The Imjin War (8 page)

Among them was General Qi Jiguang. His victories, his books, his success in building a formidable fighting force from the ground up all counted for nothing with his protector now dead and gone. He was a Zhang man, and so he had to go. The ailing general was turned out of office in 1583. His wife left him soon after and, with no income or personal wealth, he spent his declining years in poverty and unhappi
ness. Qi finally died on January 17, 1588, reportedly so poor he could not afford even medical care. By 1590 his mandarin duck formation was a forgotten curiosity and his formidable battle wagons an idle dream buried in unread books.

And what of the Wanli emperor, that promising young monarch who was now an obese, full-grown man with a deep, authoritative voice? The death of Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng, his tutor, his mentor, and in many ways his father, changed him entirely. Anti-Zhang officials wasted no time in running to the throne with stories of Zhang’s perfidy and succeeded in deflating the emperor’s high regard for the man—perhaps too well. Zhang, he learned, was a hypocrite. He had insisted that everyone, including the emperor, live frugally while he himself resided in a grand mansion heaped with wealth. Zhang was a tyrant. He had dismissed virtuous men from office who should now be reinstated. Zhang was a fornicator. He had brought on his own demise through excessive sexual activity, bucking up his flagging libido with exotic aphrodisiacs.
[46]

For the Wanli emperor it was devastating. That this man who had filled his head with so much talk of virtue was himself so clearly not virtuous led the emperor first to question the moral lessons of his youth and then cynically to reject them. After his austere childhood he now became greedy and grasping, building a personal fortune with the aid of his inner coterie of corrupt court eunuchs. He would no longer counte
nance the remonstrances of civil officials. When they criticized him in proper Confucian fashion for his overspending and inattention to duty, he had them beaten. When he perceived that some ambitious officials actually courted such beatings for the career-enhancing moral stripes it earned them, he simply ignored everything they said and wrote and sat in the Forbidden City doing nothing. He would not attend audiences. He would not approve appointments. He shirked his royal responsibilities and whiled away the days. It is hard to fully appreciate just how much frustration and anguish this caused for the men trying to keep the government running without the emperor’s participation, but there are some telling glimpses in the historical record. On one occasion a grand secretary, after being repeatedly denied an audience with the emperor to discuss some important issue, became so agitated upon finally being admitted into the imperial presence that he lost control of his bladder and fell into a coma for several days.
[47]

The Wanli emperor’s contrariness reached its zenith in the late 1580s, when he refused to allow his firstborn son by his unloved empress to be installed as heir, insisting instead that a younger son by a favored concubine succeed him on the throne. At first he simply put off the succession ceremony year after year. Eventually, however, the issue was forced into the open and a deadlock occurred, one that the Ming government had neither the legal means to break nor the classical precedents to understand. This crisis of succession was the overriding concern of the Chinese court and civil service at the beginning of the 1590s. It was more serious than famines and droughts, economic woes and factional strife. It was more threatening than minority rebellions in the west, mutinies in the army, and renewed border incursions by the Mongols to the north.

As for developments in a faraway island nation called Japan, inhabited by a people referred to disparagingly in the Chinese dynastic histories as “dwarfs,” they were scarcely given a thought in Beijing. As far as it was concerned, Japan was a tributary state of long standing—but not a very important one, since its territory was not contiguous to China’s—with an on-again, off-again record of tribute missions dating back to at least the early seventh century. At the moment relations seemed to be off. No Japanese mission had arrived since 1549, bringing to a close a century and a half of friendly intercourse.
[48]
The Japanese currently seemed to be caught up in some sort of internal struggle, and the shogun, who the Ming emperor had invested with the title King of Japan back in 1401, was no longer in control. When they eventually managed to put their house in order, they would undoubtedly return to their proper place in the Chinese-centered world and resume the noble task of trying to emulate Sino-civilization.

In the meantime they hardly bore thinking about.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the indomitable conqueror, the irresistible unifier, the supreme despot of all Japan, was at heart a family man, a tenderhearted, affectionate, and sentimental provider who often fretted about the health and safety of his loved ones. Indeed, attending to his family circle seems to have fulfilled a longing in the man that went at least as deep as his desire to rule Japan and in turn the world.

