Authors: Samuel Hawley
The man was executed by having his flesh peeled off his body.
October 1597 had not been a good month for the Japanese army in Korea. On the sixteenth its northern advance had been blunted by a small Ming force at Chiksan, seventy kilometers south of Seoul. Ten days later its fleet was blocked by the Korean navy from entering the Yellow Sea. Despite these setbacks, however, Japanese losses remained fairly light: a hundred or so men killed in the assault on Namwon, another six hundred in the Battle of Chiksan, and thirty-one ships lost to Yi Sun-sin at Myongnyang. In fact, considering that several thousand Chinese and Korean soldiers had been killed so far, plus civilians numbering in the tens of thousands, it has to be concluded that Hideyoshi’s army was a long way from being beaten.
Why then did the Japanese decide to withdraw and return south to their forts? First, Hideyoshi ordered them to do so. There is evidence to suggest that he never intended his armies to retain control of the territory they marched through. According to two separate reports from Japanese soldiers captured and interrogated at or shortly after the Battle of Chiksan, the taiko instructed his commanders at the start of the offensive to rampage through the southern part of
Korea, killing everyone in their path, then fall back to the south.
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These reports support the supposition that Hideyoshi never had designs on conquest in his second invasion of Korea, but only a desire to punish the Koreans, impress the Chinese, and in so doing vent his spleen and save some face.
If Hideyoshi did not wish to conquer the southern part of Korea, many of his commanders certainly did. They had no intention of risking life and limb for the sake of their master’s wounded pride. They wanted something tangible, like conquered lands and larger fiefs, to show for their effort. In November of 1597, however, Hideyoshi’s order to withdraw coincided with their own strategic interests. It was now evident that the Chinese were again committed to providing military aid to Korea. The presence of Ming troops at Namwon and Chiksan was concrete evidence of this, and intelligence reports indicated that these were but advance units of a much larger force being amassed somewhere to the north, a force said to number 100,000 men or more. If the Japanese were to attempt to hang on to all the territory they had seized in Kyongsang, Cholla, and Chungchong Provinces with this huge army bearing down upon them, particularly with winter coming on and with it the promise of scant supplies, their widely distributed garrisons would be easy targets to be picked off one by one. There was only one sensible course of action to meet this looming threat: fall back and consolidate in the string of forts around Pusan.
As the Japanese proceeded with their withdrawal to the south they continued to inflict still more cruelty upon
Korea’s civilian population. Noses hacked off the faces of the massacred were submitted by the thousands at the nose collection stations set up on the way, where they were carefully counted, recorded, salted, and packed.
To: Kikkawa Hiroie
Number of noses taken verified as 437.
1597, 9th month, 11th day
Hayakawa Nagamasa
To: Nabeshima Katsushige
Number of noses taken verified as 1,551.
1597, 9th month, 13th day
Hayakawa Nagamasa
To: Kuroda Nagamasa
300 noses taken.
At Kaeryong, 1597, 9th month, 19th day
Takenaga Gensuke
To: Kikkawa Hiroie
10,040 noses from the dead were taken by units at Chinwon and Yanggwang.
1597, 9th month, 26th day
Kakimi Kasunao, Kumagai Naomori, Hayakawa Nagamasa
To: Akana Hisauji
A total of 365 noses were delivered to the Nose Collection Officer.
1597, 10th month, 2nd day
Kikkawa Hiroie
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In addition to collecting noses from the slain, the retreating Japanese took captives. The priest Keinen traveling with Kato Kiyomasa’s contingent recorded the following description of the horrors he witnessed as civilians who survived the massacres were rounded up and marched south. “Among the many kinds of merchants who have come over from Japan,” he wrote, “are traders in human beings, who follow in the train of the troops and buy up men and women, young and old alike. Having tied these people together with ropes about the neck, they drive them along before them; those who can no longer walk are made to run with prods or blows of the stick from behind. The sight of the fiends and man-devouring demons who torment sinners in hell must be like this, I thought.”
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Some of these un
fortunates would be put to work building fortifications along the south coast in preparation for the anticipated Ming advance. A good number of them would be worked to death, or have their heads cut off when they became too exhausted to be of any more use. Others, 50,000 Koreans or more,
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were transported back to
Japan. After spending a few days or weeks in prison camps on Kyushu and Shikoku,
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many were put to work as farmers, laborers, or artisans in the fief of their daimyo owners, where they were left in relative freedom to rebuild their lives as best they could. Others were sold to other daimyo and resettled else
where. Few would ever see Korea again. After what was undoubtedly a period of severe bitterness and heartache, these unwilling immigrants had no choice but to accept their fate and be gradually absorbed into Japanese society.
Of all the Korean prisoners taken to Japan, none would have a more visible impact on that nation’s culture than artisans skilled in the manufacture of ceramics. Prior to the war Korean methods of ceramic production were more advanced than those employed in Japan, and Korean pottery in great demand. One of the few benefits that the Japanese derived from Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea was the acquisition of this technology by capturing Korean potters and sending them back to Japan—evidently on such a large scale that Korea’s own ceramic industry was thrown into a severe postwar decline.
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Shimazu Yoshihiro, for example, sent at least seventeen potters to his fief in Satsuma on the
island of Kyushu. Mori Hidemoto similarly resettled potters in the area around Yamaguchi on the western tip of Honshu. The house of Hosokawa had not sent a contingent of its own to Korea, but nevertheless managed to acquire Korean potters to staff kilns in Tango Province just west of Kyoto. Despite their evident unwillingness to be in Japan—the Korean head of the Hosokawa production line attempted to escape more than a dozen times—the techniques these Koreans brought with them revolutionized the Japanese ceramic industry, leading to the development of such ceramic types as Satsuma ware, Karatsu ware, Agano ware, Hagi ware, and Arita ware. It is for this reason that Hideyoshi’s Korean campaign is sometimes referred to by Japanese historians as
yakimono senso
, “the pottery war.”
