Authors: Samuel Hawley
Ko Kyong-myong was a yangban landowner from the town of
Changhung on the far southwestern tip of the peninsula, a typical upper-class gentleman who had had to settle for a quiet life of scholarship after failing to pass the civil service exam in his youth and obtain a government career. Upon receiving the shocking news that the Japanese had occupied Seoul and forced King Sonjo to flee, Ko put up posters throughout the region calling for recruits, and soon organized an army of peasants, slaves, and scholars numbering between six and seven thousand. King Sonjo sent a letter of thanks south to Ko when he heard of this, along with General Kwak Yong to provide experienced military leadership, which Ko himself lacked. Kwak brought with him several hundred government troops.
Ko’s initial intention had been to lead his force north to
Seoul and attack the Japanese there. They had only just begun their march to the capital when they learned that enemy forces were being amassed on Cholla’s northern border at Kumsan with the evident intention of overrunning the province, which had been bypassed in the initial invasion. Ko and General Kwak Yong thus made a change of plans: they would attack Kumsan first and forestall the Japanese invasion of Cholla-do, then resume their march against Seoul.
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Ko Kyong-myong and General Kwak reached Kumsan with their combined force of civilian volunteers and government troops on August 16, 1592. They arrived with a total of only eight hundred men; the bulk of their six to seven thousand-man force had either deserted along the way or the number of volunteers that Ko had raised had been much smaller than historical records show. Inside the walls of the town was a force of indeterminate size from Kyushu under fifty-nine-year-old Kobaya
kawa Takakage, the seasoned commander of the sixth contingent, the oldest daimyo to serve in Korea during Hideyoshi’s war. On the first day of the battle General Kwak threw his troops against the walls of the town in a direct frontal attack, but their heart wasn’t in the fight and they were easily driven back. Ko’s patriotic followers enjoyed somewhat more success. With their leader beating a large drum to urge them on, the uibyong managed to breach the outer ramparts of the town’s defenses and set a number of buildings inside the walls ablaze with their hwapo fire tubes. They were unable to advance any farther, however, and eventually withdrew for the night.
The Koreans went on the offensive again the next morning, General Kwak’s soldiers against the north gate, Ko’s volunteers at the gate to the west. By this time the Japanese within the walls had devised a plan. Having observed the previous day that the government troops were less motivated than Ko’s fiery-eyed volunteers, Kobayakawa’s men con
centrated their fire against Kwak’s soldiers at the north gate and soon put them to flight. The sight of their retreat, as the Japanese had undoubtedly hoped, broke the resolve of the uibyong to the west. A cry soon arose from Ko’s ranks—“The government soldiers are running away!”—and their lines began to waver and then break. With that the Japanese threw open the gates and went on the offensive. In the confusion of the counterattack Ko Kyong-myong’s horse threw him to the ground and ran off, leaving him bruised and on foot. Ko’s lieutenants, seeing that the battle was lost, tried to get their leader onto another horse and away to safety. The graying scholar refused to budge. “Save yourselves,” he told them. “But I will not retreat.” Ko’s eldest son Chong-hu pleaded with him to withdraw, but still the old man would not relent.
Several men stayed with Ko to the end. Two of them, An Yong and Yu Paeng-no, shielded him with their bodies when the hand-to-hand fighting commenced and were cut to pieces. Then Ko himself fell, and with him his second son, Ko In-hu.
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Ko Kyong-myong and his band of civilian volunteers, one of the first guerrilla armies to emerge after the start of the war, did not inflict much damage on the Japanese during their short-lived period of resis
tance. But the courageous way in which they met death must have left the Japanese defenders of Kumsan with a sense of foreboding of the tide of resistance that was rising against them. It also served as an example to and fueled the anger of thousands of other potential guerrilla fighters—including Ko’s one surviving son, Ko Chong-hu. After the loss of his father and brother at Kumsan, Chong-hu organized his own force of guerrillas under the banner “The Band That Seeks Revenge.” And so the fight passed from father to son, and Cholla remained a dangerous place for the Japanese to enter.
