Authors: Samuel Hawley
* Total for Takahashi, Akizuki, Ito and Shimazu
** Total for Kurushima Michiyuki and Michifusa
Hideyoshi, then, did not envision a vast Japanese army fanning out across China, down into Indochina, over the Himalayas, and onto the sweltering plains of the subcontinent. Only his rule would spread in this manner, carried farther and farther by locally levied native armies serving an inner core of Japanese troops. A purely Japanese army, or more precisely a Kyushu army, would only begin the process. It would act as the first domino in the cascade, a cascade that would extend Hideyoshi’s rule to the farthest reaches of Asia.
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The Japanese army of invasion that had assembled at
Nagoya by April of 1592 was a formidable force, the Darwinian end product of more than a century of civil war that saw traditional military thought give way to more practical methods of killing. The way of the samurai was still considered glorious, quality horseflesh was still appreciated, and the finely crafted katana sword was still a highly valued thing. But they were no longer the mainstay in Japanese warfare. The lightweight arquebus had changed all that. It was relatively cheap to manufacture. It shot farther than a bow, and more important, packed a greater armor-piercing punch at the closer distances preferred in battle, usually one hundred meters or less. It was easy to use; an uneducated farmer could be taught to handle one effectively in just a few weeks. It did not demand the same degree of intestinal fortitude to wield in battle as did “short weapons” such as the sword and spear; Japanese arquebusiers commonly did their work from behind protective cover. And it gave a soldier an overwhelming, even shocking, advantage. As Oda Nobunaga’s stunning victory in the Battle of Nagashino demonstrated, no amount of samurai skill or courage could prevail against a curtain of flying lead balls. In that seminal 1575 engagement, three thousand Oda foot soldiers stood behind a wooden paling with muskets in hand and patiently mowed down charge after charge of traditionally armed adversaries. After that Japanese warfare was never the same.
Samurai therefore did not constitute a very large portion of Hideyoshi’s invasion army in 1592, nor were traditional cavalry units much in evidence. The use of horses was largely confined to daimyo commanders and their officers, custodians of the samurai tradition with their superbly crafted armor, fierce war masks, and exquisite swords. The bulk of the army was now the ashigaru, the foot soldier. These were mainly farmers and fishermen recruited and trained by daimyo from their respective domains, men like Hideyoshi’s own father Yaemon. They would have been a rough lot, poorly educated and for the most part unable to read. They would not have traveled much; the march to
Nagoya alone was likely the greatest journey many had ever taken. In looking ahead to the crossing to Korea, fear was probably the dominant emotion—fear of dying in a strange and distant place. Most probably wanted nothing more than to get the job done and return to their families. But on the other hand all the talk circulating through the camps of Korean and Chinese wealth must have been alluring, conjuring up visions of cities overflowing with booty, just sitting there for conquering Japanese soldiers to haul away home.
The ashigaru were equipped with swords and spears and bows in addition to lightweight muskets. A portion of these traditional weapons came from the various sword hunts Hideyoshi had conducted over the previous few years to disarm the peasantry of
Japan. His edict of 1589 had declared that all weapons turned in would be used in the construction of the Great Buddha in Kyoto, but the stipulation that swords be collected together with their scabbards indicates that they were to be stored for future use, not melted down to make nails and bolts. One source states that a total of 5,000 battle axes, 100,000 long swords, 100,000 short swords, 100,000 spears, and 500,000 daggers were collected through sword hunts and daimyo requisitions and transported to Nagoya. This figure is undoubtedly inflated, but it is safe to say that Hideyoshi’s army was generously supplied with traditional weapons.
Such was not the case with muskets. Subsequent letters sent home from
Korea by Japanese commanders would repeatedly state that they had more than enough swords and spears and arrows and did not want any more. What they needed were more muskets. To the Koreans the invading Japanese seemed well equipped with these feared weapons; one source opined they had 300,000 of them.
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This is a very unlikely figure. The exact number is not known, but inferences can be made from correspondence of the period. In his 1591 letter of requisition to the
Kyushu daimyo Shimazu Yoshihiro, for example, Hideyoshi ordered that he arm 1,500 of his men with muskets, 1,500 with bows, and 500 with spears.
