Authors: Samuel Hawley
These concerns must have been weighing heavily on the mind of Emperor Go-Yozei in
Kyoto, for that summer he took the unusual step of writing to Hideyoshi to urge him to abandon his plan:
Your plan to proceed to Korea, braving great storms and dangerous seas, is both too serious and too desperate to be considered. You should realize how precious is your life and how necessary you are to the national welfare. A man of your genius and attainments may direct an army thousands of miles distant and be able to win a brilliant victory, as great military leaders of yore have done. Moreover, the military men whom you have already sent to the continent, together with those whom you are about to send, will be capable of conducting the military work satisfactorily. For the sake of the throne and for the sake of the empire, we urgently request that you abandon your plan to go in person.
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This personal appeal from the emperor did little to sway Hideyoshi. He remained adamant about crossing to Korea as soon as his health allowed. But the emperor was not alone in his concern. The inner circle of daimyo attending Hideyoshi with their reserve forces at Nagoya were equally adamant that he abandon his plan. They warned him of the dangers of the sea crossing to Pusan during typhoon season, particularly for the large number of men and ships that Hideyoshi was proposing to take, and they urged him to postpone his trip for at least a few months. The danger certainly was real. It was a typhoon, after all, that had wrecked the Mongol armada of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century when he attempted to invade Japan.
According to Hideyoshi it was these entreaties that eventually caused him to change his mind and postpone his crossing. In a letter of explanation sent to his daimyo commanders in Korea later in the fall, he announced that he would be joining them at a later date than had been originally planned, on account, he said, of the weather:
All preparations for crossing the waters having been completed, I made ready to sail. However, Iyeyasu, Toshiiye, and several other prominent military men came forward and begged that I change the plans, saying that the hurricane season was approaching, and that the transportation of our troops to
Korea would require several months, extending to even August and September, after which water traffic would be closed because of the stormy weather. The transportation of troops in these seasons would cause great loss of life and possibly end in disaster. Therefore, we decided to postpone sailing to Korea until next March when the sea should be open and the sailing safe.
Taking the God of War and other deities as witnesses, we pledge that this decision to delay is wholly contrary to our desire, but was necessary because of conditions. As it is a settled national question that Tai-Min [
China] is to be conquered, my plan of sailing to the continent and assuming personal charge of our entire army in the coming spring will certainly be carried out.
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Was weather the only concern that prompted Hideyoshi to postpone his trip to Korea? Possibly not. There may also have been political considerations behind his decision. At some point during July, Hideyoshi held a council meeting with the principal daimyo attending him at Nagoya: Maeda Toshiie, Gamo Ujisato, Asano Nagamasa, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. (Maeda, Gamo, and Asano were all
fudai
daimyo, meaning that they had voluntarily entered Hideyoshi’s service early in his career, and had risen to prominence on his coattails. Tokugawa Ieyasu was a
tozama
daimyo who risen to prominence independently and allied himself with Hideyoshi in the later stages of national unification.) At this meeting Hideyoshi proposed that he, Maeda, and Gamo lead their forces to Korea to help finish off that country and add their weight to the upcoming push to Beijing. Tokugawa Ieyasu, he said, would stay behind to oversee affairs in Japan. No one present openly questioned this idea. After the meeting, however, Asano Nagamasa muttered that “Hideyoshi is out of his mind.” The taiko, overhearing this comment or having it reported to him, flew into a rage and confronted Asano. “What do you mean insulting me in this way?” he roared. “If you have a reason for making such a rude speech I will hear it; otherwise I will cut off your head!”
“You can cut my head off whenever you please,” replied Asano coolly. “But as to what I have said, of course I have a reason for it.... You say that it is your intention to go in person to
Korea...and that you will leave the whole of these sixty-odd provinces in the hands of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Now, you are perfectly well aware that by dint of years and years of hard fighting you have only just succeeded in bringing the whole of Japan under your control. At present there is peace. But why? Only because you are feared. Your departure to another country would be a signal for a general uprising. The great lords who have been humiliated would take this opportunity of avenging themselves on you. At such a crisis what could Tokugawa do? It is because you do not see this, because your usual sharpness in forecasting what is likely to happen under given circumstances seems to have left you, that I say you are out of your mind....”
