2. The Volunteer Army and the Emergence of Imagined Community

By continuing to explore the issue of volunteer army, this chapter deals with how and to what extent the missives reached their intended audience, and whether the tropes and images discussed in the previous chapter became meaningful symbols to a wider populace.¹ The volunteer movement became a national movement in part because of the successful creation of an affective image of an imagined community of Chosŏn. Evidence shows that the writers of exhortations made great efforts to see that their messages reached and affected their intended receivers, including those who were not lettered.² If we assume that at least to a limited degree there was a correspondence between conceptual and actual audience, what was the mechanism through which this was achieved? The letters were disseminated through the utilization of the public and private technology of communication available at the time, and in a combination of written and oral forms. Once a letter was completed, it was copied in tens or hundreds of duplicates, each of which was sent to places where a person of responsibility would receive it,³ read it aloud to congregations, and instruct those who could to repeat the process. Evidence indicates that copies were made either by woodblock print, usually at county schools that had printing facilities,⁴ or by hand copying. What is notable about this endeavor is that it was the collaborative labor of a community. It required the cooperation of those in charge at schools and, in the case of hand-copied manuscripts, the services of the educated. Evidence indicates that a great many rendered service.

In time of peace the country was connected through postal stations, which were responsible for the circulation of government missives, chief among them the daily court gazette (chobo), and which provided lodging and transportation, often horses, to officials in transit. Although these stations did not function in occupied areas during the war, some of the routes were used to disseminate official letters as well as letters by volunteer army leaders and soldiers. The landed elite had long since developed a private system of postal exchange relying mainly on their own slaves and servants as couriers. During the Imjin War, a more elaborate private postal network seems to have been established. Apparently utilizing and in some cases privatizing some fragments of official facilities and routes of communication between the central government and provincial and local offices, and using private couriers, they were able to disseminate information so that they could maintain and even expand the space of communication.

Modes of Dissemination and the Reception of Exhortations

It is difficult to determine the speed and efficiency of this mode of communication during the Imjin War. We have only a few records of dates of receipt of dated missives. Communication in the occupied areas, especially during the first days of the war, seems to have been quite slow. Cho Chŏng (1555–1636) reports in his Diary of the Imjin War (Imjin ilgi) that the exhortation that Kim Sŏng’il, the chief recruiter of Kyŏngsang, sent out on June 14, 1592, arrived in Sangju of the same province on August 13. He reports two days later, on August 15, that Chŏng Inhong, Kim Myŏn, and others were mobilizing the army, and that they had gathered more than six thousand people.5 Chŏng Inhong appeared on the scene with his army on July 5, and so the news seems to have acquired speed as time went on. It could well be that it took time to devise the routes in the early phase of the war, and that the network functioned better once the system was in place. Missives in Chŏlla Province fared much better since it was not occupied. O Hŭimun, staying at Changch’ŏn, northern Chŏlla, records in The Trivial Matters that a letter of exhortation dated August 3 by Kwŏn Yul (1537–1599), the magistrate of Kwangju, administrative center of southern Chŏlla, arrived on August 6, three days later;6 and that a circular letter dated June 22 from Yŏngdong, the northwestern point of Chŏlla that borders on Kyŏngsang and Ch’ungch’ŏng Provinces, also arrived three days later, on June 25.⁷ A circular letter of July 26 from volunteer army leaders of Anŭp in Kyŏngsang crossed the provincial border and arrived at Changch’ŏn on the following day.⁸

Royal edicts were disseminated with greater care, lest they be intercepted by the enemy. The Trivial Matters reports that Sim Tae (1546–1592), bearing a copy of the royal edict of June 4, arrived in Chŏnju, the provincial capital of Chŏlla, on June 20, that copies of the royal edict that he brought were sent to various towns, and that a copy arrived in Changch’ŏn, in northern Chŏlla, through Chinan.⁹ It appears that once it arrived at Chŏnju, copies were made and disseminated, at least in unoccupied Chŏlla Province, through the usual routs of communication. The Miscellaneous Record also says that a copy of an edict, on a torn piece of very poor quality paper, sent through the governor arrived in the Namwŏn area on June 23.¹⁰ While it is unclear whether this was the same edict as the one mentioned in The Trivial Matters,¹¹ it shows that copies of edicts circulated to the far reaches of Chŏlla Province.

