The Changing Nature of Literary Chinese in the Japanese Occupation
We have already seen in previous chapters that the Imjin War was fought not only in military battles with weapons but also in communicative media with the corresponding tools. For the Chosŏn government it was particularly urgent that it devise a communication strategy that would fulfill dual purposes: to send messages to the Korean population in a medium accessible only to them and not to foreign forces, and to do so in a medium with the potential of reaching the broadest of audiences and in the most affecting of rhetoric. Under these circumstances, the Chosŏn government adopted a radical language policy: to deploy Korean vernacular script as a means of communication among Koreans. Departing from the practice of exclusively using literary Chinese in public missives, royal edicts in Korean script were sent out to population at large either to be posted in conspicuous places where people gathered or passed or to be distributed among them. Edicts in Korean script were also delivered to Koreans held captive by the Japanese.1 The government also received certain reports in Korean script, and it used the script in espionage against the enemy. This language policy of using vernacular Korean script in official missives was not formulated in a systematic fashion; rather, the royal court, in flight and under extreme pressure, adopted it as a desperate measure to reach the scattered, endangered, and embittered population in an attempt to restore its faith. Nor was this policy carried out consistently but on an ad hoc basis only when there was urgently felt need. No matter, a vernacular national space emerged, as this and the next chapter will show.
The creation of a vernacular national space was an epochal measure that redefined the geo-cultural-political entity of Korea. The step was taken in part as a response to the changed nature and use of literary Chinese during wartime. Before the war literary Chinese was a linguistic medium that connected a cosmopolitan cultural imaginary and the participating polities in the region, which shared its values and worldviews. Although much of public writing in inscriptional spaces in each of the East Asian countries was in literary Chinese during the Ming, direct communication among them was along the prescribed lines, either diplomatic exchanges between states2 or occasional correspondence between the educated of these countries, mostly between China and Korea.3 True, Japan deviated from the model in that the military men who were in power were not particularly proficient in literary Chinese, but many public records, including diplomatic correspondence, were in literary Chinese written by Buddhist clergy.
During the war the cosmopolitan cultural imaginary was reconfigured into feuding polities. The three countries writing literary Chinese that converged on Korea either as allies or enemies deployed such writing as a part of their military strategy. In considering the function of language in the rise of nationalism, Benedict Anderson groups literary Chinese with sacral languages that included Latin and Qur’anic Arabic and maintains that sacral languages, “as truth languages, imbued with an impulse largely foreign to nationalism,” made larger transnational communities imaginable.4 Literary Chinese functioned as the sacral language of East Asia to the extent that it was the language of the Confucian canon and other religious scriptures. However, the vision that the Confucian canon portrays was that of well-ordered polity, and literary Chinese was first and foremost the language of governance of secular states and of political ideology and all that is associated with it, including patriotism. We have already seen in the preceding chapters that literary Chinese functioned in Chosŏn as a linguistic medium of patriotic expression.
When the war broke out, a dizzying array of multidirectional communiqués in literary Chinese began to flow within and across national groups and between enemies and allies. The boundaries of communicative space along national lines vanished, and the Korean domestic communicative space of literary Chinese became permeable to others. It was alarming to the Chosŏn government that Japanese and Chinese authorities penetrated into the interior of the Korean communicative space by sending out public announcements and promulgations in literary Chinese to the Korean population. The Japanese approached the Korean population with a dual policy of terrorization and appeasement. Frequently when the Japanese Army massacred residents and looted villages, they also put up posters coaxing residents who had fled to return from their places of hiding and promising them safety. Even before they entered the war, the Chinese, from the emperor on down to the military strategists and generals, also bombarded Koreans with their messages. Literary Chinese became the medium through which the three countries competed for the attention and support or appeasement of Koreans.