Hideyoshi clearly idolized his mother, known to us only by her courtly title O-Mandokoro, and in his private correspondence con
stantly advised on and fussed over her health and happiness. In a letter to his wife in 1589 he observed that “if O-Mandokoro is kept in a small place, she may begin to feel depressed, and so please take care of her for the time being. But if [she is in a large place and] there are draughts, she will catch a chill in such surroundings and so you must not do that.”
[49]
And in 1590, writing directly to his mother: “Go to some place and thus amuse yourself—and, please, become young once more. I beg you to do this.”
[50]

Hideyoshi exhibited such tender concern for many in his family circle. In a 1589 letter to his wife, the Lady Kita-no-Mandokoro, other
wise known as O-Ne, he wrote, “Take care of your health and have your usual meals in order not to make me feel anxious about you. Don’t be careless.”
[51]
And again, “I am always longing to have good news of you.... And I think that it would be better if you were less constipated, so why don’t you take an enema?...I shall wait for a better report con
cerning your health and telling me how long it takes the enema to have its effect.”
[52]
In an undated letter addressed to his adopted daughter Go-Hime he wrote, “I would like to know if you are in good spirits and if you have been taking more
kuko
[boxthorn] medicine. As I am so very fond of you, I invite you to come and live in Himeji soon. I want to supply you with everything you need, especially a palanquin if you want one.”
[53]
And to his concubine Tomoji, “We were recently together for two or three days and enjoyed ourselves. I expect you were annoyed because we just stayed at home. Be of good cheer and take care of yourself so that you don’t fall ill.”
[54]
Hideyoshi clearly enjoyed the role of protector, patriarch, and benevolent provider. It was the inner world behind the castles, the armies, and the trappings of power that made his life complete.

And yet there was something missing. Hideyoshi had no son.

In 1589 Hideyoshi was in his early fifties and was becoming by his own reckoning something of a senior citizen, complaining often in his letters of failing eyesight, poor appetite, fatigue, and the white hairs on his head that were too numerous to pluck out. He was at an age where a great man might begin to think of resting on his laurels, assuming the comfortable role of patriarch while his sons carried on the more strenu
ous work of securing the power of his house and the greatness of the name of Toyotomi for centuries to come. But Hideyoshi did not have any sons. He had been married to O-Ne for twenty-eight years, but the union had produced no children. He had taken several concubines over the preceding two decades, but they too had failed him. One might indeed speculate that this lack of an heir may have been one of his motivations for wanting to conquer China. Without a son to carry on his name and inherit his greatness, he perhaps felt a driving need to do all the work himself, within his own lifetime, to make himself and his house so great that it would carry on irresistibly even after his death, even without an heir.

And then a miracle happened. One of his concubines, Yodogimi, announced that she was pregnant. In June of 1589 she bore a child, a son named Tsurumatsu. Hideyoshi was beside himself with joy, but pretended not to show it. To have done so would have tempted the gods to take away from him what he cherished most. The baby was therefore publicly referred to as
Sute
, meaning “abandoned” or “thrown away,” and Hideyoshi struggled to hide the happiness he felt.

By all accounts he did not succeed. When he was with the boy he could not resist showering him with kisses, cradling him in his arms, and dandling him on his knee. And when his campaigns of unification took him away from his “young prince,” he worried incessantly about the child’s health and safety and longed to return, as seen in this letter written to Yodogimi from the siege at Odawara in 1590:

You have sent me no word by letter and I find myself very anxious. Is the young prince getting bigger and bigger? It is very important to give strict orders to your men that they should keep your place safe from fire, and that they and their subordinates should not lapse into disorder. Around the 20th I shall certainly see you and embrace the young prince, and on that night I’ll let you sleep at my side: so wait for me.

Sincerely,

Denka

I repeat: you must tell them to keep the young prince from catching a chill; you must not be careless about anything.
[55]

But little Tsurumatsu was a sickly boy. He had been weak from birth, and finally died in September of 1591. It was a terrible blow to Hideyoshi—to have tasted the joys of fatherhood and then to have his young prince snatched away at the age of only two. He could bring down castles and force powerful daimyo like the Hojo of Odawara to bow before him. But to protect this one little boy, the jewel in his family circle, was beyond even his great power.

