Authors: Samuel Hawley
The two and a half weeks that elapsed before Yi Sun-sin sailed into the war were thus a time of calm and deliberate preparation. First, he decided that the most effective way to counter the Japanese would be to combine his modest force (he had twenty-four panokson board-roofed battleships, fifteen mid-sized vessels, and forty-six comman
deered fishing boats that he would later discard as useless) with the vessels in Yi Ok-ki’s Cholla Right Navy to create a united fleet. It is clear from his diaries and dispatches to Seoul that he had begun organizing this soon after the start of the invasion. Second, Yi needed information on the waterways of Kyongsang Province before he could act—no small consideration, for Korea’s southern coast is a maze of rocks and reefs and dangerous tides, any one of which can doom a vessel. He thus sent a request for charts to Kyongsang governor Kim Su and to Won Kyun in his refuge to the east, and when they arrived he studied them carefully.
Finally, Yi needed time to prepare his men mentally for the battles ahead. The news of the fall of
Pusan and Tongnae, the destruction of both Kyongsang fleets, and the seeming invincibility of the Japanese had had an understandably demoralizing effect on virtually every man in the fleet. To have rushed them into battle in such a frame of mind would have been disastrous, for as the fourth-century-
B.C.
Chinese military classic
Ssu-Ma Fa
observed, “When men have minds set on victory, all they see is the enemy. When men have minds filled with fear, all they see is their fear.”
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Yi had to be confident that his men, particularly his captains, would not lose their nerve and in turn their heads at the first sight of the enemy. He needed to build up their anger and their confidence to the point where they were fully prepared to fight and win. In his diary entries for this period we thus find him holding numerous conferences with his captains, testing their resolve and leading them in solemn pledges to fight to the death. We find him questioning the magistrates of the towns under his jurisdiction to gauge their commitment to man the walls and fight. We find him offering encouragement to his men, stirring up their martial spirit, quelling their fears and imbuing in them his own grim determination to strike a telling blow against the Japanese.
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This is why Yi Sun-sin waited two and a half weeks before leading his ships into battle. This is why, when Won Kyun and Kyongsang governor Kim Su urged him to come to their aid, he replied with a request for charts. He refused to act rashly. He would proceed only with calm deliberation, “like a mountain.”
All this was lost on Kyongsang naval commander Won Kyun, holed up in a cove to the east with his remaining four ships. In his view he had sent out a call for help that Yi Sun-sin had failed to answer. It was the first of numerous complaints that an increasingly resentful Won would make against Yi. Soon the two men would thoroughly despise each other.
*
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With
Korea’s beacon-fire system in disrepair, it took four days for news of the Japanese invasion to travel the 450 kilometers north to Seoul. The first dispatch came by horse and rider, sent by Kyongsang Left Navy Commander Pak Hong. Pak himself was not far behind.
After more than a year of foot-dragging over defensive preparations, it was only now that the government appointed the generals needed to lead the nation’s armies. In 1591 Minister of the Left Yu Song-nyong had urged that these appointments be made well in advance of the out
break of hostilities so that the generals would have time to acquaint themselves with their commands and mount an effective defense. But this went against the Choson practice of keeping generals in Seoul until the moment they were needed to lead troops into battle, and so Yu’s suggestion was ignored. Now, just as Yu had predicted, “visiting generals” would have to “gallop down to the provinces on the spur of the moment” to defend the routes north to Seoul. For the top post of
dowonsu
, commander in chief of the armed forces in all of Korea’s eight provinces, a fifty-eight-year-old civil servant named Kim Myong-won was selected—yet another example of the Korean idea that a classically trained government official with no military experience was capable of leading armies. Sin Ip, a bona fide army officer, was appointed to the secondary post of
samdo sunbyonsa
, “commander of the three provinces” of Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong. Beneath Sin came Yi Il as
sunbyonsa
, “provincial commander,” with responsibility for Kyongsang-do, and then a handful of
pangosa
, “county commanders,” charged with defending specific strategic points.
With these crucial appointments out of the way, it was time to apportion blame for the crisis. The brunt of it fell upon Kim Song-il, the envoy who had returned from
Japan in 1591 with assurances that war would never come. Kim, now serving as Kyongsang Right Army commander, was arrested for making a false report to the throne, a charge that carried an almost certain sentence of death. He was being transported to Seoul, bound as a prisoner, when his close friend Yu Song-nyong petitioned the king for a pardon and secured his release. Kim would be sent back to Kyongsang Province as a recruiting officer to raise civilian troops. He would fall sick and die there the following year.
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The Koreans had a good idea how the Japanese would march north. Because their kingdom was so mountainous (a local joke has it that if Korea were ironed flat it would be as big as China), long-distance traffic was necessarily confined to prepared routes that snaked through the labyrinthine valleys and cut across the otherwise impenetrable moun
tain ranges that crisscrossed the peninsula. There were three such routes linking Pusan and Seoul of which the Japanese were known to be aware: the eastern road through Kyongsang Province, the western road through Chungchong Province, and the central road, the most direct route to the capital, running up the middle of the peninsula. With these three routes in mind, the following defensive plan was accordingly drawn up. General Yi Il would head south along the crucially important central road to meet the Japanese advance while it was still in the southern province of Kyongsang. General Sin Ip would position his forces farther north along the central road in the town of Chungju, there to meet the Japanese if they managed to get by Yi Il. The county commanders, meanwhile, would fan out across the south to hold various strategic points: General Pyon Ki was charged with defending Choryong, “Bird Pass,” a narrow defile in the Sobaek mountain range on the central road between the towns of Sangju and Chungju. General Yu Kuk-ryang would make a stand farther north at Chuknyong, “Bamboo Pass,” a short distance south of Seoul. General Cho Kyong was sent south to meet any Japanese force that ventured up the western road through Cholla Province near the Yellow Sea coast, and General Song Ung-gil down the eastern road along the peninsula’s opposite side. Commander in Chief Kim Myong-won, finally, would remain in Seoul for the time being to oversee defensive preparations there.