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Considering that Shimazu contributed about 10,000 men to the invasion, and that no more than half this number were full-time fighting men (the rest would have been engaged primarily in logistical support work),
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this would suggest that fifteen percent of his total force, or thirty percent of his fighting strength, was equipped with personal firearms. Applying this percentage to the total number of 158,800 Japanese soldiers sent to
Korea, a more realistic total of roughly 24,000 muskets is obtained—still a crushing advantage over the Koreans, who had seen their first “dog leg” only the year before.
The various companies in Hideyoshi’s army were highly self-contained. Each was led by a daimyo, thirty-eight in all. In every instance musket-bearing ashigaru formed the vanguard. It was their job to decimate enemy lines and, it was hoped, send them into retreat so that spear and sword units could then rush forward and finish them off with a minimum of resistance. Cavalry units no longer existed as such. Daimyo and their top men rode horses; the ashigaru foot soldiers, as their name implied, walked. Bringing up the rear, finally, were the porters and support staff, that long logistical train that comprised at least half of every unit. These were the nameless men who built fortifi
cations, set up camp, hauled food and gear, cooked meals, and did the hundred and one other jobs that were indispensable to the operation of any army in the field. In the coming invasion of Korea, however, even the lowliest porters and laborers in the Japanese army would prove themselves quite capable of handling a sword or musket and joining in the fight, and so they must be factored into the fighting strength of each unit as quasi-soldiers rather than noncombatants.
These various companies were grouped into nine contingents. In the upcoming invasion the nine would occasionally work in coordination like divisions in a modern army to achieve some particular objective, but more often they would operate independently of one another. Indeed, the individual companies comprising each contingent would at times split up and go their own way. They were able to do so because Hideyoshi’s invasion force, unlike the armies of
China and Korea, was not a centrally controlled national army commanded by a government-appointed hierarchy of officers, but rather a loose confederation of regional armies that were in effect “owned” by the wealthy daimyo lords who raised, armed, and led them. Each of these daimyo had sworn allegiance to Hideyoshi and was committed to using his army to achieve Hideyoshi’s goals, but beyond that he expected and was accorded a good deal of independence in how he organized and employed his men. It was a system that generally worked well for the Japanese. It meant, however, that Hideyoshi himself was the only one capable of effective supreme command; the only one with the clout to override the independent spirits of the daimyo and exercise control over the entire invasion force. The taiko knew this. It was therefore his intention to cross over to Korea in the wake of his advancing armies, reestablish his headquarters in Seoul once that city had been taken, and from there orchestrate the subsequent move on Beijing.
The Japanese army gathering at
Nagoya in the spring of 1592 was the largest army ever assembled in Japan up to that time, and the most professional; a well-organized, well-supplied, and well-equipped war machine designed to project massive killing power. There was not an army anywhere in the world at that time that was superior to it, or probably even its equal. Contemporary armies in Europe were well equipped with muskets and artillery, but they came nowhere near to equaling the immensity of Hideyoshi’s. By way of comparison, the Spanish armada that sailed for England in 1588 consisted of 30,000 men aboard 130 ships—one-fifth the size of the taiko’s 158,800-man expeditionary force. There was in fact only one other country in the world that could raise an army of even 100,000 men, and that was Ming China. But the Ming, for all their manpower, did not have state-of-the-art arquebuses, only old-fashioned fo-lang-chi guns and a scattering of poorly made muskets that tended to blow up in your face.
There was, however, one chink in Hideyoshi’s armor, one weakness that would prove telling if not fatal later on: his navy. Navies had not played much of a role in
Japan’s wars of unification, and consequently Japan’s naval development lagged behind Korea’s. Ships were used during the sengoku period mainly to transport troops, or on rare occasions as floating platforms upon which land battles could be extended offshore. In such engagements the usual objective was to decimate the men aboard enemy vessels with arrow and musket fire and then, when their ranks had been sufficiently weakened, to move in close for boarding to finish off survivors. Naval warfare, in other words, was conducted much like warfare on land: the idea was to kill enemy soldiers, not sink enemy ships.
