The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

WAR AND PEACE 275

thousand led by Kato Kiyomasa and Nabeshima Naoshige traversed

eastern Hwanghae and after a week's march entered Hamgyong Prov-

ince,

its objective. It took the Japanese little more than two months to

subdue the populated portions of this huge and mountainous territory,

the northeastern quarter of Korea, which stretched from south of the

thirty-ninth parallel all the way to the forty-third, where it touches the

Tumen River. In the process, Kato captured two Korean princes of

the blood royal: Fleeing to the northernmost extremity of their coun-

try, the two had the ill luck or bad judgment to seek refuge in a penal

colony, Hoeryong on the Tumen, where the political exiles lost no time

in putting them and their retinue in chains and delivering them into

the hands of the Japanese.

Having scored this success, Kato permitted himself

the

luxury of an

expedition across the Tumen into Manchuria, for no apparent purpose

except to test the mettle of his troops against the Jiirched tribesmen

who roamed there. Nabeshima in the meantime kept himself busy in

the rearward area of Hamgyong Province regimenting the populace,

requisitioning supplies, and registering the land's capacity to be taxed.

Still extant are the assessment rolls

(sashidashi)

of six districts, com-

piled for Nabeshima over the signatures of local Korean officials who

vowed accuracy on pain of "having all our heads cut off." True to their

master's orders that they treat their conquered areas "according to

Japanese rules" (Nihon

okime

gotoku),

the generals of Hideyoshi's

occupation forces in Korea taxed the peasants, confiscated their weap-

ons,

coerced them by taking hostages, and ruthlessly put down recalci-

trants as though they were subjecting yet another Japanese province to

his regime of unification through the methods of the Taiko

kenchi.

Thus they took up in Hamgyong in 1592 where they had left off in

Mutsu and Dewa in 1591.

On returning from his Manchurian expedition to his headquarters

at Anbyon, Kato boasted that he had pacified the whole province,

from north to south, in such a way.that there was not the slightest

opposition to the regimen laid down by him. Taxes and dues were

being paid; in other provinces, where a slack hand was kept, distur-

bances might occur, but there need be no fear about Hamgyong, Kato

60 Shimokawa Heidayu, comp., Kiyomasa Korai nojin oboegaki, vol. 4 oiZokuzoku

gunsho ruiju

(Tokyo: Kokusho kankokai, 1907), p. 299.

61 On the Japanese military administration and the tax rolls in Hamgyong, see Kitajima,

Chosen

nichinichiki,

pp. 97-107. Hideyoshi's orders of 1592.6.3 can be found in several collections of

documents, for example, that addressed to Hashiba Kobayakawa Jiju (Kobayakawa Taka-

kage),

in Dai Nihon

komonjo,

iewake 11: Kobayakawa-ke

monjo,

vol. 1, no. 323, p. 292.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

276 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

maintained.

But his bluster was misplaced. What Kato evidently did

not know at the time of writing this report to Hideyoshi's headquar-

ters at Nagoya was that a successful revolt had already broken out

against the Korean collaborators whom he had left in charge of the

province's northern reaches. A Japanese punitive force attacked the

guerrillas but was defeated and bottled up in the fort of Kilchu for the

winter. Indeed, as the people of southern Hamgyong also rose against

the rule of Nabeshima, killing the rural administrators who served him

and then taking to the hills, it became apparent that the Japanese

controlled no more of the province than the string of forts that they

garrisoned along the coastal highway. In the Japanese sources, these

revolts are described as

Tojin

ikki.

Tojin

being

term with an opprobri-

ous connotation, the phrase might be translated as "Chinamen's upris-

ings."

Naturally enough, those who came to conquer in the name of

Jingu Kogo could not worry themselves about such tenuous details as

calling the Korean people by their proper name, Koreans.

The

early

signs of a stalemate

It is noteworthy that the Japanese field staff in Seoul - Ishida Mitsu-

nari (1560-1600) and others detailed by Hideyoshi to coordinate opera-

tions in Korea - should have sent Kato instructions to withdraw from

Hamgyong even before Konishi's defeat at P'yongyang made the Japa-

nese position in northern Korea untenable. Kato and his troops were

more urgently needed in the southern part of the peninsula, and in

particular in Kyongsang, the gateway province, where the Japanese

hold was far from secure. There Korean guerrillas swarmed about the

Japanese lines of communication. They threatened the main route of

supply between Pusan and Seoul, and by year's end they had repelled

all attempts by Hosokawa Tadaoki (daimyo of Miyazu in Tango, 1563-

1646) to dislodge them from their stronghold at Chinju. Kyongsang

Province, to be sure, had been a hotbed of resistance against the Japa-

nese from the beginning of the invasion, but it

was

no means

unique.

