Narrowly considered, Hideyoshi's Korean war may seem to have but a tenuous connection with the Pacific at large; but its significance, if negative, was real enough. Immediately, it diverted Japanese attention from a known option to the south; longer-term, its failure seems to have implanted a distaste for expansion and outside contact, a factor in the eventual self-internment of the country. Simply as a strategic study, the war is of great interest, a preview of the Korean campaigns of 1894–5 and even 1950–3. The naval historian must lament the absence of Coelho's promised carracks, which could have tested their technical capacities against the Korean ‘tortoise-boats’, while a European eye-witness account would have been of inestimable interest.

Hideyoshi's main motive seems to have been a megalomaniac lust for glory: Korea in fact was to be but the bridge-head for the conquest of China, a belated revanche for Kublai Khan's attack on Japan through the peninsula, three centuries earlier. Secondary motives probably included the need to divert discontents stirred up by his tough land policies; to find employment for the masterless or landless warriors left over from the wars—the ronin, obviously a potentially dangerous group; and to secure trade without tribute, or even with tribute coming to Japan. The decision was not a sudden impulse; the project had been long in Hideyoshi's mind and may have been taken over from Nobunaga.^[72] Pretext was found in the Chinese refusal to extend facilities for trade by ships licensed under Hideyoshi's ‘Red Seal’, and in that of the Korean king to pay homage and tribute (he was of course already tributary to Peking); he warned Hideyoshi that to attack China would be like ‘a bee stinging a tortoise’, which was more true than tactful.^[73] There were many minor irritations which could be blown up by either side into quarrels—the overlordship of the Ryukyus, piracy—and the diplomatic exchanges were complicated by local vested interests such as those of the daimyo of Tsushima (lying between Japan and Korea), the reasoned policy calculations of competent generals in the field such as Konishi and the unreasoned reactions of other warriors, and the inveterate if very natural tendency of the intermediaries to tamper with their instructions when these would obviously offend the recipient: one Chinese envoy, for example, when reporting to Peking habitually represented a Japanese desire for ‘peace’ as one for ‘submission’.^[74]

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A total of some 225,000 men were mobilised, with Nagoya (in Shikoku, not the modern city on Ise Bay) as the main and Tsushima as the advanced base; organisation was meticulous, and hundreds of craft, small and large, were assembled for transport—the one-time pirates of the Inland Sea found a new opening for their talents. The first three divisions, under Konishi Yukinaga, Kato Kiyomasa, and Kuroda Nagasama, numbered some 52,000. On 24 May 1592, aided by mist, Konishi made an unopposed crossing of the 75–80km between Tsushima and Fusan (or Pusan, the chief southern port of Korea), which he took the next day. He was joined almost at once by Kato and Kuroda; the government of the country was in a miserable state, and the Japanese ‘swept through Korea like a swift wind blowing away dead leaves’; they were much aided by their possession of firearms, which the Koreans lacked.^[75] By 12 June Konishi was in Seoul, having covered 440 km in under twenty days.

In the meantime, however, and almost simultaneously with Konishi's occupation of the capital, the fatal errors in Japanese planning were revealed: the lack of an effective supreme command in the field, Hideyoshi remaining at home, and above all the neglect of sea power. The Korean Court seems not to have taken the threat seriously at first, but even had orders to oppose the crossing been issued, the naval commander at Fusan, Won Kiun, was so worthless that they might not have made much difference. Strategically poised in a group of islands near the southwest corner of the peninsula, however, was his colleague Yi-sun Sin, a man of a very different mettle, and this soon became apparent. The Japanese fleet contained a number of large ships built for war, but on the whole these seem to have been inferior to Korean and Chinese vessels. Probably the Japanese crews and some individual captains were as skilled seamen and sea-fighters as their opponents, and many of them must have had naval experience in Nobunaga's blockade of Osaka (1578) and the Kyushu campaign; but there was no unified command. The squadron commanders were soldiers, and as in the land fighting they were inspired by intense rivalries; but the spirit of ‘marching to the sound of the guns’ was more hazardous at sea, faced as they were with an opponent with superior armament and very clear ideas on how to use it.

By contrast to the Japanese commanders, Yi-sun appears a professional—his achievement in fleet-building alone shows that—and he was an admiral of such resolution, intelligence, and power of leadership that in the second naval campaign (1597–8) the chief of the Chinese contingent served under him, which in view of the normal Chinese stance towards lesser powers would seem almost against nature. He had also the advantage of the ‘tortoise-boats’, which were novel to the Japanese although they did not, as is often implied, spring new-born from Yi-sun's brain—they had a long prehistory in Chinese war-junks. Nor were they, as Ballard styles them, the Dreadnoughts of the time, though perhaps weightier than Sadler's alternative of torpedo-boats.^[76] They probably had some form of armour-plating, certainly a carapace-like deck studded with spikes to cripple the boarders on whom the Japanese relied too much—like another- 171 -Armada only four years earlier, their ships were crammed with troops. The offensive capacity of Yi-sun's ships depended on fire-power—guns (in cannon, as against small arms, they were ahead of the Japanese), fire-arrows, something like Greek fire—and their use of the ram has been generally much exaggerated; by and large, any ramming seems to have been largely incidental.