When the Chosŏn government sent out royal edicts in the Korean script, as described in the next chapter, it was consciously creating a separate linguistic space apart from the transnational one of literary Chinese that Korea shared with its enemy as well as its ally, but it was also seeking an inclusive space open to all Koreans. A royal edict was a communication that, by virtue of the ruler’s unique position, enabled the king to address all the people of Korea in a vertical line of communication and was reserved solely for his or his deputy’s use. Even after civilian leaders and the soldiers of the Righteous Army created another nationwide discursive space of a more horizontal nature, royal edicts still provided the ruler with a privileged stage from which he could send messages of assurance. When the country was swarming with enemy soldiers and allied but alien troops, in the rhetoric of affectivity available to him alone as the father of the country (kukpu), the king could conjure up a vision of the ethnic community of Koreans, the inhabitants of a nation besieged by intruders all of whom had to be expelled. Sŏnjo’s wartime edicts in Korean script powerfully penetrated the emergent horizontal national discursive space, and competed with and mutually reinforced the other strands of discourse. In this sense, the royal edicts in Korean breached the last barrier to the movement toward constructing a new ethnolinguistic national space of discourse. Sheldon Pollock maintains that literature “addresses, sometimes calls into being, particular sociotextual communities.”5 I contend that the vernacular royal edicts that the Chosŏn government deployed called into being a community of “us” as opposed to “them,” and that this was “national” in that it was bound by and inclusive of the Korean ethnolinguistic community.
The inauguration of a vernacular national communicative space also marked a milestone in reconstituting the interior writing space of Korea and the way in which the vernacular and the classical were characterized and positioned in relation to each other. Previously, while the invention of the han’gŭl script in the mid-fifteenth century had been based on a new concept of writing—accessibility to all and for daily use—and its promulgation ushered in a diglossic writing culture, the vernacular space grew under the overweening hegemony of the classical space. The result was that, rather than being evaluated on its own terms, the vernacular was perceived as the shadowy other of classical writing and endowed with qualities opposite the latter in binary formation. That is, the vernacular was local; the classical, universal (or transnational); it was temporary where the classical was eternal; feminine as opposed to masculine; private as opposed to public; secretive as opposed to open. During the war some of these very qualities, such as the “secretive” and “local” qualities of the vernacular script, were transformed in meaning to “ours” and “national.”6
Japanese Infiltration Into Discursive Space
It may not be an exaggeration to say that the encounter between the Japanese Army and Koreans during the Imjin War remains one of the most intense clashes recorded in East Asian history. It occurred in the context of a worldview wholly different from that of the present: that of the sixteenth century, when different assumptions of self and other prevailed. To begin with, for most of those involved on all sides, it was the first time they were encountering “foreigners” on a large scale. True, the leadership of the invasion probably had had some dealings with Westerners. In fact, two of the generals leading the campaign, Konishi Yukinaga and Kuroda Nagamasa, were Catholics, and a Spanish Jesuit priest, Gregorio de Cespedes (1551–1611), went to Korea as Yukinaga’s chaplain on two occasions, 1593 and 1597, and spent some time there, becoming the first Western visitor recorded in Korean in history.7 Nevertheless, no one in the Japanese leadership, not to mention common soldiers, had set foot on foreign soil before they landed at Pusan. What could have been their expectations as they crossed the sea?
There is no indication that they had given much thought to the “foreignness” of Korea except to think of the place as a country in which to wage battles. As for Hideyoshi, who was thinking of himself as a conqueror, it is questionable whether he even had a desire to acknowledge any difference. In discussing Christopher Marlowe’s (1564–1593) Tamburlaine, which was based on the fourteenth-century Tamerlane (c.1336–1405), the Mongol conqueror, Virginia Mason Vaughan observes that “the desire to conquer goes beyond notions of exchange to imply the transformation of another sort, whereby the conquered territory or people loses its original identity, becoming instead a mirror image of the conqueror.” She also says that “Tamburlaine’s geography is not a respecter of difference. In his catalogue of the territories he has conquered, Tamburlaine makes few distinctions. Instead he flattens and conflates—all will become homogenized under his rule.”8 Like his fictional contemporary, Hideyoshi acted the conqueror, showing no inclination to take note of the distinctiveness of Korea or of other Asian countries. To him Korea was merely the first step toward constructing a vast Asian empire, which he wished to homogenize in the image of Japan. As he declared in his letter to Sŏnjo, “I have it in mind to introduce Japanese customs and values to the four hundred and more provinces of that country [China] and bestow upon it the benefits of imperial rule and the culture of the coming hundred million years.”9