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The vast majority of Koreans taken captive during the second invasion were uneducated and illiterate, and thus unable to leave behind a written record of what they experienced as prisoners in
Japan. But there were a few exceptions. No In was a well-educated, upper-class Korean who was wounded and captured at the Battle of Namwon in September 1597. He was kept in Korea for a time, then shipped to the island of Shikoku in Japan, where he discovered Koreans were being bought and sold as slaves. Although he heard many tales of misery from other Korean captives, No himself was treated quite well by the Japanese because of his status and education. He even became something of a celebrity, with samurai and monks paying him to write poems and calligraphy in Chinese characters and to critique their own efforts at classical composition. No nevertheless remained desperately unhappy; concern over the fate of his parents troubled him particularly. In February 1599 he therefore tried to escape. The attempt failed, but it resulted in his fortuitous transfer to the port of Sakai near Kyoto, where he met travelers from China who agreed to take him home with them. Thanks to these Chinese seafarers, and to the considerable degree of freedom the Japanese seem to have accorded him, No eventually reached the Chinese mainland and from there made his way back to Korea. He arrived only to learn that his parents had died two years before.
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Chong Hui-duk had much the same experience during his own time in captivity. He and his family were chased down by Japanese naval forces on November 6, 1597, as they were attempting to sail westward to safety. With capture imminent, Chong’s mother, wife, sister, and sister-in-law all jumped into the water and drowned themselves rather than risk the dishonor of being raped. The rest of the family was taken alive. Chong’s sick father and his children were released three days later. Chong Hui-duk and his brother were sent together with about one hundred other prisoners to
Shikoku, where they spent a miserable winter in close confinement, exposed to the weather and wracked by hunger and fever. As an example of the brutal treatment captives often received, Chong wrote of witnessing the Japanese hacking at the corpse of a dead Korean to test the sharpness of their swords. Once Chong was identified by his captors as an educated man, however, his life greatly improved. He was given more freedom than most other captives and was allowed to earn money copying books and working as a ghostwriter. Finally, in mid-1599, he was given permission to return to Korea. He arrived home during the harvest season to find his entire village burned to the ground.
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The third and final scholar to leave behind an account of his captivity in
Japan is also the most famous. His name was Kang Hang. Kang, born into a distinguished family in the southern province of Cholla, was raised to a life of scholarship and passed the civil service examination at the young age of twenty-one. During the first invasion of 1592–93 he remained in Cholla-do, working to supply the nation’s army. He served in various government posts in Seoul after that, then returned home to Cholla in 1596 to begin what he thought would be a quiet life of teaching and study.
With the second Japanese invasion in 1597, Kang, now thirty years of age, once again went to work supplying food and weapons, this time to the allied forces garrisoning Namwon. It was not long after the fall of that city that Kang Hang and his family were captured by the Japanese. On November 2, 1597, forces under Todo Takatora stumbled upon the vessel that Kang had procured to carry himself and his family west
to safety with Yi Sun-sin’s fleet. After abandoning his youngest son and daughter on the shore to die, the Japanese sent Kang and the remnants of his family eastward on a journey first to Tsushima, then on to Todo’s fiefdom of Ozu on the island of Shikoku. One of Kang’s nephews fell ill on the way and was thrown overboard; another nephew and a niece died from disease two months later. Kang himself, being a well-educated man, was at first given clerical duties in the household of the Ozu daimyo, then was transferred to Hideyoshi’s own Fushimi Castle as the extent of his knowledge came to be better appreciated. Here he was solicited by scholars, monks, and the better educated among the daimyo for advice on poetry and classical composition, and also instruction in the principles of Neo-Confucianism, which was not yet well understood in Japan. Kang Hang has indeed been identified by some Korean scholars as the main conduit for the transmission of Neo-Confucianism to Japan, an abridged and “Japanized” form of which would come to have a profound influence on that nation in the centuries to come.
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Although this is an overstatement—the transmission of Neo-Confucianism to
Japan occurred over the course of a century or more—it must be admitted that Kang Hang played a significant role in the process.
Kang Hang, like other well-educated Koreans taken forcibly to
Japan, was treated remarkably well during his period of captivity, certainly better than prisoners from the lower ranks of society. This did not prevent him, however, from thinking constantly of escape. He made two attempts to purchase a boat with his earnings and sail to Korea with his family. Both failed. Then he realized that the best way he could serve his country would be to gather intelligence about the Japanese to aid the Korean government in dealing with them in the future. The report that Kang eventually produced, completed during his journey back to Korea as part of a postwar prisoner repatriation, was initially entitled
Kongorok
(Record of a Criminal), a name chosen by Kang to express the shame he felt at having lived as a captive in an enemy’s land. In later years his disciples would rename it
Kanyangnok
(Record of a Shepherd), a reference to a Chinese officer named Su Wu whose loyalty to his king never wavered during nineteen years of captivity among the Huns in the first century
B.C.
As will be discussed later, this work would do much to shape Korea’s policy toward Japan in the decades and indeed the centuries following the conclusion of the Imjin War.
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Not all the Koreans taken captive during the second invasion were resettled in the islands of
Japan. An unknown number were sold to Portuguese and Italian traders at the slave market in Nagasaki and were transported to such far-flung places as the colony of Macao in southern China, to Goa on India’s western coast, and even to Europe on the other side of the world.