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Elsewhere in
Cholla Province a fifty-five-year-old scholar-official named Kim Chon-il was raising an army of his own. Unlike other uibyong leaders like Ko Kyong-myong and Kwak Jae-u, who had failed to achieve their ambition of a government career, Kim had passed the civil service exam as a young man and had subsequently risen to the middle ranks of public office—although he never quite made it into the company of the
daesin
, that select group of top officials of rank 3A and above. At the outbreak of the war he mustered a force of three hundred men in his hometown of Naju in southwestern Cholla, with the intention of leading them north to Uiju to protect their endangered king. They all swore an oath prior to setting out that they would fight to the death and sealed the vow with a drink of blood after ancient Korean military custom. Kim and his followers then started marching north, picking up volunteers along the way until their numbers had swollen to several thousand. They never made it as far as Uiju. Kim instead made his base in an old mountain fortress south of Seoul, launching hit-and-run attacks on Japanese units in the area and dealing harshly with any locals suspected of truckling with the foe. In August of 1592 he then led them farther north to the royal fortress on Kanghwa-do, an island at the mouth of the Han River fifty kilometers west of the capital, which for centuries past had been maintained as a place of refuge for the king. Here they dug themselves in and became yet another knot of resistance that the Japanese could not dislodge.
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One final uibyong leader who demands introduction is Cho Hon, a talented forty-eight-year-old government official whose outspokenness during the prewar years had guaranteed him a rocky career in public office, punctuated with occasional dismissals and even a banishment or two. Cho was an untiring letter writer who penned hundreds of memorials to the throne over the years suggesting ways the country could be reformed. In the late 1580s one of his particular grievances was the government’s willingness to receive emissaries from Japanese dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi was unworthy of a relationship with
Korea, Cho thundered, because he had “killed his king” prior to seizing power for himself. This misconception, universally held within the government, probably grew from the Koreans’ misunderstanding of the final demise of the Ashikaga shogunate during the ascendancy of Oda Nobunaga in the 1570s. Oda did not actually “kill” the final Ashikaga shogun, Yoshiaki—who had by this time been reduced to a puppet—but rather sent him into exile. The Ashikagas, moreover, while they had indeed been granted the title “King of Japan” by the Ming court nearly two hundred years before, had never been the ultimate monarchial authority in Japan. The emperor was. But Cho understood none of this. To him Hideyoshi was a foul usurper who had upset the proper order of his society and as such should be ostracized. As for the emissaries he sent to Seoul, Tsushima daimyo So Yoshitoshi, the retainer Yanagawa Shigenobu, and the monk Genso, Cho wrote to King Sonjo suggesting that their heads be cut off and hung in the street.
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Pronouncements like this earned Cho Hon the reputation of a hot
head and fanatic in the years prior to 1592. He proclaimed that war was coming, but no one would listen. He reportedly even sat outside the gates of Kyongbok Palace for three days, wailing and striking his head on the ground in an attempt to awaken the king to the danger facing the nation. But still he was ignored. Then, just as he had predicted, the Japanese attacked, providing Cho with vindication. During the first weeks of the invasion the now-prescient official raised a force of eleven hundred civilian volunteers in the central province of Chungchong. They would participate in two major engagements during the next few weeks: the retaking of Chongju and the second battle of Kumsan.
They would not fight alone. At the same time that leaders like Cho Hon were raising “righteous armies” of civilian volunteers, a second resistance movement was gathering momentum, one that, although numerically quite small, would play a significant role in the battles ahead. This was the rise of the monk-soldiers.
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It was King Sonjo who first considered calling upon the nation’s monks to rise up and fight the Japanese. Prior to the war the Korean govern
ment wanted nothing to do with this religious community, and in fact had done everything in their power to suppress it. But now they needed the manpower. They needed every able-bodied man they could get, even those who insisted on shaving their heads and wearing the robes of a monk. Sonjo knew that any call to arms from himself or his government would be ignored by this disaffected group; the call would have to come from someone who commanded the monks’ respect. Early in the summer of 1592 the king accordingly summoned the aged Buddhist master Hyujong from his mountain retreat to ask him to organize the nation’s monks into some sort of resistance movement to fight the Japanese.