Popular uprisings and the mobilization of irregular troops, typically

led by members of the local gentry, took place sooner or later in every

province of Korea that the aggressors entered. Irregular troops con-

tained the penetration of the army of Kobayakawa Takakage (daimyo

of Najima in Chikuzen, 1533-97) into Cholla Province in the seventh

62 Kato Kiyomasa to Ki(noshita) Hansuke, dated [Tensho 20.] 9.20; Kitajima, Chosen nichi-

nichiki, pp. 117-19.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

WAR AND PEACE 277

month of 1592 and cleared the province of invaders two months later.

Guerrillas and militia harried the divisions led by Mori Yoshinari

(daimyo of Kokura, d. 1611) and Shimazu Yoshihiro (daimyo of Ku-

rino in Osumi, 1535-1619) as they crisscrossed Kangwon Province.

By the end of the eighth month, these Japanese forces were confined to

garrisoning the towns that screened the approaches to Seoul along

Kangwon's western border - Wonju, Ch'unch'on, Kumhwa, and

Ch'orwon - and had abandoned the effort to dominate the rest of the

province. In Hwanghae Province, Dom Damiao Kuroda (Nagamasa,

daimyo of Nakatsu in Buzen, 1568-1623) began his occupation with

bravado, calling on the absconding peasants to return to farming or be

killed, and compiling the inevitable taxation rolls. After he failed to

take the strategic town of Yonan from guerrilla forces, however,

Kuroda was by the beginning of the ninth month compelled to concen-

trate his troops in the southeastern corner of the province in order to

protect the highway between Seoul and P'yongyang. For the Japanese,

the days of easy victories were over. Everywhere, Hideyoshi's armies

bogged down.

By the beginning of the new year Bunroku 2 (or, by the Chinese

calendar which also applied to Korea, Wan-li

21),

the Japanese had yet

to suffer a major defeat on land, but they had been put on the defen-

sive,

almost without realizing it, by a pesky and persistent Korean

resistance. Korean regular troops, unused to war, were no match for

the Japanese soldiers, who had been made expert in their craft in the

battles of unification. Korean guerrillas were beaten time and again

when they could be cornered into a fight. And yet the Japanese failed

to obtain a free hand in Korea. The areas they thought they had

conquered refused to stay pacified; they held no more than corridors

through a hostile countryside. Along those corridors, the Japanese did

not dare to venture in bands of less than three hundred; north of

Seoul, at least five hundred were needed for safety.

Adding to their difficulties on land were the reverses the Japanese

suffered at sea. Unlike the army, the Korean navy proved itself supe-

rior to the Japanese in the quality of its armament and leadership. The

Japanese with their mixture of light raiding craft inherited from the

bahan

trade and the lubberly men-of-war called

atake-bune

could not

match the more solid and also more maneuverable Korean vessels. In

particular, the celebrated "turtle ships"

(kobuk son)

gave them trouble.

63 Frois, Hisioria, pt. 3, chap. 75, ed. Wicki, vol. 5, p. 571; Matsuda and Kawasaki, trans.,

Furoisu

Nihonshi, vol. 2, p. 261.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

278 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

These were not ironclads, as is commonly asserted, but stoutly built

wooden ships that had convex decks spiked with sharp pieces of metal

to discourage boarding; they were armed with upward of fourteen

cannon. There were never more than a few of them (ultimately per-

haps as many as five), but they constituted the core of a formidable

striking force that repeatedly surprised and beat the Japanese. Under

the inspired tactical leadership of Naval Commander Yi Sun-sin, the

Korean fleet fought a series of ten victorious engagements along the

southern coast between Sach'on and Pusan in the summer and early

fall of

1592.

These Korean victories forced the Japanese to reduce the

scope of their naval operations to a passive defense of the sea-lane

between Kyushu, Tsushima, and Pusan. The Japanese fleet was kept

out of the Yellow Sea and thus was unable to establish communications

with the land forces that had advanced north as far as P'yongyang, let

alone supply them.

