiers in the service of Oda Nobunaga's father. As a country boy familiar with horses, he first found employment in the Shogun's stables. Having started out in life as a bandit, he clawed his way up the military ladder by courage, effrontery and sheer good luck. He joined Oda Nobunaga's army in 1558, and quickly became a favorite of the great daimyo, who called him saru, monkey. Hideyoshi proved his abilities as an able military leader and a master of seigecraft.

Hideyoshi learned of the seige at Kozuki while commanding a seige against the Miki castle. After detaching half his forces to relieve the danger to the Amako daimyo at Kozuki, he received orders from Oda Nobunaga to head at once for Kyoto and to leave the Amako to their fate. Isolated and with no hope of reinforcements, Amako forces surrendered to the Mori general without opposition. In defeat, Amako Katsuhisa committed suicide, thereby destroying the Amako family. Yamanka Shika-no-suke Yukimori was captured and later murdered in cold blood while under escort near the village of Takahashi.

In 1582, Hideyoshi put another of the great Mori castles under seige;  Takamatsu Castle, one of the few water castles in Japan. Surrounded by a moat filled with water channeled from the sea through adjustable gates, Takamatsu turned into lengthy seige for Hideyoshi. In June of that year, Hideyoshi's samurai finally decided to divert a nearby river into the Takamatsu moat, an operation that looked promising as it slowly turned the moat into a vast lake that gradually began flooding the castle itself. It ws in the midst of this flooding operation that Hideyoshi learned the dramatic news of Oda Nobunaga's death.

Oda Nobunaga had ordered General Akechi Mitsuhide, one of his vassal daimyo, to lead his samurai west to assist Hideyoshi in his fight against Shimizu Muneharu. On the journey to join his forces in western Japan, Oda Nobunaga stopped at the Honno Temple in Kyoto for the night. General Akechi turned on his benefactor and sent his samurai into the temple in a surprise attack that trapped Lord Oda . After being pursued throughout the temple, the forty-eight-year-old Nobunaga is said to have finally disemboweled himself as the building was consumed with fire.

Upon hearing the shocking news, Hideyoshi decided he had to rapidly abandon the Takamatsu seige and move before any of Nobunaga's other generals heard the news and became his avengers instead. He hurriedly arranged a peace agreement with Mori Terumoto, an agreement that included the condition that the brave castle defender, Shimizu Muneharu, should commit suicide. Muneharu decided to end his life as dramatically as he had lived it. Rowing a small boat into the middle of the growing artificial lake and waiting until he was sure Hideyoshi's men were closely watching his every move, he committed seppuku, whereupon Hideyoshi hurried to Kyoto to avenge his master's death.

At the time of his death, the powerful Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga held possession of only one third of Japan. He had accomplished a great deal toward reunification, but there was much left to do. Laying claim to leadership as Oda's successor, Hideyoshi turned against those daimyo in central Japan likely to challenge him, including Oda's own son. He defeated General Akechi Mitsuhide at the Battle of Yamazaki, and Shibata Katsuie, the leader of opposition to Hideyoshi, at the Battle of Shizugatake. He also set out to eliminate the remaining daimyo groups in nearby areas still capable of mounting a threat to his dream for national leadership. He could not however, remove the one man who was potentially his most dangerous foe, the daimyo Tokugawa Ieyasu, then occupied in the northeast.

Hideyoshi's triumph resulted from his superior skills as a general and his ability to make bold decisions and take resolute action. While he ruled with a basically personal and at times magnanimous touch, he always backed up his authority to rule with the heavy-handed threat of overwhelming military might. Like all the daimyo of his era, Hideyoshi had a vicious streak. Though not as cruel as Oda Nobunaga, Hideyoshi's vassals nonetheless lived in real fear of him. Once, after some unknown person or persons had scribbled abusive graffiti on his gate, Hideyoshi had eight Kyoto residents arrested. On the first day he had their noses sliced off, the second day their ears, and on the third day they were strung upside down and impaled.

After establishing his own supremacy over Oda Nobunaga's remaining daimyo, Hideyoshi rebuilt the great castle at Osaka as the seat of his new military government. Like Oda Nobunaga, he coveted the position of shogun, but he never took the title. His background made him ineligible. Instead, Hideyoshi drew on the imperial court for his legitimacy. In 1585, Hideyoshi had himself appointed to the post of kanpaku, regent, by Emperor Oogimachi. The following year, he had himself appointed to the post of Chancellor, dajodaijin. He was not yet supreme throughout Japan, however. The daimyo Shimazu Yoshihisa in Kyushu refused to acknowledge Hideyoshi's authority (Figure 2). In response, Hideyoshi gathered an army reportedly consisting of some 200,000 men and marched directly into Satsuma in 1587. After routing Shimazu's forces north of the Sendai River, he returned to Kyoto in triumph. The following year, he invited Emperor Go-Yozei to his residence, where all the daimyo pledged their loyalty to the Emperor and the regent, Hideyoshi.

The conqueror of Japan did not simply rest on his laurels. Instead, he fell prey to the Alexandrian desire for more worlds to conquer, and in East Asia at the time that meant China. As early as the spring of 1586, years before he completed the subjugation of all his enemies in Japan, Hideyoshi's fertile imagination led him to lay down plans for a great Oriental Empire ruled by a Japanese sovereign. In expressing his dream to the Jesuit Vice-Provincial Gaspar Coelho, he stated that his sole ambition was to leave behind a great name. His plan was simple and direct. He resolved to cross the sea at the head of a large expeditionary force and form an alliance with Choson's King Sonjo. Japan would then march northward up the Korean peninsula with Choson troops in the vanguard and conquer the Chinese Ming Empire "as easily as a man rolls up a mat."

Hideyoshi began preparations for his grandiose campaign by ordering the construction of 2,000 ships. He asked Coelho to provide his navy with two Portuguese carracks. Anxious to please the regent, Coelho agreed and, in an attempt to gain Hideyoshi's support for the Christians, offered to ask Portuguese authorities for help with the campaign against China. These injudicious offers only proved to Hideyoshi how dangerous these foreigners were. If they promised warships to him this year, they might arm some other daimyo next year, and civil war would erupt again. The following year, on his way back from the campaign against Shimazu Yoshihisa on Kyushu, Hideyoshi visited a small ship anchored at Hirado Island off northwest Kyushu. On July 24, 1587, Hideyoshi and Coelho had another meeting at which the two men celebrated Hideyoshi's victories with generous amounts of wine.

Sometime around midnight, samurai awakened Vice-Provincial Coelho and dragged him before Hideyoshi for a chilling interrogation. Why did the Portuguese force Japanese to become Christians or urge their followers to destroy Buddhist temples?  Why did they offend Japanese by killing and eating such useful animals as horses?  And who gave them authority to carry Japanese off as slaves to India?  The befuddled Jesuit priest denied the charges, but Hideyoshi ignored his explanations. Hideyoshi ordered all Jesuit missionaries out of Japan within twenty days and commanded them to collect in Hirado. The port of Nagasaki, which had been placed under Jesuit control in 1580 by the local daimyo, was returned to Japanese jurisdiction. Oddly, Hideyoshi seemed to lose interest in the matter after issuing his expulsion order. The Jesuits continued their work, but they knew well their position was insecure.

The frequent diplomatic missions between Japan and Choson during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were terminated after a particularly vicious pirate attack on the Cholla coast in 1555. The activities of Japanese pirates remained virtually uncontrolled, but the situation gave Hideyoshi a convenient pretext for an attitude of injured dignity. With a firm grip on Japan, Hideyoshi undertook an exercise in international diplomacy in 1587. Using the offices of the So clan of Tsushima, the only daimyo then having formal relations with the Yi court in Seoul, Hideyoshi sent a short note to King Sonjo with a request that the reciprocal exchange of diplomatic envoys be resumed. King Sonjo was reluctant to restart this expensive custom, a matter which had never been approved by the Ming court in Beijing. Hideyoshi sent another mission to Choson the following year to reiterate his demand and not to return until they had the king's agreement. Choson held the Japanese at arm's length for nearly two years while court officials discussed and argued Hideyoshi's proposal . In their closest approach to an actual decision, they replied to Hideyoshi that they would consider his request if he eliminated the problem of pirate raids on the peninsula.

When Choson finally sent its mission to Kyoto, Hideyoshi's vanity had been so ruffled by the lengthy delays in dealing with Seoul, he kept the Choson envoys waiting for over a year. After treating the envoys unceremoniously, he sent them home along with two Japanese envoys carrying a letter to King Sonjo that went far beyond a mere request to reopen formal relations between the two countries. The envoys were instructed to make it public that the Chinese had refused to receive a Japanese embassy (at best an excuse) and that if Choson gave Hideyoshi free passage through the peninsula to invade China and remained neutral they would be unmolested. Japan's future friendship with Choson depended on the answer. The two Japanese envoys underscored the seriousness of Hideyoshi's proposal with a surreptitious warning, telling the Choson officials who received them that a refusal to cooperate might invite a Japanese invasion. King Sonjo flatly rejected the idea, noting that Choson had been friendly with China for centuries and pointing out the hopeless project was like a bee stinging a tortoise.

In 1590, still unable to reach a definite conclusion on Hideyoshi's proposal, King Sonjo sent a large diplomatic mission to Kyoto to discover whether or not the Japanese could actually carry out their threat of invasion. The senior member of the Kyoto delegation, a member of the court's So-in (Western) faction, had as his deputy a member of the court's Tong-in (Eastern) faction. To Sonjo's dismay, the mission returned with typically conflicting points of view. While the chief of the embassy presented an alarming report indicating the extent of Japanese military preparations already underway, his deputy stressed the lack of any evidence whatsoever to support Japanese preparations for an attack on Choson. As too often happened, the truth of the matter disappeared in the shuffle as faction members at court closed ranks behind their man to support his judgment, right or wrong.

Although Choson was militarily weak at this point, it was not as unprepared to defend itself as one might suspect. In response to the resumption of sporadic pirate attacks against Choson during the mid-sixteenth century, the Yi government entrusted the country's defense to its Border Defense Command. Jointly staffed with civil and military officials, this government agency eventually evolved into a kind of executive council that completely reorganized the Choson army. The Border Defense Command reorganized artillery, bowmen and spearmen into specialty units. It also pressed private slaves, once exempt from conscription, into service. In the year 1420, there were about 200,000 government slaves. By 1484 the number had risen to 350,000, and in later years their numbers, as well as the slave population owned by private individuals increased markedly. Desperate for both funds and manpower, the Sonju government pressed many slaves into military service, a move that brought with it an automatic upgrade in status. Frequently, the government had no other option but to free large numbers of slaves for no other reason than it could no longer afford to feed and house them. Korea's new military structure soon became permanent and saw no significant changes for nearly three hundred years.

Choson's yangban, accustomed as they were to peacetime conditions, could not be easily moved by national issues. Once the matter of Japanese military readiness became seriously enmeshed in factional conflict, a concerted national effort became impossible. As a result, the Choson military took only half-hearted defensive measures. Instead of accelerating troop training, Choson's top generals merely ordered an inventory of all weapons. Armed with few guns of any sort, when warned of Japan’s big advantage in cannons and muskets, one commander said dismissively, “They can’t hit their targets every time they shoot, can they?”  Had it not been for the efforts of Chief Minister Yu Songnyong, a member of the Namin (Southerner) faction, Choson would likely have made no defensive preparations at all. Unwilling to let Choson's defense die in the hands of competing factions, Minister Yu insisted after considerable debate that a report be immediately sent to the Ming court in Beijing. By this time the Chinese had already learned of Hideyoshi's intentions through similar reports from its envoys from the Ryukyu Islands. As a result of Yu Songnyong's prodding, a number of cities began repairing and reinforcing their defensive walls. Facing Japan across the Tsushima Straits, a dozen or so towns in Kyongsang Province built new defensive walls. From early in the fifteenth century, as a direct result of pirate raids and the military reorganization of King Sejo, towns in Kyongsang Province took on the appearance of virtually armed camps. By 1591, all the principal towns in Korea and most of its inland towns had defensive walls.

Choson knew the military uses of gunpowder and had a few firearms, but it lacked the manufacturing technology to produce its own muskets. With no available source to supply these weapons, virtually all Choson's troops carried swords, spears, bows and arrows. Choson also faced a a major problem gathering a defensive army, since most peasants bought an exemption from military service by paying the exemption tax. What soldiers there were had little real military training and spent most of their time employed in public works projects such as building defensive walls. Although a few active military units guarded the northern border region and repelled Japanese pirates, Choson had no full-scale field army. Given the condition of the government and the economy at the time, training and mobilizing such a force would have taken years. Nevertheless, under the guidance of the military district headquarters at Andong, located in the northern interior near the headwaters of the Naktong River, military officers in each town drilled the local peasants in tactics and the use of weapons twice a year. Choson's "citizen soldiers" were no match for any invading army.

Hideyoshi's final challenge to his supremacy came in the south central region of Honshu, where the Hojo family, linked by marriage to Tokagawa Ieyasu, barred access to the Kanto Plain through the commanding position of their great castle at Odawara at the foot of the Hakone mountain range. To clear the way, Tokagawa Ieyasu joined forces with Hideyoshi to mount a lengthy seige against the mountain fortress. Odawara finally surrendered on August 12, 1590, clearing the way for Hideyoshi to establish control over all of Japan. He persuaded Tokagawa Ieyasu to give up his former domains in the west and accept new domains in the Kanto region. Ieyasu thus took command of the stronghold at Edo, the site of modern Tokyo, located in the center of the Kanto Plain.

Oda Nobunaga attempted to unify Japan through sheer brute force and by 1590, after subduing northern Honshu, Hideyoshi finished the task of restoring national political unity in Japan. By concentrating on the arts of peace and administration, Hideyoshi began to forge a new administrative organization to guarantee unification. Even though he was the undisputed master of Japan, he did not try to establish a centralized government under his control. Instead, he sought to establish a national structure that would allow regional daimyo to remain independent and yet still cooperate among one another. He built a government on the foundation of the old feudal system of personal loyalties rather than a centralized administration.

When peace came suddenly to Japan, Hideyoshi found himself in control of a nation with a population of nearly twenty million people, an economy with extensive experience in seafaring and commerce, and a mobilized military force brimming with samurai warriors and no wars to be fought. His greatest challenge was how to restructure the country to guarantee a lasting peace among the warring feudal domains. Concerned about people like himself and his former lord, Oda Nobunaga, men who had risen from obscurity through ruthless, single-minded ambition, Hideyoshi instituted a number of measures designed to restrict social mobility. He made social class a permanent status for individuals and their offspring. The samurai became a separate class and no one who was not a samurai was permitted to carry weapons or armor. The sweeping katana-gari, or Sword Hunt, begun in 1588, was pursued ruthlessly in order to disarm the peasantry, prevent possible uprisings, and to distinguish clearly between farmers and samurai. Hideyoshi ordered that samurai must not shift their loyalty or take up the business or farming, and everyone was encouraged to inform on violators.

