Authors: Samuel Hawley
Back at Namwon almost everyone was dead, including Cholla Army Commander Yi Bok-nam and his men, every civilian who had remained in the city, and numerous others who had been cut down out
side. The priest Keinen, serving with the Japanese army as a chaplain and physician, recorded in his diary that “the only people to be seen were those lying dead on the ground. When I looked around the fortress at dawn the next day I saw bodies beyond number heaped up along the roadside.”
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He would later encapsulate the trauma of the scene in a poem:
Whoever sees this
Out of all his days
Today has become the rest of his life.
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After the battle the Japanese set to work cutting off the nose of every corpse. According to Okochi’s firsthand account, 3,726 noses were collected at Namwon. Konishi Yukinaga’s men accounted for 879 of them, Ukita Hideie’s contingent placed second with 622, Hachizuka Iemasa’s third with 468, and Shimazu Yoshihiro’s fourth with 421.
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These were submitted by samurai to their daimyo commanders, then were passed on to the designated “nose collec
tion officer” for salting, packing, and shipment home to Japan.
*
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While Konishi and his Left Army colleagues were attacking Namwon, Kato Kiyomasa and forward units of the Right Army were busy else
where. Leaving his coastal fort at Sosaengpo in the middle of September, Kato led his ten thousand-man force inland along a westerly route, intent on beating the Left Army to Namwon and attacking the fortress there first.
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He was accompanied by the veteran Nabeshima Naoshige at the head of twelve thousand men, and by Kuroda Nagamasa with five thousand. They had advanced about sixty kilometers when they came upon the mountain fortress of Hwawangsansong, defended by a force of Korean volunteers under the famous “Red Coat General” Kwak Jae-u, recently returned to active military service as regional commander of
Kyongsang Right Province. Judging the walls of the fort to be impregnable and the men inside dangerously determined, Kato, Nabeshima, and Kuroda decided to bypass this knot of resistance and continue on their way.
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They felt differently about the next mountain fortress they came to, named Hwangsoksansong after the thousand-meter-high
Mt. Hwangsok on the slopes of which it stood. This fortress guarded the strategically important mountain pass leading from Kyongsang Province to Cholla. It therefore had to be taken.
Hwangsoksansong was one of several mountain strongholds in southern
Korea that had been either built or repaired in the years leading up to the second invasion. Weapons and supplies were stockpiled inside, and local magistrates were instructed to lead civilians there for safety in the event of a renewed attack. When the Japanese began to move inland, Kwak Jun, the forty-seven-year-old magistrate of the surrounding county of Anum, was placed in charge of Hwangsoksansong. He entered the fortress with two of his sons, a son-in-law, and a force of several hundred militiamen. They were joined by Cho Chong-do, the elderly magistrate of neighboring Hanam County, together with his wife and children, and by Kimhae governor Baek Sa-rim, who had been sent by Inspector General Yi Won-ik to provide military expertise.
Baek was the only one among these three officials with a military background. As the Japanese neared the fortress it was thus to him that everyone inside looked for leadership. They were sorely disap
pointed. When Baek saw the odds arrayed against them, 27,000 Japanese warriors against no more than a few thousand Koreans, many of them civilians, he led his family to a secluded part of the fortress, lowered them on a rope over the wall, and stole away into the trees. When his disappearance was discovered any determination to hold Hwangsoksansong quickly drained away. As the Japanese surrounded the fortress, Nabeshima on the west, Kuroda on the east, Kato on the south, the people inside ran to Kwak Jun in a panic, pleading with him to lead them in an escape. Kwak refused. Although he knew they could not withstand the coming onslaught, he would not accept the ignominy of flight. This, he said, is the place I will die.
The Japanese attacked Hwangsoksansong on September 26. They took it that same day. Most of the civilians jumped over the walls and attempted to flee when the fighting began, leaving Kwak and his few hundred militiamen to defend the fortress alone. Kwak died trying to stave off the final assault. His two sons were cut down as they cradled his body and wept. The Japanese then flooded into the fortress, killed almost everyone and started collecting noses. The final tally was 353 Korean soldiers killed within the fortress itself, plus several thousand civilians in the valley below.
