Authors: Samuel Hawley
With the daylight nearly done and all the larger Japanese vessels destroyed, Yi withdrew his force to the open sea to pass the night. Before departing he left a few of the smaller enemy ships intact and in place as a lure for the Japanese who had fled inland. Eager for total annihilation, he hoped that these scattered remnants would attempt to use the vessels to return to Pusan, thereby offering him a second chance to destroy them out on open water.
On the following morning, July 9, word arrived of a squadron of Japanese ships sighted a little farther to the east, at the
harbor of Tangpo. The Korean fleet immediately made off in that direction, arriving before noon to find twenty-one enemy vessels at anchor along the beach, nine of them as large as the Koreans’ own board-roofed ships. One of them appeared to be the flagship of the fleet. A pavilion ten meters high was erected on its deck, “surrounded by a red brocade curtain with a large Chinese character ‘Yellow’ embroidered on each of the four sides. Inside the pavilion was seen a Japanese commander with a red parasol in front. He showed no expression of fear, like a man resigned to death.” This was Kurushima Michiyuki, one of the daimyo leading the advance party of the Japanese navy west to the Yellow Sea. With him was a force of seven hundred fighting men, plus crews. It would be the last day of his life.
Once again the turtle ship led the way into the fray, striking out at every vessel it passed. One of the panokson closed with Kurushima’s flagship. An arrow struck the Japanese commander in the brow; then a second pierced his chest and sent him toppling off his pavilion, where
upon one of Yi’s officers hacked off his head with a sword.
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The sight so unnerved the rest of the Japanese force that they abandoned the fight and fled into the hills, leaving the Koreans once again to burn their ships unopposed.
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Aboard one of the Japanese ships that fell to the Koreans that day, a curious piece of booty was recovered and carried to Yi Sun-sin. It was a gold fan packed in a black lacquer case. Written on the center of the fan were the words, “sixth month, eighth day, Hideyoshi,” to the right of this “Hashiba Chikuzen-no-kami,” and to the left “Kamei Ryukyu-no-kami.” Yi took these inscriptions to mean that “the Japanese com
mander, whose head was cut off, must be Chikuzen-[no-kami], the garrison commander of Chikuzen.”
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He was mistaken. “Hashiba, Lord of Chikuzen” was in fact the appellation used by Hideyoshi himself ten years before. In 1582, when he was still consoli
dating his hold over the territories of his recently deceased master, Oda Nobunaga, Hideyoshi secured the allegiance of Kamei Korenori, a fellow daimyo in Inaba Province, by promising to give him the Ryukyu Islands whenever they should be conquered. As proof of his word, Hideyoshi took his fan from his belt and inscribed it with his and Kamei’s names, the date, and the words “Ryukyu-no-kami,” “Lord of Ryukyu.” This fan remained a prized possession of Kamei’s for the next decade and was now evidence of his presence at the Battle of Tangpo, alongside Kurushima. Kamei lost all five ships under his command that day, but managed to escape with his life.
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After completing the destruction of the Japanese fleet at Tangpo, Yi and Won Kyun spent the next two days scouring northern
Koje Island and then west along the mainland coast, searching for more enemy ships. Not a single Japanese vessel was sighted. On July 12 Cholla Right Navy Commander Yi Ok-ki at the head of twenty-five large warships finally caught up to Yi Sun-sin, bringing the combined strength of the Korean fleet to fifty-one large battleships plus many smaller craft. The arrival of these ships and reinforcements raised the spirits of Yi Sun-sin’s tired men immeasurably.
Then came news: enemy ships at Tanghangpo.
Tanghangpo, at the head of a narrow inlet ten kilometers from the open sea, was a potentially dangerous place to take on the Japanese. Yi Sun-sin, Yi Ok-ki, and Won Kyun accordingly approached it with caution. A scout was first sent ashore to inquire whether the bay was wide enough for their ships to maneuver. It was. Then a small advance party of warships was sent through the narrow neck of the inlet to locate the enemy. This was soon done and signal arrows sent up, calling the rest of the fleet forward. Leaving four of their ships behind to pick off any Japanese ships that attempted to flee, the two Yis advanced into the bay at maximum speed.
