The Samurai Archives Introduction to Japanese History Podcast Series

For the past 3 months on the Samurai Archives Podcast, your hosts have been presenting an introduction to Japanese history, from paleolithic Japan to the end of the Sengoku period.  It took a lot of work, and at times felt like quite a chore, but at last we have finished our mini-opus.  We'd like to thank our dedicated listeners for the feedback and questions, and present here a compilation of the entire Introduction to Japanese History series.  Now that the intro series is complete, we'll be bringing you more detailed episodes covering various aspects of Japanese history - and as always, if you have any questions or interests you'd like to see covered in future podcasts, please don't be shy about letting us know.  Feel free to respond to this blog post, or send questions our way on Twitter @samuraiarchives.


If you haven't been following our Introduction to Japanese History series, it goes without saying that you're in for a treat.  At first we expected that it would run about 6 episodes, but in the end it turned out to last 15 episodes, and although quite detailed, we still consider it a relatively brief overview.  Feel free to pick and choose which episodes to listen to - people interested in Samurai battles may choose to skip our treatment of neolithic Japan, or vice versa - so fill up the iPod, and enjoy!


Intro to Japanese History P1 - Prehistory


For part one of our Introduction to Japanese History series, we'll be starting at the beginning of the earliest history of the Japanese archipelago and the changes that took place in culture and technology from the Paleolithic period to the Jomon period, which takes us from prehistory to approximately 300BC.


Intro to Japanese History P2 - Yayoi and Kofun Periods


For part two of our Introduction to Japanese History series, we'll be covering the Yayoi period which was a sharp change from the culture of the Jomon period, where there was a massive influx of NE Asians into the Japanese archipelago. This was followed by the Kofun period, where Japan began to slowly consolidate and unify into a confederacy. The name of the Kofun period comes from the huge keyhole shaped burial mounds known as "Kofun".


Intro to Japanese History P3 - Asuka-Nara Part 1

Continuing our Introduction to Japanese History podcast series, we will examine the Asuka-Nara period over two episodes. The Asuka-Nara period (538AD-794AD) is known for it's classic art and architecture, the introduction of Buddhism, and the Taika reforms and Ritsuryo system. Japan adopted many Chinese style institutions, began to form a national government, and started to assert itself internationally in East Asia.


Intro to Japanese History P4 - Asuka-Nara Part 2


Continuing our Introduction to Japanese History series is part 2 of our Asuka-Nara podcast.
The Asuka-Nara period (538AD-794AD) is known for it's classic art and architecture, the introduction of Buddhism, and the Taika reforms and Ritsuryo system. Japan adopted many Chinese style institutions, began to form a national government, and started to assert itself internationally in East Asia.


Intro to Japanese History P5 - The Heian Period


Part five of our Introduction to Japanese History series covers the Heian period.
The Heian period (794AD-1185AD) is named after Heian-kyo (present day Kyoto). The Heian period is known for it's art, literature, and poetry, as well as the spread of Tendai and Shingon Buddhism.


Intro to Japanese History P6 - The Rise of the Warrior

In this episode of our Introduction to Japanese history series, we examine the rise of the warrior class during the Heian period. As the Heian period began, there was not a distinct warrior class, but armies were raised on an ad hoc basis when needed by the court to put down rebellions, bandits, and pirates. As the Heian period went on, provincial lords began to maintain professional warrior bands to protect their lands and legitimacy, and to go to war on behalf of the court. The court would continue to give these provincial lords legitimacy through bestowing titles and lands. But, as the Heian period went on, court control of these provincial lords and their armies began to weaken.


Intro to Japanese History P7 - The Minamoto and Taira


An important development in the history of Japan and the Heian period, was the rise of the warrior class, which would eventually bring about a true feudal system run by warriors. As more and more military responsibility was delegated to provincial warlords who were out of the sphere of influence of the capital, these warrior houses grew in power. The transition from a central government run by the Heian court to the rise of the warrior class as the controlling group began with the Taira clan, led by Taira Kiyomori, who usurped the power of the Fujiwara clan. Eventually, the only alternative for people who were at odds with the Taira clan, was to throw in their lot with the Minamoto clan of Eastern warriors, which would eventually lead to civil war.


Intro to Japanese History P8 - The Kamakura Period


In part 8 of our Introduction to Japanese History podcast, we examine the early Kamakura period. Once Minamoto Yoritomo became Shogun, he began using the authority given to him by the emperor to solidify his power. Over the course of the next 20 years the Minamoto would usurp much of the power of the imperial court, only to be replaced completely by a line of puppet shoguns controlled by the Hojo Regents.


Intro to Japanese History P9 - The Mongol Invasions in Brief


Part nine of our Introduction to Japanese History series gives a brief overview of the two attempted Mongol Invasions of Japan during the 13th century, and the effect it had on the country in general, and the Hojo regents and Bakufu specifically.


Intro to Japanese History P10 - The Early Muromachi Period

For the 10th episode in our Intro to Japanese History podcast series, we examine the events that lead to the fall of the Kamakura Shogunate. Emperor Go-Daigo, deciding he wants a return to imperial rule without a Shogunate, enlists various warrior families to support him in overthrowing the Kamakura Bakufu and the Hojo regents - however not all goes as planned as Ashikaga Takauji, his ally turned enemy, ends his dream of imperial rule and establishes the Ashikaga Shogunate. Unfortunately for the Ashikaga clan, it's not all rainbows and lollipops for the first 60 years of the Ashikaga Shogunate, as Go-Daigo's supporters set up an alternate imperial line and engage in decades of guerrilla and outright war on behalf of the emperor.


Intro to Japanese History P11 - Prelude to the Sengoku


In this episode of our Introduction to Japanese History series, we look at the 15th century and the build up to the Onin war, and what would ultimately lead to the age of the country at war - the Sengoku period.


