Authors: Samuel Hawley
In his early-seventeenth-century account of his journey around the world, the Florentine merchant Francesco Carletti mentions visiting a slave market in Nagasaki and seeing “an infinite number of [Korean] men and women, boys and girls, of every age, and they all were sold as slaves at the very lowest prices.” Carletti bought five of them “for little more than twelve scudos,” the equivalent of roughly 440 grams of silver. He had them baptized, and took them with him on his continuing journey west. He set four free in Goa on the west coast of
India. The fifth continued on with Carletti to Europe and subsequently settled in Rome, where he went by the name of either “Antonio” or “Antonio Corea,” depending on which edition of Carletti’s account one consults.
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There is a family with the surname “Corea” living today in the Calabrian
village of Albi on Italy’s southern tip who believe they are descended from this Imjin War captive Carletti took to Europe. One of them, named Antonio Corea like his supposed ancestor, wrote to the president of Korea in 1986 to learn more about his roots, and then visited the country in 1992 at the invitation of the Seoul government to take part in events commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the start of the Imjin War.
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Subsequent DNA testing failed to find evi
dence of Asian ancestry in the genes of Antonio Corea and his Albi clan.
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Back in
Korea, Hideyoshi’s forces had completed their withdrawal to the south and were now busy repairing and strengthening existing fortifications and erecting new ones. The defensive perimeter that began to take shape in November 1597 was once again centered on the port of Pusan, as had been the enclave established in 1593. This time, however, it was significantly longer, extending from Ulsan in the east all the way to Sunchon in the west, a total of fourteen fortresses spread over more than 250 kilometers.
Konishi Yukinaga and the men of the second contingent anchored the western end of this fortress chain at the town of
Sunchon on the coast of Cholla Province. Tsushima daimyo So Yoshitoshi and the thousand men under his command stationed themselves on the island of Namhae, inside the border of Kyongsang Province thirty kilometers to the east. Next came Sachon, a fortified town just south of Chinju. Fifth contingent leader Shimazu Yoshihiro and his son Tadatsune initially set up camp in the town’s existing castle, then erected a new fortress on more defensible ground a little farther to the south, on a tongue of land extending into Chinju Bay. Continuing farther east, Tachibana Muneshige held Kosong, the former headquarters of Commander in Chief Kwon Yul; Yanagawa Tsunanobu was encamped with one thousand men on the northern end of Koje Island; Nabeshima Naoshige’s twelve thousand-man contingent was divided between the fortress town of Changwon and the nearby island of Chuk-do; the crucially important harbor at Pusan was garrisoned by the eighth and ninth contingents from western Honshu, a massive force of forty thousand men commanded respectively by Mori Hidemoto and Ukita Hideie; Kuroda Nagamasa’s third contingent was positioned north along the coast in the fort at Sosaengpo.
Anchoring the eastern end of the fortress chain at
Ulsan, finally, was Kato Kiyomasa. After leading his forces back south the previous month—stopping to burn the city of Kyongju and nearby Pulguk Temple en route—Kato set his lieutenant Asano Yukinaga
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to work erecting a fortress on a hill named Tosan just east of the town, situated in a fork in the Taehwa River with convenient access to Ulsan Bay and the open sea beyond. Time, they knew, was short. With the allied Chinese-Korean army on its ponderous way south, it would take all the energy the Japanese could beat out of their workers to prepare the walls and defenses necessary to make an effective stand.
Work proceeded without halt at Tosan from early in the morning until late at night. “From all around,” wrote the priest Keinen, “comes the sound of the hammers and the blacksmiths and the workmen, and the swish and scraping of the adze. With the dawn it grows more and more terrible, but if it means we will not be defeated I can put up with the banging I am being subjected to even in the middle of the night.”
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Korean slaves and conscripted peasants shipped over from
Japan were sent into the nearby mountains under heavy guard to fell trees and prepare the thousands of meters of lumber needed to build the fort. Others were put to work hauling stones and digging trenches and moats. Anyone deemed to be careless immediately had his head cut off, Korean and Japanese alike. When supplies ran short Asano’s captains cut the laborers’ rations, then drove some of them, including their own countrymen, into the mountains to starve.