Asano’s explanation had little effect. Hideyoshi drew his sword and rushed at his retainer, but was restrained by Maeda and Gamo. “If Nagamasa is to be beheaded,” they said, desperately trying to calm him, “let it be done by someone else. It is beneath the dignity of a man of your rank to slay a subordinate.” Asano in the meantime was quietly hustled out of the room, and returned to his home to wait for what he expected would be an inevitable sentence of death.
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A few days after this episode, an event occurred that changed Hide
yoshi’s mind and saved Asano’s life. A message arrived at Nagoya from the nearby Kyushu province of Higo that a minor vassal of the Shimazu, one Umekita Kunikane, had refused to join the expedition to Korea and was intending to march his force instead against Nagoya Castle. According to the Shimazu family history, Umekita acted as he did because he feared he would be punished by Hideyoshi for being so tardy in raising the force required of him and leading it to Korea.
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But this was not the whole story. Umekita in fact had the sympathy of at least one member of the Shimazu, the clan Hideyoshi had subdued during his conquest of
Kyushu in 1587, and he undoubtedly hoped that his small action would draw large support from this daimyo family and lead to a general uprising. But in this Umekita made a fatal miscalculation. The Shimazu were not willing to openly resist Hideyoshi, certainly not with him at Nagoya, less than two hundred kilometers away. Umekita’s rebellion thus remained an isolated occurrence, involving no more than one hundred and fifty samurai. It was quickly crushed by the Shimazu themselves, most of the participants were killed, and the leading Umekita sympathizer in the family, Shimazu Toshihisa, was forced to commit suicide.
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The threat to national peace and unity therefore subsided almost as soon as it arose. But the affair nevertheless awoke Hideyoshi to the truth of what Asano had said just days before. If he had been away in
Korea when Umekita made his move, what might the Shimazu have done? Would they have acted promptly to control the situation? Or would they have joined this rebel, thinking they could reclaim their lost island before Hideyoshi could respond? The nation clearly required the taiko’s own commanding presence if peace and unity were to be maintained.
Hideyoshi therefore summoned Asano back to
Nagoya Castle to apologize and to thank him for his candor. As a sign of his renewed favor he offered Asano’s son the honor of putting down the rebellion, but shortly thereafter word arrived that the Shimazu themselves had already completed the task.
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If Hideyoshi was concerned that
Japan might fall apart in his absence, he certainly could not admit it, for that would have been an admission that he was not in full control. Nor could he cite his own ill health, for that would have made him look feeble. In the end the only reason he could openly give for postponing his trip to Korea was the weather. Which consideration was foremost in his mind we do not know. All that is certain is that the decision was made and that it was made some time prior to July 28, as revealed in a letter he penned to his wife on that date: “As I said the other day,” he wrote, “since I have been told that the sea will be calm in the 3rd month [April of the following year, 1593], I have decided to postpone my visit to Korea until spring and to greet the New Year in Nagoya....[P]lease do not worry.”
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Hideyoshi was now caught on the horns of a dilemma. To safeguard the fragile unity he had imposed on the nation over the past ten years, he had to remain in Japan. In this regard his decision to postpone his trip to Korea was the right one. By putting off the journey, however, he was placing his great dream of empire in jeopardy. The Korean campaign was proceeding very nicely at the moment, even without his personal leadership. The news from the front was excellent, better than even he could have hoped. But Hideyoshi was no fool. His success in unifying Japan is evidence of just how well he could manipulate powerful men, and by inference of how well he understood them. He knew he could not crush every rival from Satsuma Province in the south to Mutsu in the north and make everyone his groveling servant. That approach would have greatly prolonged the process of national unification. Instead he cut deals, allowing rivals to keep large land holdings and positions of power in exchange for oaths of loyalty to him. It was this approach that so speeded up the drive toward national unification after Hideyoshi seized the domain of his fallen master, Oda Nobunaga. But it meant that Hideyoshi’s Japan was governed at the provincial level by a number of powerful and strong-willed men, daimyo who had outwardly sworn loyalty to Hideyoshi, but inwardly remained quite independent.