Hideyoshi destroyed many feudal strongholds, leaving defeated daimyo in possession of their estates and carefully relocated a number of fiefdoms by rewarding his supporters with confiscated lands. This process, known as kunigae (province change), ensured that the daimyo who were transferred had to build up a new following. He thus made it difficult for would-be warlords to attract the manpower needed for revolt even as he conferred local security and tax exemptions upon loyal daimyo. A population census taken in 1590 further helped ensure that farmers remained tied to their land for life. In effect, Hideyoshi's reforms aimed to prevent the possibility that any other warlord might build a career similar to his. The far-flung commercial interests of Japanese merchants and the country's new international orientation gave Hideyoshi a strong desire to turn the daimyo's military strength outward to prevent them from engaging each other in power struggles inside Japan.

The Imjin War  • In May 1592, Hideyoshi's army invaded Choson.  With overwhelming force, the army occupied Seoul within three weeks and took P'yong'yang soon after.  The legendary exploits of Admiral Yi Sun-sin killed any hope that Japan would ever succeed in invading China or hold on to its position in Choson.

Born in Seoul on April 28, 1545, Yi Sun-sin thoroughly absorbed the tactics and theories of the Seven Military Classics and passed his military examination in 1576. He not only studied the ancient military and literary classics, but actually understood how to apply their principles to contemporary warfare. This gifted naval architect with an unusual talent for mechanical inventiveness became a true soldier-scholar and a great military leader. His broad grasp of the strategic situation facing Choson from Japan and his remarkable, proven skills as a naval tactician rightfully place Admiral Yi Sun-sin among the world's great military commanders, heroic men like England's Admiral Horatio Nelson, and America's generals Robert E. Lee, George S. Patton, and Douglas A. MacArthur .

Typical fighting ships in sixteenth century Choson and Japan were little different than their merchant ship counterparts. Fighting ships generally had more oars for greater speed and a better hull design for added maneuverability. Japanese fighting ships still used the boarding tactics employed in the Battle of Lepanto. The captains's main goal was to get close enough to the enemy ship to use grappling hooks and pull his ship close aboard so his soldiers could then engage in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. When that wasn't possible, archers and men armed with matchlock rifles targeted the crew of the enemy ship and frequently fired flaming arrows to set the enemy ship ablaze. Even the arquebus, a predecessor to the musket used by the Japanese, required the ships to get close enough for the guns to be effective. Well aware of his navy's current limitations, potential threats, and the need to improve and strengthen Choson's naval forces, Admiral Yi Sun-sin began work in 1588 to develop an entirely new ship design.

While diplomatic wrangling continued between Seoul and Kyoto, Admiral Yi was busy creating a genuinely secret weapon, the kobukson, or "turtle ship" (Figure 1). Although Yi Sun-sin is commonly given credit for inventing the "turtle ship," the term kobukson was actually used in historic documents as early as 1414, when King T'aejong first inspected this new warship design. The aggressive use of the kobukson in Koryo's 1419 raid against pirates on Tsushima Island certainly indicates it was originally designed as an attack ship.

Beginning with a hull design adapted for high speed and maneuverability, Admiral Yi's highly-modified kobukson was essentially a flat-bottomed, oar-powered galley 100 feet in length with a 25 foot beam and two large masts rigged with large rectangular sails. Admiral Yi did not have to defend the open seas of the Tsushima Strait, but faced the constant battlefield constraint of inadequate maneuvering room in the narrow channels and shallow waters among the 400 small islands and uninhabited islets of the Hallyo Waterway. This small inland sea stretches 172 km from Hansan Island in the east, including Ch'ungmu, Samch'onp'o and Namhae Island, Odong Island, to the seaport of Yosu in the west.

Japanese superiority in both soldiers and firearms made engaging Japanese ships at close quarters a very dangerous tactic. Admiral Yi could not afford to be boarded, so he designed an arched "roof," believed to have been made of iron plate, that covered ship's entire topside structure to ward off enemy arrows and cannon shells. The top of this roof was studded with sharp upright spikes to deter potential boarders. The Yi court had discussed the idea of building ironclad ships as early as 1413, but the world's first ironclad warship was not actually built until Yi Sun-sin took command of the Choson navy.

Choson had already manufactured some very powerful cannons designed to protect fortresses and they soon figured out how to put them on ships. Yi Sun-sin increased the firepower of his kobukson by mounting thirteen small cannon atop the rowing deck along both flanks of the ship that fired through portholes to allow the vessel to deliver a broadside attack from either side at will. The Choson Navy had four types of cannons;  ch'on (heaven), chi (earth), hyon (black) and hwang (yellow). The heavy 660 pound ch'on cannon, with a 5.5 inch bore, could hurl a cannonball only a few hundred yards. Smaller and shorter in range than contemporary English cannons, Admiral Yi's guns certainly proved adequate to counter the threat posed by the smaller cannons aboard Japanese ships.

A large dragon head sat above the reinforced ram in the ship's bow and a wood-fired smoke generator was used to spew sulfur smoke through the dragon's grinning mouth. When put to use with the ship underway, the smoke screen enshrouded the entire ship and no doubt intimidated superstitious enemy sailors. The addition of new advanced cannons, archery ports ahead, astern and abeam, iron spikes on the roof, and the smoke generator in the bow made the kobukson a true offensive weapon.

The primary strength of Choson's professional military resided in its naval forces garrisoned along the southern coast, the direct result of Japanese pirate activity in Korea during the fourteenth century. In 1591, faced with an imposing threat from Japan and with Choson's very existence at stake, Chief Minister Yu Songnyong persuaded the royal court to appoint Admiral Yi Sun-sin to the post of Naval Commander of the Left (western) Cholla Province Naval Station headquartered at the southeastern port city of Yosu. There, in early 1592, Admiral Yi energetically set about training crews for his new warships.

With Choson enmeshed in factional squabbling, Hideyoshi readied his forces to move into Choson. From his headquarters in Hizen, Hideyoshi mobilized seven fully-equipped divisions, nearly 150,000 men and gathered a fleet of some 700 ships, transport vessels, naval ships and small craft to move his army across the Tsushima Strait. Many of the approximately 9,000 seamen who manned the Hideyoshi's fleet were reportedly former pirates. From their advanced staging area on Tsushima Island, an expeditionary force of three divisions (51,000 men) sailed for the south Choson coast near the end of May 1592 (Figure 2):  11,000 men under General Kuroda Nagamasa, 18,000 men under the leadership of General Konishi Yukinaga, a Christian born of a merchant family from Sakai, and 22,000 men commanded by General Kato Kiyomasa, a Buddhist "mustang" officer who rose from the ranks with Hideyoshi.

Pusan garrison troops under the command of Chong Pal manned beachhead defensive positions around Pusan  To the north, a few miles inland at the small town of Tongnae, town magistrate Song Sang-hyon commanded a small civil defense force. General Konishi reached the port of Pusan a full five days ahead of generals Kato and Kuroda.The Japanese surprised and quickly overwhelmed the badly outnumbered defenders in both Pusan and Tongnae. Despite bravely defending the beachhead areas to the death, Choson's garrison troops proved no match for Japanese soldiers armed with short-range brass cannon and matchlock muskets. Moreover, they faced an army with extensive combat experience, men already bloodied from the many campaigns of Japan's Warring States period.

General Konishi had already established a beachhead in Choson by the time Kato and Kuroda's two remaining divisions reached Pusan (Figure 3). The combined Japanese army was too large to advance along a single route, particularly since the troops would have to live off the land. The Japanese left Pusan in three separate columns, opening a three-pronged northward assault toward the capital in Seoul. By messenger and beacon fires, reports of the invasion quickly reached the Yi court in Seoul along with reports of the many towns captured by the Japanese. Stunned by the news, King Sonjo's government panicked. The Border Defense Command quickly issued orders to call up the scattered remnants of the Choson army.

The government placed its hopes on the talents of General Sin Ip, a tough military fighter who had won earlier fame in successful campaigns against the Jurchen in the northern provinces. General Sin received orders to take all the men he could muster and contain the Japanese in the Naktong River basin by blocking the three mountain passes leading out of Kyongsang Province. Sin mustered a few thousand untrained men armed only with spears, bows and arrows. The leadership of this ragged group was even worse than the condition of the troops. Well before his small force reached the first of the mountain passes, General Sin received disturbing, detailed reports describing the Japanese army's battle prowess. Instead of taking the high ground, where tens of men could defend against thousands, the doughty general decided to wait for the advancing Japanese behind a strong defensive position established on an open plain near the city of Ch'ungju, where he felt his men would fight better than in the mountains.

General Kuroda's division swept westward through the Sobaek Range over the Ch'up'ungyong Pass and proceeded north through the western provinces toward Seoul. General Konishi's division moved virtually unopposed up the center of Kyongsang Province. Meanwhile, General Kato's division, the third prong of the Japanese assault, drove north from Pusan toward Kyongju, turned northwestward, then linked up with Konishi in the valley near Ch'ungju. After crossing the undefended Oryong Pass, Konishi's soldiers moved into the lower Han River valley, where the Japanese met their first strong resistance from General Sin Ip's rag-tag army. In the bitter and bloody fight that ensued, Japanese troops overran the Ch'ungju defenders and killed General Sin. The two Japanese divisions continued their march toward Seoul along two different routes. The main objective of the assault on Korea was plunder. The Japanese deployed six special units with orders to steal books, maps, paintings, craftsmen (especially potters) and their handicrafts, people to be enslaved, precious metals, national treasures, and domestic animals. Meeting little resistance, the Japanese ravaged the civilian population. Entire villages were swept up in the raids. Japanese merchants sold some to Portuguese merchants anchored offshore and took the rest to Japan.

If the summer of 1592 exposed fatal weaknesses in the Choson army with brutal thoroughness, it also highlighted the Choson navy's reputation. Admiral Yi Sun-sin proudly launched his kobukson in May 1592, just days before General Konishi's troops landed at Pusan. The admiral selected eight of his most courageous naval officers to act as commandants at various ports. He also called up four government officials from their posts as magistrates of local cities and put them in the forefront of his battle formations as commanders of the Left Wing, Front Forward, Central Forward, and Right Forward commands. Within days of the outbreak of the Imjin War, Admiral Yi Sun-sin sailed into the Hallyo Waterway in search of Japanese shipping intent on engaging and destroying it whenever and wherever it might appear.

The war was less than ten days old when the Choson Navy had its first major engagement against the Japanese (Figure 2). Sailing from the southwest early one morning, Admiral Yi sighted the supply and troop ships that landed two Japanese divisions near Pusan less than two weeks earlier lying at anchor near Okp'o, off Koje Island. Borrowing a maxim from Sun Tzu's Art of War - "If the soldiers are committed to fight to the death they will live, whereas if they seek to stay alive they will die." - Admiral Yi gathered his captains and repeatedly had them pledge their willingness to fight.

Driven by a strong steady wind, Admiral Yi's ship led his ships downwind into the anchorage, firing cannon and arrows from both sides. Skillful maneuvering prevented the Japanese from boarding any of the attacking ships, which soon set a number of Japanese ships ablaze with flaming arrows. In the confusion that followed, Japanese sailors began cutting their anchor lines in a desperate attempt to flee. Few were lucky enough to escape destruction. In its first engagement the Choson Navy sank twenty-six Japanese vessels without a single loss. The only casualty was a sharpshooter who received a slight arm wound. It was the first naval combat action for many of the men in Admiral Yi's command, including many of the local magistrates recruited for military duty.

Sailing eastward from Okp'o under a steady wind, Admiral Yi ran across and attacked a smaller Japanese patrol squadron later that same afternoon. After annihilating the Japanese to the last ship before dark, he continued eastward for the rest of the night. The following morning, Admiral Yi's ships reached the main shipping lanes between Pusan and Tsushima Island, where he spotted a massive Japanese fleet sailing north. Undeterred by the odds, Admiral Yi plowed into the Japanese like a sledge-hammer. During the day-long battle, the Japanese fought with determined courage, but to no avail. By sundown, the entire Japanese fleet was either captured, ablaze, or on the bottom of the sea.

After a week of nearly constant action at sea, Admiral Yi wanted to attack Japanese ships at Pusan Harbor. After considering his situation however, with provisions low and his men exhausted and wounded, he wisely decided to avoid overextending his fleet deep into enemy territory and exposing himself to being cut off. With complete dominance of the seas along Choson's south coast and with no fear of a rival, Admiral Yi moved his fleet unobserved further west to the islands off the southern coast.

The relentless Japanese advance toward Seoul caused turmoil among the local population already gripped by confusion, fear and panic. Thoroughly alarmed and near panic themselves, King Sonjo and his court decided to flee north from Seoul to Kaesong. The government made no attempt to defend Seoul, but Sonjo ordered his two sons into the northern provinces of Hamgyong and Kangwon to raise fresh troops for the army. Neither of Sonjo's sons found anyone who would respond to their pleas to help defend the country against the Japanese. In the end, the Japanese captured both Choson princes.

King Sonjo made hasty preparations to abandon the city to the advancing Japanese. He gathered his family and with his retinue of high court officers fled through the west gate of the city along the "Beijing Road."  When word of the impending royal evacuation reached the streets of the capital, citizens blocked their exit, hurling insults and stones at them. After fleeing the city to the north, the band of less than courageous aristocrats arrived in Kaesong only to be met again by local citizens armed with anger and masonry. Seven days later, the royal retreat finally crossed the Taedong River and halted in P'yong'yang (Figure 3).

Infuriated by the government's incompetence and irresponsibility, the people of Seoul erupted in a furious rage. They placed the full blame for Choson's wretched state of affairs squarely on the backs of government officials, men who had failed to concern themselves with the welfare of the people and had permitted the farming villages to fall to ruin. Mobs of people swept through the city looting and burning government storehouses. The city's slave population attacked and burned the offices of the Ministry of Punishments and the hated Ministry of Justice. In their fury, mobs of angry citizens destroyed large numbers of census registers and the archives which held the slave-deeds. The destruction of the census registers and numerous other documents that recorded the status of Choson citizens by the Japanese freed many slaves from their bondage.

Less than three weeks after departing Tsushima Island, Konishi Yukinaga's division triumphantly marched through the South Gate into the city of Seoul. By late spring, all three of Hideyoshi's vanguard divisions occupied the Choson capital. Hideyoshi landed the remainder of his army on the nearly defenseless southern coast to occupy Kyongsang Province. There the Japanese quickly began to organize feudal land holdings similar to those in Japan for distribution to victorious commanders.