Intro to Japanese History P12 - The Early Sengoku Period


After the Onin war in the mid-late 15th century, the centralized power of the Ashikaga Shogunate collapsed, leaving the field open to anyone ambitious and powerful enough to make a grab for power. During the first half of the Sengoku period (approximately 1477-1560) there was massive consolidation as daimyo across Japan solidified their power bases and battled for land and resources. The lack of central government left individual clans to fend for themselves, and in the ensuing chaos many would rise and fall in epic battles that anyone familiar with the pop-culture representations of the Samurai in Movies and Anime would recognize.


Intro to Japanese History P13 - Sengoku Daimyo Who's Who

For the 13th episode of our Introduction to Japanese History series, we present a "Who's Who" of Daimyo of the later Sengoku period. We cover the big names of the Sengoku, the Daimyo that anyone who has an interest in the Samurai would have heard of, and is a primer for those who are new to the Samurai. Introduced in this podcast are Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Takeda Shingen, Uesugi Kenshin, and others.


Intro to Japanese History P14 - The Wars of Oda Nobunaga


From the 1550's until his death in 1582, Oda Nobunaga was involved in constant warfare. One by one, the major Daimyo of his era - the Imagawa, the Takeda, the Asai and Asakura and others - fell before his armies. This episode, we give a concise history of Nobunaga's ambition to unify the country under his rule, from the pivotal battle of Okehazama that first put him on the national stage, to his betrayal at the hands of Akechi Mitsuhide.


Intro to Japanese History P15 - Tokugawa & Toyotomi Unification

For our final Introduction to Japanese History series podcast, we cover the last part of the Sengoku period. We start with the assassination of Oda Nobunaga by Akechi Mitsuhide in Kyoto while all of his other generals are scattered about the country. Toyotomi (Hashiba) Hideyoshi gets back to Kyoto first and avenges Nobunaga's death, and the unification of Japan continues under him, and then ultimately under Tokugawa Ieyasu. We cover the events and battles of this period, as well as answer some listener Q&A about the Sengoku period.




Bibliography and recommended reading:


Aikens, C. Prehistory of Japan (Studies in Archaeology)
Academic Pr, September 1982 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0120452804


Arnesen, Peter. The Medieval Japanese Daimyo: The Ouchi Family's Rule of Suo and Nagato
Yale University Press (1979) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/B000PSGVY6


Barnes, Gina. The Rise of Civilization in East Asia
Thames & Hudson, July 1, 1999 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0500279748


Batten, Bruce. Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War And Peace, 500-1300
Univ of Hawaii Press, March 2006 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0824830296


Berry, Mary E. Hideyoshi (Harvard East Asian Monographs) Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University (January 1, 1989) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0674390261


Brown, Delmer (Editor). The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 1: Ancient Japan
Cambridge University Press, July 30, 1993 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0521223520


Brownlee, John. Crisis as Reinforcement of the Imperial Institution. The Case of the Jokyu Incident, 1221
Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Summer, 1975), pp. 193-201 http://www.jstor.org/pss/2383842


Conlan, Thomas. Friday, Carl. Currents in Medieval Japanese History: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey P. Mass
Figueroa Press (September 1, 2009) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/1932800522


Conlan, Thomas. In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Takezaki Suenaga's Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan
Cornell Univ East Asia Program (August 2002) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/188544513X


Durston, Diane. Old Kyoto: The Updated Guide to Traditional Shops, Restaurants, and Inns Kodansha USA; 2 edition (April 1, 2005) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/4770029942


Edwards, Walter. Event and Process in the Founding of Japan: The Horserider Theory in Archeological Perspective
Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1983), pp. 265-295 http://www.jstor.org/pss/132294


Farris, William Wayne. Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan's Military, 500-1300
Harvard University Asia Center, April 15, 1996 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/067438704X


Friday, Karl. Hired Swords: The Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan
Stanford University Press, March 1, 1996 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0804726965


Friday, Karl. Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan (Warfare and History)
Routledge; New edition edition (December 29, 2003) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0415329639


Friday, Karl. Teeth and Claws. Provincial Warriors and the Heian Court
Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 153-185 http://www.jstor.org/pss/2384742


Grossberg, Kenneth. From Feudal Chieftain to Secular Monarch: The Development of Shogunal Power in Early Muromachi Japan
Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 29-49 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2384184


Grossberg, Kenneth. Japan's Renaissance - The Politics of the Muromachi Bakufu
Cornell University, New York, 2001 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/1885445083


Hall, John W. Government and Local Power in Japan 500-1700: A Study Based on Bizen Province
ACLS Humanities E-Book, August 1, 2008 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/1597405957


Hudson, Mark. Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands
Univ of Hawaii Press, March 2006 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0824821564


Ikegami, Eiko. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture
Cambridge University Press, February 28, 2005 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0521601150


Imamura, Keiji. Prehistoric Japan: New Perspectives On Insular East Asia 
Routledge, October 24, 1996 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/1857286170


Lamers, Jeroen. Japonius Tyrannus: The Japanese Warlord Oda Nobunaga Reconsidered Hotei Publishing (November 2001) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/9074822223


Mass, Jeffrey (Ed). Court and Bakufu in Japan: Essays in Kamakura History
Stanford University Press (January 1, 1995) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0804724733


Mass, Jeffrey. Yoritomo and the Founding of the First Bakufu: The Origins of Dual Government in Japan
Stanford University Press; 1 edition (January 1, 2000) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0804735913


Mass, Jeffrey. Lordship and Inheritance in Early Medieval Japan: A Study of the Kamakura Soryo System
ACLS Humanities E-Book (August 1, 2008) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/1597405981


Mason, Penelope. History of Japanese Art 
Published jointly by Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams, Inc. October 4, 2004 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0131176013


McCullough, Helen. The Tale of the Heike 
Stanford University Press; 1st edition (March 1, 1990) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0804718032


Mishima, Yukio. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Vintage; Trade Paperback Edition edition (October 4, 1994) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0679752706


Mishima, Yukio. Patriotism
New Directions; Second Edition edition (February 24, 2010) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0811218546