These narratives also note the performative scenes in which these letters reached their audiences. In an appointed location with a congregation, a letter was ritualistically handed over to a person of influence in the locality who, after receiving it respectfully, solemnly read it aloud to an audience, which is described as having responded with deep emotion. This mode of dissemination—relying on oral delivery—was to a large extent necessitated by the low literacy rate. Though the literacy rate of premodern Korea has yet to be determined, the rate for literary Chinese in which letters of exhortation were written was far lower than that for vernacular Korean. Exhortations and circular letters were almost always written in literary Chinese, and this meant that the person who read the letter to a congregation had to make an impromptu translation into Korean and deliver it in language accessible to ordinary people. Some letters included specific authorial instructions on the importance of addressing and affecting the illiterate: “We should also let those not versed in letters get this news. Make certain that they hear the gist of this letter in words that are accessible to them so that they will be moved.”12

This form of delivery was a common mode of communication between agencies that insisted on using literary Chinese and the majority of Chosŏn Koreans. An important reason for staging communal readings seems to have been performative—to maximize effectiveness. It has been noted that religious meetings in Europe adopted the strategy of reading a text aloud to a congregation for emotional impact, that this had nothing to do with whether people read the same text silently in private, and that those who were moved by hearing it also propagated the messages to those who were not present.¹³ Given that the production and dissemination of letters of exhortation were politically charged, those involved in the process must have looked for the most “socially anchored” forum¹⁴ and gravitated toward communal readings. One gets the impression that even in occupied areas surveillance was sporadic, and that communal readings were staged, if furtively. This is not to say that there were no other modes of dissemination—copies were made by individuals to be read silently and to preserve and record the missives—but communal readings are the mode of dissemination most frequently referred to in narratives.

The setting and the oral delivery were important, but the centerpiece of these readings was the letter. Given the voluntary nature of the Righteous Army, the writers were acutely conscious of the requirement that their language be powerful enough to move readers or listeners to offer that which was most precious to them, their lives and property. They operated in a literary culture that believed that only when words were spoken with passion and sincerity, not merely with artfulness of phrase, could they acquire the power to elicit the same from the reader or listener.¹⁵ Thus, while they calibrated letters to the audience to which they were addressed,¹⁶ they did so with a conviction that purity of emotion was connective tissue. It is also interesting to note that evaluations of the letters are focused almost exclusively on their effects on the reader. A preface to the collection of exhortations by Ko Kyŏngmyŏng and his associates praises Ko’s famous letter of exhortation to the people of all provinces as “so passionate and heartfelt that when anyone read it, their hair stood on end and tears began to roll down their cheeks.”17 A chronological biography (yŏnbo) of Ko Kyŏngmyŏng, admittedly hagiographical, says that wherever his famous exhortation letter arrived, “all those refugees hiding in the deepest recesses in mountains or valleys, competed to read and copy it, and some even shed tears.”¹⁸

The knowledge that letters were being transported and made available in reasonably authentic form enabled readings to be held widely, and so they were disseminated to great distances and to audiences of great variety. With growing scholarship on print culture in recent years, we are aware of the cultural impact of imprints. As I mentioned in the introduction, what is interesting about Korean book and print culture was that “prints” in various materials—movable type, woodblock prints, and handwritten manuscripts—coexisted and circulated simultaneously. A recent study of the book culture of China shows that, while the flourishing of commercial publishing led the imprint to become the dominant form in the sixteenth century, it neither replaced nor eliminated manuscripts from circulation, and that manuscripts continued to exert influence on the style of imprints.¹⁹ It is Korea’s pride and joy that movable-type printing was invented in Korea much earlier than in the West. However, printing in movable metal type remained largely under government monopoly.²⁰ Moreover, Korea had a much smaller commercial market than China, and the use of woodblock prints and manuscript copies was more prevalent and persisted longer.²¹ Commercial printing did not become common until the nineteenth century.²² Woodblock prints and hand-copied letters during the Imjin War were reproducible, transferable, and transportable with relative speed. The letters often had instructions on how and to whom they were to be disseminated.²³ What seems clear is that when writers addressed their letters to all residents of their province or the people of Korea, they envisioned that their letters would be read or heard by the people and that this was the case to a qualified extent.

What was new was not just that the letters were addressed inclusively but that private individuals created a conceptual horizontal national space of communication with these letters. Also new was that the technology and facilities of the communicative national space, both vertical and horizontal, were opened to use by private individuals. Previously the person in charge of a certain administrative unit could communicate with the people under his jurisdiction. Private individuals had their own networks, which included family and relatives, friends, and professional colleagues. Rarely did a private person address fellow residents of a geographical unit, not to mention larger regions. It appears that in spite, or perhaps because, of the urgent and adverse condition under which channels of communication had to be opened, a wider and more inclusive space of communication was constructed and maintained. This actual emergence of a national space of communication paralleled the creation of a conceptual space—the national community.