After leaving a garrison force to maintain order in the city of Seoul, the three vanguard divisions marched north. Konishi and Kato proceeded northwest toward P'yong'yang, where they would halt and await resupply by the Taedong River. In their drive toward the ancient "western capital" of Koguryo, the Japanese encountered a determined defense force at the Imjin River. Choson defenders put up a fierce battle for three full days before the Japanese finally overran their positions. During the brief respite, King Sonjo and his entourage again took flight to the north, this time to the border city of Uiju on the Yalu River. General Kuroda turned his troops westward toward the Yellow Sea. General Kato marched eastward to subjugate the northern provinces of Hamgyong and P'yong'an, eventually crossing the Tumen River into Manchuria. General Konishi's division assaulted and captured P'yong'yang. With no hope of repelling the Japanese alone, the royal court in hiding at Uiju dispatched envoys to Beijing with an urgent plea for help from Ming China.

In the south, Admiral Yi Sun-sin's second major campaign against the Japanese began off Sach'on, where about four hundred Japanese soldiers were building fortifications to protect twelve pavilion vessels anchored near the wharf below (Figure 2). The Japanese held the high ground, safe among the cliffs facing the bay above Sach'on, well beyond the reach of arrows. Since the ebbing tide made it impossible for Admiral Yi's kobukson to get within shooting range of Japanese ships, he employed a classic maneuver frequently cited in Sun Tzu's Art of War. Breaking his formations and giving every impression of a disorderly retreat, the well-disciplined Choson navy drew the Japanese into open water. Suddenly, Admiral Yi turned on his enemy and, as if riding a charging war chariot, drove right through their midst, firing cannon and flaming arrows into the Japanese ships. The ensuing battle turned into a complete rout as the Japanese broke and ran into the surrounding hills. Admiral Yi wisely spared a few Japanese ships to give the defeated soldiers a way to escape and to prevent them from terrorizing the local population.

Hideyoshi had the temperament of a land warrior and tended to think of his fleet as little more than transportation for the army. As a result, the Japanese "navy" embarked on the Choson invasion ill-armed and ill-trained for fighting at sea. Yi Sun-sin took full advantage of the mismatch. In several sea battles near Tangp'o and Tanghangp'o during June and July, he cleared the seas of poorly led Japanese ships using line-ahead tactics with rams and flaming arrows. In one battle, Yi Sun-sin caught a convoy with twenty-five escort ships bound for P'yong'yang in open water and sent it to the bottom. Flushed with success, Yi Sun-sin's fleet lingered in the area the peninsula expecting further action.

A few days later, off Tanghangp'o, Admiral Yi once again sought the advantage of fighting in open water. He broke off his attack in a feigned retreat so the Japanese would not abandon their ships and escape to land. The results were the same as at Sach'on. The Japanese set off in pursuit of the admiral's ships, which then counterattacked from both flanks and destroyed all but one of the Japanese ships. As planned, the next morning one of Admiral Yi's captains caught the lone escaping Japanese ship in open water and sank it.

Whether Hideyoshi knew of Admiral Yi Sun-sin's stunning naval successes or not, he committed a fatal blunder by holding to his original plan for reinforcing his land army in northern Choson through the western passage. The Japanese advance to P'yong'yang had been so rapid that reserves meant to link up with them had to be embarked aboard ships by the end of June. In early July, hundreds of Japanese transport ships escorted by the majority of Hideyoshi's remaining fighting ships, set sail along the western passage toward the islands off Choson's southern coast and sailed directly into a trap. Anticipating the Japanese would sail a course to sight Choson's southern islands, Admiral Yi Sun-sin stationed his ships near Hansan Island and lay in wait for any Japanese shipping that happened by.

Anchored near the mouth of the Hansan Strait, a 400 yard-wide channel strewn with submerged rocks and shoals, Admiral Yi's ships were sitting in a position from which they could quickly sail in either direction. At dawn on the morning of July 9, 1592, lookouts sighted a Japanese fleet on the far eastern horizon. Fearing his large kobukson would be unable to maneuver effectively inside the strait, he decided to lure the Japanese into open water south of Hansan Island, where he could take the Japanese in a single strike.

The Battle at Hansan Island began when Admiral Yi moved five or six kobukson in a tentative attack against the approaching Japanese. When he was sure he had been sighted, he turned his ships and feigned a retreat under oars. The Japanese admiral, intent on capturing a fleeing enemy, gave immediate chase under full sail. Admiral Yi carefully drew the faster Japanese fighting ships further into open water, outrunning the slower transports. At the critical moment, and with his own ships still under oars, Admiral Yi suddenly turned about. In a spectacular demonstration of precisely-timed maneuvering, he fell hard against the lead Japanese ships, ramming them as they tried to turn away from the approaching attack. One by one, the lead Japanese ships crumbled against the reinforced bows of the kobukson and near continuous cannon fire. Those lucky enough to escape the initial disaster were driven back into the approaching main body of the convoy, which also turned away in panic to escape.

During the running fight, Admiral Yi's fleet sunk or set fire to some seventy Japanese fighting ships. When a large reinforcing convoy was spotted sailing into the onrushing melee, Japanese admirals made a valiant attempt to halt the retreat with the new arrivals. The two large bodies of ships closed on each other quickly, which added to the building confusion. Nearly fifty more Japanese ships were lost to ramming, cannon fire or flaming arrows. Faced with an apparently unconquerable enemy, for the first and only time while engaged with a foreign enemy, Japanese commanders lost courage, panicked and broke in all directions looking for a way out. The retreat quickly degenerated into a rout, with a mixture of transports, escorts and fighting ships sinking and burning together. The panic was so thorough that the majority of those who managed to escape made for the coast rather than suffer the fates of their comrades. Many ships were driven aground and wrecked with a great loss of life.

The Battle at Hansan Island not only annihilated the Japanese fleet, it destroyed the vital materiel needed by generals Konishi and Kato in the north. Admiral Yi Sun-sin's systematic application of the principles of Sun Tzu and other Chinese military classics in his four sweeping naval campaigns of 1592, culminated in a single battle which cut off the sea lanes around the southwestern tip of Choson and abruptly ended all prospects of a future Japanese invasion of China.

The Home Front  • While Admiral Yi Sun-sin continued to hamper Hideyoshi's ability to launch fresh attacks in Choson, the people of Choson, faced with a direct threat to their personal wealth and security, formed guerilla bands to fight, not to preserve the government, but to preserve their own way of life.

Admiral Yi sailed for Pusan in late August 1592, intent on destroying every last remaining Japanese ship, most of which were concentrating in the area of Pusan Bay (Figure 1). After three successive defeats, the Japanese had learned the best way to protect their ships was to anchor them close ashore beneath fortified hills for protection where they could take advantage of their superiority in shore guns and use their troops armed with matchlock rifles. Admiral Yi's fleet of only 166 ships charged into the Pusan anchorage on September 1 to attack some 470 enemy ships defended by thousands of Japanese on the nearby hills. The Japanese unleashed a nearly continuous barrage of arrows, rifle and cannon fire, yet despite the hail of falling projectiles, Admiral Yi pressed the attack.

The Battle of Pusan Harbor was an assault deep into enemy territory and is eloquent testimony to the bravery and courage of Choson's fighting sailors. Pusan Bay echoed with gunfire from the day-long battle as the Choson fleet repeatedly rowed their ships deep into Pusan Harbor, attacking the Japanese under a barrage of enemy fire and successfully sinking or destroying 133 Japanese ships, many caught at anchor. Admiral Yi Sun-sin understood that if he totally destroyed the Japanese fleet, it would "block the retreating route of the Japanese pouring down from the north, [and] the enemy thus trapped would probably become guerrillas in all provinces. . . ."  Admiral Yi also understood his own navy's capabilities and limitations. Once he reached the point of diminishing returns, he called off the attack. The gallant admiral withdrew from Pusan Bay as night fell without having lost a single ship, unwilling to risk anymore lives or ships needlessly.

Admiral Yi Sun-sin stands, without exaggeration, as the single greatest hero in Korean history. Compared with other famous naval battles in history, Admiral Yi's exploits and his navy's victories stand in a class with the Spanish defeat of the Turks off the Cyprus coast in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Each of these great naval engagements resulted in a significant turning point in naval warfare. The Battle of Lepanto marked the end of the era dominated by massive oar-powered war galleys and the defeat of the Spanish Armada marked the beginning of a new era dominated by the use of the heavily-armed, sail-powered man-of-war.

In 1571, Don Juan de Austria, the half-brother of Spain's Philip II, commanded the massive fleet of the Holy League against the fleet of the Ottoman Turks in the Gulf of Lepanto (Gulf of Corinth). The Battle of Lepanto was the last major naval battle fought by opposing fleets of rowing war galleys utilizing boarding tactics against each other. The Japanese relied on boarding tactics as their primary attack method in naval battles during the Imjin War, but Admiral Yi consistently denied them the opportunity to use them.

When King Henry VIII ordered new cannon installed on his warships in 1512, the result was the powerful English man-of-war. Powered by large sails and armed with heavy cannon mounted low on the cargo deck that fired through gun ports in the hull, the man-of-war stood in sharp contrast to the lightly armed Spanish galleys which still relied on boarding tactics as their principal fighting technique. The removal of the ornate elevated decks fore and aft made these ships lighter, less bulky and much easier to maneuver, a critical quality if a captain was going to avoid close quarter combat with an opponent. The development of England's man-of-war makes one appreciate Admiral Yi's development of the kobukson and its ultimate impact on Choson's history.

In the late 16th century, Spain's King Phillip II sent his "Invincible Armada" of 125 ships into the English Channel to ferry the Duke of Parma's army from the Spanish Netherlands across the channel and land them in England. There they would march on London, capture Queen Elizabeth I, and proceed to conquer the entire country. When the heavy Spanish galleys under the command of the Duke of Medina Sedonia arrived off the southwest coast of England in mid-July 1588, an English fleet led by Lord Howard and the privateer Francis Drake sailed into the channel to attack.

The more maneuverable English ships avoided close-in fighting, but harassed the Spanish galleys as they sailed up the English Channel to Calias. Between July 31 and August 8, individual English ships inflicted considerable damage by continually sailing around the heavier Spanish galleys using "hit and run" tactics. The Spanish, who began the fight in their traditional frontal line formation, reacted to the unorthodox English tactics by breaking their formation to fight individually, thus forfeiting their greatest strength. The resulting chaos caused by separate fights between individual ships turned the battle in England's favor.

In danger of a total defeat, the Duke of Medina Sedonia made a fateful decision to forego the invasion and return to Spain via the North of Scotland and Ireland. The English fleet pursued the Spanish into the North Sea for three days, breaking off and returning to England only after they ran out of ammunition. The few Spanish ships that managed to survive the violent storms off Scotland and Ireland limped back to Spain totally defeated and demoralized. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was an English victory only in the sense that its new warships held their own against the might of the Spanish Navy. It was certainly not a victory of English naval tactics, since they had no coordinated battlefield strategy. The free-for-all battle involving one-on-one engagements showed they had no idea how to apply their cannons effectively, but it also marked the beginning of a new era in naval warfare that used sailing men-of-war armed with heavy cannon.

England was lucky in 1588. Because early cannon were inaccurate, the British didn't understand that the best way to maximize the man-of-war's firepower was to sail in line-ahead column formation, to turn broad-side to their target and unleash all their cannons at once. Admiral Yi Sun-sin understood this principle because he read Sun Tzu. Furthermore, Admiral Yi did not rely on luck to win a fight. Just four years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Admiral Yi, who had never heard of Spain or England, consistently applied the right technology and used the right strategy to defeat the Japanese in 1592. Like the English, Admiral Yi had superiority over his enemies with fast, maneuverable warships. Both England and Choson adopted new sea-fighting techniques to thwart an enemy whose strengths lay in its soldiers and boarding tactics. The Defeat of the Spanish Armada ended in a draw. Admiral Yi Sun-sin however, was decisive in his victories and won every battle in 1592 against a far larger number of enemy ships without losing a single warship of his own!  Neither Sir John Hawkins nor Sir Francis Drake could make that claim in 1588.

Hideyoshi's armies entrenched well north of Seoul could be supplied only by sea. General Kuroda Nagamasa, holding the region west of P'yong'yang, depended completely on Japanese shipping for resupply, shipping that had to sail northward through waters under the full command of Admiral Yi Sun-sin. The Choson navy's spectacular summer offensive erased all hope of resupply or reinforcement and left the Japanese army to itself and its own resources for survival. Admiral Yi's achievements not only imperiled Japanese supply routes and hampered Hideyoshi's ability to launch fresh attacks in Choson, it had the lasting benefit of keeping the grain-rich Cholla Province out of Japanese hands. Stung more than once by this crafty naval officer, after three months of fighting the Japanese learned to avoid Admiral Yi on the open sea. They changed tactics and began making night raids and avoiding areas patrolled by the Choson Navy.

Japan soon faced a new set of challenges from the Choson people, who responded in a very interesting way to the presence of Japanese troops on their native soil. Despite the calamitous threat posed by the invasion, the common people's deep disaffection with their own government led many to actually refuse to support the government in defense of the country. Once the threat to their own estates and land holdings became a reality however, when the Japanese presence actually threatened their personal wealth and security, a boiling rage among the people swept the peninsula. People suddenly found the inspiration to fight, not to preserve the government, but to preserve their own way of life. The same population that earlier reacted so indifferently to government efforts to muster fresh troops to defend their country, suddenly took up arms in defense of their own homes.

In district after district, peasant farmers and slaves coalesced around a single leader, generally a member of the rural aristocracy, to form small fighting units. Literally hundreds of guerilla bands, including bands of Buddhist monks, large and small alike, sprang to life amidst the Japanese. As these guerilla bands gained strength, they expanded their area of operations. Using hit and run tactics, guerrilla fighters often dealt severe and stinging blows to Japanese military operations.

Once the Choson populace began to fight the Japanese, a number of heroic battles took place that earned a number of people a lasting place in Korean history . Cho Hon led a guerilla force that rose from Okch'on in Ch'ungch'ong Province and routed the Japanese from Ch'ongju. Cho died in a later assault on Kumsan. Kwak Chae-u assembled a guerilla force in Uiryong in Kyongsang Province and, in battles along the Naktong River, drove the Japanese out of the Uiryong-Ch'anggyong area. Kim Ch'on-il led a guerilla force that repeatedly harassed the Japanese in the area around Suwon.

Ming China finally responded to King Sonjo's plea for help in July 1592, by sending a woefully inadequate 5,000 man division into Choson. After crossing the Yalu River near Uiju, the token force bravely marched southeastward toward P'yong'yang. General Konishi led his forces in a single night battle that swiftly decimated the entire Chinese division. Basking in his victory over the Chinese, Konishi eagerly anticipated the arrival of reinforcements sailing up the Taedong River so he could begin the actual invasion of China. He was not strong enough to move north without them. When he finally learned of the crushing defeat of Japanese shipping at sea and that reinforcements would never come, he realized there would be no invasion of China. He sat as far north as the Japanese would ever get. The Japanese army was spread across north-central Choson at the time and held a strong enough position they could wait for further orders. As they waited through the autumn of 1592 with no word from Japan, supplies ran low and their position became more precarious. Worse, the Chinese were concentrating a strong, well-equipped army north of the Yalu River.