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Among the dead were Cho Chong-do and his entire family, and the son-in-law of Kwak Jun. When Kwak’s daughter heard of her husband’s death, she grew despondent and hanged herself.
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Shortly after they captured Hwangsoksansong, word reached the Japanese that the Left Army had already taken Namwon. With this objective no longer available to them, Kato, Nabeshima, and Kuroda set out instead for
Chonju, fifty kilometers farther north. By the time they arrived the city had been deserted by both civilians and troops: upon receiving news of the fall of Namwon, Chinese general Chen Yuzhong had withdrawn with his two thousand men and retreated north toward Seoul. Kato and his compatriots thus marched into Chonju on September 30 without a fight, where they were soon joined by a portion of the army that had taken Namwon. After garrisoning the city, this forward army fanned out west toward the coast and northeast toward Kumsan to subdue the northern half of Cholla Province. Nabeshima Naoshige led his forces farther north to take Kongju, the main city in Chungchong Province. Kato Kiyomasa’s contingent headed northeast to occupy the town of Chongju. Kuroda Nagamasa, finally, ventured farthest north into Kyonggi-do, the province bordering Seoul.
By the beginning of October the Japanese army therefore seemed well on its way to achieving its objective of seizing the southern half of
Korea as Hideyoshi’s consolation prize. They had been in much the same position five years before, however, only to see their initial gains slip away due in part to unremitting Korean resistance. Breaking this resistance was now a prime concern of the daimyo commanders. They intended to do so by terrorizing the local population. A good example of this is seen in the proclamation Ukita Hideie issued to the people of Cholla Province in September, reiterating the hard-line policy on resistance that the Japanese army had first announced upon returning to Korea earlier in the year. It was a standard announcement that was being made by all commanders throughout the south:
Ukita and his fellow daimyo were deadly serious in their demand for compliance. From the start of the offensive their campaign to pacify the provinces of Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong was accompanied by the most horrific atrocities perpetrated against the region’s civilian population. People were killed almost daily well outside the time frame of any significant battle, and their noses hacked off by the hundreds, even the thousands. We know this because the units responsible, ever mindful of recording the proof of their valor, kept meticulous records and receipts, some of which have survived to this day:
To: Kuroda Nagamasa
Noses from 23 enemy dead slain in battle taken and duly recorded.
1597, 8th month, 16th day
Kumagai Naomori, Kakimi Kasunao, Hayakawa Nagamasa
To: Nabeshima Katsushige
Noses taken yesterday and today in lieu of heads verified as 90.
1597, 8th month, 21st day
Kumagai Naomori, Kakimi Kasunao, Hayakawa Nagamasa
To: Nabeshima Katsushige
Noses taken today verified as 7.
1597, 8th month, 22nd day
Kakimi Kasunao, Kumagai Naomori, Hayakawa Nagamasa
To: Nabeshima Katsushige
Noses taken today in lieu of heads verified as 264.
1597, 8th month, 25th day
Kumagai Naomori, Kakimi Kasunao, Hayakawa Nagamasa
To: Todo Takatora
346 noses taken.
1597, 8th month, 26th day
Oda Kazuyoshi
To: Kikkawa Hiroie
Total number of noses taken verified as 480.
Hayakawa Nagamasa
1597, 9th month, 1st day
To: Kikkawa Hiroie
Total number of noses taken verified as 792.
Hayakawa Nagamasa
1597, 9th month, 4th day
To: Kuroda Nagamasa
Total number of noses taken verified as 3,000.