This indifference to difference does not eradicate the logistical problems of dealing with the other or the shock of discovery of their “difference.” This was obvious from the very beginning. I have already mentioned that the Japanese began the invasion with the massacre of residents of Pusan, where they landed. It was clear even during this indiscriminate mass slaughter, an act that one might imagine requires no exchange of words, that the invaders and the local residents were discovering that they were separated by a gulf of language. It is vividly brought home by a description of the massacre in a memoir by one Yoshino, a member of the Japanese Army, written twenty-four years after the event:10
When we landed in the early morning on May 23, we immediately attacked the fort at Pusan. They were waiting for us inside the walled town. Arrows from half-size bows flew and fell upon us like rain. Ignoring this, our force responded with mass firing of arquebuses. Noise shook Heaven and Earth . . . shields, watch towers all tumbled down. No one stuck his head out. Climbing a stone wall 3 hiro high,11 we all charged in. . . . The enemy was running in search of hiding places. They hid between houses or under tables. Those who could not find places to hide ran to the east gate to escape. [When captured] they all put their hands together kneeling down and uttered words that we had never heard, incomprehensible words that sounded like “manō, manō!” It sounded as if they were pleading for mercy. Yet, our forces ignored these words, slashed them and trampled them to death. This was done in the spirit of making an offering to the god of war. The victims were both men and women, and even dogs and cats were cut to pieces. In all, as many as 30,000 people were slaughtered.12
It is noticeable that in recollecting this scene, the narratorial voice of the participant-memoirist shifts. Most of the time he narrates as a member of the troop that landed at Pusan. He refers to the Japanese Army as “our force” (mikata) and to Koreans as “enemy” (teki). For a brief moment, however, he changes to an individual who sees and hears the other—Koreans were hiding and making noises that he had not heard before, but that seemed to be pleas. Then personal perspective is again replaced by a collective one, referring to the Japanese as “our force.” And yet, submerged in it, there is a personal voice that observes that “our force” ignored what seemed like pleading, trampling “them” to death, and massacring people and animals alike. This is a complex document that dramatically displays the shock of discovery of the other from the point of view of the attacker, probably suppressed at the time but remembered and narrated later.
The March to Seoul
As the Japanese went inland, there is no indication that they changed their approach, either in tactics of intimidation or in their indifferent methods of dealings with the other. The Japanese took three separate routes in their march toward the capital city. The first group, led by Konishi Yukinaga and Sō Yoshitoshi, took the middle route and conquered Yangsan on May 26, Miryang on May 28, Taegu on May 30, Indong on June 1, Sangju on June 3, Mun’gyŏng on June 5, and Ch’ungju on June 6, reaching Seoul on June 12. The second group, led by Katō Kiyomasa, took the eastern route, starting from Tongnae and then occupying Kyŏngju, Yŏngch’ŏn, Ch’ungju, Chuksan, and Yongin before arriving at Seoul on June 12. The third group, led by Kuroda Nagamasa, started from Kimhae and took Ch’angwŏn, Sŏngju, Kŭmsan, and Chuksan, arriving at Seoul on June 16.13 All three groups left trails of burned towns and pillaged villages on their march north.14 Nevertheless, as their objective was to occupy Korea and to collect taxes from Koreans, not just to ransack and leave, it was not enough just to intimidate Koreans. Many of the terrified Koreans abandoned their homes and took refuge in mountains and valleys. The Japanese had to find ways to persuade them to return to their homes, and they became aware of a problem caused by their inability to communicate with Koreans. Hideyoshi, however, was not on site. Contrary to his original plan, he did not personally join the campaign in Korea.15 Instead his orders were conveyed to field commanders as they advanced inland into Korea. In his absence the commanders had to make ad hoc decisions.
The first and most consistently used method was to dispatch written orders in literary Chinese to Koreans. Each battalion of the Japanese Army had a Buddhist monk-recorder who kept a record of the war and could be called on to write missives in literary Chinese. The Japanese began to post them at various places. The first such order (yŏng) was posted when the army led by Yukinaga and Yoshitoshi entered the town of Indong, a little north of Taegu in Kyŏngsang Province, on June 1. The proclamation, sent out in the name of Yoshitoshi although written by Tenkei, one of the Buddhist monk-recorders,16 read: “The scattered residents must immediately return to their homes: Men are to go back to farming and animal husbandry, and women to sericulture. All must continue with the work of their occupation, be it scholarship, agriculture, craft, or commerce. If any soldier of our army were to violate the law by interrupting your work, he will be punished.”17 The Miscellaneous Record confirms this posting. It also adds that many Koreans surrendered to the Japanese and received plaques of identification, and that the Japanese sometimes distributed to people grain that they took from the Chosŏn government granaries.18
On June 12 Yukinaga and Kiyomasa, whose rivalry and enmity toward each other were legendary, arrived at Seoul leading their respective troops within a few hours of each other. They entered the eerily quiet and deserted city with no resistance.19 Just as the loss of the capital city was a catalyst for the Korean local elite, propelling them to mobilize the volunteer army, the capture marked a turning point for the Japanese estimate of whether Hideyoshi’s project of building an Asian empire might become a reality.