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All these generals had difficulty mustering armies to lead to the south. The military lists of soldiers stationed in and around the capital proved useless, for the vast majority of these men were absent, many excused due to sickness or for the prescribed two-year mourning period for a deceased parent. The company of three hundred supposedly crack troops assigned to
Yi Il, for example—a miserably small force to begin with—turned out to consist in large part of hastily recruited students and clerks pulled out of government offices. Ordered to depart immediately for the south, General Yi decided to leave this useless rabble behind and set out with a guard of just sixty mounted men he knew he could rely upon. With this small “army,” plus others he hoped to pick up along the way, General Yi was expected to halt the Japanese advance.
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The situation was only marginally better for Yi’s superior, Sin Ip, who headed south from
Seoul the following day. King Sonjo was on hand to see him off, together with a large portion of the capital’s anxious population. In a brief ceremony the king presented Sin with an old and valuable sword symbolizing the military authority that was now being bestowed upon him. You have my personal permission, Sonjo said, to call up men in the provinces to form an army, to requisition whatever weapons you need from government armories, and to execute anyone who fails to obey your commands.
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King Sonjo and the people of Seoul expected great things from General Sin as they watched him depart, for he was one of the most highly regarded generals in the nation, with a distinguished career leading his vaunted cavalry against the Jurchen tribes of the north. He had expressed a great deal of confidence prior to the outbreak of the war of Korea’s ability to resist the Japanese, assuring Yu Song-nyong that even if Hideyoshi’s soldiers had muskets, “they can’t hit anyone with them.” Now that war was upon them Sin continued to talk along the same lines. The Japanese were rapidly outrunning their supply lines, he claimed, and were growing daily more vulnerable to the devastating cavalry charges he intended to unleash upon them. He vowed to stop them in their tracks, or to not come back alive. It was all brave talk, probably designed, like his earlier pronouncement on muskets, to buck up quavering government officials and nervous military men. Sin himself certainly was not foolish enough to believe it. He would have known that they were now facing something much more serious than a simple border raid.
*
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As General Sin was setting out on his journey south to halt the enemy advance, the second contingent of the Japanese invasion force was arriving at
Pusan. After a maddening delay waiting for favorable winds, it finally managed to make the crossing from Tsushima Island on May 28, five days behind the vanguard of Konishi Yukinaga. The second contingent consisted of 22,800 men, like Konishi’s first contingent exclusively from the southern island of Kyushu, and was under the overall command of Kato Kiyomasa, the thirty-year-old lord of Kuma-moto Castle in Higo Province.
Kato’s second contingent, composed entirely of Buddhists of the Nichiren sect, came ashore near
Pusan under a banner emblazoned in red with the mantra
namu myoho renge kyo
: “Glory to the Holy Lotus.” The sect had been founded by the evangelical monk Nichiren, who had inspired the Japanese to stand firm against the Mongol invasions two hundred years before. Nichiren’s adherents were now returning to the launching point of those invasions, Korea, to exact their long-awaited revenge.
Kato and his men would have cut a striking appearance as they waded and were ferried ashore. Kato himself was easily identifiable by the high-crowned helmets he favored. Painted in silver or gold, they were intended to look like the headgear worn by courtiers in the imperial court; to the modern Western eye they resemble an elongated shark’s fin or stylized dunce cap. Unlike most other daimyo command
ers and samurai warriors, he also sported a full beard, reportedly to ease the discomfort of his helmet cord, and carried a three-bladed lance, his favorite weapon for running down and skewering his enemies. Kato’s higher-ranking subordinates sat astride horses in exquisitely made suits of armor, wide-brimmed, horned helmets, and snarling war masks. His foot soldiers wore plainer armor and simple iron-bowl helmets, and had identifying sashimono banners affixed to their backs bearing the image of a ring, Kato’s family crest. They carried spears and swords and arquebuses, the dog-leg weapon the Koreans were coming to fear.
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Kato would have been in an impatient mood that day. There was no more ambitious commander in Hideyoshi’s army, and the fact that his rival Konishi had had the honor of being the first into battle must have chagrined him greatly. But now they were both in the field, and their chances for glory henceforth would be equal. Konishi may have been first to
Pusan. But Kato intended to be first to Seoul.
But where were Konishi and his army? Where was the prima donna daimyo now? His first contingent was supposed to wait at
Pusan for the arrival of Kato’s second contingent and Kuroda’s third, after which they would race north simultaneously along the central, eastern, and western routes. Where was the Christian “Augustin” that Hideyoshi had such an inexplicable affection for?
The answer was a shock. Konishi, he was told, was gone. He had not waited for the arrival of the second and third contingents as per the plan, but had forged ahead for
Seoul as soon as Pusan and Tongnae had been taken and was already several days’ march to the north.
Kato was furious. For Konishi to steal a march on him and capture
Pusan was one thing. For him to then race ahead and take Seoul as well was quite another. That was a degree of glory hogging that Kato would not allow. Mustering his forces for an immediate pullout, he struck north at a punishing pace along his pre-assigned eastern route. He stormed through Ulsan first, encountering no resistance. At Kyongju, capital of the ancient Silla dynasty, he easily smashed through the hastily assembled defenses, torched the city’s thousand-year-old buildings and temples, and put three thousand people to the sword. Next it was Yongchon’s turn, then Sinnyong’s and Kumi’s. His men must have been tired by now, but Kato did not relent. He pushed them on, marching day and night, determined to catch up to and pass his rival Konishi before he reached the gates of Seoul.