Military Activities of the Volunteer Army Units

The military activities of the volunteer army grew, and they grew in tandem with the expanding space of discourse of nation. The deaths of Ko, Cho, other leaders and volunteer soldiers at the battles of Kŭmsan inspired participation in the movement rather than discouraging it. From sometime around August 1592, new Righteous Army units of varying size in different locations announced their formation almost daily with open letters of exhortation. By late summer there does not seem to have been a province without several Righteous Army units.24 The Miscellaneous Record reports in November that there were twenty-eight large units of the Righteous Army in Chŏlla, that all eight provinces had a similar number, and that there were innumerable smaller formations of the army.²⁵ Apparently they came in all sizes, shapes, and compositions, and they changed over time. Perhaps the most renowned were units consisting of Buddhist monks.²⁶ The eminent monk Hyujŏng of P’yŏngan Province, for example, with his equally famous disciple Yujŏng, formed an army of a thousand monks.²⁷ There were groups ranging from ten or a dozen people, consisting mostly family members servants and slaves, such as the one led by Sŏng Ch’ŏnhŭi of Ch’angnyŏng, to huge groups such as the one of six to seven thousand led by Ko Kyŏngmyŏng.²⁸

The Righteous Army was vested with much hope, especially during the first year of the war. Sometimes it was spoken of as if it were invincible, and this view was shared by the court.29 True, it does appear that from the Korean perspective the voluntary army was the only game on land until the Chinese Army arrived. To what extent was the view of voluntary army’s prowess grounded on its military exploits? There are a tremendous number of studies devoted to this topic in Korea; I will be able to present neither a comprehensive picture of the volunteer army as a military force nor a discussion of studies on it. However, the most celebrated tropes of commemoration in postwar Chosŏn were the volunteer army’s displays of indefatigable loyalty on the battlefield against great odds, both individually and collectively. For this reason I will briefly assess the voluntary army’s military activities.

Despite exhaustive studies on the volunteer army, there does not seem to be any agreement on a precise number for the Righteous Army or, for that matter, of the royal army. The numbers obviously fluctuated. The report on its military force that the Chosŏn government submitted to the Ming on February 11, 1593, puts the combined number of the royal army and the Righteous Army at 172,400.³⁰ The accuracy of this number has been called into question, and because of the way the report is written, it is difficult to sort out the Righteous Army from the royal army. Ch’oe Yŏnghŭi believes the number to be an exaggeration, but he suggests that the ratio between the two armies was about four to one.³¹ This puts the Righteous Army at about 43,000. What is conveyed in this report is that the state regarded the Righteous Army as a legitimate component of its military force paralleling the royal army, and that it constituted a significant portion of the force. The relationship between the volunteer army and the royal army was complex and fluid, and it spanned a wide variety of arrangements, from official recruiters mobilizing volunteer army units³² to groups of Righteous Army attaching themselves to the royal army,³³ and a number of royal army units joining the Righteous Army.³⁴ Most studies, however, maintain that despite blurring and overlapping between the volunteer army and the royal army, the distinction did not disappear. They cite the distinguishing features of the Righteous Army: civilian leadership, the voluntary nature of its membership, its relative autonomy in its field of operation, and private financing.35

It is widely known that one of the main reasons that the Korean Royal Army could not compete with the Japanese in the early phase of the war was that firearms gave the invaders a huge advantage. Then how did the Righteous Army fight, and what arms were they able to procure? We read quite often of how poorly equipped the civilian volunteers were.³⁶ A recent study by a military historian brings another perspective. Kenneth Swope maintains that the muskets the Japanese used were effective only at a certain range, that missile weapons were almost as important as firearms, and that in this respect the Korean bow and arrow, strong, speedy, flexible in usage, and wide of range, was very effective.³⁷ Although narratives are generally reticent about the weapons that the Righteous Army used, from the time Kwak Chaeu mobilized the Righteous Army, we hear of archers. One of the circular letters mobilizing the volunteer army describes the qualification as “irrespective of high or low, those who have brave hearts, and those who know how to handle bow and arrow.”³⁸ A description of the second battle of Chinju makes it clear that bows and arrows and the lance were the main weapons of the Korean Army.³⁹ The practice of archery and the production of bows and arrows were commonplace in Korea,⁴⁰ and it is most likely that this was the main weapon on which the Righteous Army relied.