Morillo, Stephen. Guns and Government: A Comparative Study of Europe and Japan Journal of World History, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 75-106 http://www.jstor.org/pss/20078620


Morris, Ivan. The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 1, 1988) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0374521204


Neilson, David Society at War: Eyewitness Accounts of Sixteenth Century Japan PhD Dissertation University of Oregon, 2007 http://gradworks.umi.com/32/85/3285619.html


Ooms, Herman. Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650-800
Univ of Hawaii Press, October 2008 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0824832353


Sansom, George. A History of Japan to 1334
Stanford University Press, 1958 http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0804705232


Souryi, Pierre. The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture)
Columbia University Press (August 27, 2003) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/0231118430


Toby, Ronald. Review: Rescuing the Nation from History: The State of the State in Early Modern Japan Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 56, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 197-237 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2668408


Verschuer, Charlotte Von. Ashikaga Yoshimitsu's Foreign Policy 1398 to 1408 A.D.: A Translation from Zenrin Kokuhōki, the Cambridge Manuscript Monumenta Nipponica Volume 62, Number 3, Autumn 2007 https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/monumenta_nipponica/summary/v062/62.3verschuer.html


Yamamura, Kozo. Imatani, Akira. Not for Lack of Will or Wile: Yoshimitsu's Failure to Supplant the Imperial Lineage
Journal of Japanese Studies Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter, 1992), pp. 45-78 http://www.jstor.org/stable/132707


Yoshikawa, Eiji. Taiko: An Epic Novel of War and Glory in Feudal Japan Kodansha Amer Inc; 1st edition (September 1992) http://astore.amazon.com/samurai-20/detail/4770026099


Zollner, Reinhard. Review: The Sun Also Rises. Go-Daigo in Revolt
Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 517-527 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2385743

Interview with Samuel Hawley, Author of The Imjin War --Part Two

This is the conclusion of our two-part interview with author Samuel Hawley

SA: The rivalry between the two Japanese generals Konishi Yukinaga and Katō Kiyomasa is perhaps one of the more interesting sub-plots in the overall Imjin War saga. You refer to the disharmony between the two leaders quite a bit in your book. Do you think that this rivalry hindered or helped the Japanese cause?
SH: Hindered or helped? Some of both, I suppose, but I’d tend more toward “helped,” considering how the rivalry spurred each commander on to greater efforts. For pros like Kato and Konishi, it was almost like a game, seeing who could outdo the other in beating the hell out of the Koreans. Rivalries like this are often the stuff of great military campaigns.

SA: Were there any other persona from the Japanese side that you found interesting? Who and why?
SH: I definitely found Hideyoshi the most interesting character. I even flirted for a short time with writing a book about him, something that would appeal more to general readers than Berry’s biography. There’s the rags-to-riches story of his life, his later quest for gentility, his fretting about his heir...it amounts to a grand story. I’ve long since given up the idea of a book on him, though. Now that I know a bit more about the publishing business, I realize it would be a dead loss for me to write such a book.

It’s funny, but shortly after The Imjin War came out, I was interviewed by KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) Radio. The tone of the interview, as you can imagine, had a pretty anti-Japanese slant. A lot of it seemed to be, “How can we use the Imjin War to smear the Japan of today?” Anyway, when the interviewer asked me about who I found most interesting in the story, I didn’t give the expected answer, “Yi Sun-sin” or “Yu Song-nyong” or whoever. I said “Hideyoshi,” and went to express admiration for his chutzpah. Boy, the interviewer didn’t like that!

SA: I wouldn’t sell yourself short about your ability to write a story about Hideyoshi—you could definitely pull this off. Tuttle just recently re-released A.L. Sadler’s bio of Ieyasu and a new 96 pager book about Hideyoshi is coming out very shortly from Turnbull (published by Osprey). Hideyoshi sells specifically because he does capture the imagination of many people and his life story is interesting enough to transcend borders. And the same can be said of Admiral Yi Sun-sin, who stands out as the hero from the Korean side. However, the myth of his character and prowess has grown beyond reality, much like what has happened with the “cult” of Sakamoto Ryoma worship in Japan. Yi is certainly worthy of the title of hero, but do you think he maybe gets too much credit? What about the contribution of the Korean warrior monks and their role in bringing about the defeat of the Japanese? Is their contribution wrongfully overshadowed by Yi?
SH: In writing The Imjin War, I wanted to tell the story as Koreans know it, as imperfect as that might be, so that Western readers who know nothing about the subject could learn about the war and in turn something about Koreans. In other words, I wasn’t trying to be revisionist about anything (except, perhaps, my ideas on the turtle ship, which is a relatively small thing). In writing about Yi Sun-sin, for example, I presented him as Koreans tend to see him (but without the messianic touches of the two English-language biographies, which to Western readers come across as way over the top). Same with Hideyoshi, Konishi, Kato, etc. I did as much research as I could and then presented them in a way that I thought reflected the Japanese viewpoint. I wasn’t trying to put any sort of revisionist stamp on anything because I saw myself as a chronicler and storyteller (heck, it’s an interesting story and deserves to be told well), not as an academic trying to come up with some new interpretation.

Let me add here that, as sympathetic as I might appear to Koreans in The Imjin War, I actually took some flak from Koreans after the book came out for being too critical of their ancestors. For example, I received a letter from the foundation devoted to preserving the memory of Imjin War government official Kim Song-il, asking me to change some things in the book that they felt didn’t reflect well on their ancestor. I even got a blast from a descendent of Yi Sun-sin, who felt I had blackened Yi’s name. I think this had to do with the part where I describe Yi ordering the execution of a Japanese prisoner on the false charge of having killed his son (it’s right there in Yi’s diary). I liked this because it showed the humanity, the fallibility, of Yi. It shows that he was a real person, capable of doing the wrong thing, and not a messianic figure as he has been previously depicted. I guess some Koreans don’t see it that way.

