The Imjin War (52 page)

August 27, 1593:
After dark, Right Admiral Yi Ok-ki came to my boat and said that...Won Kyun talked nonsense as he brought false accusations against me. All that he says is absurd.

August 31, 1593:
In the evening Admirals Won Kyun, Yi Ok-ki and Chong Kol came to a staff meeting in my cabin, where Won Kyun jabbered all the time with pointless words. He kept contradicting himself.

September 13, 1593:
Won Kyun again uttered many absurdities. His treachery cannot be expressed properly with ordinary words.

September 20, 1593:
[Won Kyun] became drunk, bellowing out mad words of a vicious nature. Astounding!

September 22, 1593:
Won Kyun came to me and uttered many vicious and deceitful words. What a dangerous man!
[520]

Won was indeed dangerous. Although he often appears in Yi’s diary as an ineffectual, drunken buffoon, he was shrewd and calculating, and knew what was needed to bring a rival down. From early in the war and continuing on to the end of 1594, Won repeatedly sent dispatches to Yi urging him to join him in attacking the Japanese. Yi saw through these messages as mere ploys to make him look bad; Won had no wish to go on the attack. Just how duplicitous these calls to action were became clear in July of 1593 when, after receiving two letters from Won “urging me to go with him and attack the enemy,” Yi called his bluff with a return communication ordering a joint attack. The Kyongsang commander “failed to answer [the order],” Yi wrote in his diary, “using the alibi that he was drunk.”
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Won Kyun continued to play this game throughout 1594, “proving” that Yi Sun-sin was an unfit commander by sending him one frivolous call to action after another. If Yi took the bait and led his ships into action, he would be unable to accomplish much, not with the Japanese holed up on shore and unwilling to fight, and thus would look ineffectual. If he ignored Won’s letters, Won could then accuse him of shirking his duty. It was a simple strategy, designed to damage Yi no matter what he did. And it began to have its intended effect. Members of the Western faction in Seoul were the first to take note of Won’s accusations, for Yi was a friend and appointee of Prime Minister and Eastern faction leader Yu Song-nyong. Even among the Easterners, however, there were those who came to wonder about Yi. Frustrated by the fact that the Japanese seemed set to negotiate their way out of an unjust war, many within the government were looking to Yi to strike a blow, as he had done so effectively earlier in the war, and now were disappointed to find his ships idle.

In April of 1594 Yi Sun-sin finally had an opportunity to redeem himself: a report arrived at his Hansan-do base that a squadron of enemy ships was probing westward beyond the perimeter of Japanese forts. The movement appears to have been nothing more than a small-scale raiding expedition composed of thirty-one ships; the Japanese in
Korea were now desperate for food and had to venture further to get it. They would not get far. On the twenty-third and twenty-fourth, squadrons of warships from Yi’s fleet hunted down and destroyed all thirty-one of the Japanese ships just north of Koje Island, eight of them at Chinhae, on the very doorsteps of Konishi Yukinaga’s Ungchon camp. Very little actual fighting took place. The Japanese crews ran for shore and fled inland as soon as they spotted the Korean navy arrayed offshore in crane wing formation, leaving their beached vessels behind for Yi’s men to pick through and then burn at their leisure. Yi was not entirely satisfied with this outcome. He had tried to arrange a coordinated attack with government army units stationed along the coast so that they would be waiting on shore to cut the Japanese sailors down when they beached their ships and fled. But his call to action went unanswered, and so the Japanese, although they lost their ships, were able to get away.

The operation ended on a sour note on April 25 with the arrival at Yi’s flagship of a field order from Ming general Dan Zongren, then visiting Konishi Yukinaga at his camp at Ungchon, commanding him to call off his attack so as not to jeopardize peace negotiations. “Many Japanese commanding officers have become filled with relenting hearts,” Dan wrote, “with their weapons packed up and their soldiers given rest to prepare to go home; therefore, your warships are also expected to return to their home bases and not approach the Japanese positions.” This angered Yi Sun-sin. He was opposed to any sort of settlement with the Japanese other than their complete and immediate destruction, and replied to General Dan that as “a subject of
Korea...I cannot live with these robbers under the same heaven.” Yi concluded by saying,