Hideyoshi’s Plans for Occupation
When Hideyoshi received the news that Seoul had fallen, he began to dash off plans for its occupation. On June 15 he sent his generals in Korea a stratagem consisting of nine items: one called for “a seat of governance” to be “established for Hideyoshi in Seoul”; a second required that “townspeople will be forced back to [urban centers], and that the peasants scattered throughout the country will be directed back to their villages and prohibition laws will be enforced.”20 On June 18 Hideyoshi issued a memo (oboegaki) consisting of twenty-five items, directed to his heir, the Regent Hidetsugu, giving a blueprint for constructing a grand East Asian empire. This addressed mainly questions of redistributing the ruling body to geographical posts he hoped to acquire. For example, the Japanese emperor would be relocated to Beijing.21
Hideyoshi again postponed his departure to Korea. Instead, on July 11 he dispatched Ishida Mitsunari as the governor of Korea with further instructions: the eight provinces of Korea were to be placed under Hideyoshi’s direct jurisdiction and a bailiff (daikan) was to be stationed in each; the peasants in hiding were to be returned to their villages to farm and pay tax; new lodgings for Hideyoshi were to be built along the route to China.22 In accordance with Hideyoshi’s instructions, eight daimyos were appointed as bailiffs to each of the eight provinces, and the tax due from each province was calculated in precise amounts down to pennies.23
Hideyoshi also sent detailed instructions to different bailiffs. One sent to Kiyomasa included a directive concerning a curious item called tsukai me, which can be rendered as “service women” or “service concubines.” The order required that the Japanese authorities should let it be known to Koreans that along with tax and other produce, they would be obliged to send in “service women.” Kitajima explains that this order was sent so that the high-ranking Japanese officials, bailiffs, mayors, and other generals of responsibility would be provided with service women, who would render services that included sex.24 In view of the political uproar over comfort women in World War II, this reference to “service women” is potentially an explosive topic. A fuller treatment of the issue would require a thoughtful investigation of available sources in the context of the sixteenth-century practices of a conquering army toward local women and the significations of these practices. Rape of local women was a common practice in time of war. What is noticeable is the institutionalization of “service women” directed from the highest authority. We do not know the extent of this practice, who were taken as “service women,” whether and how deeply the practice penetrated into civilian families, or the extent of the coercion involved.
There is, however, evidence that many Korean women were taken as “service women” by the Japanese occupiers. There are also indications that when they were recovered, these women were not treated well by Korean men. The Miscellaneous Record reports an incident involving such women. Kim Myŏn, the leader of the Righteous Army, won a battle at Chirye and burned all the enemy soldiers to death. He found many “beautiful women” from Chŏlla Province who had been taken and kept by the Japanese. The women pleaded for their lives, but Kim burned them to death along with the Japanese soldiers.25 The familiar gendered symbolism and psychology seem to be at work here: the defilement of women symbolizing the emasculation of the conquered men who could not protect their women, and male fury turned on defiled women. There was also a fear of miscegenation. The question of female purity for its symbolic and human implications would emerge as an important issue for individuals and the state not only during the Imjin War but also during and after the Manchu invasions of 1636–1637. Suffice it to say that embedded in this question are issues of ethnic and national identity.
