An Army With Nowhere to Go

By 1590 Toyotomi Hideyoshi had done what nobody had managed in a century: he had unified Japan. He had also inherited the problem that came with it. A hundred years of civil war had produced the largest and most experienced military establishment on earth — hundreds of thousands of professional warriors, a third of them armed with arquebuses they had been using for fifty years — and peace made all of them useless and dangerous. There was no way to send them home.

So he decided to conquer China. Korea was simply the road: he informed the Joseon court that it could either join the invasion or be trampled by it, and appears to have genuinely expected to rule from Beijing within a few years. He was already assigning court appointments in an empire he had not reached.

Korea had been at peace for two hundred years and had no idea what was about to happen to it. The court sent two envoys to Japan in 1590 to assess Hideyoshi's intentions; they came back with directly opposite reports, split along the factional lines of Easterners and Westerners, and King Seonjo chose to believe the one that meant he need do nothing. The army was a paper establishment. The fortresses were unrepaired.

One official disagreed. Ryu Seong-ryong argued for years that the invasion was coming, and in 1591 he used what influence he had to push a twice-demoted, badly connected officer named Yi Sun-sin into an obscure naval command in the southern province of Jeolla, over the objections of better-connected men. Yi spent the next year repairing ships, drilling crews, and building strange armoured vessels for a war his government had officially decided was not coming.

On May 25, 1592, Konishi Yukinaga's First Division came ashore at Busan and asked for passage. The garrison commander refused. At Dongnae, the magistrate Song Sang-hyeon wrote on a wooden placard: it is easy to die, but hard to let you pass. Both fortresses fell in a day.