Supplies to the forward armies of the invaders therefore had to be

carried on the backs of men or horses, along insecure roads, two-thirds

of the way up the Korean peninsula. This logistical necessity severely

taxed the organizational ability of the Japanese warlords and increased

their manpower needs: They either had to impress more of the elusive

Koreans into work gangs or transport more of the equally reluctant

Japanese laborers across the sea. At first, the Japanese were confident

that they could live off

the

land, especially as huge amounts of

rice

and

other cereals stored in Korean government granaries had fallen into

their hands. According to the chief state councilor of Korea, Yu Song-

nyong, they captured over 100,000 Korean

soft

(more than 767,000 U.S.

bushels, or 270,000 hectoliters) of tax grains in P'yongyang alone.

But

this cornucopia eventually had to run

empty.

Putting the peasants back

to work in the fields and then requisitioning the product of their work

from them became, accordingly, urgent tasks for the Japanese occupa-

tion forces. Whatever success the quartermasters had at these tasks

evidently did not suffice to keep all their troops provisioned until the

end of the campaign. The Jesuit Frois states that of the 150,000 Japa-

nese soldiers and transport laborers who crossed over to Korea in the

first invasion, one-third died - few of them through enemy action, and

most from exhaustion, hunger, cold, and disease. The Korean losses in

dead and in prisoners, he says, were incalculably greater.

64 Vu Song-nyong (Soae), Chingbirok, pt. I, f. 35V, facsimile of the 1633 ed., in Soae

munjip

Chingbirok (Seoul: Songgyungwan taehakkyo taedong munhwa yonguwdn, 1958), p. 509.

65 Frois, Historia, pt. 3, chap. 79, ed. Wicki, vol. 5, p. 599; Matsuda and Kawasaki, trans.,

Furoisu

Nihonshi, vol. 2, p. 304.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

WAR AND PEACE 279

The intervention of Ming China

The Koreans, however, could not hope to expel the invaders from

their land by themselves, and it was not the various logistical and

organizational difficulties suffered by the Japanese that doomed the

first invasion to failure. Rather, its fate was sealed by an external

factor, the intervention of Korea's protector power, Ming China.

The first Chinese troops crossed the Yalu into Korea on the day

P'yongyang was occupied by the Japanese, 1592.6.15. Amounting to

no more than three thousand men, they were led into a debacle by an

overconfident commander who had them attack the far superior Japa-

nese garrison of P'yongyang

month later. The Chinese withdrew, but

even in defeat they inflicted a rude shock on the Japanese generals, the

more perspicacious among whom realized that it was only a matter of

time before this new enemy would reappear in strength. At the other

end of the theater of

war,

off the southeastern tip of

the

peninsula, the

Japanese naval forces were in the meantime being battered by the

Korean fleet of Yi Sun-sin and were finally ordered by Hideyoshi to

avoid engagements at sea. Hence it was clear that the initiative was

slipping from the Japanese.

Yu Song-nyong observed correctly that the Korean naval victory

spoiled the entire strategy of the invaders by "cutting off one of the

arms"

with which Japan tried to envelop Korea, isolating Konishi

Yukinaga's army at P'yongyang and securing Chinese waters from the

fear of a Japanese attack, so that "the Celestial Army could come by

land to the assistance" of Korea.

The Chinese, however, could not

commit major forces to Korea until they had dealt with a Mongol

rebellion in Ning-hsia, on the distant northwestern frontier of the

Ming Empire. They therefore initiated pourparlers with Konishi

Yukinaga, who agreed to a fifty-day truce. The Ming emissary, Shen

Wei-ching, may have intimated to Konishi that his government would

66 Chingbirok, pt. I, f. 43, in Soae munjip, p. 513. The reference is to the victory of Admiral Yi

Sun-sin at Hansan Island, 1592.7.7 (7.8 in the Korean and Chinese calendar), which was

followed two days later by another off Angolp'o. See Yi Sun-sin's own report on these

engagements, dated Wan-li 20 (1592).7.15: Chosenshi henshukai, ed.,Nanjungilgich'o, Imjin

changch'o I

Ranchunikkiso,Jinshinjdsd, in

Chosen shiryd

sokan,

vol. 6, (1935), pp. 337-48; Ha

Tae-hung, trans., and Lee, Chong-young, ed., Imjin

Changch'o:

Admiral Yi

Sun-sin's

Memori-

als to Court (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1981), no. 9, pp. 56-68. Cf.

Wakisaka

ki, in Zoku

gunsho ruiju, vol. 20, demivol. 2, kan 593(a), pp. 440-2. Hideyoshi's orders to cease naval

operations until further notice, addressed to Todo Sado no Kami (Takatora), are dated

[Tensho 20J7.16, the day of the Chinese defeat at P'yongyang; document in Kitajima,

Chosen

nichinichiki, pp. 184-5.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

28O JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

not be averse to a partition of Korea at the Taedong River.

