Authors: Samuel Hawley
Yi Chong-in continued to resist until the bitter end, fighting off the attacking Japanese in a rearguard action that took him onto the rocks at the edge of the
Nam River. Here he is reported to have seized two Japanese in his arms and shouted, “Kimhae Magistrate Yi Chong-in is dying here!” He then cast himself into the water, carrying the two soldiers down with him.
Chinju
magistrate So Ye-won met a less glorious end. Okamoto Gonojo, a samurai in the service of Kikkawa Hiroie, came upon him sitting on a tree stump, injured and exhausted, and cut off his head. It rolled down an embankment and was lost in the grass. Not wanting to lose the prize, Okamoto sent two men down to retrieve it, and later had it pickled in salt and sent to Japan for presentation to Hideyoshi.
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At least sixty thousand Koreans lost their lives in the Second Battle of Chinju. Most were killed in the massacre that followed the taking of the city, an orgy of destruction that has been called the worst atrocity of the war.
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The Japanese under Kato, Ukita, and Konishi had no mercy. They did not leave a cow or dog or chicken alive. In a frenzy of revenge against a nation that refused to be conquered, they pulled down the walls and burned all the buildings. They filled the wells with stones. They cut down every tree. When the destruction was finished
Chinju ceased to exist. Since the beginning of the war, the Korean annals would later report, no other place had been so thoroughly destroyed, nor had loyalty and righteousness been so magnificently displayed.
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A large number of civilians committed suicide in the wake of the fall of
Chinju, many by drowning themselves in the Nam River. The most famous instance involved a local female entertainer, or
kisaeng
, named Non-gae, then no more than twenty years old. Shortly after the fall of the city, Non-gae went out onto the rocks at the base of the Choksongnu pavilion, where a group of senior Japanese commanders were having a banquet to celebrate their success. When the Japanese saw her beckoning to them seductively, “they gulped down their spit” but no one dared to approach. Finally one of them, reportedly a samurai named Keyamura Rokunosuke from Kato Kiyomasa’s contingent, drunkenly climbed down from the pavilion and out onto the rocks, Non-gae luring him on with an amorous smile. When he reached her she took him in a passionate embrace, then suddenly jumped into the river below, dragging them both to their deaths.
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This act of defiance and self-sacrifice would become widely celebrated in the decades that followed. In the eighteenth century the Chinese characters
ui-am
, meaning “righteous rock,” were carved on the face of the rock from which Non-gae was thought to have leapt. A shrine and commemorative stone would be later erected nearby. Today Non-gae is the symbol of the city of Chinju, and her story known to virtually every Korean.
*
* *
On July 27, the day that the walls of
Chinju were breached and the fate of the city sealed, Toyotomi Hideyoshi prepared a statement for the edification of the Chinese outlining his version of the war and its causes. The document was not addressed directly to the Ming envoys, now in their fifth week of residence at Nagoya. It went instead to Konishi Yukinaga and the three commissioners, Otani Yoshitsugu, Mashita Nagamori, and Ishida Mitsunari, with instructions that they communicate its contents to the Ming Chinese. The document was full of bravado and self-aggrandizement. Beneath the window dressing, however, it is clear that Hideyoshi’s understanding of the conflict, and more generally his view of the world, was too far removed from that of the Chinese and the Koreans for there to be any common ground between the two sides. And without common ground, there was no basis for peace.
The document began with the standard recitation of Hideyoshi’s predestined greatness: how he was conceived by a ray of sunlight that entered his mother’s womb; how his mother was told in a dream that the virtue of her unborn son would in time shine throughout the world. Hideyoshi next cataloged how he had put an end to chaos and unified
Japan in just ten years, annihilating anyone who stood in his way and establishing “national prosperity and wealth.” Nor had the Japanese people been the only ones to benefit from Hideyoshi’s munificence. In stamping out the wako pirates formerly based in western Japan, he had put an end to centuries of raiding and killing that had plagued the Chinese coast. “By reason of this, all your coast provinces and the inhabitants therein are enjoying safety and prosperity. Are these not the things for which you have been striving for generations without success?”
Hideyoshi, in short, had done a great service not only to his own people but to the Chinese as well. It was in fact
Beijing’s lack of gratitude that had caused the present war. “Perhaps you have ignored our nation,” opined Hideyoshi, “believing she is too small to take any action, no matter how she may be dealt with.” He therefore decided to send an army to China to demand the appreciation that he was rightfully due. He had been prepared to do so in 1589, but had postponed his plans when the Koreans sent envoys to him requesting that they be allowed to mediate between himself and China and thus avoid a war. At this same time, Hideyoshi added, “Korea pledged to open her kingdom to us, obstructing neither the roads on which our fighting men would advance nor the lines of communication or transportation, when we should be ready to invade Tai-Min [China].” Hideyoshi promised the Koreans to postpone his campaign against China for three years. He patiently waited for this period of time, until 1592. “But Korea made no report to us. She thus deceived our country, and committed a serious international crime, for which she should not remain unpunished.”