These were the generals who were now fighting in
Korea. They were doing Hideyoshi’s bidding. But their loyalty and fear of him would take them only so far. They were all still more or less on track in these early days of the war, reveling in the glory of the thing as they slashed their way to Seoul. But in time their individualism was bound to assert itself, leading them to question Hideyoshi’s orders, to resent their hardships, and to compete among themselves for honors they felt they deserved. The first signs of this were already appearing in reports Hideyoshi was receiving of the rivalry between Kato Kiyomasa and Konishi Yukinaga. This must have worried him. He must have understood that, sooner or later, his unquestioned leadership would be needed in the field to hold his enterprise together and keep it moving forward. When this critical point would be reached one could only guess. Did Konishi, Kato, Kuroda and their colleagues have the determination to carry on all the way to Beijing without Hideyoshi at the lead, urging them on? Would they only go as far as the Yalu River before their enthusiasm petered out? Or would they stop at Seoul?
Now that Hideyoshi’s armies had advanced halfway up the Korean Peninsula to Seoul, it was becoming essential that a seaborne supply line be established so that reinforcements, weapons, and food stores could be brought forward in preparation for the coming push into China. The entire enterprise hinged on the opening of this sea route. Without it, everything would have to be carried all the way from the Pusan beachhead to the advancing front, and every soldier would have to walk, a distance already of hundreds of kilometers over mountainous terrain. After completing their task of ferrying the first eight contingents of the Japanese army from Nagoya to Pusan, therefore, squadrons from Hideyoshi’s seven-hundred-ship fleet began probing westward along Korea’s southern coast, feeling their way through treacherous channels, around rocky headlands, and into potentially hostile territory, reaching out for the Yellow Sea and the way north.
They made it about eighty kilometers. Then the Korean navy stopped them in their tracks.
The Korean navy by this time was in very bad shape, both the Kyongsang Left and Right Navies, fully two-thirds of its entire force, having been scuttled by their own commanders, Pak Hong and Won Kyun, soon after the arrival of Hideyoshi’s armada at Pusan. Pak, based at the nearby port of Kijang, panicked upon witnessing the Battle of Tongnae and fled inland to safety after ordering his fleet sunk and all his weapons destroyed. Won Kyun, upon receiving this astonishing news at his base on Koje Island forty kilometers to the west, tried to lead his own fleet farther west to safety before the Japanese arrived to destroy him, but soon mistook distant fishing boats for approaching enemy battleships, and in a panic he too ordered his vessels scuttled and prepared to flee north. Entreaties and threats from two of his lieutenants finally brought him to his senses. But by then it was too late; only a handful of vessels from his hundred-ship fleet were still afloat. With this remnant of the Kyongsang fleet, Won Kyun went into hiding in the coves along Korea’s southern coast, from where he began sending desperate requests for reinforcements westward to Yosu, home port of Cholla Left Navy Commander Yi Sun-sin.
Yi Sun-sin did not charge into battle upon hearing of the Japanese invasion, nor upon receiving requests for reinforcements from his colleague Won Kyun. He waited for two and a half weeks. He had a number of reasons for this. First, there was the matter of orders. Yi was charged first and foremost with protecting his own command, the eastern coast of
Cholla Province. Until he received orders from Seoul freeing him to act on his own recognizance, he was thus duty bound to remain at his post. Second, Yi needed time to prepare for action. He needed to strengthen the defenses of the ports under his command. He needed to acquire maps of the treacherous coastal waters of Kyongsang Province, and intelligence on the intentions and movements of the Japanese. He hoped to organize a united fleet of some ninety ships with his colleague Yi Ok-ki, commander of the Cholla Right Navy, for separately their respective forces were rather skimpy for taking on the Japanese.
Finally, Yi needed to be sure of his men. This meant whipping up their confidence and fighting spirit so that they would not lose their nerve in the face of the enemy as their Kyongsang counterparts had done. It also meant punishing deserters. When several men tried to escape in the night in early June, Yi sent out troops to round them up, then ordered them executed and their heads displayed, “to calm down the agitation and confused minds within the camp.”
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*
* *
June 12, 1592. The day
Seoul fell to the Japanese. In Yi Sun-sin’s camp another sailor attempted to desert. Yi had the man arrested and his head cut off and hung on a pole.