Four months after Tsurumatsu’s death Hideyoshi accepted the inevitable that he would never have a son of his own and named his twenty-three-year-old nephew Hidetsugu his adopted son and heir. He passed the title of kampaku, imperial regent, on to the young man, and became himself the taiko, the retired imperial regent.

It was perhaps not a coincidence that Hideyoshi now entered into a frenzy of activity for the coming invasion of Korea. With no biological son to carry on his name and ensure his greatness, he would have to accomplish it all himself in the few years he had left. He ordered work to begin on a castle at Nagoya on the coast of Kyushu, the point of embarkation from the country’s southern tip. Requisitions were issued to all the daimyo to raise and arm troops. Stores and weapons were stockpiled. Maps were prepared. Ships were built and manned.

Finally, just eight months after the death of his beloved Tsurumatsu, the gargantuan task was done. Hideyoshi’s army of invasion was ready to sail.

From at least the seventh century
A.D.
the Japanese have referred to their island nation as Nippon, “Rising Sun,” a reference, of course, to the east. It is not the sort of name that would occur to a people residing in Japan itself, for from their perspective “the east” is nothing but the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Where, then, did Nippon come from? It almost certainly came from the Asian mainland, from where Japan does indeed lie to the east, in the direction of the rising sun. Specifically, it came from Korea.
[56]

By the time the Chinese started recording history around the fourth century
B.C.
, a handful of small states are found to be occupying the Korean Peninsula, foremost among them Old Choson, a kingdom with roots extending back to a legendary founder named Tangun, who established his royal residence near present-day Pyongyang some time before 2,000
B.C.
[57]
By the fourth century
A.D.
these various rival states had coalesced into three large kingdoms: Koguryo in the north, Silla in the center and southeast, and Paekche in the southwest. During the next two and a half centuries, a span known as the Three Kingdoms period, these three states would combine Chinese statecraft, writing, science, and thought with indigenous elements to create a unique Korean culture—a process that was occurring to one degree or another in all those states directly bordering what was then the emerging Middle Kingdom. By the early eighth century, Silla had eclipsed Koguryo and Paekche to gain control of most of the peninsula, uniting Korea for the first time into a single political and cultural entity allied to Tang-dynasty China. Silla was by all accounts a wealthy, refined, and outward-looking state, praised by travelers from as far away as India and the Middle East as a land of wonders and regarded by Koreans today as a cultural high point in their history. It was reportedly such an attractive place that many Arabs who visited there settled down and never returned home. As one Arab historian explained in 947, “Seldom has a stranger who has come there from Iraq or another country left it afterwards. So healthy is the air there, so pure the water, so fertile the soil and so plentiful all good things.”
[58]

By this time a unique culture was also emerging in
Japan from a similar interplay of indigenous tastes and elements with foreign influences passing from Korea and China, particularly between the fourth and eighth centuries, when a significant influx of immigrants arrived on the islands from the kingdoms of Koguryo, Silla, and Paekche. The resulting native culture would evince a greater degree of selectivity in its borrowings from China than was the case in Korea, a luxury afforded the Japanese by their relative isolation offshore. They borrowed those aspects of mainland civilization that they considered useful or aesthetically pleasing, adapted others, and disregarded the rest (much as would be done with Western civilization starting in the late nineteenth century). This process of selective borrowing and adaptation would lead Japan and Korea to develop fundamentally different attitudes toward their giant neighbor to the west. While the Koreans believed themselves to be culturally equal to the Chinese because they shared in the greatness of Chinese civilization, the Japanese would come to regard the natural beauty and subtle shading of their own culture as surpassing China’s with all its gaudy colors and its tedious emphasis on maintaining a high moral tone. It is difficult to put a date on when this sense of superiority emerged, but by the advent of the Imjin War it was definitely in place.
[59]