Colonizing Korea
The Japanese launched a systematic campaign directed at Koreans to transform Korea into their “colony” and to turn Koreans into taxpaying “subjects.” The first order of business was to convince Koreans that the old world in which they had lived was gone, that the new world order was in place, and that they had no choice but to surrender to it. The Japanese began with a symbolic annihilation of the Chosŏn state. They set fire to the Yi Royal Ancestral Temple (Chongmyo) in which the tablets of the Yi royal ancestors were normally kept.26 Though the tablets had been taken by the royal family and carried with them to their place of refuge, the incineration of Chongmyo was considered the worst possible desecration of Yi royal monarchy. Within months the Japanese literally defiled dead royal bodies, despoiling two Yi royal tombs, Sŏnnŭng, the tomb of King Sŏngjong (r. 1469–1494) and his wife, Queen Chŏnghyŏn, and Chŏngnŭng, the tomb of King Chungjong (r. 1506–1544). The bodies were disinterred and the tombs dismantled.27 Koreans viewed the destruction of the Yi Royal Ancestral Temple and the two royal tombs as unimaginably horrible violations of the Yi monarchical body, and the actions apparently strengthened the Korean resolve to fight the invader.
The Japanese launched a campaign to disseminate the message that there had been a change of regime and that the public had entered a new age of Japanese rule. Posters were posted at public places in Seoul and in cities and towns in the provinces. Tenkei mentions in The Diary of the Western Campaign that soon after they entered the capital, the Japanese conferred and decided to post documents on the four main gates announcing their arrival and ordering the residents to return to their homes.28 The Miscellaneous Record records a pronouncement that was sent out in the name of several Japanese generals to the towns and villages of Kyŏnggi and Kangwŏn Provinces on June 29: “Your ruler has run away, and China has become a part of Japan. We are planning to govern Korea by sending deputies to each province. Scholars and the people of rural areas should submit to the rule of Japan as you did to the previous regime. You cannot object to this. All rice and grain, jade and valuables, silk and linen should be kept intact and undispersed. Governors, magistrates and people, male and female, should not leave their posts, and should serve our deputies. Beware of this point.”29
A proclamation that Kiyomasa sent to the residents of Hamgyŏng Province immediately after he and Nabeshima Naoshige entered the province, the northeast border region, struck a loftier tone. Believed to have been written by the Buddhist monk Zetaku, it contained the following points: The purpose of the military campaign by His Highness (Hideyoshi) is the political reform of Korea; the king of Korea has fled from Seoul, but it is not our intention to punish him; we promise to provide protection to those who submit to us. Residents must return to their homes and devote themselves to farming; eight Japanese commanders have been assigned to rule each of the eight provinces and the person who is to rule Hamgyŏng is Kiyomasa. In accordance with the order of His Highness, Kiyomasa is determined to rule completely according to laws and regulations, and the residents should have no fear; residents must return to their homes and devote themselves to farming.30 What is noteworthy is an attempt to present the Japanese invasion as having been motivated by Hideyoshi’s desire for political reform in Korea. This was rhetoric challenging a regime in power, be it from a leader in rebellion or an invader. To mitigate their presence as outsiders, the Japanese attempted to project a better future for Koreans based on law and order.
The confident Kiyomasa built separate headquarters for himself and Naoshige, the second-in-command, in southern Hamgyŏng, had garrisons built throughout the province, and set about pacifying the whole province. Hamgyŏng Province was a distant border area to which the Chosŏn government sent criminals in exile, and its residents seem to have felt a sense of alienation from if not outright resentment for the central government, so the initial reaction to the Japanese promise does not seem to have been entirely negative. Korean officials, for example, cooperated with Japanese assessments of land and agricultural productivity. Naoshige collected the tax thus assessed, 244,360 sŏk in total.31 It was also around this time that Kiyomasa captured two Korean princes, Princes Imhae and Sunhwa, a huge prize, especially since they were handed over by a disgruntled Korean. Buoyed, leading eight thousand Japanese soldiers and three thousand Koreans, Kiyomasa made incursions into Manchuria. Upon his return he triumphantly wrote to Hideyoshi, proudly reporting on his perfect stewardship of his domain.32