Where is the evidence of packing their weapons to go home across the sea? You talk of peace, but it is a peace which the Japanese offer with their habitual trick and deception. However, we are not in a position to disobey your instructions, so we are going to forbear for a time while we report it to our King. In the meantime we wish Your Excellency to enlighten the Japanese fellows on the consequences of obedience and disobedience to heaven.
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Forbearing was in fact not so very hard for Yi to do; with the thirty-one enemy vessels already destroyed, there was little else for him to attack. He thus returned to his base on Hansan-do—and promptly fell ill with typhoid.
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In his official report on the operation, Kyongsang Navy Com
mander Won Kyun attempted to claim credit for all the enemy ships destroyed. Although desperately ill, when Yi Sun-sin heard of this he forced himself to sit up in bed and composed a harshly worded report of his own berating Won for lying and accusing his men of submitting the heads of Korean civilians as Japanese war dead to inflate their battle honors. Yi then gave a painstaking accounting of every Japanese ship destroyed to set the record straight. At the final tally Won’s forces had actually burned or sunk only eleven of the thirty-one vessels; Cholla ships had claimed the rest. Won visited the still very ill Yi a few days later to apologize for the inaccuracies in his account, and beseeched him to soften his own report before sending it on to Seoul. Yi agreed. He then returned to his sick bed and remained indisposed for the next two weeks.
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Although Commander Yi survived his encounter with typhoid fever, many of his men did not. During the coming months the disease would decimate the ranks of the unified Korean navy, now largely con
centrated into a single camp on Hansan Island. By June, 1,704 sailors had died, 3,759 others were ill, and lack of manpower was becoming a serious worry. Yi wrote to Seoul complaining that local magistrates seemed oblivious to the emergency and were neglecting to send him reinforcements. “Under these circumstances,” he noted, “I was obliged to recruit wandering beggars to fill the vacancies..., but having been starved for food too long many of them soon died.”
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*
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Negotiations between
Japan and China, meanwhile, were in danger of falling apart. Naito Joan, the envoy sent north by Konishi Yukinaga to deliver Hideyoshi’s seven demands to Beijing, had been denied permission by the Ming to proceed any farther than Liaodong Province, and was now waiting on the Chinese frontier. The sticking point was the letter he carried. To Song Yingchang, the Chinese civilian official charged with overseeing military affairs in Korea, Hideyoshi’s demands were presumptuous and insulting, the rantings of a barbarian unfamiliar with the ways of the world. They thus did not merit transmission on to the capital, for they would only serve to cause offense and lead in all likelihood to a resumption of war.

Throughout the latter half of 1593 Konishi Yukinaga, working with Ming negotiator Shen Weijing, proceeded to drop Hideyoshi’s demands one by one in an attempt to break this impasse. He had little choice. It was
Japan, after all, that wanted something from China, not the other way around. China’s world was already complete. On his own initiative Konishi pared the taiko’s demands down to the very bone, until finally he stated that his master would be satisfied with just one province of Korea, an indemnity payment of twenty thousand taels of silver from the Choson court, and a resumption of trade relations with China.

Song, not surprisingly, refused even this. All he would consent to consider was the revival of tribute trade as it had once existed between the two nations. For that to take place, however, Hideyoshi first would have to receive investiture as King of Japan, just as the Ashikaga shogun had done nearly two centuries before. In other words, he would have to become a vassal of the emperor of
China.

This intransigence put Konishi Yukinaga in a difficult spot. He had been able so far to drop most of Hideyoshi’s demands on his own, without the taiko’s knowledge. To satisfy the Chinese on the point of submission, however, would require a document from Hideyoshi himself, something he clearly would never consent to write. There was only one thing Konishi could do to keep the game alive: forge a letter of submission himself. He did so with the conniv
ance of the ever-resourceful Shen Weijing, who evidently knew how to word such things. The resulting document put some remarkably un-taiko-esque words into Hideyoshi’s mouth, and stands today as a testament to the amazing latitude for deception that existed in international diplomacy four hundred years ago.