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The fortress that began to take shape in the bitter cold of the Korean winter consisted of an outer earthen rampart around an inner enclosure, which in turn had a citadel tucked up in the back with stone walls ten to fifteen meters high. Tosan, then, was a fortress within a fortress, affording Asano and his men a fallback position should the outer walls be breached. If they could complete construction before the Chinese and Koreans attacked, they would make them pay a terrible price.
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Seven hundred kilometers to the east in
Kyoto, casks containing the salted noses of the slain in Korea were beginning to pile up. Hideyoshi received them gratefully, dispatching congratulatory letters to his commanders in the field acknowledging receipt of the evidence of their martial valor and thanking them for their service. He then ordered the relics entombed in a shrine on the grounds of Hokoji Temple, and set Buddhist priests to work praying for the repose of the souls of the hundreds of thousands of Koreans from whose bodies they had come—an act that chief priest Saisho Jotai in a fit of toadyism would hail as a sign of the taiko’s great mercy and compassion.
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The shrine initially was known as the
hanazuka
, “Mound of Noses.” Several decades later this would come to be regarded as too cruel-sounding a name, and would be changed to the more euphonious but inaccurate
mimizuka
, “Mound of Ears,” the misnomer by which it is known to this day.
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Apart from the sporadic orders and letters of congratulations issued in his name to his commanders in Korea, Hideyoshi by this point seems to have lost interest in his second Korean campaign. Prior to the invasion he had indicated that he might return to the headquarters he had built at Nagoya on Kyushu to personally oversee operations in Korea. But he never undertook the journey. He remained in and around Kyoto and Osaka throughout the autumn of 1597 and into the spring of 1598, overseeing repair work on Fushimi Castle, touring about the capital, relaxing with his beloved tea ceremony, and spending time with his young son Hideyori, whose security as heir was now his foremost concern. To set the vulnerable little boy up to rule after he himself was gone, Hideyoshi required his daimyo repeatedly to swear oaths of loyalty to him. He also made sure that Hideyori was equipped with all the trappings of manhood. His coming-of-age ceremony was performed in October 1597, an official title with junior fourth rank, lower grade, was bestowed upon him in the same month, and then in the following May he was promoted to a higher office with junior second rank. All this occurred before Hideyori was five years old.
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It is clear from this almost frantic concern for his son’s future that Hideyoshi knew his remaining time on earth was short. He was in fact now entering his final year of life. His appetite was poor, and his face, never full at the best of times, had become alarming gaunt. His strength was ebbing as well, making it increasingly difficult for him to travel any great distance; a trip to
Kyushu to oversee the Korean campaign, even if he had wanted to make it, was now more than he could do. The taiko’s mind, however, was still sharp and active, and the nation he had united still very much in his grasp. Even in his final decline he would brook no opposition—not against himself, and certainly not against his son. In a letter to Hideyori in the summer of 1598 he wrote, “I have understood that Kitsu, Kame, Yasu, and Tsushi have acted against your wishes. As this is something extremely inexcusable, ask your Mother, and then bind these four persons with a straw rope and keep them like that until your Father comes to your side. When I arrive, I shall beat them all to death.” Hideyoshi then gave the five-year-old lad some advice for holding on to power: “Should anyone try to thwart the will of Lord Chunagon [Hideyori], he must beat and beat such a man to death, and then nobody will be against him.”
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*
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In
Seoul, meanwhile, Chinese forces were steadily be amassed under Regulator of Korean Affairs Yang Hao, as forward units began moving cautiously toward the south. Commander in Chief Ma Gui, spearheading the southward advance, arrived at Chonju on November 23 to find the city free of Japanese, then proceeded farther on to Namwon. Both cities lay in ruins, Namwon from the battle two months before that had seen Ma’s colleague Yang Yuan so badly defeated, Chonju razed by the Japanese prior to pulling out. “Dead bodies are piled up like mountains,” Ma reported back to Seoul, “and not a house is left standing.”