The meaning of a better future, however, remained debatable. It appears that any resemblance to order was achieved by force and coercion.33 Tajiri Akitane records in The Diary of the Campaign of Korea (Kōrai nikki) that the way Naoshige collected tax was by taking hostages and releasing them one by one in exchange for the delivery of tax.34 The report of the governor of Hamgyŏng Province, Yi Hŭidŭk, in the Veritable Records of Sŏnjo is more scathing: “The enemy’s rule of this province is fiercer than in other provinces. Starting from Anbyŏn, they stationed generals in all six garrisons, each with 300 to 400 soldiers. They send soldiers to the residents every day and forcefully take from them their daily necessities. At strategic points, ambushes were installed making it impossible for people to travel. There is endless massacre and robbery. Our people are so enraged that they want to rise against them and eagerly await the arrival of the Chinese assistance army.”35 A Japanese sources shares this Korean assessment that cruelty by Japanese led to the Korean revolt. In Korea Diary (Chōsen nikki), the Buddhist monk Zetaku says: “Commoners at first complied with the Japanese orders and paid tribute in kind and tax. Later, however, they returned to the old Korean ordinances. They refused to remain in their regular abodes, hid in mountains and valleys, took up military weapons, and used bows and arrows.”36
Alarmed by the escalating resistance among the Korean civilian army all over the country, a scenario they had not anticipated, the Japanese accelerated a propaganda campaign. Posters were disseminated more widely and frequently, and their rhetoric was sharpened with equal measures of persuasion and threat. Particularly noticeable is a portrayal of Japan’s occupation as having been motivated by a lofty vision of a new world. For example, to the residents of Pian in Kyŏngsang Province on August 10, 1592:
The objective of this Japanese official is to put into effect our Highness’s goal of civilizing the world and establishing good governance for the people. The residents of this county who are in hiding or have taken refuge elsewhere should return to their abodes and live peacefully. We have arrested and are killing those Japanese who took wives from Koreans. Farmers should till the land, water the fields, get rid of weeds and await the harvest in the fall. If any in Chosŏn were to take up weapons and interrupt our activities, all will be killed. If any commoner has grievances, then come and report to our staff at our headquarters.37
Another was addressed specifically to the volunteer army in Kŭmsan, Chŏlla Province, on August 15, 1592:
The great king of Great Japan wishes to establish a political reform in Korea to save its people. What is the reason for stopping us on sea and land and turning us into the enemy? This is comparable to an insect resisting the wheel of a chariot or a dayfly shaking a great tree. Because of resistance, foot soldiers and cavalry alike had to go into the streets and lanes of villages and towns, and under our flag we had to unsheath the sword. The gates of walled towns were thus burned and the noise of cannons rumbled through every house. We captured these rebels and thought of decapitating them all. It is, however, difficult to evaluate the heaviness and lightness of each one’s crime, and so, out of our pity for the parents, wives, and children of these criminals, we forgave them. We saved them from hunger and let them live. Anyone daring to fight us further will not be tolerated and will be killed at once. Those of you who have been roaming the fields in the resistance army, repent your crime and go home. The Japanese emperor and the Korean ruler will soon reach an agreement. You should know this. You should let this news be known to armed people hiding in the mountains. If they discard their bows and swords, and surrender to us, no one will be punished. If this order is disobeyed, we will come with several hundred soldiers and will again massacre the whole population.38
Still another to residents of Hwasan, Hwanghae Province, promises on August 19, 1592, a peaceful future of benevolent rule:
Japan is no longer the Japan of the past. It looks forward to a time when the whole world will enjoy peace. We will reduce corvée labor and lower taxes. There is no reason to be anxious. Return to your old life. When the great army of Japan passes through, adults and children alike should welcome and greet them. Those who flee to the mountains will be beheaded. Those who possess weapons must turn them in to the authorities. Anyone who disobeys this order will be beheaded. Even high ministers and officials who have taken refuge should not stay in hiding and should come to meet us. Slaves, both public and private, will become our subjects.39
One can clearly see a shift in rhetoric from invader to “colonizer”: on a global scale, the emphasis shifted to the project of “civilizing” the world and bringing peace to it, and, on the local level, of reducing taxes and guaranteeing security. These Japanese attempts to mollify the fears of the local population, however, invariably were followed by the threat of death for disobedience. Situated as they were as occupiers who wanted to collect taxes in grain from the local population to feed their troops and finance their further campaign to China, there simply was no way the rhetoric could transcend the limitations imposed by the adversarial relationship. Nor could they successfully negotiate the problem of language. Various Japanese generals commented on the difficulties caused by the language barrier. Mōri Terumoto, the bailiff of Kyŏngsang Province, for example, stated that one of the greatest problems the Japanese faced was their inability to communicate with Koreans, and that even with the use of interpreters, incomprehension remained.40 Written communication was believed to be somewhat better since the use of the cosmopolitan language ensured communication at least to a certain segment of the local population, and the use of posters in literary Chinese continued.