With these tactics the volunteer army was quite successful in guerilla warfare.⁴¹ In Kyŏngsang Province guerilla activities produced visible results. In August Chŏng Inhong, with 2,800 soldiers, took over the town of Anŏn.⁴² Kwak Chaeu was famous for his guerilla tactics, and his army succeeded in securing towns such as Chŏng’amjin, Hyŏnp’ung, Ch’angnyŏng, and Yŏngsan in the eastern part of Kyŏngsang Province.⁴³ This made it possible for the Righteous Army to attack continuously to recover towns in western Kyŏngsang Province. The recovery of Sŏngju and Kaeryŏng in western Kyŏngsang was accomplished by the combined efforts of Chŏng Inhong and Kim Myŏn of Kyŏngsang, with the help of the Righteous Army led by Yim Kyeyŏng and Ch’oe Kyŏnghŭi of Chŏlla over a period of four months starting in mid-November 1592 and finally succeeding in March 1593.44 When, in February, in the middle of this attack, the state ordered that Yim’s and Ch’oe’s armies stationed in Kyŏngsang march north to join forces with the Chinese Army in the allied army’s planned attack on the capital, the scholars of Kyŏngsang and Chŏlla Provinces memorialized the throne protesting the order. The memorial stated that the safety of seven towns in Kyŏngsang was entirely dependent on the Righteous Army of Chŏlla. In fact, the mere possibility that the volunteer army units of Chŏlla might be evacuated from the region caused such fear that some residents fled the area, creating further confusion. The state rescinded the order.⁴⁵ The prominent role played by the Righteous Army of Chŏlla in securing towns of neighboring provinces was common knowledge. Moreover, securing the region made it possible to keep the routes between Kyŏngsang, Chŏlla, and Ch’ungch’ŏng open for Koreans, and, with Admiral Yi Sunsin’s naval victories, it cut the invaders’ supply lines. This is regarded as the major factor that destabilized the Japanese.⁴⁶

Larger formations of the volunteer army, however, had mixed results. First of all, large formations often consisted of combined units from different regions, combined with contingents of the royal army. Perhaps the best-known battles in which combined forces of the volunteer army and the royal army fought together were the first and second battles of Chinju. Chinju was regarded as a strategically crucial post for the preservation of western Kyŏngsang, the supply of provisions to the navy on the southern coast, and the safeguarding of Chŏlla from the enemy. Thus both invader and defender made great efforts to occupy this city. A number of battalions of Japanese, numbering around 30,000, besieged Chinju walled town on November 9, 1592. Korean forces consisted of 3,800 people led by Magistrate Kim Simin inside the walled town, 2,000 led by Ch’oe Kyŏnghŭi, and a number of units of several hundred each sent by Kwak Chaeu, Chŏng Inhong, and other voluntary army leaders. Some were stationed at strategically selected locations outside the walled town before the battle began, and some, such as a unit of Buddhist monk-soldiers led by Sin Yŏl, arrived during the fighting. The description of the battle, which lasted three days, from November 10 to 13, is colorful. The Japanese army relied mainly on muskets, while the weapons used by the Korean Army ranged from cannons, to bows and arrows, to burning arrows and stones thrown by the old and the young, to boiling water poured by women. Against all odds, the battle ended with victory of the Korean force. The main credit was consensually attributed to Kim Simin. He is portrayed as a consummate Confucian leader who led by example and by his concern for those below him. He is reputed to have shared his food with them, and even when bullets flew, he stood calmly, pleading with them that “the entire country has fallen, and there are only a few places that have been preserved. The preservation of this walled town will directly influence the fate of this country. If this walled town crumbles, then it will be the end of our country. Moreover, if we are defeated, the thousands of souls taking refuge within will be made ghosts cut down by enemy swords. Please remember that only when we fight bravely without fearing for our lives can we survive!” Soldiers are said to have responded and to have fought bravely.47

The second battle of Chinju, fought from July 18 to 27, 1593, was far more ferocious and tragic. The order to attack Chinju was issued again by Hideyoshi himself, who is reported to have been chagrined by the earlier defeat.⁴⁸ As this took place after the Japanese retreated from P’yŏngyang and Seoul, the Japanese force was huge—93,000, led by key generals, including Konishi Yukinaga and Katō Kiyomasa, all gathered at Chinju. Realizing the terrible odds against them, the leaders of the Righteous Army conferred and disagreed on the wisdom of fighting. Kwak Chaeu insisted that it would be suicidal and hence was to be avoided; Kim Ch’ŏnil asserted that it would be unconscionable to abandon Chinju.⁴⁹ The exact size of the Korean force is not clear, but it is estimated that to have been between 8,000 and 15,000 men.⁵⁰ Despite fierce resistance that lasted for nearly ten days, the Japanese took the walled town. Many leaders died, including Ko Chonghu, Ch’oe Kyŏnghŭi, and Kim Ch’ŏnil. Obeying Hideyoshi’s orders, the Japanese massacred whomever was found inside the walled town, 60,000 people in all.⁵¹ This battle also produced a female hero, the courtesan Non’gae, who is alleged to have enticed a Japanese general and, embracing him by the waist, threw herself into the Nam River, taking him with her.⁵² While the battle was a tragic defeat, scholars believe that because Japanese also suffered tremendous losses in this battle, they did not push on to Chŏlla, and in this way it contributed to the preservation of the province free from Japanese occupation.53 This battle was indelibly imprinted on Koreans’ collective memory, making Chinju a main site for commemorative activities for the Imjin War dead.⁵⁴