And so the taiko unleashed his troops. The Koreans now evinced their duplicity yet again, for far from allowing his expeditionary forces free passage through their kingdom, they “made all possible military preparation, building strongholds at strategic points and throwing up extensive works of defense.... [But] every time they clashed with our men, they were routed. Thousands upon thousands of Koreans thus lost their lives. Finally, they set fire to their national capital, reducing it to ashes.” The Chinese at this point attempted to intervene and save their vassal state, but their armies too were defeated. Hideyoshi again offered up
Korea as a convenient place to lay the blame. Just as their duplicity had led Japan and China into an unnecessary war, so was their “untrustworthiness and trickery” the real cause of Ming defeat.
But now Hideyoshi was willing to bring hostilities to an end.
China “has sent two envoys to our military headquarters [who] explained the imperial desire with respect to terms of peace. We have therefore prepared our peace terms as set forth on a separate sheet.... Further detail will be given orally by our four representatives.”
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The terms of peace that Hideyoshi referred to were set down in writing that same day. Like the preceding document, it was not addressed directly to the Ming envoys, but to Konishi, Otani, Mashita, and Ishida, together with instructions to “explain the contents in detail to the imperial envoys of Great Ming.”
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Hideyoshi’s letter contained seven demands:
The two Chinese envoys found these seven demands appallingly presumptuous. Items one and four in particular were so far beyond the realm of possibility that they must have seemed a joke. To give up one of the daughters of the Wanli emperor in marriage to the emperor of Japan signified that Hideyoshi expected a relationship of equality to be established between the two nations, something that from the Chinese perspective could never exist. China, after all, was the Middle Kingdom, the center of the world, the land without peer. If approached with the proper degree of humility, Beijing might condescend to accept Japan as a vassal state on a par with Korea. But it could never, ever, acknowledge Japan as an equal. To do so would be to turn the world on its head. As for the partitioning of Korea—Hideyoshi proposed keeping the provinces of Kyongsang, Cholla, Chungchong, and Kangwon—this too was met with disbelief, for it was asking China to relinquish a portion of its inviolate sphere of influence, one of the very things that made it so great.
Konishi and his colleagues did their best to soothe the irate envoys, pointing out that these seven conditions were not a list of intractable demands, but rather terms to be discussed and negotiated upon. With regard to items one and four, for example, the joining together of the two imperial families in marriage and the partitioning of
Korea, they pointed out that Hideyoshi was not insistent on gaining both demands. For China to relent on either one of these points would be regarded as an acceptable basis for peace. And the return of the two captive Korean princes, Konishi hastened to add, was to take place regardless of the outcome of negotiations. It was a gift, a show of sincerity on Hideyoshi’s part that the envoys could take back with them to Beijing.
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Konishi was probably correct when he told the Ming envoys that Hideyoshi intended the demands as a starting point for negotiations. Just how much the taiko was willing to compromise, however, remains unknown. The demands themselves already represented a great step down from Hideyoshi’s initial plan to conquer
Korea and China and make them a part of his envisioned empire. Now he was willing to settle for some sort of equal partnership with the Ming, with Korea somewhere underfoot, shouldering the blame for the war so that the two big powers could save face. It might to fair to say, therefore, that he was not prepared to bend very much further.
It is interesting to note that Hideyoshi was dealing with the Wanli emperor much as he had with rival daimyo during his campaign to unify
Japan, notably his foremost preunification rival, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Just as Hideyoshi had driven Tokugawa into accepting peace in the 1580s by convincing him of his own willingness to engage in a long and costly war, so the taiko took the fight out of the Ming in 1593, maintaining a chain of camps in southern Korea and laying waste to Chinju to let them know that he meant business. As Hideyoshi had demanded hostages from Tokugawa, he now asked for a daughter from the Wanli emperor, plus a Korean prince and top officials. As he had appeased Tokugawa by allowing him to retain most of his previous land holdings, Hideyoshi now offered to let the Wanli emperor retain suzerainty over the northern half of Korea.
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But of course the Wanli emperor was no daimyo, and the Ming empire no mere rival’s domain.
China was not prepared for a moment to negotiate with Hideyoshi as an equal or to meet him even halfway on the demands he had made. Had Hideyoshi known his adversary better, he would have understood this. But it is evident that he did not. When the truth of Beijing’s intractability finally became clear, the taiko’s spontaneous display of rage is ample testimony to the fact that he did indeed expect the Wanli emperor to accept him as an equal, and to give in to at least some of his demands.
This realization, however, still lay more than three years away. Until then, mutual misunderstanding would be the order of the day, misunderstanding perpetuated by the representatives of both
China and Japan. These intermediaries knew better than their masters just how far apart the two sides were. They also knew, however, that if a light were shone on this gaping void, negotiations would fall to pieces and fighting resume. It seemed to be in everyone’s best interests, therefore, to falsify a picture of approaching common ground.