Authors: Samuel Hawley
Hu Ze remained in
Seoul for three months, alternately cajoling and haranguing the Koreans to accept negotiations with Japan and the terms of peace that would ensue. By the time he finally returned north, the man who had sent him, Ku Yangqian, had, like Song Yingchang before him, been dismissed as a result of factional strife. Ku’s removal and the subsequent appointment of Sun Kuang as civilian overseer of eastern affairs marked a small victory for the hawks in Beijing. No move was made to halt negotiations with Japan, however, and the tug of war between the pro- and antiwar factions continued unabated.
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In the south, meanwhile, Konishi Yukinaga was doing some cajol
ing of his own. In late 1594 he sent an agent named Yojiro to the camp of Kim Ung-so, the Korean army commander of Kyongsang Province, bearing gifts and an invitation to parlay. Kim reported this to his superiors in Seoul and was given permission to go and see what the enemy general had to say. The meeting took place in December, Kim and his officers on one side, Konishi, So Yoshitoshi, and the monk Genso on the other.
Konishi began with the now tired refrain that the war had been entirely the Koreans’ fault; their refusal to allow the Japanese to pass through their country on a mission of peace to
China had left Hideyoshi no alternative but to attack. Kim Ung-so would have none of it. All your talk of desiring only peace, he said, is nothing but a smokescreen. We know it, and the Ming Chinese know it as well. That is why the emperor sent his great army to stop you. Besides, Kim added, if all you want is peace, then why did you attack Chinju last summer? And why did you plunder Kyongju last fall?
That had nothing to do with me, replied Konishi. Those two acts were entirely the doing of Kato Kiyomasa; they did not reflect the wishes of Toyotomi Hideyoshi at all. All the taiko wanted, he assured Kim, was to become a vassal of the Ming. And all he now asked of the Koreans was that they intercede with
Beijing on his behalf.
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The Koreans did not trust Konishi. It was obvious to them that the so-called letter of surrender from Hideyoshi was a forgery and that there was thus no real basis for a true and lasting peace. Korean prime minister Yu Song-nyong, who was ill at the time and convalescing out
side of the capital, wrote to King Sonjo urging him to communicate directly with Beijing so that the Chinese government would understand that “the Japanese will never be satisfied with becoming a vassal state and paying tribute to China.” In the end, however, pressure from the antiwar faction in the Ming capital had its intended effect. Toward the end of 1594 King Sonjo finally caved in and dispatched a letter to the Wanli emperor supporting the idea of negotiating with Hideyoshi, and requesting that toward this end Japanese envoy Naito Joan be allowed to continue his mission to Beijing. It was clearly a letter the king did not want to write. As a vassal of China, however, he found it difficult to ignore the prodding of the representative officials of that great land. Sonjo’s letter was to prove an important document, for it undermined the hard-liners within the Ming government who opposed negotiation. If the Koreans themselves, the most aggrieved party in the entire affair, were in favor of treating with the Japanese for terms of peace, then there was little reason not to at least receive Naito and see how little he could be persuaded to accept.
After a journey of nearly a year and a half, most of it spent waiting in Liaodong, the Japanese envoy thus was granted permission to pro
ceed to Beijing.
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Although King Sonjo had now given his support to the reception of the envoy Naito Joan, he and his government ministers remained deeply distrustful of the Japanese and of any talk of peace. They had good reason to be. Beginning in the spring of 1595 Kato Kiyomasa, angered by Konishi Yukinaga’s twisting of the taiko’s demands, embarked on some diplomacy of his own, laying before first the Chinese and then the Koreans the original list of seven conditions for peace that Hideyoshi expected to be met, and in so doing contradicting everything that had been said and promised by Konishi and Shen Weijing.
The first of these meetings took place between Kato and a group of Ming officials in April, at the former’s Sosaengpo camp near Ulsan, a day’s journey north along the coast from Pusan. Kato began by saying that Konishi and Shen Weijing were conducting negotiations under false pretenses. “What they are doing is all a vicious trick.” He then proceeded to outline the actual conditions for peace that Hideyoshi had drawn up back in 1593, from the demand for a Ming princess in marriage and four of Korea’s eight provinces to the requirement that a Korean prince be sent as a hostage to Japan. Finally, to make things crystal clear, Kato took up a brush and wrote some of his assertions on a piece of paper that he handed to the Chinese. His characters were poorly written and difficult to read, the Korean chroniclers were careful to note, but the gist was this: “The things Konishi has asked for were not ordered by Hideyoshi. How could anyone presume to think that he would want to become a mere vassal of the Ming? Envoys should be sent again from China to Japan, to hear the truth directly from the taiko himself.”
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Kato’s blunt talk did nothing to sway the Ming Chinese. The officials came away from the meeting suspecting that he wanted to dis
credit Konishi’s and Shen’s efforts at diplomacy so that he himself could take the lead in the negotiation process. Undeterred, Kato tried again to make Hideyoshi’s true demands known, this time to the Koreans. In May of 1595, and then again in August, he met with a group of officials and the battle-hardened monk commander Yujong, who had succeeded his aged master Hyujong the year before as supreme commander of Korea’s monk-soldiers. On both occasions Kato carefully conveyed Hideyoshi’s original demands so that nothing would be misunderstood, and Yujong just as carefully explained why each demand was utterly unacceptable, both to the Koreans and to the Chinese. In the end nothing came of the talks; the two sides were too far apart, and neither was willing to give an inch. Kato’s efforts at diplomacy in fact were entirely counterproductive, for in confirming for the Koreans their suspicions that Hideyoshi wanted much more than to become a mere vassal of the Wanli emperor, he firmed their resolve not to negotiate, but to resist the Japanese at every turn.