Popular Sovereignty and the Local Elite

The extraordinariness of the volunteer army as a movement was recognized very early after its appearance, and ever since it has received inordinate attention. Its military effectiveness has received mixed reviews. What has received most attention and been uniformly valorized is its symbolic role as the embodiment and motivator of popular will, referred to as the hearts of the people. Narrative after narrative, even including the official historiography, highlights this. The Veritable Records of Sŏnjo, for instance, in an entry of December 19, 1592, quotes a memorial that the Office of the Censor-General (Saganwŏn) sent to the throne: “After the invasion, the hearts of the people [toward the government] fell to the ground. Once men of principle rose, calling forth justice (ŭi), soldiers and the people (kunmin) responded to them and joined their army. That the state (kukka) survives until today is owed completely to the efforts of the Righteous Army (ŭibyŏng chi yŏk).”⁵⁵ An earlier entry of July 9, 1592, of the Revised Veritable Records of Sŏnjo is even more direct: “Although [leaders of the Righteous Army] did not accomplish much, they gained the hearts of the people and thus, through them, the state sustained itself.”⁵⁶

These narratives represent the volunteer army in two different modes: as a metaphor for popular will to resist the invaders, and as a metonym for the state’s loss of the people’s hearts, which were restored through its intervention. Chosŏn based its legitimacy on the Confucian concept of the Mandate of Heaven, which was confirmed, theoretically, by gaining the people’s hearts, a kind of popular sovereignty. Hence, by the terms of Chosŏn political ideology, gaining and losing the people’s hearts directly bore on the legitimacy of the regime. How can we interpret the idea that the volunteer army gained the people’s hearts after the state had lost them? It does not appear, however, that the volunteer army or any of its leaders were viewed as an alternative or challenge to the current dynastic mandate. True, the state displayed a certain anxiety over this possibility, and the war was a genuine crisis, but popular anger represented disappointment in the government rather than doubt in the legitimacy of the Chosŏn state. As the official historiography repeatedly affirmed, the volunteer army was valorized for its role as the inspirer and bearer of the people’s hearts on behalf of the state. How did it bring this about? The leaders of the volunteer army were local elites, who were mainstays of the Confucian civil culture that had prevailed in Korea for two centuries of peace. How were they able to transform their identity in a wartime emergency? What kind of ideological tools were available to them, and how were they able to assemble them into a wartime activist ideology of patriotism? How were they able to mobilize the population?

I contend that they were able to turn the people’s hearts by reconceptualizing popular sovereignty, which enabled them to redefine and reassign the roles of constituents of the Chosŏn state. Before I proceed, a note regarding the way I use the term “popular sovereignty” might be in order. My usage is embedded in Korean political tradition and hence differs from the way in which it is used in the Western context. Popular sovereignty has been one of the key ideas in modern Western political thought, and there is a voluminous literature on it as a political concept and on the way in which it was interpreted, implemented, and utilized. It would be foolhardy even to attempt any systematic comparison between the two traditions. Without going into specifics, however, we may observe very broadly a few conspicuous differences in usage between the Western and Confucian contexts. At its basic level, in the West popular sovereignty was the Enlightenment ideal that came to be associated with the republican and democratic polity.57 In Confucian political thought, popular sovereignty was an ancient political ideology associated with dynastic legitimacy by the concept of the Mandate of Heaven. That is, the possession and the loss of the Mandate of a ruling house depended on gaining and losing popular support.⁵⁸ It was conceived of more as metaphor and was used by the ruling house that prevailed as an ex post facto justification. It was not associated with political process that translated popular support into a political regime. Another fundamental difference was that whereas Rousseau’s popular sovereignty justified the transition of human society from isolated, free, prepolitical existence into an existence within polities, in Confucian imagining in which the past began with a polity, popular sovereignty was the concept that explained the conditions and changes of power.