In January 1593, General Li Ju-sung led fifty-thousand battle-hardened Chinese troops, fresh from subduing a Mongol rebellion in Manchuria, across the frozen Yalu River in the dead of winter. This Chinese army, unlike its ill-fated predecessors, marched directly to P'yong'yang and successfully drove General Konishi out of the city. General Konishi withdrew his battle-worn troops south to Seoul, pursued all the way by General Li. Choson's citizen guerrillas constantly harassed the starving Japanese soldiers, who were taxed nearly to the limit of their endurance. The fighting withdrawal halted at Pyokchegwan, just north of Seoul. Though Chinese and Japanese troops fought pitched battles outside the city walls, no large-scale attacks occurred on Seoul itself. Within the city however, Japanese troops killed many people and burned much of the capital, including the Kyongbok Palace, the Ch'angdok Palace, and numerous other structures that dated from the beginning of the Yi dynasty.

Japanese and Chinese troops fought to a standstill in a fierce battle at Pyokchegwan. Local guerilla forces under Kwon Yul, anticipating a joint attack on Seoul in concert with General Li Ju-sung's army, took up positions at Tohyang-san, the mountain redoubt south of Seoul on the north bank of the Han River near Haengju. The Chinese never arrived. General Li Ju-sung had pulled his army back to P'yong'yang for a rest, leaving the guerrillas isolated. Nevertheless, Kwon Yul's small force successfully held their ground in the bloody fighting that raged around Haengju. The Japanese repeatedly sent out large-scale assaults against Tohyang-san, but failed to dislodge Kwon's guerrillas. When the defenders ran out of arrows, women in the fortress helped gather stones that were thrown against the Japanese troops. Admiral Yi Pin resupplied the Tohyang-san fortress during the fighting by sailing up the Han River in time to deliver more arrows. Kwon Yul's guerilla force successfully held their ground in a campaign that is remembered as one of Korea's three great triumphs against the Japanese during the war.

The Japanese position gradually went from bad to worse. With no hope of resupply by sea, pinned down in Seoul by continuously mounting pressure from the Chinese army and local guerrillas, with food supplies cut off and his forces now reduced by nearly one third from desertion, disease and death, Konishi was compelled to sue for peace. General Li Ju-sung offered General Konishi a chance to negotiate an end to the hostilities. When negotiations got underway in the spring of 1593, China and Choson agreed to cease hostilities if the Japanese would withdraw from Choson altogether. General Konishi had no option but to accept the terms, but he would have a hard time convincing Hideyoshi he had no other choice.

Unbroken in spirit, but physically weakened by hunger to the point they were no longer an effective fighting force, the Japanese army departed Seoul in late May 1593, one year from the date of their invasion at Pusan. As the remnants of Konishi's division moved out of Seoul, Chinese troops marched southward from P'yong'yang in a screening formation to cover the Japanese and ensure their departure. The Chinese intended to prevent them from regrouping and again attacking to the north. Choson guerrillas joined in the pursuit by continually harassing and attacking Japanese soldiers throughout their arduous retreat to the port of Pusan and the southeastern coast of Kyongsang Province. Following the recapture of Seoul, the Chinese commander Li Ju-sung observed that,

"...the country all about was lying fallow, and a great famine stared the Koreans in the face....the dead bodies of its victims lay all along the road."

This should have been the end of the war, and General Li Ju-sung apparently believed it was over, for he marched his army northward, leaving Choson to take care of matters itself, even though the Japanese had yet to sail for home. Before the Japanese began loading aboard ships, orders arrived from Hideyoshi commanding the Japanese army to seize positions on a number of capes or promontories along Choson's south coast that were easily defended on the land side and to build entrenched camps. General Konishi strongly objected to such a plan, which was neither conducting a proper war nor completely withdrawing from Choson. Such sound advice nearly cost Konishi his head, but under specific orders to do so, the Japanese placed a number of strong rearguard detachments at selected points along the south coast to cover their evacuation. The bulk of Hideyoshi's war-weary troops finally sailed for Japan.

Once peace negotiations between China and Japan finally got underway, for some unknown reason Chinese negotiators gave Ming Emperor Shen Tsung the mistaken impression that he was about to deal with a minor state that had been subdued by war. Furthermore, they conveyed the idea that the Japanese regent, Hideyoshi, was prepared to become his vassal. Under such conditions, the Chinese sought to resolve the issue in their favor by including Japan in their tributary system of foreign relations. They would establish Hideyoshi as king of Japan and grant him the privilege of formal tribute trade relations with the Ming dynasty.

In Japan, Hideyoshi's negotiators apparently led him to believe that China was suing for peace and ready to accept him as their emperor. Thus, Hideyoshi issued the demands of a victor;  first, a daughter of the Ming emperor must be sent to become the wife of the Japanese emperor;  second, the southern provinces of Choson must be ceded to Japan;  third, normal trade relations between China and Japan must be restored;  and fourth, a Choson prince and several high-ranking Yi government officials must be sent to Japan as hostages. Bargaining from such fundamentally different perspectives, there was no prospect whatsoever for these talks to succeed.

Hideyoshi needed time to rebuild his fleet and raise a fresh army before the almost certain protests over the presence of Japanese garrisons along Choson's south coast developed into military action to force them out. A past master of the art of plausible delay, Hideyoshi kept Chinese envoys waiting for months on various pretexts then sent them home with an entirely new set of demands he knew would never be accepted. For nearly three years, both sides engaged in long and drawn out negotiations. Envoys came and went, with constant protests from one side and constant evasions and excuses from the other. The needless misunderstandings between China and Japan proved irreconcilable.

While the diplomats delayed, Hideyoshi's shipwrights were building a new fleet as quickly as they could hammer the planks together. A new army was being trained and equipped. Large stores of food were being quietly cached in Japanese garrison camps along the south Choson coast. All the while, Choson's former great fleet sat rotting at anchor, with a few ships being used in the coastal trade. Admiral Yi Sun-sin lived the quiet, dull life of isolated retirement. In the summer of 1596, preparations were well underway to mount a second invasion of Choson. Hideyoshi appointed General Konishi Yukinaga commanding officer of his new fleet and quietly slipped a force of 100,000 men into the Choson garrison positions. Realizing that Ming China was adamantly refusing to entertain his demands, let alone submit to them, Hideyoshi suddenly exploded in a carefully affected attitude of rage at the latest Chinese emissaries. Claiming that China was trying to force Japan into submission, he stated in his reply that he intended to punish Choson for impeding good relations between his own country and China (a claim totally without foundation) and broke off all talks with the Chinese.

Song of the Great Peace  • Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched a second major invasion of Choson in 1596, but faced greater opposition from both Choson and Chinese forces.  Unable to expand beyond Kyongsang Province, the Japanese finally withdrew in the winter of 1598.  The final disastrous defeat of the Japanese fleet by Admiral Yi in the Battle of Chinhae Bay ended fleet actions by the Japanese for the next 300 years.

The pounding suffered by the Japanese navy at the hands of the Choson navy remained an acute embarrassment to Hideyoshi. When Japanese troops left Choson, they did so quite willingly, in large part because so long as Admiral Yi Sun-sin lived, and so long as his ships controlled the seas, Japan had no hope of reinforcing the peninsula. Nearly 180,000 Japanese had already died at his hands and the Japanese greatly feared him. The Japanese confidently believed that removing Admiral Yi Sun-sin would leave the Tsushima Strait virtually undefended. Well-aware of the festering political jealousies that permeated Seoul, the Japanese devised a plan they hoped would take the Choson admiral out of action permanently.

In late 1596, a spy arrived at the Yi court in Seoul with a tempting piece of totally false, yet totally believable intelligence. He carefully planted the story that a Japanese invasion fleet would be sailing past a coastal point on a certain day. The still frightened and suspicious Yi government took the bait and immediately ordered Yi Sun-sin to sea to intercept the invaders. Yi Sun-sin had an ego as big as his fleet however, and correctly interpreted the situation as nothing more than a great deception. He refused to sail.

Admiral Yi Sun-sin, the naval hero whose genius ensured Choson's survival during the Japanese invasion, received his appointment from a member of the Namin (Southern) faction and subsequently earned the support of the Tong-in (Eastern) faction as well. Despite the war, factional feuds raged unabated in the Yi court with the So-in (Western) faction holding the dominant position. The bickering between the Tong-in and the So-in factions led to the kind of ironic result that epitomized the senseless nature of factionalism and the Choson court's totally unrealistic attitude toward the Imjin War. Yet another telling example of this attitude is the manner in which King Sonjo issued awards. Eighty-six members of the retinue that followed Sonjo in his earlier retreat to the city of Uiju received status awards granted to merit subjects. Only eighteen men received such awards for meritorious service for combat against the Japanese.

In the aftermath of the accusations and innuendos that flew about the Yi court, King Sonjo ordered Yi Sun-sin's arrest. The court relieved him of his command, reduced him in rank to a simple soldier, and jailed him in early 1597. The victorious So-in (Western) faction replaced Yi Sun-sin with its own favorite son, Won Kyun, commander of one of the Cholla district naval stations. The So-in won a hollow political victory. Admiral Won Kyun proved to be an utterly incompetent naval commander with little taste for battle, which he carefully avoided whenever he could.

Hideyoshi made two fatal mistakes in planning his second invasion of the Korean Peninsula. First, he assummed that with Yi Sun-sin out of the picture, even if he should encounter trouble at sea, which he evidently did, he had no reason to fear major interference with his invasion. Second, and more devastating, he completely underestimated the probable opposition on land. He totally misinterpreted the fact that Japan's rapid advanced up the peninsula in 1592 was due more to China's slow response than Choson's weak military defense. He confidently expected an easy occupation, secure from any interference by sea.

The Chinese realized that in the first war they had moved too slow in sending troops to assist Choson and left too soon, allowing the Japanese to retain a foothold in the south. Suspicious of Hideyoshi's intentions throughout the years of deadlocked diplomatic wrangling, the Chinese poured troops into Choson, helping to defend virtually every city, town, mountain pass, and river ford in depth.

Japan's second expeditionary force of about 140,000 men safely arrived along the southern coast of Choson and landed unopposed on the south coast of Kyongsang Province in early 1596 (Figure 1). Once they established a foothold however, the Japanese found Choson both equipped and ready to deal with an invasion. Even China responded quickly to the renewed threat, sending an additional contingent of 40,000 troops under the command of General Yang Hao directly into Kyongsang Province. The Japanese faced strong, stubborn opposition and could not break out of the southern provinces. Outnumbered at every step of their painfully slow advance, it took the Japanese six months of constant fighting to advance no father than a point which they had reached in only two weeks during the first invasion in 1592.

The Japanese land army achieved little more than local success in its engagements and remained confined largely to Kyongsang Province. By late 1596, the Japanese dug in and established defensive positions from which they launched numerous short-range attacks that kept the more numerous Chinese and Choson forces off balance. To avoid any chance that the leadership in Kyoto would doubt the fighting prowess of the Japanese commanders in Choson, the officers sent barrels filled with the pickled ears of nearly 38,000 of their victims to the capital as proof. The grisly remains were later given a proper burial a long way from home at Kyoto in the Mimizuka, or "Mound of Ears."

The situation at sea was very different. With Yi Sun-sin out of the picture, the Japanese navy operated with unaccustomed aggressiveness. Events quickly overtook the freshly appointed Admiral Won Kyun that again threatened the survival of the Yi dynasty. When news of the approaching invasion fleet reached Choson, Admiral Won received orders to attack. His lack of leadership had reduced the Choson fleet to such a low level state of readiness that it was hardly an effective fighting force. Nevertheless, Admiral Won was obliged to obey. When he finally crossed paths with General Konishi's fleet, purely by chance as it turned out, his inept maneuvering nearly resulted in the elimination of the entire Choson fleet. Admiral Won's captains deserted him at the first contact with the Japanese and the Choson fleet scattered. Admiral Won saved his own skin by fleeing the battle. Konishi completely turned the tables and destroyed nearly all the ships in Admiral Won's weak command, the first great naval victory against a foreign enemy in Japanese history. When word of the disaster reached the Yi court, it was only the influence of the powerful So-in (Western) faction that prevented his execution.

King Sonjo had no alternative. Having already treated a national hero with insulting ingratitude, he hastily pardoned Yi Sun-sin and reinstated him as Admiral of the Navy and Commander of the Fleet. Yi Sun-sin, always ready to act in the service of his country, accepted his new command;  the twelve surviving ships from Admiral Won Kyun's disgraceful action against the Japanese. It is unclear whether these were all the ships that Won Kyun left him, whether the government feared he might stage the world's first naval coup d'état if he had more, or whether all he needed was twelve ships. Despite its small size, Admiral Yi's ships wasted little time in aggressively harassing the Japanese to great effect.

General Konishi, unaware of the change of command in the Choson navy, dispatched a squadron of ships to the west from Pusan to assist the garrisons in that area. As Admiral Yi Sun-sin sailed into the area frequented by Japanese shipping along the southern coast, Konishi's squadron sailed headlong into his approaching ships near Hansan Island, the site of his earlier decisive victory over the Japanese. The results were the same as they had always been. The entire Japanese squadron suffered a complete and disastrous defeat. Although it was only the loss of a small squadron and Konishi's fleet remained intact, news of the naval action sent shivers through the Japanese army command. Their past experience with Admiral Yi Sun-sin made them suddenly very cautious about taking any further risks.

The Japanese held their positions through the winter of 1596, constantly harassed and threatened from the land side, but free from assault by sea. Although Admiral Yi had destroyed one naval squadron, he was too weak in numbers to take on the main Japanese fleet. His reputation still haunted Konishi and his menacing presence on the Japanese western flank kept the Japanese general perpetually apprehensive. Matters remained indecisive well into the summer of 1597, yet Hideyoshi refused to admit he had been beaten. The mounting strain took a terrible toll on troop morale as the Japanese tried to maintain a position from which they had nothing to gain.

During the winter of 1597, a large Japanese fleet sailed from the southern port of Oranp'o bound for the Yellow Sea. At the time, Admiral Yi's small twelve-ship squadron was stationed in the straits off South Cholla Province that lie between Jin Island and the Hwawon Peninsula, reinforced by a small squadron of Chinese ships under orders to follow his command. It is remarkable testimony to the great respect the Chinese held for the man, since on all other occasions of cooperation with Choson, the Chinese always insisted on taking supreme command. Lying in wait off Myongnyang, near the port of Mokp'o, secure in his knowledge of local high tides and torrential currents that roar through the narrow strait, Yi Sun-sin's twelve ships sat in ambush as the Japanese fleet carefully filed between Jin Island and the peninsula.

With his flagship anchored at the throat of the narrow channel, Admiral Yi held his position while his other ships sat at the ready to his rear. As the Japanese continued their advance, Admiral Yi's subordinate officers gave him up for dead and started rowing in retreat. At this critical juncture, Admiral Yi "whipped off the neck of a sailor rowing back and hung it up high on the ship's mast, then roared, "Attack!"  With predictable effect, the decapitation galvanized the fighting spirit of his men and they charged into the Japanese ships. Through sheer fighting skill and the spirit of his men, Admiral Yi's twelve fighting ships sank thirty-one Japanese ships, killed their fleet commander and scattered the remaining ships into retreat. The "Miracle of Myongnyang" put the seas once again under Choson's control and sealed the fate of Japan's land army.