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By this time, however, peace negotiations had advanced too far to be stopped. Naito Joan had reached
Beijing.
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* *
Kato Kiyomasa was right of course: Toyotomi Hideyoshi entertained no thoughts whatsoever of becoming a vassal of
China. Had he known that his representative Konishi Yukinaga had forged a letter stating that this was what he desired, the taiko would probably have ordered him to commit suicide, a common response to acts of disloyalty and deceit. Fortunately for Konishi he never found out.
Just how unrepresentative the forged letter was of Hideyoshi’s wishes becomes evident by contrasting it with the orders he dispatched to his army in
Korea in early 1594:
Hideyoshi clearly thought that some of his war objectives could still be achieved.
China had apologized for resisting him (or so he thought) and was now suing for peace (or so he thought). And if they did not offer suitable concessions he would launch his forces again. At the very least he expected to come away from the negotiating table with a large piece of Korea, a piece that he already considered “a part of our domain, the same as Kyushu.”
In this document Hideyoshi went on to assure his troops in
Korea that replacements would soon be arriving and that they would all get a chance to return to Japan for a furlough. There was thus no reason for anyone to “become restless.” This reference to restlessness evinces awareness on the taiko’s part of dissention among the ranks of his soldiers in Korea, an awareness he addressed directly in the following lines: “All the men at home in Japan...are assigned to work of one kind or another in connection with the present campaign. In fact, our fighting men in Korea are doing less work than are the Japanese at home.”
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Hideyoshi’s assertion to the contrary, the Japanese troops stationed in
Korea did not consider themselves lucky to be there. Far from it. They were exhausted from the heavy work of building fortifications. They had not seen their friends and relations for a year and more and were desperately homesick. They were hungry, for supplies did not often arrive from Japan, and the land about their forts had been laid waste by the Koreans in an effort to starve them out. Then the cold of winter set in, a piercing, bitter cold unlike anything they had known back home, a cold that their strongly built but poorly heated quarters did little to keep out. And finally, early in 1594, typhoid fever spread from camp to camp, carrying off hundreds, possibly thousands.
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Under these conditions desertion became common. Some soldiers attempted to slip back home to Japan. Others offered their services to the Koreans. This latter group came to number in the thousands, and constituted such a significant force that the Koreans formed them into units called
hangwaedae
(surrendered Japanese corps) and incorporated them into their army and navy.
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These men would never return to
Japan. They settled in Korea after the war and became naturalized citizens. It was a relatively easy shift in allegiance to make—certainly easier than it would have been for a Korean—for after two centuries of civil war the average Japanese did not have such a strong sense of “nation.” The men of the hangwaedae may have been susceptible to feelings of guilt for having betrayed their families or their village or their former daimyo lord, but the thought of betraying Japan as a whole would have caused them little remorse.
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In order to provide comfort to and quell discontent among his largely Christian force, Konishi Yukinaga sent a request to the Jesuit fathers back in
Japan for a priest to be sent over to Korea. The Jesuits, who regarded Konishi as their staunchest ally, readily complied, dispatching Father Gregorio de Cespedes of Spain and a Japanese lay brother toward the end of 1593. Father de Cespedes, a forty-three-year-old missionary with sixteen years of service in Japan and a remarkable grasp of the language, would become the first European on record ever to visit the Korean mainland.
Father de Cespedes arrived on Tsushima en route to
Korea in early December 1593. Rough seas and adverse winds prevented him from proceeding any farther for the next eighteen days. He spent the time ministering to the island’s small Christian community as a guest of Maria, wife of Tsushima daimyo So Yoshitoshi and daughter of Konishi Yukinaga. Finally, “by the help of God,” de Cespedes managed to reach Korea’s rocky southern shore on December 27, landing near Konishi’s fortress at Ungchon. The priest was initially impressed by the impregnability of the complex that had been constructed to resist Korean and Chinese attack. “[G]reat defensive works have been erected there which are admirable,” he wrote, “considering the short time in which they were completed. They have built high walls, watch towers, and strong bastions, at the foot of which all the nobles and soldiers of Augustin [Konishi], his subjects and allies, are encamped. For all there are well built and spacious [barracks]. Houses with stone walls are built for the chiefs....For one league around there are various fortresses.”
The general conditions de Cespedes saw around him, however, were not good:
The cold in
Korea is very severe and without any comparison with that of Japan. All day long my limbs are half benumbed, and in the morning I can hardly move my hands to say mass, but...I am cheerful and don’t mind my work and the cold.
All these Christians are very poor, and suffer from hunger, cold, illness and other inconveniences.... Although Hideyoshi sends food, so little reaches here that it is impossible to sustain all with them, and moreover the help that comes from
Japan is insufficient and comes late. It is now two months since ships have come, and many craft were lost.
An understanding regarding peace is not reached yet, and those who should come to conclude it never arrive. Many suspect that this delay is nothing but a trick in order to keep the Japanese waiting until summer, when ships of the Chinese armada may arrive, and an army by land.
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