About the warrior monks, I’ll just say this: If I had written a dissertation on them, I bet I would have concluded that they had played a bigger role too. And if I had written a dissertation on the role of the Ming army in beating back the Japanese, hey, I bet I would have concluded that they had played the crucial role too. And if someone comes out with a book on the role of women in the Imjin War, I can tell you right now that the thesis will be that they played a darn big role. That’s the way it works when you set out to prove some sort of core thesis. My own book is not a dissertation; I didn’t have any core thesis to push, for example that the Koreans could have won the war on their own or something like that. I speculate on things along the way and express opinions, of course, but my ultimate purpose was just to tell the story.

SA: It’s disturbing but not surprising that you took some flak from certain corners in Korea. History sometimes tends to get shoe-horned to fit whatever the wearer wants in order to pursue an agenda or to support a certain “interpretation” of the truth. I should add that sadly, this can still be a problem in Japan as well. But let’s stay on the topic of the Korean warrior monks. Their units tended to be the strongest land forces the Koreans were able to deploy. What were some of the factors that made them such formidable fighters? Why were they so willing to die for a government that had persecuted their religion for many years?
SH: For the warrior monks, it wasn’t just about being loyal Koreans. Why should they be, after the way they had been treated during the Choson dynasty’s drive to establish Neo-Confucianism as the primary ideology? There was something of more personal benefit to gain: By proving their allegiance and worth to the Korean government—by doing the country a service—the monks hoped to win back some of the things that had been taken away from them over the years. For the individual monk, this was first and foremost the right to be officially ordained and recognized as a monk. (The government had previously done away with the law allowing for the ordination of monks.)

So why were the monks-soldiers such an effective force? Well, first of all, they operated as guerrilla fighters. In so doing they played to their strengths and took advantage of Korea’s mountainous terrain. Second, the monk community had a pre-existing organizational structure, complete with leaders that the monks highly respected and were predisposed to follow. Third, the monks as a body of men were conditioned to obedience and to seeing themselves as part of a cohesive group. It was religious obedience, and the cohesive group was monastic, but it translated well into the military sphere. When it came to fighting, they were therefore already conditioned to operating as a group, and to obeying the head monk or the abbot serving as their commander.

Finally, we should bear in mind that when we say that the monk-soldiers were an effective fighting force, we’re comparing them to the highly ineffective Korean government army. The army hadn’t been much of a cohesive group prior to the war, what with all the exemptions from service, the generals being kept in Seoul, etc. So you had the situation at the start of the war of a bunch of disparate, disorganized men being pulled together to form an army and a strange commander racing down from the capital to lead them. The result is that there was no sense of cohesion in the group, no shared sense of discipline, and no deeply ingrained respect and unquestioning loyalty for the commander.

SA: Who else from the Korean side did you find yourself drawn to during your research?
SH: Those few who stand out do so mainly because they left us some sort of personal record that gives us a glimpse of what sort of people they were (i.e. Yi Sun-sin’s diary; Yu Song-nyong’s Chingbirok; King Sonjo’s travails as revealed in Sonjo sillok). But that’s all they are—very small glimpses. The thing about writing about something that happened so far in the past is that it’s hard to get much of a feel for individual characters. People back then—and especially people in East Asia—didn’t lavishly reveal their personal feelings the way that we would come to do in the West in our private letters and our diaries and journals, which can sometimes be almost stream-of-consciousness stuff. In the diary George Foulk kept while traveling in Korea in 1884, for example, he rages against Koreans when their staring makes it impossible for him to take a crap in private. It’s this sort of intimacy that draws you to a historical figure; that makes you feel close to him. You just can’t say the same thing about anyone involved in the Imjin War. No one is “know-able” to such an extent. Even such a central figure as Hideyoshi. The little glimpses of him as a man that emerge in his private letters, his concern for his aged mother, his doting on his son—these are gems to seize upon precisely because they are so rare.

SA: While the famous “Turtle Ship” of the Korean Navy has often been described as the “First Ironclad”, this appears to have not been the case. Your book has an interesting anecdote about how a Western journalist might have been responsible for this misconception. Could you tell us more about that?
SH: Putting iron plates on the roof of the turtle ship would have been very unusual—something definitely worth noting. And yet Yi Sun-sin makes no mention of it in the ship description in his diary and reports. Neither does his nephew in his biography of Yi, which contains another description of the ship. Neither do the Annals of King Sonjo, which contain yet another description. They mention iron spikes, but not iron plating. This is what led me initially to question the notion of the use of iron plating. I became more convinced after realizing that iron plating would have been superfluous, a waste of metal, considering that these ships were already so heavily built that they were impervious to Japanese firepower. One thing that did confuse me was the record of the Koreans piling straw on the roofs of these ships to hide the spikes. My first thought was: “Well, in that case the roofs had to be iron-plated, for the straw would have caught fire once the fire arrows started flying and an exposed wooden roof would have burned.” But then I realized that the Koreans would have doused the straw with seawater, a logical response to fire arrows. Fire arrow striking the roof therefore would have been extinguished.

My account of how the iron plating story may have come about is pure conjecture. To the best of my knowledge—and new evidence may have been unearthed since I wrote the book; I haven’t kept up on the subject—the idea that the turtle ship had been iron clad didn’t surface until the early 1880s. It started in part thanks to US Navy ensign George Clayton Foulk, who was in Korea from 1884 to 1887 and served as charge d’affaires, effectively Washington’s ambassador in Seoul. Foulk traveled extensively throughout the country in 1884, one of the first Westerners to do so, and was one of the first Westerners to master Korean. (I’ve done two books on him, America’s Man in Korea and Inside the Hermit Kingdom, both Lexington Books, 2007.) Anyway, in his reports, Foulk mentioned hearing stories about the Koreans having once possessed an armored ship, and reportedly saw the remains of such of a ship at the port of Kosong in southern Korea. This snippet found its way into newspapers in the States. Now here’s where I’m conjecturing, but it seems likely that Westerners would have related this notion of an armored ship to the famed ironclads that had recently been used in the Civil War. And it seems equally likely that the Koreans, emerging from their long isolation and finding themselves weak and vulnerable and far behind the West, would have latched onto this notion as a matter of pride, a shining example of, “Hey, here’s something we thought of first.”