In early 1598, the Chinese engaged the Japanese in a massive battle near the city of Ulsan. Although the fierce engagement did not break the Japanese position, it starkly reinforced the fact that Hideyoshi's army could not break out of its defensive perimeter in Kyongsang Province. Driven back into a shrinking perimeter along the south, central and southeastern coastal regions, the Japanese army found itself hemmed in both by land and sea. Japan's position in Choson became so bad by autumn that the Japanese field commander was on the verge of asking to negotiate an armistice. The stalemate was broken with the sudden arrival of news from the Shogun. Hideyoshi had died suddenly on September 18, 1598 , and his successor had decided to abandon the campaign. The Japanese army in Choson quickly sued for peace and agreed to a complete withdrawal.

Orders for reembarkation were issued and in early winter the Japanese began the slow process of moving aboard ships for the journey home. Although neither Chinese nor Choson troops made any effort to grasp the opportunity at hand, the Japanese exercised extreme caution during their withdrawal, trying to prevent the sizeable forces nearby from taking tactical advantage of the movement. The withdrawal was successfully completed in due time, and the transport ships set sail for Japan, escorted by the main Japanese fleet under the command of General Konishi, the first to arrive in Choson some six years earlier and now the last to leave.

The Japanese still faced the challenge of recrossing the Tsushima Strait, a stretch of open water where the implacable warrior Yi Sun-sin still held command. Admiral Yi felt little sympathy for his landbound colleagues, who sat and watched the Japanese leave without striking a farewell blow. He was resolved that on his element at least, they should feel one. Having already been dealt with so unceremoniously by King Sonjo's court, Admiral Yi felt certain that jealous factions would again try to bring him down in disgrace after the war. Before that could happen however, he determined to win one last great victory against the Japanese.

Carefully watching for his chance, Admiral Yi Sun-sin hurriedly moved northeastward from Ch'ungmu just as the evacuation convoy was fully underway. On December 16, 1598, Admiral Yi led his fleet against some 400 Japanese ships in Chinhae Bay off Noryang Point. The small Choson squadron had no difficulty catching up with great lumbering fleet moving slowly toward the Tsushima Strait. Far outnumbered, Admiral Yi used his ships like sheep dogs to encircle the Japanese and herd their ships into a confused and helpless mass. General Konishi put up a gallant defense during the long and fiercely contested naval engagement that followed.

Near the height of the battle, under a sky covered by the smoke of burning ships, with arrows and rifle balls flying in all directions, a random bullet fatally wounded the fifty-four-year-old Yi Sun-sin as he proudly stood in the prow of his flagship. Lying mortally wounded on the deck of his ship, enjoying the satisfaction of seeing the last of the Japanese invaders leaving his homeland, Yi Sun-sin ordered his men to keep his death a secret until a decisive victory had been won. Both sides suffered heavy losses in the fighting that ultimately broke the Japanese convoy into a number of smaller groups. As the stragglers broke free of the fighting and made their way to safe ports, the last great naval battle of the Imjin War faded into history. Although Japan did not suffer the complete defeat handed the French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar, the outcome of the winter Battle of Chinhae Bay ended any fleet battle actions by the Japanese for the next 300 years.

Few naval commanders ever more thoroughly justified Napoleon's words that, "war is an affair not of men, but of a man."  The fact that Admiral Yi Sun-sin fought aboard a ship of his own design with such superior fighting qualities that nothing else afloat at the time could match it does not lessen the magnitude of his success. If the object of a war is to win, then the nation, or man, that attains that goal by the intelligent production of better weapons is fully entitled to the success achieved. Yi Sun-sin did more than just design a better ship. He never made mistakes. He went to war without the guidance of existing principles of naval strategy and literally improvised and acted on his own initiative as he went along. Not a single instance of any importance in his whole record of service was marred by faulty judgement.

Admiral Yi Sun-sin realized at the very outset of the Imjin War that he could not make the sea impassable to Japan by splitting his fleet and stationing squadrons along the southern Choson coast. He clearly understood that instead of picking the fruits of victory piecemeal, the best way to reach the fruit was to take a sharp axe and cut down the entire tree. In his first major campaign near Okp'o, he went directly after the troop and supply ships on which all else depended. Having destoyed them, the impact was felt throughout the Japanese command, right down to the soldier in the field.

The Imjin War cost the Japanese thousands of lives and an untold amount of their national treasure, all without any measurable material gain whatsoever. If Hideyoshi's two wanton and unprovoked invasions in 1592 and 1597 accomplished anything, they virtually devastated Choson and left a broken and desolate landscape. Nearly every one of Choson's eight provinces had been an arena for pillage and slaughter. While the Choson navy sank or destroyed by fire over three hundred Japanese ships in its first four naval campaigns, Admiral Yi's naval actions were the only true bright spot of the Imjin War.

In 1598, the poet Pak No-gye described the horror of the Japanese invasions in an epic entitled "Song of the Great Peace";

For 10,000 li the waving battle-flags
   darken the sky.
With a great roar the cries of the soldiers
   seem to lift heaven and earth.
   --------
Higher than mountains, the bones
   pile up in the fields.
Vast cities, great towns
   become the burrows of wolves and foxes.

The Choson economy depended heavily on grain production and Japan's occupation of the southern rice-producing areas and the war demands they placed on the people created vast shortages of food and other supplies. The widespread foraging activities of Chinese and Japanese troops further aggravated an already serious grain shortage. As the grain shortages became more acute, famine and disease spread across Choson along with open banditry and peasant uprisings. The two attacks by Japan scarred the country for years afterward and left a legacy of undying hatred toward the Japanese, a bitter feeling handed down from one generation to the next. In the view of some historians, the country never really recovered .

One of the most important aspects of the Imjin War was that resistance against the Japanese emerged from among the people of Choson instead of being directed from the Choson government. For the first time in their long history, Choson's united guerilla resistance against an alien invader gave the Koreans a sense of nationalism and self determination.

Posted: 28 February 2006 at 11:10pm | IP Logged

Beyond Turtleboats: Siege Accounts From Hideyoshi’s Second Invasion of Korea, 1597-1598

By Kenneth M. Swope, Ball State University

The fact that the countries of the Korean peninsula have been at the forefront of the international news scene for the past few years should not surprise any student of Korea’s past. For virtually all of its long recorded history Korea has found itself in the midst of both larger power struggles between militarily greater neighbors and rent by internal struggles amongst the various political entities or factions on the peninsula at any given time. As early as the fourth century B.C. the ancient state of Old Chosŏn was invaded by the Chinese kingdom of Yan, which sparked the formation of a successor kingdom, Wiman Chosŏn, which bore many of the hallmarks of more advanced Chinese civilization to the west. This state in turn was invaded and crushed by Han (202 BC-220 AD) China in 109 B.C. The Chinese then established a number of commanderies that functioned as proto-colonies in the Korean peninsula.1 With the weakening of Han influence Korea embarked upon a period of indigenous political development and contention known as the Confederated Kingdoms period (1st-3rd centuries A.D.). Korea would be invaded again by China under the Sui (589-618) and Tang (618-907) dynasties, and was also involved militarily with Japan as the Japanese maintained a coastal foothold in the southeast corner of the Korean peninsula, a tenuous position which the Japanese themselves later erroneously referred to as a colony. Still later the Koreans found themselves in the unenviable position of serving as unwilling accomplices in Khubilai Khan’s two abortive invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281. In the early Choson (1392-1910) period Korea and China alike were frequently subjected to waves of piracy, attributed to the Japanese, but perpetrated by residents of all the East Asian states as well as buccaneers from as far away as Europe and Africa. Thus the massive Japanese invasions of the 1590s were but one more harrowing event in a history fraught with international conflict.

That being said, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s (1536-1598) invasions of Korea, which lasted from 1592-1598, were perhaps the most traumatic events in the history of Korea. They involved hundreds of thousands of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese soldiers and even more civilians, and left the peninsula devastated for decades. The war produced Korea’s greatest national hero, Admiral Yi Sunsin (1545-1598), and shrines and memorials to the conflict still dot the Korean countryside. Amongst Koreans the war is perhaps the single most significant historical memory, dwarfing even the Korean War of the 1950s.2

While Admiral Yi’s exploits are well-documented in secondary literature, and rightly so, far less attention has thus far been accorded to other dimensions of the conflict, most notably the sieges that characterized most of the fighting during Hideyoshi’s truncated second invasion.3 For while they easily overran Korea’s defenses in the spring and summer of 1592, the Japanese invaders were much less successful in their second attempt to conquer Korea due to vigorous allied resistance by the Chinese and Koreans that managed to check the Japanese advance and force them to retreat to an expanded “Pusan Perimeter” around the eastern and southern coasts of Korea. Even though the allies were seldom able to dislodge or completely defeat the Japanese defenders, they managed to effect a military victory by virtue of preventing the Japanese from launching any offensives and wearing them down through process of attrition. In the end, upon the advice of his top generals in Korea, Hideyoshi ordered a withdrawal of Japanese forces, which was already well underway by the time of the taiko’s death in September of 1598. This paper shall examine various accounts of some of the sieges of the second Japanese invasion of Korea and discuss their tactical and strategic significance. It will also suggest bases for comparison between these sieges and their early modern European counterparts.

Before launching into a discussion of the sieges themselves, a few words about the conflict prior to 1597 are in order.4 In May of 1592 a force of over 150,000 Japanese troops landed at the southeastern coastal city of Pusan. The stated Japanese goal was conquest of not only Korea, but China and India as well and the Koreans were regarded as but a nuisance to be dealt with along the way to greater things. There had been some warning of the invasion but Korea’s faction-ridden court and military were ill prepared for the onslaught. In particular the Koreans were daunted by Japanese arquebus muskets, which they had beeen using for decades in Japan but were far less known in Korea.5 Within weeks the capital city of Seoul had fallen to the invaders and the King Sonjo (r. 1567-1607) and his court were fleeing to the north, stopping at the auxiliary capitals of Kaesong and Pyongyang before finally retreating to the border town of Uiju, on the Yalu River, where they beseeched Ming (1368-1644) China, Korea’s tributary overlord, to send military assistance. Although an initial Ming expeditionary force was badly beaten by the Japanese in the summer of 1592, a Ming negotiator managed to arrange a cease-fire with the invaders in order to buy time for the Ming to assemble a more formidable host. In the meantime Korean guerrillas sprang up all over the country and in conjunction with the naval exploits of the aforementioned Yi Sunsin, the Koreans managed to finally stem the tide of the Japanese advance.

In February of 1593 a Sino-Korean force of some 50,000 or so troops counterattacked the Japanese garrison at Pyongyang and overwhelmed them with superior firepower, most notably great cannon whose range and destructive power greatly exceeded that of the Japanese muskets.6 The allies then drove the Japanese south, quickly recapturing Kaesong, before their advance was temporarily checked at Pyokchegwan, just north of Seoul. Though some in the Chinese camp now advocated a temporary respite or even a retreat, a small detachment managed to burn the Japanese grain stores in the vicinity of the capital and the invaders were compelled to withdraw to fortified camps along Korea’s eastern and southern coasts. A prolonged and bizarre period of peace talks then followed, with both the Chinese and Japanese negotiators deceiving their respective governments even as the Koreans were largely kept out of the process.7 The end result was that the talks fell apart entirely when Hideyoshi realized the true nature of the dealings and the angry Japanese leader organized a second invasion of Korea, this one punitive, with no “lofty” goals of world conquest.

As indicated above, the second invasion of Korea did not go nearly as smoothly as the first, at least from the perspective of the invaders. While on the one hand they did benefit from a factional intrigue that had resulted in the removal of Yi Sunsin from his position of military authority in Korea’s naval forces, they also now faced a much more experienced and less daunted foe. Once again Ming China would send help and this time they would blunt the Japanese advance even before they reached Seoul. The result was that unlike the first invasion, the second would see the Japanese on the defensive most of the time and would feature extended sieges. Even though the allies were never completely successful in rooting the Japanese out of their seaside fortresses, known as wajo (Japanese castle), they did prevent the invaders from carrying out any effective offensive actions after the autumn of 1597 and eventually convinced Hideyoshi and his generals that retreat was their only option. A study of the major sieges of the second invasion reveals much about the nature of warfare in early modern East Asia. One also gets a sense of what the different combatants valued and how they perceived one another. The importance of internal politics and their relationship to events on the battlefield is also revealed. Finally, we can actually hear at least a few individual voices, accounts from the lowly as recorded by Korean, Japanese and Chinese chroniclers. In the rest of this piece I shall briefly examine accounts from four major sieges of the second Japanese invasion of Korea (Namwon, Ulsan, Sachon, and Sunchon) and discuss them in light of these issues.

The Siege of Namwon
The first important siege of the second invasion was the Siege of Namwon, a fortress city located in south-central Korea. This is the only siege discussed herein in which the Japanese were the besiegers and it offers a fine picture of Japanese battle tactics and strategy. After a series of battles that routed the Korean navy at sea, the Japanese landed on Korea’s southern coast and various divisions advanced towards Seoul “like the outstretched fingers of a hand seeking to extend its grasp around Korea.”8 Meeting little resistance, a force estimated at approximately 60,000 and including many of the most prominent Japanese commanders, surrounded the city of Namwon on September 22, 1597.9 The Japanese forces also contained some of the most important chroniclers of the second invasion, namely the minor samurai Okochi Hidemoto, author of a book of reminiscences known as Chosen ki (A Record of Korea), and the Buddhist priest Keinen (ca. 1534-1611), who left behind one of the most poignant and descriptive memoirs of the entire war, a poem diary known as Chosen nichnichi ki (Korea Day by Day).10 This chronicle details the horrors of war with a level of sympathy unrealized by the vainglorious accounts presented by samurai eager for rewards or the terse accounts typically proffered by Chinese and Korean military censors. From the start of his journey as a physician and spiritual advisor to the daimyo Ota Kazuyoshi, Keinen describes Korea as a veritable Hell, in which slavery, wanton slaughter and general human suffering play major roles.11

It seemed to many observers that Namwon was doomed to fall from the start. The Chinese defender of the city, Yang Yuan, and his Korean allies had assembled barely 4000 troops for the defense on the city. In addition to this serious numerical disadvantage, Yang had not made adequate use of the local topography. Nearby there was a mountain fortress (sansong) typical of the kind of defenses used to protect local populations throughout Korea.12 Had the allies and locals retreated to this fortress they most likely would have been able to withstand a protracted siege, as the invaders would have to attach uphill and through forested terrain, as opposed to a level plain where they could easily surround vastly outnumbered defenders. The Koreans urged Yang Yuan to relocate to the mountain hold, but Yang remained stubborn, exemplifying the high-handed behavior that unfortunately characterized many Chinese officers in Korea. It was said that Yang, being a soldier from northern China, was unfamiliar with fighting in such terrain and he preferred the flat ground of Namwon and disdained the fighting styles of southern Chinese troops.13 This did not mean that Yang refrained from bolstering his defenses, however. He actually did quite a bit, adding walls, digging deeper trenches around the outside of the fortress, setting cannons up atop the main gates, and digging a small reservoir outside the fortress in the midst of which he built a fortification called Yangmajang, that he later altered to incorporate cannon into.14 He also had a network of fences built in the fields around the city, although ironically enough these would subsequently work to the advantage of the attackers.