This process of cultural identities diverging in
Korea and Japan was mirrored in the political sphere. In Japan, political institutions initially developed along lines similar to Korea with the establishment in the seventh century of a centralized government based on the Chinese model—although unlike Korea, Japan’s government only managed to extend its control over the nation’s heartland, leaving much of the periphery to regional lords. Then in the early tenth century a feudal warrior class came to dominate the country and its emperor, giving rise to a line of shoguns and then sengoku civil war and lasting until the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1867. During this long period of military rule the Japanese would come to reject the idea that China was the ruler of all it surveyed and eventually to believe that their own island nation, the “Land of the Gods,” was just as important in the grand scheme of things. The Japanese were thus not nearly as accommodating as the Koreans when messages arrived from China at the start of the Ming dynasty inviting their submission. “Heaven and earth are vast,” came the Japanese reply. “[T]hey are not monopolized by one ruler.” Such defiance left the Ming incensed. “You stupid eastern barbarians!” wrote the Hongwu emperor in 1380. “Your king and courtiers are not acting correctly...; you are haughty and disloyal; you permit your subjects to do evil. Will this not inevitably bring disaster upon you?”
[60]
The Ashikaga shoguns would eventually enter into a tenuous relationship with the Ming for whatever trading rights and legitimacy they could squeeze out of the deal, but their expressions of loyalty would never be very heartfelt.

In Korea, Chinese-style government continued to evolve as the Silla dynasty gave way to the Koryo (918–1392), a government eventually controlled by a civilian aristocracy of scholar-bureaucrats picked from the
yangban
upper class. Korea’s location on the continent meanwhile continued to expose it to strong gravitational forces from China, drawing the peninsula into a subordinate relationship with its giant neighbor that would attain its most mature form in the Choson dynasty (1392–1910), which succeeded the Koryo. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Choson Korea was Ming China’s most loyal vassal state, and was in turn regarded by the Chinese as their most civilized neighbor. It was a status in which the Koreans took great pride. They did not consider themselves to be fully equal to China. What country could presume to be equal to the Celestial Empire? But they did share in China’s greatness by virtue of the fact that they had accepted its civilizing influences. The Koreans based their culture on Chinese culture. They studied Chinese history and the writings of Chinese sages. They modeled their court after the Chinese court, shaped their government administration along Chinese lines, and clothed their officials in Chinese robes. Their kings received legitimacy from the Chinese emperor in the form of the Mandate of Heaven. They followed the Chinese calendar, thereby recognizing the emperor’s role as mediator between heaven and earth. They made Chinese morals their morals, Chinese laws their laws, and considered the Chinese mode of conduct superior to anything else. “[We made] our customs like that of the Flowery Land,” stated the
Tong-mong-sun-seup
, a cornerstone text of a classical Korean education, “so that Chinese themselves praise us saying ‘Korea is little China.’”
[61]

Korea
did not regard its cultural proximity to China as placing it above other nations—at least not diplomatically. Officially the Chinese emperor stood at the top of the heap as the ultimate power in the universe; the kings of Korea, Japan, Java, the Ryukyu Islands, Cambodia, Thailand, and all other tributary states were accorded positions of equal status below him, and non-tributary states scarcely entered the picture. Unofficially, however, Korea’s worldview was more finely graded. China, the “civilized center,” of course came first. Korea, the “small civilized center,” came second, and all other nations fell further down the ladder according to their perceived level of Chinese cultural attainment.
[62]

The Japanese did not fare well in this culturally determined Korean worldview. They were referred to deprecatingly by both the Chinese and the Koreans in their dynastic histories as “dwarfs” and were considered to be beyond the pale of civilization. This fact was confirmed for the Koreans time and again over the centuries during diplomatic exchanges with these uncouth neighbors across the sea. Korean envoys to the shogun’s court would be subjected to what the Koreans considered inappropriate and even insulting seating arrangements and would observe a general ignorance of Chinese-style protocol. Japanese envoys to Seoul would conduct themselves in ways the Koreans found rude and at times arrogant. Japanese written communications would often not follow correct Sinocentric forms of address and date. The Japanese emperor, for example, would be referred to as “emperor”—the title reserved solely for the Son of Heaven in Beijing—rather than “king,” an amazing presumption in the eyes of the Koreans for a ruler who could not even assert control over his own domain. The Koreans also took note of the often splintered state of Japan. There seemed never to be a single figure in overall control of the islands, raising the question of whether it was a nation at all. They were always fighting among themselves, acting as pirates toward their neighbors, and generally favoring violence and warfare over good conduct and peace. All in all they were an uncivilized, dangerous, arrogant people whom the Koreans, even more than the Chinese, regarded with particular disdain.
[63]