As a sidebar that may interest your readers, here’s a passage from Foulk’s 1884 travel diary in which he relates a story told to him by his Korea attendant, evidently some sort of oral tradition. I believe it’s a convoluted account of Yi Sun-sin:

“Today Suil spoke long on Korean officers. He says for many years past it has been the custom of this government to get rid of strong men physically and mentally among the common people, fearing the use of their power against it. Thus such men are made to live in fear and silence. If by chance discovered, a charge, no matter how slight, is brought against them and off goes the head. The hero of Tongyang, after killing so many Japanese for his country (a man of the people), knew that this display of his power would cost him his life, and standing on top of his junk in plain sight of the Japanese fleet, shot himself with a Japanese pistol or gun, thus to avoid dying like a criminal! Thus it was that while at times of war with Japan and China strong good men would not serve the government, knowing that whether they lost or won, death was the result.” (Samuel Hawley, ed., Inside the Hermit Kingdom: The 1884 Korea Travel Diary of George Clayton Foulk, pp. 93-94.)

SA: Much of Japan's failure can be traced to their inability to keep their forces supplied, and in particular their inability to protect their shipping from the Korean navy. Well protected and armed Korean ships regularly pounded the Japanese fleet. In your opinion, why didn't the Japanese show a greater interest in upgrading the capabilities of their ships in order to address this gross imbalance? This has struck me and others as being incomprehensible, considering how flexible the Japanese in general, and Hideyoshi in particular, had shown themselves to be in the past when integrating new technology into warfare and tactics.
SH: First of all, the Japanese did greatly improve their naval ability for the second invasion, as evidenced by their almost complete annihilation of the Korean fleet under Won Kyun. One can’t blame this Japanese victory solely on Won’s poor leadership. The Japanese had definitely upped their game. The argument could perhaps be made that this represented the greatest naval improvement one could reasonably expect from the Japanese, considering that they had started the war with a fairly primitive notion of naval warfare (i.e. ships as floating platforms for soldiers).

Here’s something else to consider: the Japanese military machine that was sent to Korea was the result of a process of evolution that took place during the country’s long civil war. It was the result, in other words, of a period of intense Darwinian adaptation. This suggests that flexibility was key—and it was. But even the Japanese had limits. For example, the samurai refused to use muskets themselves, considering it beneath their dignity. So there still existed certain constraints on the Japanese notion of warfare. One of these constraints was that Hideyoshi and his daimyo had spent their whole lives mastering the art of warfare on land. They have taken land warfare to the heights of effectiveness. They have made themselves arguably the best land warriors in the world. So how willing would such a man have been to say, “Well okay, I’ll shift my focus to the water, even though I don’t know much about it,” and leave all the glory to be had on land to rival daimyo? It would be like a top NASCAR driver foregoing the Daytona 500 in order to take up horseback riding to compete in the Kentucky Derby. Sure, it could happen. But there would definitely be a tendency toward resistance.

SA: Despite the fact that the future of their country was hanging in the balance, Korea was excluded from the peace talks that followed the Japanese retreat to the south coast after the Chinese offensive of 1593. What led to this situation, and how did it affect the eventual failure of the peace talks that led to the second Japanese invasion?
SH: The Koreans were aware right from the start that once they asked Ming China for help to repel the Japanese invasion, they themselves would be pushed aside to one degree or another and Beijing’s heavy-handed representatives would take the lead. That was the way things worked between China and its vassal states. It was why this was such a big deal for the Koreans, asking the Chinese for assistance. They knew it would mean losing some of their autonomy; that the Ming would start calling the shots. So while it certainly caused the Koreans anguish to be left out of the peace negotiations, it was perhaps not entirely unexpected.

I don’t recall if I describe this in my book as a contributing factor to the failure of peace talks leading to the second invasion. The Ming definitely would have benefited by listening more to the Koreans in order to get a clearer understanding of the true situation. Listening to them, however, might not have made any difference, for the negotiations seemed destined to fail. The whole thing was a farce of purposeful miscommunication between the Ming and Japanese envoys, miscommunication necessitated by the intransigence of both sides. They were just too far apart to reach common ground. Failure was the way it had to play out.

SA: And speaking of the Chinese, you, as well as Turnbull in his first book on the Imjin War, make it fairly clear that the Japanese would have lost in Korea with or without Chinese intervention. The participation of the Ming was just a mere catalyst that helped speed up an inevitable outcome. If this is the case, then what do you think of Kenneth Swope’s theory that Japan’s defeat in Korea had more to do with China’s involvement and more importantly, the military technology they deployed?
SH: The arrival of the Ming army certainly hastened the withdrawal of Japanese forces and in turn the end of the war. The Japanese were already bogged down in northern Korean, however, before the first Ming forces arrived. In the absence of the Ming, I believe the Japanese would have eventually exhausted themselves and pulled back into the south. Hideyoshi’s death in 1598 would have spelled the end of the adventure.

I in fact corresponded with Swope back in December 1999, when I was just starting to write The Imjin War and when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. I still have the e-mails. His ideas of the central role of the Ming army were fixed even then—based, as he said, on his reading of Chinese sources. Maybe I’m biased, but I put a lot of stock in Korean sources like the Annals of King Sonjo (Sonjo sillok). I say this because the Koreans readily accepted their subsidiary role in a Chinese universe and thus tended to be more self-critical in their official histories. The Annals of King Sonjo, for example, contain a lot of self-deprecating history. You have Korean generals running away, the king fleeing in a completely ignominious fashion, Koreans looking incompetent in the face of the Japanese threat. To me, this smacks of truth. The Chinese, on the other hand, were more heavily invested in preserving the idea that they were pre-eminent. They were, after all, the Center of the World. It therefore gave me pause when Swope wrote to me in Dec. 1999, for example: “The amazing thing about the Chinese sources is that Admiral Yi is not that much of a factor. Some sources scarcely mention him at all!...Yi Sun-sin is often named simply as Chen Lin’s brave second-in-command.” So the Chinese admiral is placed at the forefront and gets the lion’s share of the credit in Chinese accounts. That’s surprising....