In any

event, the Japanese considered the talks not only opportune but also

promising. The Chinese, however, actually meant to use the truce

period for no other purpose but to marshal their forces.

When Shen Wei-ching again came to P'yongyang for negotiations at

the end of the truce, he would promise nothing more than that the

Chinese government would consider resuming diplomatic and trade

relations with Japan (and, as the precondition, investing a "King of

Japan") if the Japanese first withdrew from Korea altogether. To be

sure,

Shen could afford

tough negotiating attitude, because he knew

that a Chinese army of forty thousand men under the command of Li

Ju-sung was about to march into Korea. Despite all the signs that

pointed to a massive Chinese intervention, however, the Japanese were

as surprised and as overwhelmed when it occurred as General Douglas

MacArthur's United Nations forces would be in a similar situation

three and a half centuries later. Unaware of the enemy army's ap-

proach until the Chinese were practically on top of

them,

the Japanese

were routed from P'yongyang on Bunroku 2.1.7 (February 8, 1593)

and retreated southward in great disorder. Nine days later, Dom Agos-

tinho Konishi's frostbitten soldiers stumbled into Seoul, and a week

after that, they put that city to fire and the sword, "killing to a man all

the Chinamen

[Tojiri]

that there were in the capital and burning all the

houses outside the [Japanese] fortifications."

As this carnage was taking place in the streets outside their quarters,

the members of Hideyoshi's field staff gathered to compose a gloomy

report to their master on the unavoidable reasons for the withdrawal of

his forward divisions as far back as Seoul, the critical need to secure

the routes of communication south to Pusan, and the precarious sup-

ply situation of his troops. In short, they saw the imperative demand

for going over to the defensive in Korea. As the Chinese closed in on

the Korean capital, however, its Japanese occupiers showed that their

forces were far from spent, by mounting a sharp counterattack. Sally-

ing forth in eight detachments that totaled more than forty thousand

men, they succeeded in trapping the vanguard of Li Ju-sung's army in

a long and narrow valley at Pyokchegwan, some fifteen kilometers

67 Kitajima, Chosen nichinichiki, p. 204.

68 Tajiri Akitane, Korai nikki, entry for Bunroku 2 (1593). 1.23, in Kitajima,

Chosen

nichinichiki,

384. Sonjo Sogydng Taewang sillok, 27:5, entry for S6njo 26 (1593)1, states that Konishi

and other Japanese, enraged by their defeat at P'yongyang and suspecting the Korean popula-

tion of aiding the Chinese army, massacred the male citizens of Seoul but not the women, so

that men who disguised themselves in female clothes escaped the slaughter. See Choson

wangjo sillok, vol. 25, p. 637.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

WAR AND PEACE 28l

north of

Seoul,

and slaughtered the Chinese cavalry as it floundered in

the mud of this impasse. Li Ju-sung fled with the rest of his troops to

P'yongyang. Left exposed by his headlong retreat was the fort of

Haengju, at a strong hilltop position on the Han River fifteen kilome-

ters downstream from Seoul, which was held by a Korean garrison.

Intent on eliminating this thorn from their side, the Japanese tried to

storm Haengju with an assault force of thirty thousand, but they were

resoundingly defeated and fell back on Seoul.

Diplomacy, deceit, and

disillusion

The victory of the Japanese at Pyokchegwan coupled with their defeat

at Haengju showed that a stalemate had developed. The Japanese were

no longer strong enough to pursue a sustained offensive against either

the Chinese or the newly confident Koreans, but they were still too

powerful to be displaced from Seoul if they chose to cling to it. In-

deed, at the beginning of the third month of

1593,

with the division of

Kato and Nabeshima back from Hamgyong, there were no less than

53,000 of them in the city.

Two things were done to encourage the Japanese to leave. First, a

Chinese commando penetrated Seoul and burned the storehouses at

Yongsan, destroying most of what was left of the Japanese troops'

depleted stocks of food. Next, Shen Wei-ching made another appear-

ance to conduct negotiations. Threatened by Shen with an attack by

an army of 400,000 Chinese and aware of their own weak position,

Konishi and Kato agreed to an armistice under which the Japanese

troops would be withdrawn to the Pusan area while the Ming forces

were called back to China; a Ming embassy would be sent to Japan to

discuss peace terms. Notably ignored in this agreement were the

wishes of the Koreans, who vowed to

fight

on. Ten days after the talks,

however - on 1593.4.18 - the Japanese evacuated Seoul, marching off

to be redeployed in the southeastern corner of the peninsula and the

islands off Pusan. Along with them went Shen Wei-ching and two

special agents of the supreme commander of the Chinese forces in

Korea, masquerading as regular diplomats. On 5.15, this group of

Chinese negotiators arrived in Nagoya, where Hideyoshi received

them as Ming imperial envoys. Among the several displays he orga-

nized to impress them was a tea ceremony in his golden tearoom, that

ne plus ultra of ostentation.