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There were exceptions. In 1576 Oda Nobunaga approached
Osaka with his army aboard a flotilla of three hundred small craft with the intention of storming the Mori stronghold. The Mori’s own fleet met him in the harbor and in the ensuing battle seriously mauled Oda’s floating army. To break the Mori’s naval superiority, Nobunaga ordered one of his vassals, a co-opted pirate leader named Kuki Yoshitaka, to construct seven heavy ships, armored in part if not wholly in iron, that would be impervious to the Mori’s arrow and musket fire. He returned to Osaka with a squadron of these vessels in 1578 and succeeded in annihilating the Mori’s conventional fleet of light, wooden ships—the first recorded use of “iron ships” in the history of naval warfare.
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This amazing victory seems to have had little impact on Hideyoshi, who was a top Oda general at that time and undoubtedly acquainted with the battle and the shipbuilding activities of his fellow vassal Kuki. Instead of attempting to develop the idea of an armored ship impervious to enemy fire, he seems to have remained mired in 1592 in the old notion of the ship as a floating platform for land troops.
To transport his invasion force across to Korea, Hideyoshi ordered the maritime daimyo of Kyushu, Shikoku, and Chugoku (the western end of Honshu) to supply ships at a rate of two large vessels for every 100,000 koku of annual revenue. This core of large ships would have been augmented by several hundred existing smaller craft, fishing boats, and Inland Sea cargo ships. The resulting motley armada totaled approximately seven hundred vessels of various sizes, capable of carrying anywhere from just a few tens of men up to several hundred. To man them, fishing villages were required to provide ten sailors for every hundred households.
These seven hundred vessels were not warships. They were trans
ports that were intended to ferry soldiers across to Tsushima Island and then on to Pusan. They were lightly built, they afforded the men on board little or no protection, and they had no onboard artillery other than the few cannon that were being transported to Korea, which in all likelihood were stowed as cargo and not mounted for use at sea. They were, in short, vulnerable to attack by the Korean navy. To provide this flotilla some measure of protection, Hideyoshi ordered Kuki Yoshitaka—the same man who had commanded Nobunaga’s iron ships back in 1578—to oversee the construction of several hundred warships in the Bay of Ise on central Honshu’s Pacific coast. The largest of these, of the atakebune class, were thirty-three meters long and carried a crew of one hundred and eighty. Smaller were the sekibune and the kohaya classes. Although heavier than the transport ships they would be convoying, all three of these classes were still significantly lighter than the warships of the Korean navy, and not as maneuverable. They also carried fewer cannon: the atakebune, the largest and presumably the most heavily armed, had only three guns, whereas the most lightly armed Korean battleship carried at least twelve.
Hideyoshi also attempted to augment his navy with European ships. The idea had been in his mind from at least as early as May 1586, when he expressed a desire to the Jesuit Gaspar Coelho to charter two Portuguese men-of-war for his planned conquest of
China. He was prepared, he said, to pay handsomely for the vessels, and would additionally have churches built all across China and order the entire population converted to Christianity. Father Coelho, thinking Hideyoshi was merely daydreaming, agreed offhandedly to provide the ships (despite standing orders from his superior not to interfere in local politics). Hideyoshi reportedly was delighted. This intriguing twist never materialized, however, despite Hideyoshi’s repeated requests to the Portuguese in the months leading up the war.
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To man the warships of his navy, Hideyoshi ordered a number of maritime daimyo on Honshu and
Shikoku to raise a total of 9,450 men, a rather light force considering the gargantuan army they would be expected to protect. The daimyo at the head of these men would be his “admirals.” They included Kuki Yoshitaka with 1,500 men, Todo Takatora (2,000), Wakizaka Yasuharu (1,500), Kato Yoshiaki (1,000), the Kuwayama brothers, Ichiharu and Masaharu with 2,000, and the Kurushima brothers, Michiyuki and Michifusa, with 700.
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Some of these daimyo admirals were the heirs of the wako pirates who had terrorized the coasts of
Korea and China up until the mid-1550s. Kuki Yoshitaka, for example, was of the same Kuki family that had launched raids from its lair on the Kii peninsula, while the Kurushima brothers descended from an Inland Sea wako chief. Such men were to be found elsewhere in the invasion force as well: Matsuura Shigenobu was a descendent of the same Matsuura clan that had given rise to the wako back in the thirteenth century; Goto Sumiharu was daimyo of the once notorious Goto Islands. While lawless wako pirates may no longer have existed in Hideyoshi’s Japan, the tradition thus was in a sense being kept alive as their now respectable descendants prepared to return to Korea in the biggest wako raid East Asia had ever seen.