They arrived at Tanghangpo to find twenty-six enemy ships anchored along the shore: thirteen small and four medium-sized vessels, plus nine large ships as big as a Korean panokson. All of them were painted black except for the largest one, the flagship. It had a three-story pavilion upon its deck that was painted in red, blue, and white and wrapped in a skirt of black cloth, and looked to Yi Sun-sin like a Buddhist shrine. Four of the vessels flew large banners painted with the characters
namu myoho renge kyo
: “Glory to the Holy Lotus,” the incantation of the Buddhist Nichiren sect.
The Korean fleet, unable to form a straight battle line in the confines of the bay, arranged itself this time in a circle. With the turtle ship again leading the way, the battleships took turns sweeping in to loose their fusillades of cannonballs, iron bolts, and fire arrows upon the Japanese, then fell back to reload as the next ship in the circle moved in. The relentless pressure soon had the Japanese on the defensive, so much so that Yi Sun-sin realized they would likely abandon their ships and flee inland, depriving him yet again of the opportunity of destroying them completely, not just their ships but their crews as well. He therefore gave the order to fall back in a feigned retreat, coaxing the Japanese to counterattack, out into open water. The ploy worked perfectly. The Japanese, assuming that the battle was turning in their favor, left the relative safety of shore and advanced into the bay in pursuit. When they were just where he wanted them, Yi ordered his ships to come about and surround the Japanese, and blast their ships to splinters. The large flagship with the pavilion on top drew the heaviest fire. According to Lee Sun-sin,
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a trusted captain in Yi Sun-sin’s Cholla Left Navy, “The enemy Commander, aged about 24 or 25, of strong physique, wearing magnificent dress, stood alone holding a long sword in his hand and fought to the last without fear as he directed his eight remaining subordinate warriors. I shot an arrow at him with all my might, but it was not until he had been shot through and through with more than ten arrows that he shouted loudly and fell, after which his head was cut off. The remaining eight Japanese were also shot down and beheaded.” Soon all the Japanese ships had been sunk or set ablaze. Only a few survivors managed to swim to shore and escape into the hills. All that remained was for Won Kyun to move forward to hack off the heads from the enemy dead.
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For the next four days the Korean fleet sailed from port to port along the coast of central
Kyongsang Province, searching for additional enemy squadrons to attack. They spotted a few ships scurrying back toward the east and safety but were unable to run them down. It soon became apparent that the Japanese navy had retreated to Pusan and that the fighting was over until they decided to venture west again. On July 18, therefore, Yi Sun-sin, Yi Ok-ki, and Won Kyun dissolved their combined fleet and returned to their respective ports to rest and rearm for the next campaign.
At the time of their parting Won Kyun expressed a desire to get together with Yi Sun-sin immediately to write and submit a joint battle report. Yi stalled, saying that there was no need for haste, and presuma
bly leaving Won to assume that they would prepare a joint report a little later on. Yi then went ahead and wrote a lengthy and detailed dispatch on his own without any input from Won. In it he once again had phenomenal numbers to report: seventy-two enemy vessels destroyed at the cost of not a single Korean ship; eighty-eight Japanese heads taken and countless others killed, against Korean losses of only eleven killed and twenty-six wounded. Yi was careful to explain that the low head count was due to standing orders he had issued to his officers not to waste time with this self-aggrandizing practice, the sole purpose of which was to win glory and rewards. Yi promised that he would recommend those who fought well, “even though they cut off no heads.” And indeed, in this and every other battle report he sent to the Korean court, he included the names of all the officers he considered worthy of reward, with urgings that these rewards be issued as soon as possible to encourage their morale. This was in line with the teachings of the ancient Chinese military classics, as well as being plain common sense: “Beneath fragrant bait there will certainly be dead fish. Beneath generous rewards there will certainly be courageous officers.”