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Then he made ready to sail. He had intended to await the arrival of Cholla Right Navy Commander Yi Ok-ki so that they could combine their fleets, but in the end orders from
Seoul drove him into battle alone. The Choson court, perhaps responding to complaints from Won Kyun that Yi was slow in sending reinforcements, ordered him to form a united front with Won’s Kyongsang Right Navy. The order showed a lack of understanding of the situation, for Won’s “fleet” now consisted of only four battleships and a few fishing boats; Yi Sun-sin’s original intention to link up with Yi Ok-ki’s intact fleet made much more sense. But orders were orders. And so he sailed east alone.
Yi led his fleet out of Yosu harbor at two o’clock in the morning of June 13. He had thirty-nine fighting ships under his command (twenty-four large panokson and fifteen smaller decked vessels called
hyeupson
), plus forty-six “sea ears,” small, open boats that would serve as couriers and scouts. They enjoyed a following wind as they headed east, saving the sailors from having to row. They continued on throughout the next day, then passed the night at Sobipo.
The Cholla Left fleet arrived at Tangpo the next day for the planned rendezvous with Won Kyun. The appointed hour came and went, but Won failed to arrive. Scouting craft were sent out to locate him. He finally appeared on the following morning aboard a single warship, bringing with him news of Japanese ships off Kadok-do, “
Lonely Island,” fifty kilometers to the northeast, on the far side of Koje-do. Over that and the following day the other remnants of Won’s beaten fleet trickled into the harbor, raising his total contribution to the combined Cholla-Kyongsang fleet to four warships and two small craft. With Won at his side as ordered, Yi now continued sailing east, toward Koje Island and the Japanese.
June sixteenth. As the Korean fleet rounded the southern end of
Koje Island and began working its way north along the coast, a scouting vessel approached Yi’s flagship with a message: “Japanese ships at anchor in Ok-po port.” Okpo lay inside a large bay only a little farther along the Koje coast. So it would be there, not Kadok Island, where the first naval battle of the war would be fought.
The fleet took up battle positions at the mouth of Okpo harbor at noon the following day, the smaller craft branching to the left and right while the heavier battleships, including Yi’s flagship, formed a line in the center. Won Kyun lingered some distance to the rear. Yi sent a message down the line to each of his captains, warning them not to give way, but to “stand like mountain castles.” Then he ordered the advance.
As the Koreans proceeded through the harbor mouth they could make out more than fifty enemy transports riding at anchor in front of Okpo village, most flying red ensigns that Yi assumed indicated the unit to which they belonged.
The vessels were largely unmanned; the invaders were all ashore, ransacking the village in search of loot and setting fire to the houses. This was in violation of the orders Hideyoshi had issued in February and reiterated on June 6 not to engage in “arson or massacre” or any “act of outrage”; his objective in Korea, after all, was not to alienate the Koreans, but to win them over and make them cooperative, useful pawns in his drive to build an empire.
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Hideyoshi was not on the scene to enforce his orders, however, or to witness the general lack of cooperation among the Koreans that was giving his sub
ordinates an excuse to act as they did.
The air around Okpo was so full of smoke that the Japanese did not see the approaching Korean fleet until it was almost upon them. When the alarm was finally raised, panic swept through their ranks. Some sprinted back to their ships and attempted to escape. Others ran in the opposite direction, up into the hills. Of those ships that managed to get under way, none ventured into the bay to meet the Korean fleet, but cut off to the left and right, hugging the shoreline in a race for safety. The Koreans, rowing strongly to the beat of Yi Sun-sin’s war drum, soon had them hemmed into the port, “like fish on a skewer.” The Japanese fought back with their muskets, but these weapons, so effec
tive in land battles, had little effect against the thick wooden hulls and bulwarks of the Korean warships. Yi’s twenty-eight large battleships were able to close with the Japanese vessels with little fear of damage, blasting cannonballs and iron-tipped arrows at point-blank range through their hulls and showering fire arrows upon the unprotected decks. The Japanese, fighting for their lives now and pulling desperately at the oars, began throwing stores overboard to lighten the load and distract the Koreans, but they were unable to get away. With comrades falling all around them, many finally gave up the fight, leaping into the sea and swimming to shore, leaving their abandoned vessels for the Koreans to burn.