SA: Have you read Swope’s book, A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail? If so, what do you think of it?
SH: No, I haven’t read it.

SA: Swope took some shots at both you and Turnbull. I am not the biggest Turnbull fan, but think that Samurai Invasion is one of his better efforts and is worthy of praise. But with you, Swope seemed to go out of his way to post a very mean-spirited review of your book on Amazon.com as well as in one of his published articles. I for one, think your book is by far the best balanced work in English on the topic and found Swope to be completely out of line. The SA’s affiliated blog, the Shogun-ki, even addressed this issue in a post titled “Fear and Loathing in the Imjin War”. How do you feel about the negative campaign that Swope waged against you and Turnbull? Do you have any idea what motivated him to act so unprofessionally?
SH: What Swope wrote about my book on Amazon.com was ungentlemanly, to say the least. I assumed he was jealous, and I was surprised that he would reveal himself so clearly and make himself look so small. His comment about how readers should “look elsewhere” was of course self-serving. Back in December 1999 Swope himself wrote to me about his own dissertation: “So when I finish, something will exist in English [on the Imjin War], but right now there’s not much at all.” In writing The Imjin War, I was trying to fill the very void that Swope himself acknowledged needed filling. I guess he thinks he owns the topic. There is a lot of arrogance like that in academia. Swope is by no unique on that score. He’s just clumsier than most.

In hindsight, the whole thing has become kind of funny, what with the heat Swope has taken. It’s been a real-life example of the saying, “You reap what you sow.” I wonder if he’s learned anything from this self-generated teaching moment.

By the way, as I mentioned before, I finished writing The Imjin War in 2003, the year that Turnbull’s Samurai Invasion came out. It was a pretty big disappointment to realize that I wouldn’t be the first to come out with a book on the topic (I was already shopping mine around to publishers as “the first book-length account in English,” etc.). But that’s life. I swallowed my disappointment—it never occurred to me to “Swope” Turnbull—and I ordered a copy of his book and found it to be a valuable work. I think he did a good job. In the two years it subsequently took me to get my own book published, I ended up incorporating some things from Turnbull’s Samurai Invasion, and I thank him for it.

SA: Can you tell us about what you are currently working on?
SH: Since giving up teaching in 2007 and moving back to Canada with my wife, I’ve been working full time writing more popular books for a wider audience. My first effort in this new vein is Speed Duel: The Inside Story of the Land Speed Record in the Sixties (forthcoming from Firefly Books, Aug. 2010). It’s about the rivalry between Craig Breedlove and Art Arfons, who pushed the LSR up through 400, 500, and 600 mph between 1963 and 1965. My next book, which I’ve already finished but haven’t yet signed a deal for, is about Canadian Olympic sprinter Percy Williams. It’s entitled I Just Ran: The Life and Times of Percy Williams, World’s Fastest Human. I’m now starting work on my third book since leaving Korea, Bad Elephant, about a circus elephant named Topsy that was electrocuted in 1903.

SA: Any plans to return to writing about East Asian history?
SH: My only involvement in East Asian history today is my link with the Royal Asiatic Society. Last year they asked me to return as general editor of their annual journal Transactions. So I’m doing that. Here’s the link to our Call for Papers:
http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/Transactions.htm

As for writing another book on East Asian history—no, I’ve done that and now I’ve moved on. I enjoy researching new topics in different fields, whatever I stumble on that strikes my fancy, and then crafting what I learn into a book. So the “bestial Swope” need have no fear on that score. It’s unlikely I’ll stray onto his quarter-acre again.

SA: It’s been a real pleasure and treat to interview you. Like your book The Imjin War, this has been a most informative and delightful experience. On behalf of the Samurai Archives, thank you very much and wish you the best with your new books!
SH: My pleasure. All the best to you and the folks at SA.

Interview with Samuel Hawley, Author of The Imjin War --Part One

On behalf of the Samurai Archives, I’m pleased to be interviewing Samuel Hawley, author of The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China . Samuel Hawley spent 20 years living in Japan and then Korea, where he was an instructor at Yonsei University and a member of the governing council of the Korean branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Like most of the membership of the Samurai Archives, Samuel Hawley is an amateur historian—which is what makes his The Imjin War and the amount of research that went into preparing the book that much more inspirational and endearing. Hawley is now residing in Canada and has devoted himself to writing full-time. His other works include America’s Man in Korea: The Private Letters of George C. Foulk, 1884–1887, Inside the Hermit Kingdom: The 1884 Korea Travel Diary of George Clayton Foulk, Help Wanted: Korea and the forthcoming Speed Duel: The Inside Story of the Land Speed Record in the Sixties .

At the time of the publication of this interview, The Imjin War is not available directly from Amazon.com, but can be ordered new from Han Books for US$72.17 by clicking on the following link.
http://www.hanbooks.com/imwajasiinof.html


SA: Sam, it’s a pleasure to have you here with us for this interview.
SH: Thanks for your interest in The Imjin War. It’s a pleasant surprise that there are still people out there who want to talk about it.

SA: To start things off, when you were living in Japan, were you drawn to samurai and Japanese history?
SH: During the time I lived in Japan (1988-1994), I was interested more generally in the culture than specifically in Japanese history. I loved things like sumo (especially hanging around heya), yakatabune (those pleasure boats that you dine on), tsuribori (urban fishing ponds) and spent many happy afternoons out taking photos and doing research for magazine articles. In Tokyo there are neat and quirky things to discover in just about every corner.

I moved on to Seoul in 1995 and lived there until 2007. That’s where I wrote The Imjin War. It was actually a bit of a homecoming for me, for I’d grown up in Korea. I was born in Pusan in 1960 (my parents were missionaries), we moved to Seoul when I was about 2 and stayed there until I was 14. So my awareness of the Imjin War goes back a long way, back to when I was a kid in the ‘60s. I can remember my parents even had a model of Yi Sun-sin’s turtle ship in a glass case.