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As for Won Kyun, Yi Sun-sin made no effort to cast him in a favorable light or secure for him a reward. On the contrary, he pointed out that the Kyongsang commander had lost his entire fleet at the start of the invasion and so had nothing to command in the recent campaign, and by inference nothing to contribute. This upset Won when he heard of it, and resulted in the tensions that already existed between the two men giving way to open hostility. Henceforth they would submit separate battle reports.
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Just as hurtful as Yi’s words, however, was the fact that recognition was not forthcoming. As Yi Sun-sin was rewarded with letters of commen
dation and one promotion after another—to court rank Junior 2B in June, Junior 2A in July, and Senior 2A in September—Won Kyun received nothing. Won evidently made his dissatisfaction known to the government, for in early October it was recommended that he and Yi Ok-ki receive promotions and letters of commendation in recognition of their service alongside Yi Sun-sin.
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Why did the Korean navy under Yi Sun-sin enjoy such superiority over the Japanese? First, the Koreans had better ships. With their two banks of sculling oars, Yi’s turtle ship and board-roofed ships were faster and more maneuverable than anything the Japanese possessed. They were more heavily built, with sides and roofs of thick wooden planks that were impervious to Japanese muskets. They were well equipped with large cannons that could blast a stone or iron ball clean through a Japanese hull. With these three strengths a Korean battleship could close to within just a few meters of an enemy vessel and smash it to splinters with little fear of counter-fire, for the Japanese navy at this point did not possess cannons in any appreciable number. It only had lightweight muskets, an effective weapon against the flesh of Korean soldiers and horses on land, but of little use against the thick wooden shell of a Korean battleship.
The Koreans also benefited from a more unified system of naval command. In these early sea battles of the war, Cholla Left Navy Commander Yi Sun-sin naturally took the de facto lead of the Korean navy in the south—he was fifteen years older than thirty-two-year-old Cholla Right Navy Commander Yi Ok-ki and correspondingly more experienced—a role that would be formally recognized by the court in the coming months with his promotion to the special rank of supreme naval commander. On the Japanese side there was no one in a comparable position of overall authority. The Japanese navy was composed of a loose assembly of squadrons, each belonging to and commanded by a separate daimyo, each looking out for his own interests, each deciding for himself what he would and would not do. No one, in other words, was bound very closely by orders. There was in fact only one man with enough authority to compel these naval commanders to work together to achieve a single objective, and that was Hideyoshi. But Hideyoshi was not on the scene. He was still at Nagoya, ostensibly waiting on the weather. In his absence the commanders of the Japanese navy thus had to work out among themselves ways for dealing with the Korean threat, with egos and rivalries and jealousies all coming into play, a fact that hampered their ability to face down Yi Sun-sin’s united fleet.
All these advantages that the Koreans enjoyed at sea—better ships, better guns, and a more unified system of command—are evidence of a more sophisticated understanding of naval warfare than that possessed by the Japanese. In 1592 Hideyoshi and his commanders still had a medieval conception of warfare at sea. To them it was little more than an extension of warfare on land, with ships serving as fight
ing platforms from which opposing forces tried to pick one another off with arrow and musket fire, followed by grappling and boarding to finish off survivors. The goal, in short, was to kill enemy sailors, not sink enemy ships. They thus armed their vessels accordingly, with lightweight arquebuses, not heavy cannons.
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The Koreans saw things the other way around. For Yi Sun-sin, Yi Ok-ki, and Won Kyun the primary purpose of naval warfare was to destroy enemy ships. They thus armed their panokson and kobukson with cannons to sink them and fire arrows to burn them. Kill an enemy, after all, and you only kill one man. Destroy an enemy ship, however, and you destroy much of its crew as well, leaving the rest floundering in the water where they then could be hacked to death.