When the Koreans saw the Japanese coming, most of them fled. Yang requested help from the Korean commander Yi Pongnam(d. 1597), who arrived leading a few hundred more troops only after receiving several urgent missives from the Chinese general.15 The Japanese attack commenced on September 23 as about one hundred Japanese in the vanguard approached the fortress and launched musket volleys, a tactic that had served them particularly well during the first invasion. The Japanese then dispersed themselves in the fields around the city and used the newly erected livestock fences for cover as they attacked in small units of three to five. They also made use of stone and clay walls around civilian homes that had been torched just outside the south gate of the city. Because the attackers operated in such small units, the large cannon mounted atop the walls had difficulty hitting them.16 The main Japanese army, made wary of the power of Chinese and Korean cannon by the experience of the first invasion, took care to remain outside firing range, hoping to goad the defenders into sallying forth.

The next day the attackers closed in on the city from three sides and attacked with cannons and muskets as they had the day before. That night they launched a probing attack on the south gate, resulting in heavy losses for the defenders.17 On September 25 the Japanese soldiers started cutting down wild grass and rice plants, bundling them into sheafs and piling them between the fences and walls. The evening witnessed another concerted Japanese attack with arrows and musket fire. The Japanese used their superior numbers to keep the pressure on the defenders who could never catch their breath as wave after wave of gun and arrow fire rained down. Even the elements seemed to betray the defenders as the moonlight rendered the evening as bright as day when it reflected off the green rice plants growing in the fields around the city.18

At one point the Japanese commander Konishi Yukinaga (1558-1600) dispatched an emissary to ask Yang to abandon the city. Yang responded, “I have been a general since I was fifteen and I have traveled all over the empire. Now the Son of Heaven has ordered me to defend this city and I have not yet received an order to withdraw.” At this Konishi laughed and said, “One thousand odd troops certainly cannot resist one million fierce soldiers. Korea accepts your sacrifice but will they have sympathy for your efforts later?”19

The overmatched defenders somehow managed to hold out against the incredible odds for four days. They continued to rain cannonfire down on their besiegers. Finally the Japanese managed to move in close enough to secure the moat. Moving up against the most lightly defended portions of the city wall, the attackers piled up their bundles of rice and grass stalks they had harvested from the fields around the city. That night a great sound burst from the Japanese ranks and they attacked with a renewed fury, bullets and cannonfire coming down like rain. This lasted for one to two hours before it suddenly stopped.20By the time the defenders, many of whom had quailed within during the latest barrage, realized what was happening, the Japanese were atop the walls. Though initially driven back, some Japanese managed to enter and set things alight. Chaos ensued as fires broke out all over the city and the Chinese troops rushed to escape out the north gate but could not as there were simply too many horses “running around as if their legs were bound.”21

When the city gates were finally forced open by the defenders seeking to escape, they were confronted with Japanese troops several ranks deep. Many simply bowed their heads and allowed themselves to be decapitated.22 Yang Yuan, seeing the situation was hopeless, fled the scene on foot with eighteen followers, though some maintained the Japanese deliberately allowed him to escape so he could bring word of the destruction of Namwon to the north.23 All the other commanders died. Toda Takatora was the first Japanese commander to enter the city and was honored by Hideyoshi.24 All told some 3900 were killed and nearly 2000 were captured, according to Japanese sources. Keinen noted that men and women, young and old alike were all slaughtered indiscriminately so the Japanese soldiers could obtain noses, the grisly trophies they sent home for rewards from Hideyoshi.25 The collection of noses is one of the most galling aspects of the second invasion for Koreans, but it became a symbol of the prowess of competing Japanese daimyo and a testament to their eternal martial glory. Noses were pickled in brine and shipped back to Japan where they were inspected by Hideyoshi and eventually interred in a mound in Kyoto erroneously labeled the Mound of Ears (mimizuka), which was allegedly erected by the Japanese ruler to show mercy to the ghosts of his victims.26 Additionally, leading commanders such as Shimazu Yoshihiro sent triumphant letters back to Hideyoshi boasting of their success and family chronicles immortalized these exploits for future generations.27 A Chinese source says that barely 100 made it out of the city alive.28

In terms of the strategic and military significance of the siege of Namwon, it reinforced Koreans notions of the superiority of southern Chinese troops over their northern counterparts. It also demonstrated the importance of utilizing terrain to the best advantage, something the attackers clearly did. In that way it also proved the superiority of mountain based defenses versus isolated citadels on plains. For when the Japanese advance was checked at Chiksan a few weeks later, they retreated to isolated mountain strongholds rather than face equal or superior numbers in more vulnerable locales. In fact it was strange that Yang even chose to defend Namwon over the nearby mountain fortress because one of the stated goals of allied commanders in the second campaign was to make optimum use of Korea’s formidable natural defenses. The defeat also temporarily threw the Koreans into a general panic and refugees scrambled north towards Seoul.

For the Japanese, the battle illustrated their response to the often overwhelming firepower of the allies and was just one more example of the kind of ingenuity displayed by Japanese field commanders throughout the war. It also demonstrated that they appreciated the value of superior numbers, an advantage they did not always enjoy, though it should be noted at this juncture that Japanese accounts from the time tended to exaggerate the number of enemy foes as well as inflate their own head counts in battle, a mistake that has been replicated in at least some of the modern accounts of the war. In fact it is doubtful that the Ming ever had as many as 80,000 troops in Korea at any one time, as opposed to well over 100,000 Japanese soldiers during both invasions. In any case, the victory at Namwŏn marked the high point for the Japanese during the second invasion. Although they would win future battles, they would never regain the momentum they enjoyed just after the victory at Namwon. This was because the defeat at Namwŏn galvanized the allied counteroffensive and led the Ming commanders Yang Hao and Xing Jie to dispatch their best subordinates to engage the Japanese south of Seoul, where they halted their advance in a sharp engagement that featured heavy use of firearms.29 The Korean court also saw the error of its ways and restored Yi Sunsin to a position of authority and in tandem with Chinese naval forces, his fleet managed to cut Japanese supply lines to the west. The result was a tactical retreat along a several hundred mile front along Korea’s eastern and southern coasts. The Japanese would essentially be on the defensive for the rest of the war and would face siege after siege before they finally withdrew in defeat.

The Siege of Ulsan
The Siege of Ulsan was probably the most interesting and well documented of the entire campaign, as the priest Keinen was once again present and there was a major factional crisis amongst the allies in the wake of the battle. It would probably be fair to say this siege could be viewed as a microcosm of the entire second invasion, an assertion I intend to make in a future paper. As the invaders hunkered down for the winter in December of 1597, the allied commanders resolved to embark on a three-pronged assault, attacking the Japanese forces under Kato Kiyomasa at Ulsan, the forces under Konishi Yukinaga at Sunchon, and those under Shimazu Yoshihiro at Sachon. In the months following their retreat the Japanese had embarked upon a crash program of fortress expansion and reinforcement, much of it completed by conscripts brought from Japan or slaves rounded up from the Korean populace who were forced to work day and night by Japanese overseers, a scene Keinen describes as being reminiscent of Hell itself.30 The Japanese constructed a series of rings around the innermost fortress of Ulsan proper, a defense strategy that calls to mind the traditional layout of contemporary Japanese castles and one which was replicated throughout Korea.31

An allied force of some 44,800 troops set out from Seoul on January 14, 1598, gathering intelligence and determining to attack Kato Kioymasa, regarded as the most dangerous of the Japanese generals, first, learning he was at Tolsan, a fortified camp just south of the main fortress at Ulsan.32 Delighted at this news the allies reched the outskirts of Ulsan two weeks later and enjoyed early success, pushing the Japanese back into the mountains as they smashed through the outlying defenses, reportedly taking 500 heads the first day and some 800 the next as the Japanese pulled back.33 The Korean minister Yi Tokhyong was cautiously optimistic, exclaiming, “This is what can certainly be called a minor victory. But when we exterminate the [Japanese] bandits at Sosaengpo (a city to the south) and Pusan, then I will really be delighted.”34

When the attack began in earnest, the sky was filled with arrows and cannons thundered, allegedly shaking heaven itself. High winds, chronicled in Keinen’s account, spread fires, throwing the Japanese into a panic as myriads perished in the flames.35 Two Chinese commanders led their elite cavalry in an assault upon the central fastness of Ulsan, but were forced to retreat before a heavy counterattack, though they managed to entice the Japanese into an ambush that claimed 400 more Japanese lives.36 The Japanese pulled back into the city as the allies tried to create further havoc by starting fires within, to no avail. In the meantime the allied commanders tried to get the Japanese to surrender.

There was much debate amongst the Japanese commanders as to what course of action they should take as they were sorely outnumbered and supplies were almost gone. The Japanese were already out of water and forced to collect snow to melt and drink and food supplies were so scarce that the besieged took to sneaking out of the fortress at night to search the bodies of the dead for scraps of food. Many of these scavengers were captured by Chinese forces, who pumped them for information regarding the state of affairs within the city. The Japanese later resorted to eating paper and even mud in a desperate attempt to keep their bellies full. Keinen’s diary is replete with images of the suffering of the garrison and with his own belief that he would soon “go in bliss to paradise.”37

The allies kept the pressure on. On January 30, Chinese commanders attacked one of the reinforced outposts, firing the stockade around it. Five hundred more Japanese perished in the conflagration and the rest retreated further. Allied losses were also heavy. The next day they attacked the heavily fortified inner Tolsan fortress as the Japanese rained bullets down upon them, inflicting grievous losses once again. In the end, though, the allied forces, led by one Mao Guoqi’s southern troops, took the outer fortress, killing 661 more Japanese.38 The Ming attacked the inner sanctum the following day only to be surprised by the arrival of Katō Kiyomasa himself at the head of 500 troops. The shocked besiegers proved unable to prevent the relief force from entering the city, though they still held the outlying areas.

The Japanese then shut the gates and waited for reinforcements, hoping the weather might impel the allies to lift the siege. The Chinese continued their assault as a commander named Chen Yin personally braved the arrows of the defenders to set up scaling ladders. Katō Kiyomasa galloped about the battle in white robes urging his men on. For the time being the allies were deterred by the high, stout walls of the fortress. The assembled generals held a meeting in which they decided to cut off the water supply and tighten their hold on the areas around the city, thereby starving them out. Fearing the Japanese would send a rescue force from Pusan, the Ming commander Ma Gui sent two officers to Yangsan and another to Namwŏn, while still another commander was detailed to guard the water approach from Sosaengpo.39 For ten days and nights they besieged the Japanese, all the while under heavy fire from those within the fortress. Again the Ming had trouble getting their heavy cannon up the narrow roads leading to the fortress itself, as their men were exposed to heavy fire every time they tried to advance.40 It is said that spent shells piled up high within the fortress while the Japanese kept up their dogged resistance. Still, Ma figured the Japanese would soon be unable to resist for lack of food and water, as they estimated there were perhaps 10,000 Japanese in the city.

The allies stepped up their attack, pummeling the walls with heavy cannon, but to no great effect. The defenders continued to riddle them with bullets from their muskets. One of the Ming commanders managed to ascend the wall briefly, only to be clipped by an enemy bullet.41 On the evening of January 31, 1598, the skies clouded over and freezing rain fell, turning the ground around the fortress into a quagmire. Ma Gui reported the allied forces continued to attack, and despite losing 700 Chinese and 200 Korean troops in the process, an equal number of Japanese were killed.42 Yang Hao also received a tip that Katō Kiyomasa was planning to escape on his own. Further allied assaults claimed many more Japanese lives, and they even breached the wall for a short time before being turned back by the well-prepared defenders. Forty Japanese ships were spotted approaching on the Taehe River, so 2000 southern Chinese troops and 1000 cavalry were dispatched to guard the riverbank. Captured Japanese reported Kato had fled two nights before. Yi Tokhyŏng and the Korean general, Kwon Yul, reported that the rains continued to fall and they were hopeful the Japanese would soon capitulate though there were rumors Kato was returning, if in fact he ever left. The battle raged again the following night, as lead from the besieged came down with the rain, inflicting heavy casualties on both the Chinese and the Koreans. At one point Yang Hao pulled the Chinese forces back to rest, telling Kwon Yul to lead Korean troops in the attack. Kwon did so and suffered heavy losses in a hail of Japanese bullets.43 There was reason for hope, though, as captured Japanese reported the situation within the city was growing worse by the day. They also reaffirmed the fact that Kato himself was still in the city.44

On February 5, the Japanese sent a letter to the besiegers which read, “We want to negotiate a peace agreement, but no one in the city is literate [in Chinese]. There is a Buddhist monk on a boat in the river. If you dispatch an envoy [to meet him] then we can negotiate.”45 Considering the Japanese situation, the attackers decided not to negotiate. The Japanese still held out some hope, both because they received word that help was on the way and because spies reported there were no cooking fires in the Ming camp, meaning that they were also running low on food.46

Finally, on February 8, just as Japanese resolve was crumbling and they were on the verge of capitulating, Konishi Yukinaga arrived by sea with a large relief column.47 Konishi was initially reluctant to advance, seeing the numbers arrayed against him. Instead he sent a force of 3000 crack troops upriver to see if there might be a weakness somewhere in the allied lines. Yi Tokhyong saw this and sent word to Yang Hao. Yang then asked Yi what he felt they should do. Yi replied that allied forces should be able to hold the relief columns off until the city fell but Yang was less sure, pointing out that thus far they had attacked the city for several days to no avail but with grievous losses. As it turned out at least two probing assaults by the relief column were turned back.48 In addition to this fact, the great sleet that had been falling for days continued, seriously hindering the assault, and the cold and lack of adequate fodder conspired to kill many horses.49

Reports came in suggesting as many as 60,000 Japanese troops were on the way to recue the garrison at Ulsan. Therefore, Yang, apparently believing he was about to be flanked, fled the field, causing the entire allied army to break ranks. The Japanese were overjoyed. They emerged from Ulsan to attack the Chinese and Koreans as they fled, killing over 10,000, according to some accounts.50 Countless weapons and suits of armor were reportedly abandoned as soldiers fled for their lives. The allied troops might have been completely wiped out had it not been for the valiant efforts of Mao Guoqi and another Ming commander, who turned back the Japanese onslaught with heavy losses.51 On the other hand, according to the Chinese general Li Rumei, while some 3000-4000 Chinese and Korean troops were killed, they also inflicted significant casualties on the Japanese, which forced them to break off their counterattack.52 The Ming Military Commissioner Yang Hao returned to Seoul, dispatching his subordinates to other strategic locales with orders to prepare for another offensive.