Popular sovereignty was a central trope in the rhetorical and conceptual makeup of the Chosŏn state. The Chosŏn dynasty, founded with the Confucian vision of an ideal state as model, based its legitimacy on the receipt of the Mandate of Heaven. This Confucian concept of popular sovereignty was explicitly evoked at the founder’s coronation edict of 1392: “I was told that the people’s wishes are such that Heaven’s will is clearly manifested in them and that no one should refuse the wishes of the people, for to do so is to act contrary to the will of Heaven. Because the people insisted so steadfastly, I yielded finally to their will and ascended the throne. Now that we are at the threshold of a new beginning, I must show abundant grace, and I hereby announce the following policies for the benefit of the people.”59 In the subsequent two centuries, as the political culture of Chosŏn became increasingly Neo-Confucian, the rhetoric of popular sovereignty became a site on which the monarchy and the bureaucracy competed for power and authority with each other: bureaucrats pointed at the possible loss of popular sovereignty as a way to advance their counsel, whereas the king flaunted his possession of it to counter bureaucratic arguments. In the pre-Imjin Chosŏn state, however, the notion of popular sovereignty was used with the understanding that the state as a ruling body held a monopoly of responsibility to maintain the people’s welfare and to safeguard the country. In this vision of good rule, the people were projected as passive objects to be protected. When the Imjin War broke out, this formula changed. Permitting private individuals to mobilize civilian armies, and thus implicitly relinquishing the state monopoly on the military, was the first step in the development of a more expansive popular sovereignty.⁶⁰

It was the provincial elites who radically changed the concept of popular sovereignty and reassigned the roles of various constituents of the Chosŏn social structure. The relationship between the state and the people was always thought to be reciprocal: the king (and his government) owed benevolent rule, whereas the people owed loyalty to the king. In their exhortations the volunteer army leaders went beyond reciprocity and stressed interdependence. As we have seen in their exhortations, they repeatedly pointed out that during two hundred years of peace, the government had nurtured the people. At this time of crisis when the king was in flight and the state was in peril, it was their turn to rescue the king and restore the state. Not only did they belong to the king; the king also belonged to them. The loyalty each owed to the king needed to be translated into sacrificial action: willingness to die for the country. By redirecting responsibility to flow from the people to the state, they rendered moot the issue of the state’s failure and invigorated the people’s spirit to fight to preserve their state. What made local elites credible and inspiring was that they were at the forefront of this movement, taking up arms and dying for the country.

Who were these local elites, and what in their sense of identity compelled them to act as they did? Civilian leaders of the Righteous Army came from a number of backgrounds, and they ranged widely in age, experience, and relationship to the central government. There were those who had recently migrated from the capital or from some other region to their present places of residence and those who had inhabited one place for a long time. There were those who had previously served in the bureaucracy and those who had always lived as private scholars. As a group they did share certain common attributes in that their primary identity consisted of the yangban—aristocratic—status, and prominent standing in their locality. While the yangban was a bureaucratic class in its origin, it was an ascriptive privilege that certain lineages could claim and transmit to their descendants with no need of confirmation from the government.61 The social prestige of these lineages, however, depended on a continuous maintenance and renewal of cultural capital, and this was achieved through adherence to the Confucian way of life. The way in which the ingredients of the Confucian mode of life evolved over time displayed an expanding influence of the Neo-Confucian intellectual and scholarly apparatus and its ethos. Such towering figures as Yi Hwang (T’oegye) and Yi I (Yulgok), the founders of the school of principle (li)62 and the school of material force (ki)⁶³ in Korea, respectively, not only took Confucian scholarship to new heights of sophistication but also led the Confucian establishment in a geographical expansion. Private academies were founded in numbers in the provinces, and the centers of learning located in different provinces competed with and supplemented the educational establishment in the capital area.⁶⁴ The migration of elite lineages into localities away from the capital continued. All these movements and changes led to the forging of an intricate web of relationships between the intellectual establishment and the power elite both in the capital and in the provinces.

By the sixteenth century there was a certain homogenization in what constituted the essential elements of the Confucian mode of life. In addition to such standard features as the observation of Confucian ritual and the acquisition of Confucian classical learning, providing moral leadership to the local population emerged as an important ingredient. The elite displayed great concern to disseminate Confucian mores among the local population beyond the confines of the educated. Scholars in nonmetropolitan areas seem to have taken activist roles in “civilizing” the local population quite seriously. Spearheaded by such scholars as Yi Hwang and Yi I, the movement to adopt community compacts and localize the practice to suit each locality seems to have spread throughout Korea.⁶⁵

