The History of Korea (vol. 1 of 2)

by Homer B. Hulbert

Korea and Japan may be said to have been at two opposite poles. Beginning with Korea, we notice, first, that her relations with the Ming dynasty were eminently peaceful. Unlike the Mongols of an earlier date and the Manchus of a later date the Mings did not have their origin in the north, and therefore were brought less into contact with Korea along her northern border. They belonged to central China and were not a horde of brutal pillagers as were the Mongols and Manchus. Hence it was that so long as Korea was friendly and held her own way quietly the Ming emperors concerned themselves very little about her. To this day Korea looks back to the Ming dynasty as her true patron and realizes that the Manchu supremacy is an alien one. Korea had been strongly unified by the statesmanship of the first kings of the Cho-sŭn dynasty, the present one, and had been ruled so well as a general thing that there was no sense of insecurity and no particular fear from the outside except such as arose from the occasional irruption of a northern tribe or a piratical raid of a few boatloads of Japanese. The only need of a standing army was to guard herself from such attacks. The arts of peace flourished, the country was peaceful, there is little reason to believe that she was sunken, as many have averred, into a state of shameful effeminacy. In fact there is much to indicate the opposite, for almost up to the very year in which the invasion occurred the policy of reform instituted by king Se-jong was adhered to and the rulers, however unwarlike they may have been, surely did much for the sake of literature, art and public morals. You will scarcely find in the annals of history that the kings who ruled during times of great public degeneracy, when luxury sapped the vital power of the nation, spent their time in giving to the people treatises on moral, scientific, social and literary topics as these kings unquestionably did even up to the day when the Japanese cataclysm swept the country. It had not been a hundred years since an unworthy king had been driven from the throne by his disgusted people and been refused the posthumous title. That king was succeeded by one who made the land even puritanic in the severity of its morals, who fostered the arts and sciences as hardly any other had done and who crowned his work by publishing the Ok-pyŭn, which marked an era in the literary life of the people. He had been followed in turn by a king who continued the work of progress and among other things caused the construction of a complicated astronomical instrument. The following reign was the one in which the invasion occurred. No candid reader can believe that the country was steeped in such absolute degeneracy as the Japanese annalists would have us believe, and which other writers who had not access to the Korean annals have described. But some may say that the good work of Korean kings does not necessarily argue a good people. This again is a mistake, for there could scarcely be found a people that has taken their cue more directly from the court than have the Korean people. When the kings have been lax the people have followed the example and when the kings have been true men the people have been brought back to honest living. The refutation of this calumny then needs but a careful perusal of the Korean annals; not those which have been written under government sanction and are therefore unreliable but those which, like these, have been drawn from the private and popular histories of the dynasty and are presumably reliable. For centuries Korea had been at peace, except for insignificant uprisings on the border, and the arts of peace had gradually taken the place of martial prowess. A man is not an object of contempt simply because he is not a warrior. If he is, then let us go back to the peat-smoke of our ancestral hovels.

Having shown this reason for Korea’s inability to hold the[the] Japanese in check to have been a false one it will be necessary to account for it in some other way. This can easily be done. The reason was three-fold. In the first place the Korean people, having no use for a large standing army, had not been trained in large numbers to military life. Secondly the Japanese were armed with firearms while the Koreans had absolutely none. The first firearm that was ever seen in Korea was given the king by a Japanese envoy just at the outbreak of the invasion, as we shall see. This alone would account for Korea’s inability to cope with the islanders. In the third place the rise of the political parties had brought in a spirit of jealousy which made it impossible for any man to reach celebrity without calling down upon himself the hatred of the opposing party and his consequent ruin. This we deem the main cause of Korea’s weakness. The following pages will show whether this view is upheld by facts or not. It was the mutual jealousies of opposing parties that proved the bane of the land and not the supineness and effeminacy of the people.

We must now glance at Japan and see of what stuff the invaders were made. Unlike the Korean people, the Japanese had never been welded into a homogeneous mass. Feudalism was the most marked feature of Japanese life. It has been but thirty years since Japan became a unit. It was feudalism and its consequent spirit of liberty (for feudalism is liberty in embryo) that made possible Japan’s phenomenal development during the past three decades. Her feudalism is therefore not to be decried, but one of its necessary evils was a state of almost continual civil war. For two centuries preceding the invasion of Korea Japan had been one great battlefield. War was the great occupation of the people. While Korea had been busy producing Japan had been busy destroying and when at last Hideyoshi, the great Shogun, found himself the virtual ruler of a temporarily quiet kingdom he had on hand an enormous army which must either be given occupation or must be disbanded. The latter he dared not do and the former he could not do without finding a field[a field] of operation abroad. But we are anticipating.