SA: Prior to the publication of your book, not a whole lot about the Imjin War, better known as the Bunroku to Keichō no Eki in Japanese, was available in English. There were some writings by Geo. H. Jones at the turn of the 20th century, Stephen Turnbull’s Samurai Invasion and a couple of other publications about Admiral Yi and his turtle boats. In essence, this conflict is probably the true “forgotten Korean war” when it comes to exposure in the West. Why do you suppose that until Turnbull, you and Swope came onto the scene in the past 8 years or so, there hasn’t been much written about the Imjin War in the West?
The first problem was the language barrier. When I was writing The Imjin War (I started in 1999), Turnbull’s Samurai Invasion wasn’t out (I already finished my book when I stumbled on it on Amazon.com) and neither was Choi Byonghyon’s Chingbirok translation. There was in fact very little material on the subject available in English. I ended up studying Korean to attain some basic reading skills, then went through umpteen volumes of Sonjo sillok and other Korean-language works with the help of a native Korean translator. I did that for two years—spending my own money on the translation help, by the way. It entailed a heck of a lot of work, more than most people would be willing to do for a payout of little more than personal satisfaction.

I speaking of course of amateur historians such as myself, taking on a project like this on the side for personal enjoyment. It’s different for academics. For them, penning a scholarly tome can be the route to tenure and a pretty good living as a professor, so there’s an incentive. So why didn’t some history professor with much better language skills than me write a book on the Imjin War first? The reason, I think, is that the topic is too big, too wide-ranging for an academic to tackle. Academics tend to choose very narrow topics to specialize in (i.e. “The Impact of the Imjin War on Rice Production in Cholla Province”), then spend the rest of their careers protecting this little quarter-acre of ground. It’s the safe approach. I mean, once you become the foremost expert on Cholla rice production in the 1590s as it relates to the war, no one is going to be able to criticize your work, right? No one can “Swope” you. But if you try to write a book about the whole Imjin War, you’re going to be writing about rice in Cholla and a thousand other things. And since a single person can’t be the foremost authority on such a wide range of topics (Korean history, Japanese history, Chinese history, battle tactics, Korean/Chinese/Japanese court intrigues, East Asian diplomacy, battleship construction, etc., etc.) it means taking a big creative risk and courting criticism and maybe even falling flat on your face.

SA: But in my eyes and the eyes of others, it was worth the risk. I thought the book was fantastic and many of us here at the SA learned a tremendous amount from it. But what made you want to write about this conflict?
SH: My first idea actually had been to do a biography of Yi Sun-sin, for I thought I could improve on the two English-language works then in existence. That was in early 1999. When I realized there was no book in English on the Imjin War as a whole, I broadened my focus. It ended up being a far, far bigger job than I ever imagined.

So why did I set out to write the book? Well, I wasn’t an academic trying to carve out a niche as a scholar, so the above concerns about taking risks didn’t mean anything to me. I did it because I wanted something intellectually challenging to do, and I wanted the satisfaction of writing a book. It was as simple as that.

I’d like to point out here that I didn’t set out to write a scholarly book on the Imjin War, because I didn’t—and I still don’t—consider myself an expert on anything. My objective was just to tell the amazing story of this war, which hadn’t been fully told before in English and which scarcely anyone in the West knew about. (Again, I finished writing the book in 2003, the year Turnbull’s Samurai Invasion came out, and long before Swope.) The book, you’ll note, is narrative history, not a dissertation. In other words, its purpose is to “tell the story,” not to advance any particular core thesis. That it ended up in the scholarly realm, which I hadn’t intended, was entirely due to the fact that it was the only way I could get it published.

SA: You had mentioned in other correspondence that you had trouble finding a publisher for The Imjin War. Why do think this was the case? Was it because this topic is still considered controversial considering the sometimes cankerous triangular relationship that exists between China, Korea and Japan?
SH: My difficulty in finding a publisher had nothing to do with the controversy surrounding the subject. Here’s the story:

Since I had written The Imjin War as a narrative history for general readers, I wanted to get an agent who could place it with a mainstream publisher. I failed. The consensus was that a book of this nature wouldn’t sell. (“Korean history? Who the hell wants to read about that?”) I was also told it was too long. The only agent to actually look at the manuscript (all the others turned me down at the query letter stage) concluded that he might be interested...if I rewrote the book to beef up the Japanese side of the story and cut back on the Korean. My emphasis on the Korean perspective, he figured, would not be popular with potential publishers. (By the way, I initially entitled the book “The First Korean War.”)

After banging my head against that wall for a while, I started contacting university presses. That earned me a whole bunch of rejections. Nobody—nobody—would even look at the manuscript. The problem here was obvious: I wasn’t a history professor, but just an English teacher. And I didn’t have a PhD, just an MA. (In history from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, by the way.) It was very much a case of judging a book by the author’s CV.

The fact that The Imjin War was published at all was due to a series of lucky breaks combined with my own hustling. The only outfit to express any interest in the book had been the Royal Asiatic Society of Korea. They couldn’t publish it, though, because they didn’t have the money. What they did do was invite me to speak before the Society on the topic (in Nov. 2003, I think it was). In the audience was Yoo Kang-ha, secretary of the So-ae Memorial Foundation, a part of Poongsan Corporation. (So-ae was the nom de plume of Yu Song-nyong, Korean prime minister during the Imjin War. The chairman of Poongsan Corp. is a direct descendent of So-ae.) Anyway, I ended up receiving a publishing grant from Poongsan for The Imjin War. (Note: this financial backing did not color how I wrote the book. It was already written by this point.) This grant was enough to cover roughly half the cost of publication. By this time the RAS had invited me to join their governing council and elected me publications chairman. The first book I shepherded through the press for them was Elizabeth Underwood’s Challenged Identities, which the RAS fully funded. I then showed them how we could publish my book, The Imjin War, without it costing the RAS a penny, funding it with the Poongsan grant and money out of my own pocket. The council liked the idea. I then approached the Institute of East Asian Studies Press at UC Berkeley, which had previously turned the book down, and offered them a co-publication deal that would similarly not cost them a cent. They liked the idea and signed on and took editorial oversight of the project. I then did all the grunt work myself: I did the camera-ready copy, I made the maps, I designed the cover, I made the index, I liaised with the printer, and I provided all the money, the Poongsan grant plus my own dough, a total of around $11,000. After all this, I declined to use the RAS’s standard publishing contract, as I felt this would be grossly unfair to me. I instead drafted a contract myself whereby I received the lion’s share of the profits and retained full rights to the book. This was okay with the RAS because they ended up making a tidy sum of money without having to invest anything or take any risk.