This project of Confucianizing local society had a dual impact. It strengthened and solidified the privileges of the local elite. The central government also valued their role as mediators and implementers of its long-standing program of the Confucianization of Korean society. At the same time the civilizing project subscribed to the transformability of the local population and the possibility of moral suasion, which was in turn based on the Mencian vision of the original and natural goodness of human nature. This emphasis on the common attributes of human beings highlighted an alternative system of evaluating individuals on the basis of moral qualities and merit. The coexistence of two distinct systems of organizing society was not new. Like most societies, Korea exhibited the tension between an inherited class structure and alternative systems of evaluation. The ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism neither diminished nor offered a better resolution to the conflict between these two systems, but it did accelerate the fusion between the two systems of evaluation.66 That is, social status was encoded with signifiers of virtue. The elite were expected to display more virtue. Qualities of individual moral character such as humanity and righteousness came into the play more visibly. The moral leadership that was expected of the local elite in promoting a local Confucian society by example and the active promotion of Confucian precepts were closely intertwined with this fusion.

The Confucian vision impelled the elite to construct their identities as Confucians dually along axes of civilization and nation. Confucian identity was civilizational in that all Confucians accepted the supremacy of Confucianism and the Confucian way of life as the means of sustaining civilization and humanity. Confucians, however, also defined their identities “nationally” in that, as members of the ruling elite, they viewed themselves as coextensive with the state and were committed to maintaining it by providing moral leadership since, in their understanding of the concept of loyalty (ch’ung), their duty to the state was seen as one of the cardinal virtues of Confucianism. These two modes of defining one’s identity as a Confucian were not thought to be linked or mutually reinforcing, but the way in which they interacted and found expression in individual and collective consciousness differed widely depending on the time, place, circumstances, and individual perspective. The same can be said of the way in which the concept of loyalty was interpreted, ranging from an unswerving loyalty to one’s lord to patriotic duty to one’s country or an evaluative moral duty to principle. When peace reigned, in accordance with the prevailing Neo-Confucian ethos that stressed the individual cultivation of morality, they regarded loyalty as an individual moral duty to principle. Many scholars, for example, took for granted as their prerogative to choose not to serve in government if they wished, even when the king strongly asked for their service. They saw their primary duty as pursuing their own moral cultivation and helping to enact a moral vision in the society in which they lived.

When the war broke out all this had to change, and they had to make new sets of moral imperatives. In making a decision to take to arms for Korea and to call on others to do the same, a course of action that they had neither experienced nor expected, they had to translate the basis of their individual moral choice into an activist moral imperative to be collectively shared by members of the entire community of Korea. In confronting their personal situation, they constructed and articulated a moral-national ideal.67 I believe that provincial elites were compelled to link the moral to the national by their interpretation of popular sovereignty, that is, by their idea that it was their responsibility to carry on the functions of the state when nothing else was doing so. Now that the ruling body was incapacitated and could not safeguard the country, it was their responsibility as the one remaining group with the means to organize a resistance army to step temporarily into the vacuum and act. Insofar as “morality” and “civilization” were conceived in Confucian terms, the civilizational concept was placed in service to the polity. Likewise, the moral-national concept was also created by directing an individual’s moral duty to the national community. That is, whereas previously an individual’s duty as a member of Confucian civilization and as a member of a national community were conceived as coextensive, at this point the former was directly linked to the latter: a Korean Confucian’s duty was to save Korea. This was to be accomplished by resisting and expelling the enemy and restoring the state to its former condition. Likewise, cultural tools and imagery that carried dual connotations were also put to use primarily for the sake of the nation. Literary Chinese, which was simultaneously the language of the Confucian canon and the lingua franca of the educated in East Asia and the language of governance for each state, was used to rally for the polity. Nowhere was this more clearly shown than in the lofty heights to which the image of dying for the country was thrust. Despite two hundred years of peace during which dying for the country (sun’guk) was a remote ideal rather than a possible choice for Koreans, it was seized on instantaneously as the ultimate enactment of dedicating one’s body to the service of principle. There were many historical examples available for the late sixteenth-century Korean to draw from. Moreover, in the context of the Confucian system of values that prized earning a name for posterity above all else, dying for one’s country offered the chance of fulfilling that goal and securing a place in memory for all posterity. The rhetoric quickly seized on this point. Martyrdom for Korea was a noble exit, writing a glorious end to one’s life and earning immortality.