While this defeat was extremely disheartening for the allies, it did not really change the course of the war, though it could be argued that the failure at Ulsan prolonged matters. The Japanese were still not of a mind to launch any more offensives and in the face of certain future assaults by even larger allied forces, many Japanese commanders pushed for an end to the war and advocated a general retreat. Perhaps the greatest damage done took place in the aftermath of the siege as the battle was initially reported as a victory to Chinese officials back in Beijing.53 When contrary reports of the outcome started rolling in and a vociferous Ming military censor with an axe to grind got involved, the defeat embroiled large segments of both Chinese and Korean officialdom, including the Korean king himself in a storm of controversy that threatened to undermine the entire Sino-Korean alliance. In the end Yang Hao was dismissed and King Sonjo nearly abdicated his throne.54

In terms of siegecraft the siege of Ulsan comes the closest to a classic siege amongst the four under discussion here. The allies pressed the attack for a total of thirteen days and were prepared to starve the defenders out. They almost definitely would have succeeded had the relief column not arrived and may well have succeeded even with the arrival of the relief forces if Yang Hao had decided to make a stand at the river that led to sea and prevented the reinforcements from effecting a landing. Again we see the importance of firearms as the Japanese were able to repulse assault after assault with concentrated musket fire. Furthermore the rugged terrain and narrow approaches leading up to the fortress proper made it difficult for the allies to get their big guns into position for use against the fortress walls. Instead they had to come in waves and tried to burn out the defenders with fire arrows as recorded by Keinen: “Since the doors had not yet been installed in the gate, the Chinamen were able to swarm inside, and they started shooting furiously with fire arrows from alongside the walls and from the bottom of the stone parapets…The smoke was so thick that no one could keep his eyes or his mouth open.”55

Chronicles written by survivors on both sides of the siege attest to the terrible hardships suffered by all the troops and offer glimpses into the harsh realities of warfare in early modern East Asia. They are also reminiscent of accounts written by participants in the Korean War of the 1950s who often dwell upon the frigid cold of Korean winters. It was certainly no accident that many Japanese commanders pulled out of Korea shortly after the siege of Ulsan, including Keinen’s own lord. Indeed Hideyoshi’s generals were almost unanimous in advocating withdrawal. When he questioned them about the situation in Korea, they said, “Korea is a big country. If we move east, then we have to defend the west; if we attack to our left, then we are assailed on the right. Even if we had another ten years the matter still might not be resolved.” Thereupon Hideyoshi complained of his advanced age and the fact that there appeared to be no way out of the quagmire and asking them, “If we were to stop the troops and sue for peace, what then?” At this the generals all answered, “That would be best.”56 Thus it can be seen that, according to these sources, the decision to withdraw from Korea was actually made by Hideyoshi himself and was not made by the regents after his death. This evidence is, of course, in direct contradiction to the story which has been passed down the past four hundred years in Asia which maintains the Chinese and Koreans were at a loss as to what to do and were only saved by the timely death of Hideyoshi. Throughout the summer of 1598 the Japanese troops became increasingly restless and their commanders feared their troops were on the verge of revolting.

Things were relatively calm for most of 1598 as the Japanese slowly returned home and Hideyoshi’s physical and mental condition steadily declined. The allies bided their time and maintained defensive positions, the Koreans pressing for more aggressive action. There were occasional skirmishes as Japanese troops emerged from their strongholds to loot and Korean irregulars harassed the occupying troops. It was clear that the war was not going to be pressed by the attackers any longer and both sides were eager for a final resolution. By the time Hideyoshi died in mid-September only ten of the thirty leading Japanese generals remained in Korea and the five elders who now governed Japan for Hideyoshi’s young son ordered the final withdrawal of remaining forces in Korea.57 The allies determined to make them pay and decided to launch a series of final offensives on the treating Japanese. By the autumn of 1598 they had decided to launch a four-pronged assault on the Japanese positions at Ulsan, Sachon, and Sunchon with another group patrolling the seas under the joint command of Yi Sunsin and the Chinese commander Chen Lin.

The main allied force of over 30,000 was under the command of Ma Gui and advanced towards Ulsan. Ma still believed defeating Kato Kiyomasa was critical to ousting the Japanese from Korea. The allied advance was effective, as Ma made good use of his numerical superiority and learned from his experiences earlier in the year. His forces managed to kill more than 2200 Japanese and torch their provisions as they retreated and escaped to sea.58 A clean victory was denied Ma, however, as his men were lured into a trap and were eventually forced to pull back, giving the Japanese the opportunity they needed to escape. Kato’s men boarded their ships in the dead of night on December 14, just as their allies were sailing to their doom in the straits of Noryang.

The Siege of Sachon
Dong Yiyuan, with more than 15,000 allied troops under his banner, was charged with attacking Shimazu Yoshihiro at Sachon. This was another exciting and controversial battle, immortalized in Japanese art and called a defeat snatched from the jaws of victory by Li Guangtao.59 Sachon was actually comprised of two major fortresses and a number of outlying structures. The original structure was built by the Koreans and occupied by the Shimazu after the sack of Namwon in 1597. The newer castle was built by the Japanese between 1597 and 1598.60 This structure was built on a hill overlooking the sea to the rear of the original fortress. The route leading to the castle was again narrow and easily defended, as was the preference of the Japanese. Both fortresses were defended by stone walls and wooden stockades. The perimeter defenses extended some forty li around the main structures.

In examining the Japanese defenses from afar, Mao Guoqi remarked that they looked like a snake stretching to the sea and all they had to do was cut off the snake’s head (Shimazu Yoshihiro) and the whole snake would die.61 The initial allied assault was very successful, as they captured a number of smaller fortresses en route to Sachon. With inside information and possibly assistance, the Chinese managed to burn the provisions of the Japanese camped along a river outside the city proper. Thus the allied troops cut a quick swathe through the terrified defenders and crossed the river almost uncontested. The old fortress was also seized with relative ease, as the Japanese retreated to the fortress closer to the sea.

The allied troops hit the walls again and again with cannonfire and battering rams. The Japanese responded in kind. Though one of the outlying forts remained in Japanese hands, the allies decided to concentrate on the main prize. The Japanese knew they were in a tough spot and Shimazu Yoshihiro even remarked to one of his subordinates that, “If reinforcements don’t come soon, this will be my grave.”62 Finally, on November 1, 1598, the allies managed to breach the walls. Just as they were streaming in to finish off the enemy, however, a magazine of gunpowder exploded, though it is still unclear whether the explosion was touched off accidentally by the attackers or intentionally by the defenders. Most Chinese accounts charge that one Peng Xingu, who was said to be unfamiliar with gunpowder in spite of his previous service in the capital guards, ignited Japanese gunpowder stores as he forced the gates open with cannon and battering rams.63 At any rate, the explosion created chaos in the allied ranks as smoke and flames filled the breach they were trying to scramble through. The defenders took advantage of the situation to sally forth and inflicted heavy losses on the allied troops, though allegations of taking over 30,000 heads are almost certainly greatly exaggerated.64 Still it is said that only 50-60 of Peng’s contingent of 3000 men survived the attack and Mao Guoqi lost 600-700 more.65 Even worse from a military standpoint, the Japanese recovered valuable supplies and provisions. Dong Yiyuan then called for a general retreat to Sangju to await reinforcements. The Japanese did not pursue them because they lacked both the necessary numbers and provisions. Subsequent censorial investigations called for the execution of the soldiers deemed responsible for the blunder, though Dong Yiyuan was given the chance to redeem himself by meritorious service, although he was demoted three grades in rank.66

In order to buy some time, Dong sent Mao Guoqi to negotiate with Shimazu Yoshihiro. Upon seeing his Chinese counterpart, Shimazu gloated, boasting “Today was a great victory for me. First I’ll seize Seoul, then I’ll head west and soon you’ll see me in Liaodong!”67 Dong was concerned when he heard this, and he dispatched a messenger west to warn Yang Hao’s replacement, Xing Jie. Xing, on the other hand, was livid, saying, “Don’t resume peace talks. I’ll kill you before I authorize doing that!”68 Xing also said he was raising more troops to send against Shimazu, who reportedly lost color when he heard Xing’s angry response to his threats. These warnings convinced the Japanese commander to withdraw and his men were forced to fight as they embarked on their ships and set sail for Sunchon, losing fifty men to Zheng Qilong. When Dong Yiyuan entered the abandoned fortress, it is said he found a great deal of treasure, including gold, silks, decorative fans, and fancy carriages, all stolen from the Koreans.69

The Siege of Sunchon

Meanwhile, Liu Ting, who controlled about 24,000 allied troops, was ordered to attack Konishi Yukinaga at Sunchon.70 His land troops were supported by a naval force of over 20,000 led by Chen Lin and Yi Sunsin. The full scale allied offensive was launched in late October. Because Konishi’s fortress of Yegyo at Sunchon was well fortified and additionally protected by mountains and the sea, Liu first tried to trick Konishi into surrendering by dispatching a subordinate to invite Konishi and fifty followers to meet with Liu and discuss some sort of arrangement whereby the Japanese would be allowed to withdraw.71 Unsuspecting, Konishi agreed, and brought fifty retainers along with him to meet with Liu. In the meantime, Liu stationed men all around his tent and told them to wait for a signal to emerge from hiding and slaughter the guards and capture Konishi. When the Japanese commander arrived, Liu broke out the wine and they started talking. Unfortunately, the signal was not properly sounded and fighting broke out between the two sides. In fact Liu found himself in dire straits until a contingent of aboriginal tribespeople came to his rescue.72 Konishi jumped on his horse and galloped away to safety. Japanese sources credit one Matsuura Shigenobu with ferreting out the ambush and making sure his men were alert. Though Matsuura was wounded, his valor enabled Konishi to escape.73

In spite of these problems, the next day Konishi remained very obsequious towards Liu, even sending him a female companion. This behavior was the basis for allegations that Liu was bribed by Konishi.74 Konishi’s ploy failed, though, as Liu led his men in attacking the Japanese fortress. The allied forces killed 92 and took the bridges leading up to the fortress. Chen Lin launched a simultaneous attack by sea. Chen’s initial assault was successful as his squadron wiped out a large supply convoy.75 Seeking to press his advantage, Chen sailed up the narrow islets in an attempt to land behind enemy lines. Undaunted, the Japanese troops rallied and drove their assailants back when the tide ebbed and stranded much of Chen’s fleet. Chen himself narrowly escaped alive. Further skirmishes followed as allied troops assaulted the fortress via the narrow mountain approaches and were driven back. The Japanese tried to fight their way out the northeast corner of the stronghold, but were forced to retreat. Korean sources record there was much friction between allied commanders as they seemed unable to coordinate their efforts properly.76

Though he managed to prevail temporarily, Konishi’s time in Korea was just about up and he knew it. Shimazu Yoshihiro, fresh from his so-called victory at Sachon, was on the way and the Japanese commanders had all received the news of Hideyoshi’s death. Konishi tried to buy time by parleying with both Liu and Chen as Japanese envoys brought Chen gifts of swords, wine and food, and visited with him several times in hopes of coming to some sort of peace arrangement.77 Unresponsive to his overtures, the allies arrayed their fleet in the straits of Noryang, a narrow passage between Namhae Island and the mainland, the only route of approach for the Japanese navy coming from Pusan. The defenders of Sunchon managed to hold the Chinese and Koreans off long enough to start embarking troops on boats still moored there. This set the stage for the most famous naval engagement in Korean history, the Battle of Noryang Straits.

In this climactic battle the allied navy decimated the Japanese, sinking hundreds of ships and killing or capturing hundreds of Japanese soldiers. Some of these captives were later executed while others were actually enrolled into Chinese military units. The battle was bittersweet however, as the major Japanese commanders, including Konishi Yukinaga, were able to escape in the confusion and Korea’s Admiral Yi Sunsin was struck by a musket ball and died in battle, after telling his trusted subordinates to conceal his death from the rest of the army. Nevertheless this battle served as a fitting exclamation point to the war and afforded the Koreans the opportunity to exact at least some small measure of revenge for the depredations they had suffered at the hands of the Japanese over the previous seven years.

In both the sieges of Sachon and Sunchon we see the importance of firearms and topography as well as other elements of early modern siegecraft such as using negotiations and bribes to avoid casualties. In the larger context one gets a better sense of what Western historians such as John Keegan refer to as “the fog of battle” where decisions often had to made in a split second and where accounts of what supposedly happened can often vary radically according to the teller. Scholars of Hideyoshi’s Korean campaigns are extremely fortunate in that they have a seemingly limitless amount of source material to consult, but, as should be clear from the brief accounts given here, these sources are often confusing and contradictory and it is very difficult to determine precisely what happened in any given place or time. Still such accounts yield great information about battle conditions and tactics and should be of great interest to military historians of other parts of the world.

Comparative Dimensions and Suggestions for Further Research

Historians of early modern Europe should find much of interest in these accounts as developments in Asia paralleled those in Europe to some extent with respect to siege warfare. For example, even though it was accepted that the allies, most particularly the Ming armies, enjoyed a decided advantage in sheer firepower, they were often unable to bring their big guns to bear in battle due to terrain considerations and effective Japanese countermeasures. For, as historians of siege and gunpowder warfare in Europe have demonstrated, large guns typically had a much slower rate of fire than smaller weapons and had to be brought uncomfortably close to the walls of a town or castle to be effective.78 Commanders were often understandably reluctant to sustain the kinds of casualties necessary to achieve results with their larger guns, even though Ming armies at least often practiced what were essentially human wave attacks. At the same time there was a definite preference for incendiary attacks on the part of the allies, perhaps because fire arrows were cheaper and more portable than larger siege weapons and cannon. The accounts of sieges described here illustrate this well.

In addition to simply making more comparisons between Eastern and Western siege tactics and strategies, more comparative work needs to be done on actual fortifications and the importance of structures in determining the shape of combat. Geoffrey Parker has done a bit of work along these lines, especially with respect to how Japanese castles incorporated European and indigenous sensibilities to adapt to local realities of warfare, but much more work remains to be done.79 As Parker himself notes, Chinese realities were different and their cities were capable of withstanding massive artillery barrages by European armies even in the nineteenth century. As a result their tactics differed somewhat when approaching a siege and they were unfamiliar with Japanese fortress design, which was replicated in Korea as much as possible. This undoubtedly worked to the advantage of the Japanese, who had been perfecting siege tactics over more than a century of civil war prior to the invasion of Korea.

