Chinese off that Katō Kiyomasa was on his way to level the city. This seems not to have been
necessarily aimed at annoying Katō, but at ensuring that the town was deserted when the Japanese
arrived.
Katō Kiyomasa was determined to take Chinju, to tear down its walls, to fill in its wells and
massacre its inhabitants, as a lesson to any other Korean cities that dared to hold out. The people of
Chinju either did not receive or did not appreciate Augustin Konishi’s warning, and stayed walled up
in their town, the local garrison’s numbers swelled by many thousands of refugees. So it was that
when Katō, Konishi and Ukita pitched camp around the city, there was no longer any way out. The
siege of Chinju was bizarrely fought more over architecture than ground. In late July, Japanese
attempts to raise a mound and siege tower, so that they could shoot over the walls, were matched
by a Korean tower-building exercise inside the city. The Koreans won, by getting cannons on their
own tower ahead of the Japanese, and blowing up the rival siege-work.
A second Japanese attack aimed at dismantling the city walls, literally stone by stone, as
shielded engineers picked and hacked at the lowermost stones under a hail of missiles from the
defenders. Heavy rain brought a temporary respite to the guns and cannon, but also further
undermined the weakened walls. After several days of siege, a portion of the city wall collapsed, and
Katō’s men poured through the gap. Some of the Korean soldiers threw themselves off the wall.
Others made a stand, but to no avail - the Japanese killed every living thing in the city that had
resisted them, and then levelled the area during a massacre that cost an estimated 60,000 Korean
lives, many of them women and Children.
Most notable among the defenders of Chinju was Non-gae, a kisaeng (entertainer, roughly
equivalent to the Japanese geisha), who enticed one of the celebrating samurai over to her, grabbed
him in a bear hug, and then leapt to both their deaths in the river below.
In the month that followed, Hideyoshi’s negotiators and the Chinese envoys, now back in
Korea, carefully twisted the words and terms of the treaty. The Koreans themselves were given no
say in the negotiations, which, once all the bluster and misdirection was cut out, now seemed to
revolve largely around whether the Japanese could keep the southern part of the Korean peninsula
for themselves, or whether they would leave. The ‘negotiations’, mostly comprising the long wait for
letters and envoys to travel to Beijing and back by the circuitous land route, would lead to three
years of waiting, and a cessation of hostilities.
Augustin Konishi had carefully dismantled all of Hideyoshi’s outrageous demands, and now
finalized his deception by forging a letter from Hideyoshi himself, in which the ruler of Japan
humbled himself and his country before the greatness of the Chinese Emperor, and begged to be
invested as a king in other words, as a vassal of China. Hideyoshi himself was entirely unaware of
this, and believed that the Chinese had agreed to stay out of Korea while Hideyoshi began a
renewed campaign that would bring the peninsula firmly under his rule. ‘We regard Korea’, he
decreed, ‘as part of our domain, the same as Kyūshū However, the same decree shows an indication
that Hideyoshi was dimly aware of trouble in the ranks, with an order for the men in Korea to stop
complaining, as they were currently working less hard for the war effort than many of their
compatriots back on Japanese soil.
In the meantime, however, the Korean King was back in Seoul, the harvests were soon
collected in the north, and the survivors of the Japanese invasion were able to make preparations for
a new counterattack. The Korean authorities were fully aware of Konishi’s forgery, and suspected
that it would only be a matter of time before the deception was uncovered and the war
recommenced. The Koreans now took musketry seriously, and trained specialized units designed to
deal with samurai opponents armed with arquebuses.
There was also infighting on both sides. Continued shortages, outbreaks of disease and a
distinct lack of loyalty to Hideyoshi’s cause led many Japanese to desert. Some sneaked back to their
farms in Japan, although several thousand actually defected to the other side, and would live out
their days as Koreans. Meanwhile, rival commanders among the Koreans attempted to slander the
achievements of Admiral Yi, while among the Japanese, Konishi tried to blame Katō for atrocities like