If the immediate purpose of war is killing and destruction, then the Japanese were better at it on land, while the Koreans excelled at sea.
After abandoning the Han River, Commander in Chief Kim Myong-won, the government official given the impossible task of defending Seoul with no more than a thousand troops, was ordered to gather as many men as he could and make a stand fifty kilometers north at the Imjin River, the next obstacle the Japanese would encounter on their march to China. The call was thus put out for Korea’s scattered forces to assemble at the Imjin. Over the next two weeks a steady stream of soldiers and commanders, some retreating from the south, others coming down from the north, began arriving at the north bank of the river, swelling Kim’s meager ranks to a total of ten thousand men. Among those present were Vice-Commanders Sin Kal and Han Ung-in, General Yi Il, who had been routed by Konishi Yukinaga’s first contingent at Sangju, and General Yu Kuk-ryang, previously charged with defending Bamboo Pass on the road north to Seoul.
The king and his entourage of government ministers were in the meantime on a brief layover in the walled city of
Kaesong a few hours farther north. It was here, on June 11, 1592, that King Sonjo caved in to mounting pressure to place the blame for the crisis on the shoulders of Yi San-hae, Prime Minister of the State Council and as such the highest-ranking official in the land. Yi was dismissed from office and sent into exile. Yu Song-nyong, previously second to Yi as Minister of the Left, was promoted to Prime Minister, Choi Hung-won became the new Minister of the Left, and Yun Tu-su, Minister of the Right.
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Later that same day King Sonjo held a public audience to “comfort the people” and allow them to voice their grievances. Paper was also distributed so that anyone who wished to do so could submit their thoughts in writing. It was something the king felt he needed to do, for he knew that his subjects were angry—angry at the government for failing to apprehend the Japanese threat, and angry at Sonjo himself for abandoning Seoul, a fact made painfully clear by the shouts and insults hurled at him as he left and by the fires and looting that started imme
diately thereafter. Reports were also coming in that some of the trades people of the capital were already reopening their shops and doing business with the enemy, evidently reassured by public proclamations that the Japanese had come to Korea merely to free the people from their oppressive king and had no wish to harm anyone. All this came as a shock to King Sonjo, an example as he saw it of his own people betraying their country and siding with an enemy force. But it was also a chastisement of his government and indeed himself that had to be addressed.
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In the course of this audience a man prostrated himself before Sonjo and asked that exiled government minister and Western faction leader Chong Chol be restored to office. Chong, formerly Minister of the Left, had been dismissed by King Sonjo in 1591 and his faction subsequently eclipsed by the Easterners as a result of a disagreement over which of the king’s sons should become the crown prince. Sonjo had been angry at Chong at the time for opposing his own choice of heir. Now, however, the king was eager to satisfy the people, so he agreed to the petitioner’s request, recalled Chong Chol from exile, and dismissed Eastern faction leader Yu Song-nyong as Prime Minister to atone for the “mistake.” After less than a day the State Council was therefore shuffled again, with Choi Hung-won becoming Prime Minister, Yun Tu-su Left Minister, and Yu Hong Right Minister.
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Yu Song-nyong’s dismissal was evidently a face-saving measure. He would continue to play a leading role in the war effort, particularly in making preparations for the coming of the Ming army, and in January of the following year would become the top civilian overseer of the nation’s armed forces with the specially created wartime position of
dochechalsa
, “National High Commissioner.” Yu would eventually be reappointed Prime Minister following the dismissal of Choi Hung-won in December of 1593 for reasons of ill health, and this time would hold on to the post until the end of the war in 1598.