As the Ming agents were about to depart late the next month,

Hideyoshi set down his terms for peace in a document addressed to

282 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

Konishi Yukinaga and his other principal representatives in the nego-

tiations, who were ordered to "explain the contents in detail to the

imperial envoys of Great Ming." Seven conditions were put forward: a

daughter of the Chinese sovereign to become the consort of the em-

peror of Japan; the tally trade between Japan and China to resume;

high officials of the two countries to exchange pledges of amity; four

provinces and the capital city to be returned to the king of Korea (that

is,

the four southern provinces of Korea to be annexed to

Japan);

high-

ranking Korean hostages to be sent to Japan; the two captive Korean

princes to be set free; and the Korean government to swear never

again to oppose Japan. Given the existing situation in Korea, Hide-

yoshi was being overly optimistic if he really expected to get all that he

demanded.

That Hideyoshi felt absolutely justified in making his demands,

however, is clear from the language of a companion piece that he

likewise addressed to Konishi and his other delegates but meant for

the edification of the Ming agents. The tone of this undiplomatic note

is established in its first sentence, "Japan is the Land of the Gods."

Those gods have given Hideyoshi a special mandate. After rehearsing

the story of his solar conception and reiterating that the power to unify

Japan was a virtue bestowed on him by Heaven, Hideyoshi gets down

cases.

It is true that Japanese pirates in the past had bothered China,

but one of Hideyoshi's most radiant accomplishments in the "rectifica-

tion of the eight heavenly directions" was to quell the

wako

and secure

the seas. For this favor, however, he never got any thanks from Ming.

Assuming the reason to be that Ming despised Japan as an insignifi-

cant country, he decided to send an army to prove otherwise. Korea

promised to cooperate but failed to keep that promise. When Hide-

yoshi accordingly set out to "correct" the Koreans, they had the temer-

ity to defend themselves. As a result, many thousands of them had to

be killed, and their capital was turned to ashes. China tried to save its

client but failed. And so the present mutual predicament - the Chi-

nese are informed in the peroration - is entirely Korea's fault.

Would the man who used this sort of rhetoric ever be satisfied with

investiture as "King of Japan," that is, as a vassal of the Ming Empire?

How could a child of the sun ever accept tributary subordination? But

69 Both the list of peace conditions and the explanatory document are addressed to Konishi

Settsu no Kami Yukinaga, Otani Gyobu no Sho Yoshitsugu, Mashita Uemon no Jo Nagamori,

and Ishida Jibu no Sho Mitsunari, and dated Bunroku 2.6.28 (the day the Chinese agents left

Nagoya). See Zoku zenrin kokuhoki, pp. 404-6. The four Korean provinces that Hideyoshi

wanted to annex were Kyongsang, Cholla, Ch'ungch'ong, and Kyonggi (less the Seoul area).

WAR AND PEACE 283

that ritual of subservience was China's traditional sine qua non for the

conduct of foreign relations. Whether or not Hideyoshi knew it, it was

the indispensable condition he would have to meet or surmount before

he could press forward his and Japan's claims in Asia.

Hideyoshi's diplomatists (most notably Dom Agostinho Konishi),

who appreciated the actualities far better than he did, were put in a

quandary by their master's presumptuousness. They were expected to

obtain a settlement that would aggrandize him; yet they knew that no

accommodation with China could be gained on his terms. When Dom

Joao Naito (Naito Hida no Kami Tadatoshi, d. 1626), the emissary

that Konishi sent to the Ming court to explain away the Korean inva-

sion, was held up in Liaotung Province because the Chinese authori-

ties there considered his credentials incomplete without a message of

submission from Japan, it became evident that this dilemma could be

solved only by desperate means.