It is well known that the government[government] of Japan was not administered by the emperor in person but by an official called the Taiko, or Kwan-băk as the Koreans say. For about two centuries this office had been in the hands of a family named Wŭn. Hideyoshi had been a retainer in the family of the Taiko. Being a bold and successful fighter he won his way to a generalship and from this point[point] of vantage killed the Taiko and assumed that title himself. It had been the dream of his life to strike at China. He had tried it once unsuccessfully by boat, attacking her at Chŭl-gang. He now changed his plan and decided to make Korea a stepping stone to the conquest of the Ming empire. His initial move was based on his statement “Year after year our envoys have gone to Korea but they never send one in return.”

In pursuance of this policy a Japanese envoy named Yasuhiro appeared at the Korean court in 1587 bearing a harshly worded and insulting letter demanding that the king send an envoy to Japan. The only notice[an envoy to Japan. The only notice] taken of this demand was a polite note in which the king stated that as the journey by sea was a long one and the Koreans were not good sailors he would have to be excused from complying with the demand. When[When] Yasuhiro placed this missive in the hands of his master he was promptly ordered into the hands of the executioner.

The opening of the year 1588 found Korea still suffering from outbreaks of the far northern[northern] border and Gen. Yi Il took a small force of men, crossed the Tu-man River on the ice and attacked the Chin-do tribe. Being successful in this he[he] took 2000 men, crossed the same river at four different points simultaneously[simultaneously] and attacked the Si-jun tribe by night, burning 200 houses and killing 300 people.

In the spring of this year there arrived from Japan a second envoy, or rather three envoys, Yoshitoshi, Tairano Tsuginobu and a monk Gensho. Of these Yoshitoshi was the chief. He is described by the Koreans as being a young man, but coarse and violent and of such a fierce nature that the other members of his suite dared come into his presence only on their knees. They dared not look him in the face. Yoshitoshi and his suite were comfortably quartered at the Tong-p‘ŭng-gwan near the present Japanese settlement in Seoul, and having renewed the demand that Korea send an envoy to Japan, he waited month after month hoping that the king would accede to the demand and fearing to go back without success lest he should meet the same fate that Yasuhiro the former envoy had suffered.

At last the king announced that he would send an envoy to Japan on one condition, namely that the Japanese government seize and send back to Korea a number of Korean renegades who, under the leadership of one Sa Wha-dong, had run away to Japan and had since led marauding bands of Japanese against the southern seaboard of Korea. To this condition the Japanese envoy gladly consented and Tairano was despatched to Japan to carry it out. But it was not till the seventh moon of the following year, 1589, that the pirate Sa Wha-dong and three Japanese freebooters together with certain other Koreans were brought back from Japan and delivered up to justice. With them came a letter from the Japanese government saying “We are not responsible for the evil deeds of these men. The Korean Sa Wha-dong is the cause of this trouble; so we send them all to you and you must mete out to them such punishment as you see fit.” The culprits were immediately decapitated outside the West Gate. This seems to have thawed somewhat the reserve of the king and Yoshitoshi was called to the palace for the first time, where he was presented by the king with a handsome steed while he in turn gave the king a peacock and some firearms, the first that had ever been seen in Korea.

Late in the year a dangerous conspiracy was discovered, the prime mover being Chöng Yo-rip of Chŭl-la Province. He had arranged a plan by which he and several friends of his in Whang-hă Province should rise simultaneously and overthrow the government. A certain monk in Ku wŭl mountain in Whang-hă Province discovered that a certain man, Cho Ku, was working diligently among the people, taking names, sending numerous letters and in other ways acting in a suspicious manner. He believed the man was a traitor and told the prefect of An-ak to be on the lookout. The latter arrested the man and examined him. It was then elicited that a widespread rebellion was being gotten up. When the news was told the king secretly he called together his officials and asked “What sort of a man is this Chöng Yo-rip?” Some said they did not know but the Prime Minister said that he was a good scholar and an exemplary[exemplary] man. The king then[then] threw upon the floor the letter telling about the plot and exclaimed “Read that and see what sort of a man he is.”

The traitor Chöng had gotten wind of the discovery and had fled with his son to Chi-nan Mountain in Chŭl-la Province but he was pursued and surrounded. Rather than be taken he cut his own throat and expired. His son and his nephew were taken back to Seoul and executed. The nephew under torture affirmed that the Prime Minister and a large number of other officials were privy to the plot. This was the more easily believed because the Prime Minister had insisted that Chöng was a good man. So he and two others were banished. It is affirmed on good authority that the Prime Minister and the other who suffered were innocent of the charge, and that it was simply one of the deplorable results of party jealousy and strife. We here have a striking instance of the cause of Korea’s weakness.