While
Korea looked down upon Japan from its lofty perch as “little China,” it did not in turn kowtow slavishly to China from a corresponding position of abject servitude. Its secondary role in the Chinese universe was more about respect—the respect of a younger brother for his admired elder sibling. Korea expressed this respect by regularly sending tribute missions to the Chinese court beginning in the Unified Silla dynasty (681–935). The envoys presented their tribute, swore Korea’s loyalty and devotion to China, observed all the necessary protocol, and made all the required gestures of submission. The Chinese for their part treated these envoys as honored guests, assured them of Korea’s special relationship with China, and sent them on their way laden with “gifts” to take back to their king—turning the political exercise into a significant form of trade.
[64]
And for the most part that was it until the next Korean mission was dispatched. It was a cheap price to pay for the benefits each side derived. By paying tribute and expressing their loyal submission, the kings of
Korea received the Mandate of Heaven from the Chinese emperor and thus legitimacy for themselves, and ensured that China would otherwise leave their kingdom alone. As for the Chinese, maintaining a tributary system with Korea and other neighboring kingdoms served to demonstrate the legitimacy of their own rule and made their empire more secure by turning potential enemy nations into a protective ring of buffer states.
[65]
It was a strategy that called for a light touch, for if the tributary relationship was made too onerous, no border state would want to enter into it, and if
China was too heavy-handed, friendly buffers would soon rebel. From the Tang dynasty onward China for the most part maintained that light touch. Indeed, except in times of uncertainty or crisis it typically had no desire to meddle in the affairs of its tributary states so long as it was satisfied that they remained loyal.

By the late sixteenth century
Korea had been a tributary state of China throughout most of the preceding one thousand years. It was a relationship that was not without its ups and downs. Things tended to be good when the Middle Kingdom was united under a native Chinese dynasty, for example the Tang (618–907), Song (960–1279) and Ming (1368–1644). Envoy missions were regularly exchanged, cordial relations maintained, and beyond that they left each other to their own affairs. During times of upheaval, however, relations often soured, especially when non-Chinese invaded China and established dynasties of their own.

Such was the case with the Mongol invasion of
China beginning in the early 1200s and the subsequent rise of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Between 1231 and 1258 the successors of Genghis Khan sent their mounted hordes six times against Korea, then under the Koryo dynasty, and eventually forced it to turn away from the declining Song dynasty and enter into a much more servile relationship with themselves. They then set their sights on Japan. The Koreans were required to build and man three hundred ships for the Mongols’ first, unsuccessful, invasion attempt of 1274. For the second invasion in 1281 the Koreans were compelled to contribute nine hundred ships of double the capacity, and fifteen thousand men. But this too failed. As the gargantuan Mongol-Korean armada approached the Japanese coast, a typhoon blew in from the west, grinding vessel against vessel until the roiling sea was a mass of wreckage and floating bodies. For the Japanese it was a miracle, a heaven-sent intervention they would remember as the
kamikaze
, the divine wind. For the Mongols, it was the beginning of the end of their dream of world conquest.

After the failure of the invasion of
Japan, the Mongol empire, and with it the recently established Yuan dynasty, began a slow and inexorable decline. The Yuan nevertheless maintained a tight grip on Korea for the next several decades. They exacted heavy tribute payments, exercised direct dominion over Korean territory, interfered in Korean politics, and in general conducted themselves in ways that ran counter to what Korea expected from the “Flowery Land.” When the Yuan dynasty began to crumble in the 1350s, therefore, the Koreans cut off tribute relations, ceased using the Yuan calendar, stopped wearing Yuan court dress and hairstyles, and moved to reclaim formerly Yuan-dominated territory, for in the words of one Korean commentator, “Heaven dislikes the virtue of the barbarians.” The new Ming dynasty, officially inaugurated in 1368, was then hailed as coming “from mid-heaven, in communication with sages and spirits of the past.”
[66]
The Koreans readily entered into a tributary relationship with it, hopeful of a return to the sort of autonomy their kingdom had enjoyed during the enlightened Song dynasty that had preceded the Yuan.