The matter was not referred back to Japan; rather, Konishi dealt

with it in his Korean fort at Ungch'on. Apparently persuaded by Shen

Wei-ching that a forged letter was better than no letter at all, Konishi

connived at the manufacture of a document in which "the former

kampaku

of Japan, [Your Majesty's] subject Taira no Hideyoshi" in the

most abject terms declared himself to be in awe of the "power of

heavenly protection" that flowed from the throne of China to keep the

four corners of the world at peace, and proclaimed all of Japan to be

the children of the emperor of Ming. Korea interfered with Hide-

yoshi's earlier desire to demonstrate his submissiveness to China, and

hence he invaded Korea; a peaceful solution was achieved at P'yong-

yang through the efforts of Konishi and Shen Wei-ching but was

ruined by Korean bellicosity; nevertheless, the Japanese showed a

"forbearing sincerity" toward the Koreans and returned them their

land. Now - the forged document continued - Hideyoshi wished to

bare his heart before the Chinese sovereign: "I prostrate myself and I

beg Your Majesty to let that light of the sun and moon shine forth with

which He irradiates the world, to extend that nourishing capacity of

heaven and earth with which He overspreads and sustains all things

that there are . . . and to bestow on me the title of an imperially

invested vassal king."

70 The text of the forged document, dated Wan-li 21 (1593). 12.-, is cited and glossed with the

appropriately skeptical comments in Sdnjo Sogyong Taewang sillok, pt. 48, f. 14V, entry for

Sonjo 27 (1594).2.[11], and again with minor variations, dated Wan-li 23(1117 error for

21).

12.21 (February 10,1594), ibid., pt. 51, f. 28rv, entry for S6njo

27.5.[24];

Chosdn

wangjo

sillok, vol. 22, pp. 221 and 276.

284 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

Conspicuously absent from this document

Hideyoshi's usual bom-

bast about his glory illuminating the universe. Little wonder that at

the Korean court, doubts were expressed regarding its authenticity as

soon as the text became known in Seoul. But the letter evidently

satisfied the Chinese government when Naito finally bore it to Peking

early in 1595. After Naito had affirmed that Japan would withdraw all

its forces from Korea, would seek no relationship (not even trade) with

China beyond the investiture of its ruler, and would establish friendly

relations with Korea as a fellow vassal state of Ming, the court of

Peking decided to grant what was presented to it as Hideyoshi's plea

and to bestow on him the title "King of Japan." Orders were given for

a golden seal bearing this title to be cast and for royal raiments to be

made, and ambassadors were appointed to conduct the ceremony of

investiture in Japan.

Toward the end of 1595, the Chinese ambassadors, conducted by

Naito, arrived in Japanese-occupied Pusan. Months before, Hideyoshi

had, in expectation of their coming, sent Konishi in Korea a reitera-

tion of his seven conditions for peace. It is possible that at this final

stage of the journey to Japan, the chief Ming envoy, Li Tsung-ch'eng,

was finally apprised of the inordinate and inflexible nature of Hide-

yoshi's actual terms or was persuaded by the rumors that he risked his

life or his freedom once the true purpose of his mission became appar-

ent to Hideyoshi. In any event, he abandoned his charge in Pusan,

further delaying the progress of the embassy to its destination. Yet

another ill omen was the great earthquake that destroyed the main

buildings of Hideyoshi's palatial castle at Fushimi in the late summer

of 1596, demolishing the enormous audience hall that had been espe-

cially designed for the reception of foreign embassies.

On Bunroku 5.9.1 (October 22, 1596), however, all difficulties ap-

peared for the moment to be surmounted when Hideyoshi received the

new envoys of the Ming Empire, Yang Fang-heng (gazetted as ambas-

sador vice Ambassador Li, who had absconded) and Shen Wei-ching

(the chief Chinese accomplice in the affair of the forged letter, now

promoted to deputy ambassador) in audience at Osaka Castle. Hide-

yoshi showed nothing but pleasure at the delivery of his kingly robes

71 Naito's reception in Peking and the Ming government's decision to invest Hideyoshi with the

title "King of

Japan"

are reported in Ming

Shen-tsung

shih-lu,

pt. 280, f. 2v to pt. 283, f. 3

passim, entries from Wan-li 22.12.[11] (January 20, 1595) to Wan-li

23.2.[3]:

Ming shih-lu,

vol. 108, pp. 5172-209. Relevant portions are extracted in Min

jilsuroku

no bu, vol. 3, pp.

705-10. Note that in the Ming sources, Naito is called by the abbreviation of the name he

adopted for the purposes of his mission as a delegate of Konishi Yukinaga: Konishi Hi(da no

Kami), or Hsiao-hsi Fei in the Chinese pronunciation of the three characters.