When the battle was over, twenty-six Japanese ships had been foun
dered by cannon fire or reduced to smoldering hulks by fire arrows. The floating debris of battle covered the bay: bloody clothing, boxes of supplies, broken oars, splinters of wood—and corpses, many bristling with arrows, two with jagged stumps where their heads had been. “The flames and smoke on the sea covered the skies,” Yi later reported in his dispatch to court, “while the fleeing Japanese hordes scurried into the forests with shrieks of fear.”
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On the Korean side only three men had been wounded. Not a single man was killed, nor a single ship lost. Elation swept through the com
bined fleet, and calls went up to pursue the thrashed “dwarfs” into the hills and cut down every one of them. Commander Yi was sorely tempted; he as much as anyone craved the total annihilation of the enemy. But he knew the risk outweighed the potential reward. To send his marksmen into the thick forests ashore to hunt for the escaping Japanese would yield a few heads at best and would meanwhile leave his fleet under-defended inside the confines of Okpo harbor, vulnerable to a counterattack from other squadrons of Japanese ships. Yi also realized the fundamental wisdom of avoiding a land fight, for that was where the enemy’s strength lay. His own strength lay at sea, so on the sea he would remain. He therefore led the fleet into open water to pass the night.
His men had only just begun to prepare a much-needed meal when a patrol boat drew near and raised the alarm: “Five large enemy ships sailing nearby!” Yi immediately set off in pursuit. The Japanese made a dash northward to the mainland
port of Happo, where they leapt ashore and fled before the Korean warships were upon them. This time Yi gave no thought at all to pursuit inland, for it was now nearing midnight, and they were well within Masan harbor, in the heart of enemy-held territory. He satisfied himself with ordering the five ships burned.
The fleet spent the remaining hours of the night off the northern tip of
Koje Island, arrayed in battle formation, resting but alert. They did not rest long. Soon after sunrise on June 17, news was received from a group of refugees that thirteen Japanese vessels had recently been at anchor farther along the coast to the west. The Koreans set sail in search of this new group and came upon them later that day at Chokjinpo. As in the Okpo engagement, the Japanese were caught completely by surprise, too busy ransacking and torching the village to notice the approaching Korean fleet until it was too late. This time they made no pretense of fighting, but fled en masse into the hills. So for a second time in twenty-four hours the Koreans set about looting and then burning Japanese vessels, unopposed.
As the Koreans stood on their decks, watching with satisfaction as flames consumed the enemy ships, a refugee hailed them from shore. He was carrying a baby on his back, wailing loudly and begging for help. He was brought out to Yi’s flagship, where the commander and his officers questioned him as to the movements and actions of the Japanese. The man replied with a pitiful tale of how the “robbers” had thoroughly looted the port and carted off everything of value, even the horses and cows. He himself had been separated from his wife and aged mother in the panic, and was desperate to find them. Could they help him? Yi was moved by the refugee’s plight, and offered to take the man with him to escape the Japanese. But the man would not go. With his baby on his back he returned to shore and wandered off through the smoke in search of his family.
With the man gone, Yi’s pity turned to wrath. He and Kyongsang Right Navy Commander Won Kyun began to plot further attacks at Chonsongpo and Kadok Island, where more enemy vessels had been sighted, and of even sailing right into the enemy’s stronghold at Pusan harbor and burning every ship.
Suddenly a messenger burst in with the dreadful news, now eight days old, of the fall of
Seoul and King Sonjo’s flight to the north. For Yi and Won, Confucian men born and breed to filial piety, this indignity to their king was too much. They burst into tears and fell into each other’s arms. What was left, with the capital now fallen and the king chased off his throne? Was their country finished? Was the war already lost? In light of the uncertainty of the situation, the two commanders decided to dissolve their combined fleet and return to their respective home ports to rest their men, repair and rearm their vessels, and await additional news from the north.
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Arriving back at Yosu on June 18, Yi wrote a long dispatch to the Korean court reporting the momentous happenings of the previous week, notably the destruction of over forty enemy ships. He also mentioned the capture of a large amount of stores and booty from the Japanese, including sacks of rice, suits of armor, helmets, masks, shell trumpets, “and many other curious things in strange shapes with rich ornaments [which] strike onlookers with awe, like weird ghosts or strange beasts.” Yi ordered a sampling of the more curious items, including a musket and “one left ear cut from a Japanese,” to be boxed up and shipped north to the Korean court.