In Konishi’s and Shen’s forged letter, dated February 10, 1594, Hideyoshi stated that
Japan was “a small and humble country” and “a child of China.” He himself stood in “fear and awe” of the Celestial Throne, and earnestly beseeches the Wanli emperor to accept him as a vassal. This had indeed been his sole desire all along. He had sent his army to Korea merely because he wished to seek tributary relations with Beijing. The unreasonable Koreans had refused to grant him right of way and had drawn him into a war that had unfortunately come to involve the Ming. But now, Hideyoshi concluded, “I prostrate myself and I beg Your Majesty to let that light of the sun and moon shine forth with which He irradiates the world, to extend that nourishing capacity of heaven and earth with which He overspreads and sustains all things that there are...and to bestow on me the title of an imperially invested vassal king.”
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The Koreans expressed a good degree of skepticism when they learned of the contents of this spurious document. It did not sound at all like the Hideyoshi they knew, but was clearly a forgery, probably from the pen of the shady Shen Weijing.
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The Chinese, however, had fewer reservations, for the letter said exactly what they wanted to hear. The impasse in Liaodong would soon be broken.

*              *              *

The negotiations between
China and Japan were causing the Koreans a great deal of concern. Was their bitter enemy Hideyoshi going to be appeased instead of punished for his unwarranted aggression? For that would be the upshot if even a single one of his demands was accepted in Beijing. And even worse, was he going to be appeased at Korea’s expense? The fact that the Koreans were being cut out of the negotiation process only served to heighten their fears on this score, and led some to voice their dissatisfaction loudly enough for the Ming Chinese to hear.

It was at about this time that Song Yingchang, the Ming official in charge of overseeing affairs in Liaodong and
Korea, was forced to resign and return to China, the victim of the factional wrangling that affected the government in Beijing nearly as strongly as its counterpart in Seoul. A growing bone of contention in the Chinese capital was the Korean war itself, a prowar faction on one side urging its aggressive prosecution, an antiwar faction on the other, led by Minister of War Shi Xing, demanding its hasty conclusion so as to spare the treasury any further expense. Song Yingchang’s dismissal marked a victory for the doves. His replacement, Ku Yangqian, moved east into Liaodong to take up his new post with a determination to restore peace in Korea through negotiation and thus solve the “Japan problem,” and so was anxious to quiet the grumbling emanating from Seoul that the war should be continued in order to punish Hideyoshi. Toward this end he sent an envoy, Hu Ze, south to talk the Koreans into supporting the negotiation process. Upon his arrival in Seoul, Hu lectured Korean government officials at length on what he considered the central issues of gratitude and common sense:

The Wan-li emperor was angered when the Japanese dwarfs invaded your country, and thus he sent soldiers to drive them back. Now the Japanese have fled back toward the south, your captured princes have been returned, and two thousand li of your kingdom have been restored. China spent a great deal of money to accomplish this for you, and sacrificed the lives of many horses and men. Our emperor and our government have treated you well.

But now we can provide nothing more. The campaign is finished. The Japanese dwarfs have been made afraid of our might, and have asked to surrender and send us tribute. We think it would be appro
priate now to accept them as vassals. We are doing this to save your country. Choson now has no food. Your people are killing and eating one other in order to survive. With this being so, how can you ask us to continue the fighting? How can you ask for further aid? If we do not accept Japan as a vassal, they might attack your kingdom again, and this time they might destroy you. Is that what you want?
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Hu Ze was particularly anxious while in Seoul to talk King Sonjo into sending a message to Beijing requesting that Hideyoshi be accepted as a vassal. Although Hu did not spell out his reasons for wanting this done, it was clearly to add weight to the arguments of Minister of War Shi Xing’s antiwar faction. It was an appeal for help from the Korean king, after all, that had drawn the Chinese into the war in the first place. To get him now to support a peace initiative was thus a perfect way to undermine the prowar camp. King Sonjo, however, refused to comply. “How could I ask such a thing of China,” he told Hu Ze, “after requesting military assistance to fight the Japanese at the beginning of the war?” Hu conceded that it might not be judicious to dispatch such a request at the present moment. But it could be done early in the coming year. In your next report to the emperor on the Japanese situation, he suggested, you could discreetly broach the idea that Hideyoshi should be appeased with an offer of tributary relations. Surely that would do no harm to your country. Sonjo again refused. Hu Ze then tried a more aggressive tack. Ku Yangqian, he said, had no more troops to send to Korea, so it would not be possible any time soon to launch a counter-offensive. The only way to get the Japanese out of Korea in the short term was therefore through negotiation. Otherwise they would remain on the peninsula for another ten or twenty years. Sonjo listened politely, but still would not agree.
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