However, there is a suggestion that Japanese might have attempted to go beyond literary Chinese. Yi Chŏng’am, a leader of the Righteous Army of Hwanghae Province, mentions in his Daily Record of the Western Campaign that he obtained a copy of a promulgation written in a mixture of literary Chinese and idu posted by Kuroda Nagamasa, the bailiff of Hwanghae Province. Idu was a system of writing that used Chinese ideograms phonetically to inscribe Korean and was employed by clerks in Korean government offices to supplement writings in literary Chinese. Yi surmises that a Korean clerk in the governor’s office must have written this poster.41 But this method was hardly more comprehensible to the Korean population who were not versed in literary Chinese. In the Record of the Campaign Against Barbarians, Yi T’aegyŏng states on August 17: “The enemy stationed at Koryŏng used a woman of our country to deliver a letter saying, ‘Why do you kill those travelling on waterways or land routes? If you continued this way, we will send our well-trained army of several tens of thousands to exterminate everyone in your country.’”42 Though the woman is identified as a messenger, it is remotely possible that by identifying the gender of the messenger, Yi may be saying that the message was in her hand, namely, in Korean script. As Japanese scriptural culture consisted of writings in literary Chinese and in Japanese script, it is not impossible that the Japanese hit on the idea of penetrating into the Korean vernacular space.
It was Seoul, the capital, in which the Japanese invested their most intense hopes in projecting their grand vision, even if they were accompanied by an equally sharp sense of disappointment. I mentioned that they entered the capital with such a sense of triumph and that they put posters at all four gates urging residents of the city to return. A considerable number must have returned. After a couple of weeks, however, the Japanese launched a mass killing of Seoul residents. The Miscellaneous Record reports the following in the entry of June 29:
Upon being ordered that they should display their might by exterminating the people, the huge battalion of the Japanese Army stationed in Seoul massacred the residents of the capital. Within half a day, dead bodies filled the streets from the East Gate to the South Gate. Those residents who had surrendered to the Japanese could not flee, and the horrible sight of pools of blood and the mounds of piled human bodies was simply beyond words. After a full day’s massacre, it was stopped. At every gate, they posted the announcements ordering that “men devote yourselves to farming, thus securing your livelihoods, and women to sericulture and weaving.”43
This mayhem is reported to have been tactically motivated. What were the occupiers attempting to do through such a display of force?
There is an indication that this display of force was an overture to the Japanese initiation of a program to remake Koreans into Japanese. In a report to Hideyoshi dated July 16, Buddhist monk Ekei of Ankokuji discussed several items, the first concerning language: it was through written words that communication took place, and when it came to the sound of Chinese characters or spoken language, they were completely different from the patterns of Japanese language. He then asked permission to employ and attach translators to various offices so that Hideyoshi’s laws could be disseminated widely. He volunteered to take charge of the operation. Then he reported what he did in Seoul: “As has been previously discussed in Japan, we have taught the Japanese syllabary (Iroha) to Koreans, shaved adults’ heads bald, shaved boys’ heads in the middle, and used them in subordinate positions. Unlike Japanese children, children here write prose and compose poetry. We order and collect things written in Korean characters (J. Kōrai, K. Koryŏ muncha). We leave them five or ten days and send them out to various places. At present I am employing two or three children, and they are quicker than Japanese.”44 When he says Korean characters, it is not clear whether he refers to writings done in Korean script or in literary Chinese. I have not come across any reference suggesting that the Japanese sent out their orders in Korean script, although one cannot completely eliminate the possibility. The program of imposing Japanese language and customs on Koreans, however, was part of an overall plan for a long-term occupation, and this seems to have been initiated in the capital city. Given the fact that the Japanese stayed in Seoul less than a year, one wonders how far the experiment went. It is most likely that the capital was the first place in which the program was put into practice.