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Ma Gui’s southward advance ground to a halt as soon as he reached Namwon. He was now in close proximity to the Japanese forces encamped on the coast, this time large concentrations of them, not the relatively small unit he had faced at Chiksan. To lead his modest vanguard army any farther, he sensibly concluded, therefore would be foolhardy. There was also the problem of food and supplies to consider, which were proving increasingly difficult to obtain the further he advanced, particularly now that winter was approaching. After combining forces with other small Ming units in the area, Ma pulled back north twenty kilometers toward Chonju, established a camp, and sat down to wait for reinforcements and supplies.
They would not be long in coming. By early December forty thousand Ming troops had arrived in Seoul from China’s Liaodong Province and regions farther west, bringing the total number of Chinese soldiers in Korea to the neighborhood of sixty thousand.
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Xing Jie, the Ming official in overall charge of military affairs in
Korea and the eastern regions of the empire, arrived soon after. He would remain in the capital for the next several months, overseeing operations from his headquarters, known as Army Gate, and meeting frequently with King Sonjo to discuss the course of the campaign.
The great Ming army that had been assembled in Seoul finally began to march south in the middle of December, much to the satisfac
tion of the Koreans, who felt the Chinese had already taken far too long to get their offensive under way. Yang Hao led the way in overall command. Beneath him were Left Army Commander Li Rumei with 12,600 men, Right Army Commander Li Fangchun with 11,630 men, and Gao Ze with his Central Army of 11,690 men.
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At Yang Hao’s invitation King Sonjo accompanied them on horseback for the first few kilometers. The procession began in a suitably stately manner with Sonjo riding alongside Yang Hao. Then, upon exiting
Seoul’s South Gate, Yang spurred his horse into a gallop, forcing the Korean king to do likewise in order to keep up. Although not a skilled horseman, Sonjo managed to race along behind the Ming commander as far as the Han River and survived Yang’s demonstration with his dignity intact.
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What had Yang intended to prove by this? It is possible that he was annoyed at the grumbling the Koreans had been doing about the amount of time that he had taken to prepare for his advance. By challenging Sonjo to a race, Yang was perhaps driving home the point that the king and his ministers were scholars, not warriors, and thus should leave the conduct of the war to experts like him.
After this rather unseemly beginning, Yang Hao’s army crossed the Han and began its long, cold trek toward the Japanese in the south. Upon receiving word that this force was on its way, Ma Gui’s army left its camp north of Namwon and began moving east. The two forces met at Kyongju on January 26, 1598, to form a combined Ming army of forty thousand men. They were then joined by ten thousand Korean soldiers under Commander in Chief Kwon Yul, bringing the total to fifty thousand. This enormous force then proceeded on toward Ulsan, the easternmost link in the Japanese fortress chain and, it was hoped, an easy target for Yang Hao’s vastly superior numbers.
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The fighting commenced three days later, on January 29, as forward Chinese units neared the town of
Ulsan. A feigned retreat drew the town’s Japanese garrison charging out in pursuit, straight into a larger Chinese force that was waiting to the rear in crane wing battle formation. As many as five hundred Japanese were killed in the engagement. The rest retreated to the fortress at Tosan where the bulk of the Japanese force lay, one kilometer east. After gathering the heads of the slain, the Chinese marched into Ulsan and took possession of the town, then followed the fleeing Japanese on toward Tosan and set up camp outside the walls. Throughout the rest of the day additional Ming and Korean units continued to arrive on the scene, cutting off the fortress completely on the landward side. By the following morning the situation for the Japanese at Tosan had become extremely grave. Peering over the wall in the early light of dawn, the priest Keinen, attached to the Japanese contingent as a scholar and medical practitioner, observed that “the castle was surrounded by countless troops, who were deployed in any number of rings that encircled us. There were so many of them covering the terrain that one could no longer tell apart the plain and the hillsides.”
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