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King Sonjo, Crown Prince Kwanghae, and their retinue resumed their flight north on June 13, this time not stopping until they reached
Pyongyang. They arrived on the sixteenth and were led through the gates to safety by an escort of three thousand troops. Finally, for the first time since abandoning Seoul a week earlier, the king and government in exile of Korea were able to settle down in a degree of comfort and take stock of the situation. It was, in a word, desperate. The Japanese had already taken the southern half of the peninsula including Seoul, and judging from the speed of their advance would be across the Imjin River in fairly short order and on their way to Pyongyang. It thus seemed inescapable that Korea would cease to exist, probably before the end of the year, unless China intervened.
During the first days of the invasion the Korean government debated long and hard over whether to request military aid from
China. Those ministers opposed to doing so were primarily worried about the negative repercussions that this would have on Korea. First it would mean relinquishing control of the situation to Beijing, something that no government official was eager to do. Korea, after all, was a sovereign nation, albeit a vassal of China, and did not want to take a back seat in dealing with matters on its own territory. There was also the burden to consider of having to feed Ming soldiers once they arrived on Korean soil, a drain on government resources that would leave that much less for the maintenance of the nation’s own troops, further hampering Korea’s ability to defend itself and manage its own affairs. Newly appointed Minister of the Left Yun Tu-su additionally pointed out that any military aid that Beijing might send would probably be in the form of troops from the neighboring Ming province of Liaodong—rapacious, undisciplined louts who might conceivably do more harm than good to the Koreans they would be ostensibly coming to help. Such concerns were foremost in Seoul during the opening days of the war, and so the first dispatches sent to Beijing merely informed the Wanli emperor of the fact of the invasion without asking for assistance.
As the Japanese continued their advance on
Seoul, however, the tide of opinion within the government began to turn in favor of requesting aid from China. The first and most obvious reason for this change was the awful realization that Korea might be swallowed up entirely if the Ming did not soon intervene. But it was not just fear of the Japanese that drove King Sonjo and his ministers to turn to China. They were also growing apprehensive of the Korean people themselves. Since the beginning of the war, long-simmering public resentment over excessive taxation, rampant factionalism, and incompetent, abusive officials had exploded into full-blown anger against the rulers of the nation. The public blamed the government for the present calamity and was now dangerously estranged. The decision to request military assistance from China was therefore made not only in the interests of protecting the kingdom from the invading Japanese, but also to prop up the now-disgraced ruling elite, for it was from the Ming that King Sonjo and in turn his ministers derived their own legitimacy.
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After the fall of the capital and the retreat to
Kaesong and then Pyongyang, the Korean government thus sent a second envoy to Beijing, this time carrying a plea for help. When this did not elicit an immediate response, a third message was sent. Then a fourth.
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In
China, meanwhile, confusion abounded and suspicions brewed. To begin with, it was not immediately clear what was occurring in Korea. Had a large-scale invasion actually taken place as the Korean government was reporting? Or was Seoul merely overreacting to a somewhat larger than usual wako pirate raid, the sort that had intermittently plagued both countries for centuries past? This issue was eventually cleared up, and Beijing acknowledged that something very big and very serious was taking place in Korea. But then the question arose about Hideyoshi’s true intentions. Did he really want to conquer China as the Koreans claimed? Or was he only after their tributary state Korea, with the Koreans inflating his intentions to attract Chinese aid? And if he really was aiming for China, were the Koreans in fact being swept aside? Or were they secretly helping him along?
Suspicions about
Korea’s playing a secret role in Hideyoshi’s planned conquest began to appear in China upon receipt of the first reports of the war. These suspicions were sparked mainly by the incredible speed with which the Japanese were marching up the peninsula: from Pusan to Seoul, a distance of 450 kilometers, in just twenty days. Suspecting that the Japanese could not be advancing toward China as quickly as they were without active support from the Koreans, the governor of Liaodong, the Chinese province bordering Korea, sent an agent to Pyongyang to investigate. The equally suspicious central government in Beijing also dispatched an official of its own across the Willow Palisade.