By 7 June, with Konishi well on the road to Seoul, the main Japanese naval forces were scattered among the numerous off-shore islands west of Fusan, where Yi-sun fell upon them: by 10 July, in seven tactically beautiful actions, he had shattered their flotillas in detail, destroying at least 160 substantial vessels. But by the beginning of September the remaining Japanese ships, still a formidable fleet, were concentrated under the fortifications of Fusan, now turned into a powerful base, and Yi-sun's attack was beaten off. Nevertheless, steady reinforcement and supply of the armies in Korea was made very difficult, and these armies had now to meet counterattack from across the Yalu River.

On 15 July Konishi had taken Pyongyang, and the Korean king had fled to the banks of the Yalu, appealing for aid to his overlord in Peking. In October a small Chinese force was trapped and nearly destroyed in Pyongyang itself, while on Konishi's right Kato had advanced into northeastern Korea, at one point crossing the Tumen into what is now Manchuria. But the Koreans were recovering from their initial collapse; not all their provincial governors were incompetents, some rallied forces and achieved local successes, aided (despite Japanese efforts at conciliatory administration) by a strong guerrilla movement. Resistance throughout the country was hardening, while the alarming naval news from the south weakened the morale of the more thoughtful Japanese leaders. Despite his successes, Konishi accepted a truce. The Chinese were now taking the invasion more seriously, and when they struck again, in February 1593, it was in such force that Konishi had to withdraw to Seoul. Kato fought his way down from the northeast to join him, and together they defeated the Chinese in fierce fighting. But the pressure continued, and in May they felt forced to abandon Seoul pending negotiations, and retreated, unhampered by the Chinese, to a fortified zone covering Fusan.

Hideyoshi was far from disheartened. By this time he seems to have lost touch with reality, and apart from a peace party led by Konishi (and it had to be very cautious) his courtiers did little to help him regain it. He had still a bridge-head in Korea (Konishi realistically saw little point in the half-way policy of hanging on to it), and although the Chinese had virtually left the Koreans out of the war and the negotiations, they themselves had left only a small garrison in Seoul. The Chinese terms for peace included a demand (doubtless much softened in the presentation) that Hideyoshi should be invested by the Chinese Emperor as King of Japan; he countered with demands for the southern provinces of Korea, resumption and extension of the ‘Red Seal’ trade, and the hand of the Emperor's daughter. Negotiations dragged on in an atmosphere of intrigue and arrogance on both sides, with the diplomats tempering their principals' demands- 172 -to the point of deceit. The moment of truth came at the end of 1596, when a Chinese embassy actually brought over the robes for Hideyoshi's investiture as a vassal. A milder man might have exploded as he did.

The war began again in March 1597, but in a different atmosphere from that of 1592. At least the naval lesson had been learnt on one side, lost on the other; Yi-sun had been dismissed through palace intrigue, and his fleet allowed to decay. Won Kiun was in command again and Konishi, now a general at sea, had no difficulty in soundly beating the drunkard who had fled from the first encounter five years before. On land the Japanese advanced with less speed and drive than previously, until in January 1598 they were forced back by new Chinese armies. There were very bitter battles north of Fusan, the Japanese more than holding their own: Konishi bore much of the brunt, surely one of the great subordinate commanders of history. The impasse was resolved in October, when news arrived of Hideyoshi's death on 15 September: there was now no point in staying. But Yi-sun had been recalled and with a reorganised navy he fell upon the retreating squadrons: the Japanese got away with very heavy losses, perhaps half their ships and men. Yi-sun himself was killed in the thick of his last battle.

The Korean war was as futile as any in the long grim competition of futile dynastic wars. It had however some useful economic effects in Japan itself. Korean captives contributed notably to the excellence of Japanese ceramics, one group brought over by Shimazu developing the famous Satsuma ware; more important was the great expansion in ship-building and allied industries.^[77] Politically, the absence from the story of Ieyasu's name is significant: that wary prince sent a small force to Nagoya, but himself sat out the war safely in Kanto, biding his time, which was very near: as in 1582, he could wait for the bird to sing.

The relevance of the war to Pacific history is that it helped to settle the geostrategic position of Japan for over two and a half centuries, estopping a very likely development of incalculable effect. Without the war, it seems all but certain that Hideyoshi would have struck south, to the Philippines. It is inconceivable that the small Spanish forces there, barely beating off Limahon, incapable of definitively subjugating Mindanao and Jolo, with little effective naval power, could have withstood the assault of even a third of the highly organised forces committed to Korea. With the metropolitan base so close and so populous, the manpower would have been available for an easier and more complete subjugation of the local peoples than that achieved by the Spaniards. By the time the Dutch and English arrived in any strength—like the Iberians, at the extreme range of their effective action—the Japanese would have been perfectly capable of meeting them on more than equal terms, and borrowing from them what they needed to adapt to a more open polity. It is easy to envisage, with Ballard, ‘a fleet of Japanese 74′s dominating the whole Western Pacific’.^[78] The statesmen of mercantilist Europe would have had ample cause to thank God for Hideyoshi's folly, had they known of it. Setting aside any- 173 -might-have-beens, the Franciscans who came from Manila to Japan in the 1590s were playing with fire; some of them all too literally.