1597, 9th month, 5th day
Hayakawa Nagamasa
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* * *
With the Japanese now rapidly advancing toward
Seoul, panic seized the populace. Citizens packed their possessions and prepared to flee into the countryside, and the Korean government began discussing plans for its own evacuation. It was immediately decided that Crown Prince Kwanghae and the queen should be sent northwest into the rugged province of Hamgyong, to safeguard the future of the monarchy and rally the people there once again to resist the Japanese. Government ministers then sat down with King Sonjo to consider options for his own safety. No mention was made of his remaining in Seoul. Although Sonjo bemoaned the fact that he had been considered a coward ever since fleeing the capital the first time in 1592, flight once again seemed the only reasonable alternative. The only questions were whether to travel by land or by sea, and what town to head to in the far north.
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The Ming forces that had abandoned the south were no more reso
lute. General Yang Yuan, badly wounded and borne on a stretcher, arrived in the capital on October 4 with the tattered remnants of his army, a total of scarcely one hundred men. He was greeted outside Seoul’s South Gate by King Sonjo, who wept at the sight of the general’s wounds. After receiving Sonjo’s thanks for having suffered so much trying to defend Korea—the heartfelt exchange reduced everyone including Yang to tears—the general and his men resumed their journey north toward the Yalu River and China beyond.
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Yang would later be tried and beheaded for his failure at Namwon. As for General Chen Yuzhong, he received one hundred strokes of the rod as punish
ment for abandoning Chonju and retreating north without a fight, and was sent back home in disgrace.
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Commander in Chief Ma Gui had in the meantime also developed cold feet. Arriving in Seoul with a thousand crack troops in the middle of August, he had initially planned to march his forces south to Kongju to meet the Japanese advance. He changed his mind after learning of the decimation of Yang Yuan’s army. Concluding that the Japanese could not be stopped with the limited forces at his disposal, Ma dispatched a message north to his superiors recommending that Korea be abandoned and all Ming forces amassed along the north bank of the Yalu River to defend China’s own territory should it come under attack.
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Ma’s superior Yang Hao did not agree. Upon hearing of the defeat at Namwon, the supreme Ming commander of military affairs in
Korea journeyed south to Seoul from his headquarters at Pyongyang to take charge of the situation and quash any talk of retreat. After criticizing Ma and his fellow commanders for their lack of determination, Yang gathered all the Chinese troops on the scene, those who had abandoned the south plus reinforcements recently arrived, a total of eight thousand men, and sent them south under Ma into the hills of Kyonggi Province to ambush the Japanese when they drew near Seoul. This was all done in secret. Yang told the Koreans nothing of his plans, presumably to prevent word of the ambush from leaking to the Japanese.
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This Ming army, a combination of foot soldiers and mounted troops, took up positions along the main road seventy kilometers south of the capital, just past the garrison town of
Chiksan, near what is today Pyongtaek City. Selecting a place where the passage between the mountains was narrow and rough, the Chinese divided into three sections, one remaining by the road and the other two branching to the left and right. They then hid themselves well and sat down to wait.
Luckily for Ma and his men, the Japanese force approaching from the direction of
Chonju was not particularly large. It was the vanguard of Kuroda Nagamasa’s five thousand-man force,
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pressing into
Kyonggi Province to establish the northernmost edge of Japan’s new holdings in Korea while their colleagues secured the territory to the south. The two sides met on the morning of October 16. Korean accounts state that Kuroda’s force was caught off guard; the first indication they had that something was amiss was the clang of cymbals issuing from the trees signaling the Chinese attack. According to the Japanese, Kuroda’s men saw the assembled Ming troops from some distance away and charged at them despite being badly outnumbered, intent on holding them on the low ground until their comrades arrived. Things went badly for the Japanese at first. But, as they had hoped, Kuroda’s main force soon raced to the scene, drawn by the sound of gunfire. With the balance of forces now even, the fighting continued without resolution until the end of the day, with heavy casualties on both sides. The rival forces then drew apart, gathered their dead and wounded, and made camp for the night. Sometime in the evening the Ming commander summoned his officers and said, “Judging from the determination the Japanese showed today, they will probably fight to the death tomorrow. So we must do the same.”