Likewise the relationship between technology and tactics certainly deserves further study, though as European historians have found, it is often surprising how little relationship there was between the simultaneous development of firearms tactics and technology.80 Throughout the war the combatants experimented with different weapons and tactics including using different types of rockets, primitive time bombs, and grenades. Yet there seems to have been little systematic implementation of particular tactics, although there were repeated attempts to standardize Korean training utilizing southern Chinese style drills and formations. The Japanese were more consistent, but again actual battlefield actions appear to have been largely dictated by commander and circumstance. A comparative look at the evolution of standardized training in Asia and Europe would be instructive. On paper at least the Chinese had standardized training methods throughout the Ming period but again following the law seemed to be up to the whims of individual commanders.

In conclusion I would suggest that as perhaps the most richly documented conflict in early modern East Asia with a voluminous amount of extant source material produced by all three sides (in marked contrast to say accounts of domestic war in China for which generally own Chinese records survive), this war demands further study from both historians of Asia and comparative military historians. A growing body of literature is emerging in Western languages that should allow historians not trained in Asian languages to at least begin to scratch the surface of the conflict and offer their insights based on our much better understanding of siege warfare and tactics in he European world.

Moreover, the study of wars and sieges should not be perceived as solely the province of the military historian. As should be clear from the accounts given herein, surviving documents provide lots of information about the societies that produced them, especially with respect to the social and military values of the participants. For example, siege accounts produced by Chinese and Korean chroniclers often relate tales of Confucian loyalty, filiality, or widow chastity. Japanese accounts, on the other hand, are more likely to extol the virtues of samurai bravery and battle prowess. Lastly, siege accounts often provide glimpses into the lives of ordinary people and how war affected their lives such as in Keinen’s account of those enslaved by the Japanese. Soldiers conscripted or volunteering to serve in armies generally came from less affluent segments of society, at least in China and Korea, and military accounts are one of the few places in which we can recover their voices. While the study of samurai history has long enjoyed pride of place in Japan, it is only recently that historians of China have turned their attention to China’s long and storied military past, and to my knowledge Korea still lags behind China in this regard. Still it seems as if the recent trend towards the study of Chinese military history promises to open up vast new vistas of China’s past for the benefit of both Asianists and comparative military historians.

1 This survey of early Korean history is based on the account given in Ki-baik Lee, A New History of Korea trans. by Edward W. Wagner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 16-21. This text is still the best general survey of Korean history available in English, although its coverage terminates at 1960.


2 On the historical and cultural significance of the conflict, see Jahyun Kim Haboush, “Dead Bodies in the Postwar Discourse of Identity in Seventeenth Century Korea: Subversion and Literary Production in the Private Sector,” Journal of Asian Studies 62.2 (May 2003), pp. 415-442; and Peter H.

Lee, trans., The Record of the Black Dragon Year (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), pp. 38-43.


3 On Yi Sunsin, see Park Yune-hee, Admiral Yi Sun-shin and his Turtleboat Armada (Seoul: Hanjin Publishing Company, 1978). For translations of primary sources produced by Yi, see Ha Tae-hung, trans., Nanjung Ilgi: War Diary of Admiral Yi Sunsin (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1981), and Lee Chong-young, ed., Imjin Changch’o (Admiral Yi Sunsin’s Memorials to Court) trans. by Ha Tae-hung (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1981). Recently another extremely important document, the account of Korea’s prime minister during the war, Yu Songnyong, known in Korean as the Chingbirok, has also been translated into English as The Book of Corrections: Reflections on the National Crisis During the Japanese Invasion of Korea, 1592-1598, trans. by Choi Byonghyon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). The original version of Yu’s text is included in a recent Chinese compilation of materials on the invasion by Wu Fengpei et al. comps. Chaoxian renchen zhi yi shiliao huiji 2 vols. (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin chubanshe, 1990), pp. 257-470. In the rest of this piece I shall refer to the translation as Book of Corrections and the original as CBR. For a more complete discussion of the historiography of the conflict, see Kenneth M. Swope, “The Three Great Campaigns of the Wanli Emperor, 1592-1600: Court, Military and Society in Late Sixteenth-century China,” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Michigan, 2001), pp. 157-161 and pp. 379-383.


4 There are far too many general histories of the Hideyoshi invasions to enumerate here, especially in Japanese. For starters, the many fine works of Kitajima Manji are highly recommended. His most recent work, a brief general history, is Hideyoshi no Chosen shinryaku (Tokyo: Yamakawa kobunkan, 2002). Also recommended are Kuwata Tadachika and Yamaoka Shohachi, eds. Chosen no eki [vol. 5 of Nihon no senshi] (Tokyo: Tokuma shoten, 1965), and Ishihara Michihiro, Bunroku keicho no eki (Tokyo: Hanawa shobo, 1963). In English, see Swope, “Three Great Campaigns,” chapters three to five, and Stephen Turnbull, Samurai Invasion: Japan’s Korean War, 1592-1598 (London: Cassell and Co., 2002), a popular account which, though lavishly illustrated, suffers from a reliance upon too few sources and presents a rather biased version of events. I do not read Korean so I cannot comment on the quality of the secondary literature, though it is certainly voluminous. The primary accounts from all three participants are generally written in classical Chinese thus allowing me to read them.


5 For a more detailed look at the military technologies of the conflict, see Kenneth M. Swope, “Crouching Tigers, Secret Weapons: Military Technology Employed During the Japanese Invasion of Korea, 1592-1598,” forthcoming in The Journal of Military History. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 2002 New York Conference on Asian Studies.


6 For an in-depth discussion of the battle of Pyongyang, see Kenneth M. Swope, “Turning the Tide: The Strategic and Psychological Significance of the Liberation of Pyongyang,” War and Society 21.2 (October 2003).


7 The peace talks are treated in Kenneth M. Swope, “Deceit, Disguise, and Dependence: China, Japan, and the Future of the Tributary System, 1592-1596,” The International History Review 24.4 (Dec. 2002), pp. 757-782.


8 Kitajima, p. 80.


9 See Kawaguchi Choju, Seikan iryaku [ca. 1831] pp. 471-774 in Wu Fengpei, et al., p. 714. Hereafter cited as SI.


10 Information on both of these sources can be found in George Elison [Jurgis Elisonas], “The Priest Keinen and His Account of the Campaign in Korea, 1597-1598: An Introduction,” in Motoyama Yukihiko Kyoju taikan kinen rombunshu henshu iinkai, ed. Nihon Kyoikushi ronso: Motoyama Yukihiko Kyoju taikan kinen rombunshu (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1988), pp. 26-32. Elison also translates a few passages from each. Keinen’s work has recently been republished with considerable commentary and analytical essays. See Keinen, Chosen nichinichiki o yomu Shinshu so ga mita Hideyoshi no Chosen shinryaku (Kyoto: Hozokan, 2000).


11 See Keinen, pp. 14-15, and Elison’s translations of similar passages on pp. 33-34.


12 Traditional Korean fortresses are described in Wilber D. Bacon, Fortresses of Kyonggi-do,” Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 37 (1961), pp. 1-64. Also see Turnbull, pp. 20-21.


13 Throughout the war there was considerable rivalry between northern and southern Chinese troops and their commanders. The Koreans generally placed more faith in southern troops, whom they deemed more proficient in infantry based warfare and who had a record of battling so-called Japanese pirates (wokou). See Li Guangtao, comp. Chaoxian Renchen Wohuo shiliao 5 vols. (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 1970), p. 1040. This is a compilation of Korean sources on the Japanese invasions, mostly taken from The Veritable Records of the Choson Dynasty, or Choson Wangjo sillok. Hereafter cited as CXSL. Also see Sin Kyong, Zai zao fan bang zhi [ca. 1693] 2 vols. (Taibei: Guiting chuban youxian gongsi, 1980), p. 528. This is another Korean account, compiled by a descendent of the Korean royal family. As this edition was published in Taiwan, I use Chinese Romanization for the title. Hereafter cited as FBZ.


14 See FBZ, p. 528, Kitajima, p. 80, and Book of Corrections, p. 200 and p. 210.


15 CXSL, p. 1061.


16 Book of Corrections, pp. 210-211, and FBZ, p. 547.


17 CXSL, p. 1062.


18 SI, p. 719.


19 Cited in Li Guangtao, Chaoxian Renchen Wohuo yanjiu (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 1972), p. 207.


20 FBZ, p. 548.


21 FBZ, p. 549, and Book of Corrections, p. 212.


22 FBZ, p. 549, and Book of Corrections, p. 212.


23 See Zhuge Yuansheng Liang chao ping rang lu [1606] (Taibei: Taiwan xusheng shuju, 1969), p. 315. Hereafter cited as PRL, this contemporary Ming source contains chronicles of Chinese military actions against foreign and domestic foes in the Longqing (1567-1572) and Wanli (1573-1620) reigns. Also see Mao Ruizheng, Wanli san da zheng kao [1621] vol. 58 in Shen Yunlong, comp. Ming-Qing shiliao huibian 83 vols. (Taibei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1971), p. 52. Hereafter cited as SDZK. Yang Yuan would later be executed for his failure.


24 SI, p. 721.


25 Keinen, pp. 17-18, and Kitajima, pp. 81-85. Also see Elison, pp. 28-30.


26 Kitajima, p. 85.


27 Images of some of these communications can be found in Kitajima, pp. 82-83. Shimazu Tadamori allegedly took thirteen heads himself. See Yamamoto Masayoshi, Shimazu kokushi 10 vols. (Tokyo: Seikyo kappan insatsujo, 1905), juan 21, p. 5a. This is a family history of the Shimazu clan, created from clan histories.


28 See SI, pp. 721-722, and PRL, p. 316.


29 On the significance of the Battle of Chiksan, see Li Guangtao, “Ming ren yuan Han yu Jishan da jie,” Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan 43 (1971), pp. 1-14. Also see FBZ, pp. 550-553.


30 Kitajima, pp. 89-90.


31 The Japanese colonial administration conducted extensive studies of the remains of Japanese built castles in Korea during the occupation in the first half of the twentieth century. See Ōta Hideharu, “Gumbu ni yoru Bunroku-Keichō no eki no jokaku kenkyu,” Gunji shigaku 38 (Sept. 2002), pp. 35-48.


32 FBZ, pp. 556-557.


33 CXSL, p. 1161, and FBZ, p. 558.


34 FBZ, pp. 558-559.


35 Li Guangtao, “Ming ren yuan Han yu Yang Hao Weishan zhi yi,” Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan 41.4 (1969), p. 545.


36 SI, p. 736.


37 See Keinen, pp. 69-73, and Elison, pp. 34-37.


38 Gu Yingtai, Ming shi jishi benmo [1658] repr. in Lidai jishi benmo 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997), p. 2378. Hereafter cited as MSJSBM. The reader should be aware that battle accounts from these times often vary slightly in particular details and are not always completely accurate, sometimes combining or deleting certain events.


39 SDZK, p. 54.


40 CXSL, p. 1162.


41 CXSL, p. 1163.


42 CXSL, pp. 1163-1164.


43 Li Guangtao, “Yang Hao yu Weishan zhi yi,” p. 553.


44 CXSL, p. 1165.


45 CXSL, pp. 1167-1168.


46 SI, p. 744. Also see Elison’s translation of Keinen’s account, p. 36, and FBZ, p. 561.


47 On the arrival of the Japanese relief column and the panic it caused, see Shimazu kokushi 21, pp. 6b-7a.


48 FBZ, pp. 559-560.


49 CXSL, p. 1972.


50 The number of allied casualties varies widely according to the source in question with estimates ranging from 3800 to as high as 10,000 or more. See CXSL, p. 1420.


51 See MSJSBM, p. 2378, and FBZ, pp. 568-569.


52 CXSL, p. 1172.


53 FBZ, p. 572.


54 For details on this fascinating episode, see the excellent articles by Gari Ledyard, “Confucianism and War: The Korean Security Crisis of 1598,” Journal of Korean Studies 6 (1988-89), pp. 81-120, and Li Guangtao, “Ding Yingtai yu Yang Hao—Chaoxian Renchen Wohuo luncong zhi yi,” Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan 53 (1982), pp. 129-166. Also see Yi Kae-hwang, Bunroku keichō no eki to Higashi Ajia (Kyoto: Rinsen shōten, 1997), pp. 7-42.


55 Translated in Elison, p. 35. For the original, see Keinen, pp. 73-74.


56 Cited in Li Guangtao, Ming-Qing dang’an lunwenji (Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1986), p. 831.


57 Kitajima, pp. 93-94.


58 See Zhang Tingyu, et al., comps. Ming shi [1739] 12 vols. (Taibei: Dingwen shuju, 1994), p. 6201. Hereafter cited as MS.


59 Li Guangtao, Renchen Wohuo yanjiu, p. 260.


60 See Shimazu kokushi 21, pp. 5b-6a.


61 PRL, p. 366.


62 Cited in Li Guangtao, Renchen Wohuo yanjiu, p. 261.


63 See, for example, SDZK, p. 57, and PRL, p. 371. Dong Yiyuan’s Ming shi biography, however, states that the Japanese set off the explosion on purpose. See MS, p. 6214. Also see the Korean account in CXSL, pp. 1375-1376, which blames Mao Guoqi’s subordinates. The Japanese version of events can be found in SI, pp. 757-760, and Shimazu kokushi 21, pp. 8b-12a.


64 Shimazu clan records claimed they took 38,700 Ming heads at Sachon, impossible if Ming and Korean records of troop strength are to be believed. See Shimazu kokushi 21, p. 12a, and MSJSBM, p. 2378. Kitajima Manji notes that Shimazu claims that there were 80,000 enemy troops besieging Sachon seem greatly exaggerated. The Japanese erected a memorial to the Korean dead the next year at Koyo-san Temple in Japan. See Kitajima, p. 95.


65 PRL, p. 372.


66 SDZK, p. 57.


67 Cited in Li Guangtao, Renchen Wohuo yanjiu, p. 262.


68 Cited in Li Guangtao, Renchen Wohuo yanjiu, p. 262.


69 PRL, p. 381.


70 Liu Ting (1552-1619), better known to his contemporaries as Big Sword Liu (Liu Da Dao), was one of the most renowned and colorful of all the Ming generals. He earned considerable distinction fighting aboriginal rebels in southwest China prior to his service in Korea. He eventually died battling the Latter Jin forces in 1619 in Liaodong.


71 MSJSBM, p. 2378.


72 MSJSBM, p. 2378.


73 SI, p. 752.


74 See Park, pp. 237-240, CBR, pp. 437-438, and SI, p. 763.


75 SDZK, p. 56.


76 See the discussion in Li Guangtao, Renchen Wohuo yanjiu, pp. 266-274.


77 See Nanjung ilgi, pp. 342-343.


78 See, for example, Maurice Keen, “The Changing Scene: Guns, Gunpowder, and Permanent Armies,” in Keen, ed., Medieval Warfare: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 277.


79 See Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 142-145. Japanese castles were typically built on hills overlooking plains and incorporated a series of walls and smaller towers in winding circles around the castle, not entirely unlike the trace italienne design used in Europe. See Parker, pp. 12-14.


80 See Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 130.