Korea
’s monks had every reason to be disaffected and unwilling to help the government, for throughout the previous two centuries they had been mercilessly persecuted by the kingdom’s Neo-Confucian elite. The founders of the Choson dynasty had adopted Neo-Confucianism as their official state ideology—making Choson Korea the only nation in history to do so—because they believed it contained a model for perfect government. To firmly establish Neo-Confucianism, it was thought necessary to suppress the competing ideology of Buddhism, which had served as the foundation of the preceding Koryo dynasty. From the beginning of the fifteenth century onward the pressure that was brought to bear on Korea’s Buddhists was therefore unceasing. Temples were closed throughout the land. Buddhist property was appropriated. The law allowing the ordination of monks was rescinded. The number of sects was reduced, and then reduced again, until only two remained: the Meditation School (Sonjong) and the Doctrinal School (Kyojong). And through it all a steady stream of anti-Buddhist rhetoric poured out of Seoul, in many instances attacks of the most virulent nature.
By the start of the Imjin War,
Korea’s long-reviled and officially outcast Buddhist community thus had every reason to loathe the government and welcome its demise, even at the hands of a foreign invader. It would take seventy-two-year-old Buddhist Master Hyujong, also known as Sosan Taesa, “Great Master of the Western Mountain,” to fire up their patriotism and draw them into the war. Hyujong was the most highly regarded Buddhist monk in Korea at that time, and indeed of the entire Choson dynasty. Orphaned at the age of nine and adopted by a local town magistrate, he was sent to a Confucian academy and given a classical education, but failed to pass the civil service examination and gain a government career. He subsequently became a monk and founded a movement to reconcile Neo-Confucianism and Buddhism, a necessary first step if the embattled, struggling religion was ever to recover any of its lost ground. In the 1550s Hyujong served successively as the director of the Doctrinal School and then of the Meditation School. Finally, in 1557, he retired to a mountain hermitage, venerated by Buddhists of both sects and grudgingly admired by many in government. If any man could get Korea’s monks to set aside their anti-government feelings and take up arms against the Japanese, it was this great master, deep in meditation on his western mountain. King Sonjo accordingly sent out the call from Uiju, and Hyujong soon replied.
Why was Hyujong willing to help King Sonjo and a government that had done so much to suppress his religion? First, he would have wel
comed the opportunity the war provided for his followers to prove their patriotism and worth, and by so doing hopefully win greater recognition and acceptance from the state. Second, on a personal level he owed a debt of gratitude to Sonjo himself. Three years earlier the instigator of a minor rebellion had falsely used Hyujong’s name to try to win the nation’s monks over to his misbegotten cause. The incident was quickly put down and Hyujong imprisoned on charges of treason, but he was subsequently released after Sonjo looked into the matter and found the monk innocent.
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When King Sonjo asked for Hyujong’s help in rallying the nation’s monks, he was therefore calling in a favor he expected to be repaid. Hyujong did not disappoint him. On July 16, 1592, the newly appointed “commander of the monk-soldiers of the eight provinces” issued a manifesto calling upon all able-bodied monks throughout the land to leave the solitude of their mountain retreats and rise up against the Japanese:
Hold your banners high, and arise, all you monk-soldiers of the eight provinces! Who among you have not been given birth in this land? Who among you are not related by blood to the forefathers? Who among you are not subjects of the king? Confucius taught us to lay down our lives to achieve Benevolence. Sacrificing oneself for a just cause and suffering in the place of the myriad souls is the spirit of Bodhisattvas....
You monk-soldiers of all the monasteries! Abandoning a just cause and swerving from the right path in order merely to survive in hiding—how can this be the proper way? The cunning enemy, the monster, will never take pity on you. Once the land perishes how then do you propose to stay alive? Put on the armor of the mercy of Bodhisattvas, hold in hand the treasured sword to fell the devil, wield the lightning bolt of the Eight Deities, and come forward. Only then can you do your duty. Only then can you find the way to life. Let the aged and the weak pray in the monastery. Let the able-bodied come out with their weapons to destroy the enemy and save the land.