The Retreat
Japanese dreams of turning Seoul into a mirror image of their own cities ended on a bloody note. By the end of 1592 the Japanese occupation was faring badly. They suffered guerilla attacks from the Righteous Army, which took back many key areas in various provinces, and naval victories led by Admiral Yi Sunsin—ten during the summer and early fall of 1592—which cut supply lines from Japan.45 Food provisions that the Japanese took from Korean government granaries ran out. Korean farmers proved to be uncooperative. The winter was cold, especially in the North. According to the Jesuit priest Frois, a confidant of Yukinaga, of 150,000 Japanese soldiers and transport laborers who went to Korea in the first invasion, one-third died, mostly from exhaustion, hunger, cold, and disease.46
The long-awaited Chinese army of 43,000 under the leadership of Supreme Commander General Li Rusong (1549–1598) arrived on January 26, 1593.47 Allied Chinese and Korean troops recaptured P’yŏngyang on February 8. The Ming, equipped with great fire power, especially great cannons, easily defeated the exhausted Japanese. The battle resulted in huge Japanese casualties—1,300 to 1,700 killed, another 500 dying in the flames, and about 6,000 more drowned in the Taedong River. Song Yingchang claimed that only 796 Ming soldiers died.48 The Japanese Army began its retreat south in great disarray, with the allied forces in pursuit. In rapid succession the allied forces recovered P’yŏngan, Hwanghae, and Kangwŏn Provinces, and they took back Kaesŏng city on February 19.
If the Japanese march to south was dejected, it was also cruel. Kiyomasa in particular seems to have expressed his fury by destroying what he could on the way. The Miscellaneous Record describes Kiyomasa’s desecration of the land on his retreat from Hamgyŏng: “Everything turned to red, even waters and mountains changed.” The author then comments that Kiyomasa was the cruelest of Japanese, and the desecration of land and the massacre and looting of villages that his army inflicted could not be compared to what others did.49
The recapture of the capital proved to be more complex. The overconfident Li Rusong lost a battle at Pyŏkchegwan, from which he barely escaped. He returned to P’yŏngyang, and refused to fight.50 As if to compensate for this, determined Koreans won the famous victory of Haengju in which, under the leadership of General Kwŏn Yul, an army of 2,500, in cooperation with the residents of the town, defeated an army of 30,000 Japanese led by such distinguished Japanese leaders as Konishi Yukinaga, Kuroda Nagamasa, Kobayakawa Takakage, and Ukita Hideie.51 Coming after the loss at Pyŏkchegwan, this victory, which has since become a legend producing the term Haengju ch’ima (Haengju skirt) for apron, so named because local women carried stones in their aprons, signaled a stalemate between contending forces. Against Korean objections, the Chinese and Japanese agreed to halt the war and negotiate a peace. The Japanese evacuated Seoul and retreated farther south.
The capital city again became the site on which the Japanese inscribed their disappointed fury. When the Japanese evacuated the capital on May 18, 1593, they chose to decimate its people and to devastate the built city. A number of documents describe the brutal manner in which they left the city. Tajiri Akitane in Korea Diary describes the mayhem: the Japanese “killed all the Chinamen [Tōjin] to a man who were found in the capital and burned all the houses outside the [Japanese] fortifications.”52 The Miscellaneous Record simply says that “the enemy secretly ordered that all the residents be killed, and so all those who had not yet fled were killed.”53 The Revised Veritable Records of Sŏnjo offers a fuller description: “The enemy massacred the residents of the capital. Yukinaga was furious over his defeat at P’yŏngyang. Suspecting that our people were in secret communication with the Chinese, he killed every male in the city. Because women were not killed, some men disguised themselves as women and thus escaped death. They set fire to all the public building and private houses.”54
When Li Rusong and Song Yingchang entered the city, they were horrified at the sight that greeted them: streets filled with dead humans and horses and survivors so starved and emaciated that they looked like ghosts. They ordered that the bodies be burned that very evening.55 It is noteworthy that the chief perpetrator of the massacre was Yukinaga, the strongest proponent of peace talks. Could it be that he destroyed the city to gain an advantage in peace talks with the Ming? It is impossible to know. What is clear is that he was leaving behind a city that he had hoped to remake in the image of a Japanese city inhabited by a people speaking Japanese and wearing Japanese hairdos. The severity of the brutality may have been correlated to the acuteness of his disappointment.
When the Chosŏn court returned to the capital on October 24, 1593, one of Sŏnjo’s first decrees was to purge the residents of Seoul of the Japanese language. The day after he returned to the capital, the king issued an order: “The residents of the capital have been under enemy occupation for a long time, and so some of them might have been infiltrated by Japanese language. Put up special posters strictly forbidding its use. If there are people who use Japanese, place strict restrictions [on their movements] within their respective neighborhoods so that no trace of the enemy’s barbarian language is mixed into ordinary use.”56 To be decontaminated of the Japanese language was a first step toward regaining Korean identity.