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These representatives eventually returned to report that the Koreans were fighting desperately to resist the Japanese advance, that tens of thousands of their soldiers had already been killed, and that they had done nothing that could be regarded as treasonous toward the Celestial Throne. Trust in Little China was thus restored, leading to a deeper commitment to help in
Beijing and in turn throwing the ponderous wheels of the Chinese military machine fully into motion. By then, however, it was already well into August, three months after the first Japanese soldiers had stepped ashore at Pusan.
This initial confusion and suspicion over what was happening in Korea explains in part why the Ming government was slow in responding to King Sonjo’s plea for help and why this response when it came was initially rather small. But it was not the whole story. Throughout the summer of 1592
Beijing had other concerns on its plate that were very preoccupying indeed. By far the biggest of these was the so-called Ordos Campaign. Earlier that year in March, two months before the start of the Japanese invasion of Korea, an officer assigned to a garrison along China’s northwestern frontier led his troops in mutiny, forcing their commander in chief to commit suicide. Their grievance was a common one in the Chinese army: they weren’t being paid. This was a problem that had arisen early in the Ming dynasty, as the self-supporting garrisons established by the Hongwu emperor slowly gave way to a reliance on paid mercenaries whose salaries the Ming treasury was increasingly unable to afford. It had led to dissention before, but this time the matter got completely out of hand. A local Mongol chieftain named Pubei, who had previously been co-opted by the Ming and rewarded with a high military rank, joined the rebellion and was then pushed to the fore as its leader. What had started as an isolated mutiny within the army thus flared into a full-blown Mongol uprising that soon had all of Shenxi Province in an uproar, and the Ordos Mongols on the steppes beyond the Great Wall poised to enter the fray.
The episode was embarrassing for local officials, for it could easily be said that the mutiny that had sparked it all was a symptom of their own mismanagement of regional affairs. In their reports to
Beijing they therefore tried to downplay the role of the army, painting Pubei and his Ordos Mongols as the source of all the trouble. It was a believable fiction; border clashes with the Mongols were a common and genuinely worrisome occurrence. The Ming government of course were not fooled by it, but they nevertheless accepted it as the official version of what had happened; to have openly admitted the truth that its own army had mutinied and that one of its own provinces was in chaos would have revealed a dangerous weakness in the empire. Beijing then moved to restore order, dispatching troops to the northwest at the very time when the king of Korea was requesting that help be sent to the east. The Chinese, not nearly as strong as their outdated military rosters implied, did not have enough manpower in the summer of 1592 to deal simultaneously and in force with its own internal troubles as well as Hideyoshi. It could deal with only one emergency at a time, and the mutiny-cum-rebellion within its own borders seemed the most pressing. It would in fact not be until the Ordos Campaign had been concluded in October of 1592 that Beijing was finally able to turn its full attention to the threat posed by the Japanese and muster an army of respectable size.
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With the bulk of its armies tied up in the Ordos Campaign, and with the picture of what was happening in
Korea still somewhat murky, China’s initial response to King Sonjo’s request for military aid was necessarily limited. The best it could do was raise an army of one thousand men to protect the retreating king. This expeditionary force, under the command of General Tai Zhaobian and “Attacking Commander” Shi Ru, began marching toward the beleaguered peninsula in July of 1592.
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On the far side of the Yellow Sea, the vanguard of the Japanese inva
sion was nearing the end of two weeks’ rest in Seoul. On June 25, two days before resuming their march toward China, first contingent leaders Konishi Yukinaga and So Yoshitoshi dispatched a letter north to King Sonjo, expressing a desire to restore peace between their two countries.
It is true that Toyotomi Hideyoshi wants to attack Great Ming by way of your country. However, we Japanese generals do not wish to travel thousands of leagues to go as far as China, although we have been ordered to come here. For this reason, we are desirous of making peace with your country first, so that we may be able to make peace with Great Ming also through the good offices of your country.