While the mode of executing one’s moral duty may have changed, the cultural logic remained the same in making one’s own choice or persuading others to make the right decision: one’s body became the text on which one wrote one’s own life story by making a series of autonomous decisions. Thus the writers of the letters of exhortation premised their arguments for rising against the invaders on the ideal of free and personal choice. They also conceded that, if an individual arrived at the decision, they did so for different reasons and from different motivations. Ko Kyŏngmyŏng’s famous letter of exhortation described the scene in which volunteers joined the Righteous Army: “no one was forced; no one hesitated.”68 This envisions a spontaneous morally compelling choice. At the other extreme, personal morality is irrelevant; it is the shared objective that is stressed: “The extermination of the invaders, however, is something that not only loyal subjects or rightful scholars wish for, but something that even disloyal subjects and unfilial individuals also wish for.” In this logic, moral-national is inverted to national-moral. It is posited that by accepting the responsibility of defending one’s country, regardless of reason or motivation, one would become a full-fledged Korean and thus a moral being. And this awakening, as was the case with dedication to a moral-national community, was imagined as personal though the objective was a collective one.

The voluntary army became a successful national movement because by creating a national horizontal space, its organizers offered to all Koreans the choice to join it, as a free and personal one. The militarization of the people had to proceed on the basis of the “nationalization” of the people.⁶⁹ We have seen that the Righteous Army was initiated among the elite but soon expanded to include nonelite volunteers. It was not that distinctions between regions and classes were erased, but they were considered far less significant than the grave task of fighting the invaders. Thus all Koreans, presented as members of the Korean nation, were called on to take up arms to preserve their lives and their unique “civilized” way of life. If they were to die, then they would die as heroes, and their names would be eternally remembered in history. Various nonelite elements of the population, “the people (min),” as they were usually referred to, were important to the way in which popular sovereignty was reconstituted. All were transformed from objects of the government’s beneficence into subjects who fought for and contributed to the survival of the country.

All Koreans, despite their differences, were imagined as persons who were capable of making the right decision. While there was an emphasis on the elite’s special indebtedness toward the state, there was no sense in the rhetoric that the elite would have exclusive or even an inherently greater proclivity toward moral choice than the nonelite. We have seen one letter that explicitly disavows this notion: “When it concerns loyalty and the sense of justice, from the descendants of scholars to slaves in mangers, there is no difference; all possess the same.” In this sense the discourse on nation that began during the Imjin War resonates with what Liah Greenfeld describes as the basis of all nationalism: “Every member of the ‘people’ thus interpreted partakes in its superior, elite quality, and it is in consequence that a stratified national population is perceived as essentially homogeneous, and the lines of status and class as superficial.”70

Aftermath

After the Chinese Army of forty thousand led by Li Rusong arrived to assist Chosŏn toward the end of 1592, the volunteer army lost much of its significance as a military force. Unlike 1592, during which it was the only land force that kept Chosŏn alive, mainly by guerilla tactics, from 1593 the main battles were fought by the allied forces of Chosŏn and Ming, to which the volunteer army units functioned as auxiliary or service units.⁷¹ By the fourth month of 1594, all groups of the Righteous Army were placed under the command of Kim Tŏngnyŏng (1567–1596), a charismatic twenty-eight-year-old leader from Chŏlla, and those who were unwilling to accept his leadership were to be disbanded.72 In 1596 the government charged Kim with sedition and put him to death. The charge was so evidently false that even the official history quickly admitted to it,⁷³ turning him into a wronged martyr of unrequited loyalty.⁷⁴ The volunteer army movement faded. During the second Japanese invasion of 1597 the movement was revived, but as the allied forces of Chosŏn and Ming matched the Japanese forces in fighting capacity, the volunteer army’s role was far less conspicuous. Its distinction as a symbol of activist loyalty, however, continued. At the time of its formation in 1592, the volunteer civilian army, organized and supported by local leaders, was not only historically but also conceptually new. The Righteous Army of the Imjin War set a precedent to which later Chosŏn people looked, and on the two occasions when the country faced crises, the same movement under the same name and rhetoric was attempted: during the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636–1637, and for several years after the Chosŏn became Japan’s protectorate in 1905.

It was through its impact on Chosŏn political culture that the legacy of the volunteer army exerted its greatest influence. In postwar Chosŏn everything associated with the Imjin War, such as persons, locations, and battles, was turned into sacral sites on which discourse of nation perpetuated and expanded. The Righteous Army, especially some of its leaders, took a central place in the commemorative culture as symbols of “purity, through fatality.” It did not, however, end with the addition of dead scholar-warriors to the pantheon of patriotic heroes. Participatory roles for civilians—local elites and ordinary people—had to be accommodated in political life. The activist concept of popular sovereignty was reformulated to rebuild the war-torn country. The state also recognized that the postwar reconstruction had to proceed, acknowledging the crucial contributions all constituent groups had made, and it negotiated with them for changes in their social and political roles. The most conspicuous example of this development was that all constituents coconstructed the commemorative culture of postwar Chosŏn. In this way each group competed and participated in the changing discourse of the imagined community of Chosŏn.