The Imjin War eventually sold out its first print run of 2,000 copies, and is now on its second printing. Pretty paltry sales, but not too bad considering that the book received absolutely no marketing or publicity. I still retain full rights to the book, and I am free to republish it in any way I see fit.

SA: Well, we hope to see it back in print and marketed properly so it can reach a larger audience. But let’s get into some questions regarding the origin of the conflict itself. You touched upon some of the theories in your book, but why do you think Hideyoshi ordered the invasion of Korea?
SH: With something as big as the invasion of Korea, there had to have been multiple factors at work. In my book I discuss, I think, five of them. I don’t think it was a case of, “One of these five factors might have motivated Hideyoshi.” I suspect several driving factors were at work. Hideyoshi, after all, was a supreme strategist; he would have been thinking on several levels, weighing advantages and disadvantages. To say “Hideyoshi invaded Korea for this reason” is to frame the thing too simply. Hideyoshi wasn’t playing checkers. He was playing chess.

Let me just insert here that The Imjin War is the distillation of my understanding of the topic as of 2003, when I finished writing it. I’m answering these questions now without referring to the book, as I don’t want to just rehash what I’ve already written and what I was thinking back then. Because of the passage of time, and because I’ve moved on to other topics, what I answer here may vary from what I wrote in the book. I may even contradict myself. But hey, so what? As we go on we learn new things and adjust our previous conceptions. So be warned that I’m just throwing musings out there; that these musings might stray from what I wrote in The Imjin War—and that anything I wrote then and say now could be dead wrong.

SA: Kenneth Swope, in his new book A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail, refers to a theory that appeared in Samuel Dukhae Kim’s PhD dissertation that Hideyoshi initiated the war in order to weaken the power of the Kyushu-based Christian daimyo as Hideyoshi wanted to eradicate Christianity in Japan. How much stock do you put in Kim’s theory? Do you think it is plausible?
SH: I guess it’s plausible, another possible motivating factor to add to the mix. But I wouldn’t give it too much weight, and I certainly wouldn’t say it was the reason. To begin with, using Kyushu-based forces for the invasion made perfect sense because these forces were the closest to Korea. It was also in line with the pattern of conquest that Hideyoshi had already established in his unification of Japan: using the forces nearest the target to spearhead the conquest of that target.

Again, Hideyoshi in his strategizing and long-term planning would have been considering several factors. Weakening the Kyushu-based Christian daimyo may have been one of the things he placed on the scales. Or maybe it was just an unplanned benefit of the expediency of using Kyushu-based forces.

SA: What was the ultimate reason, in your opinion, for Korea’s utter lack of preparation for the invasion? Did they really think that Japanese talk of invading China via Korea was mere bluster?
SH: Even if the Koreans had managed to make better preparations, the Japanese likely would still have swept up the peninsula regardless. In other words, the Koreans were perhaps inherently incapable of resisting the power of Hideyoshi’s invasion force because of the way the country was set up. First, there was the fact that generals were kept separate from their armies except in times of crisis. This was considered necessary to prevent them from becoming too independently strong and possibly attempting a coup. The founder of the Choson dynasty, Yi Songgye, had been a general himself and had seized power, and he didn’t want another general doing the same to his new dynasty. Hence the expedient of separating generals from armies. It was definitely a stupid idea in terms of military preparedness in the face of an external threat. The fact remains, however, that the Choson dynasty lasted from 1392 on into the 20th century—so clearly it made sense in terms of internal stability. It was a case, in short, of sacrificing the ability to repel an external threat in order to guard against threats from within. It was a good trade-off most of the time—but a disaster in the face of the extraordinary threat posed by Hideyoshi.

About the Koreans mistakenly regarding Hideyoshi’s threats as bluster: It’s hard to overstate the enormity of what Hideyoshi was proposing to do, at least in the eyes of the Koreans. It wasn’t just a case of one country threatening to conquer another. Hideyoshi was threatening to conquer, as the Koreans saw it, the center of the world. To put it in modern terms, it might have been like Chavez in Venezuela threatening to conquer the USA. Well, maybe not quite like that. But you see what I’m saying. The threat seems obvious to us now. But if we put ourselves back in that Korean court and try to look at things like a late-16th century Korean, it becomes easier to see how Hideyoshi’s threats could have been discounted as bluster.

Another thing to consider is the innate inability of Korea’s Confucian scholar-led system to deal with the ruthless military efficiency of Japan. In Japan, the military had evolved for maximum effectiveness thanks to a century of civil war. There were no soft-palmed scholars getting in the way, no trappings or niceties to trip over. In Japan it was all about military efficiency. The same could not be said about Korea. As noted above, the Koreans in effect hobbled their military (separating generals from their armies) to guard against internal threats. Still more hobbling was effected by the Korean—and in turn Chinese—notion of the supremacy of a scholar class; the notion that mastery of the Confucian classics, as evidenced by passing the government exam, equipped a man to do just about anything—including things he knew little about, like overseeing armies. So you had this situation in Korea where military professionals were often being second-guessed by scholars who sometimes didn’t know what they were doing, but who assumed that they did because they knew the classics.

(We can’t be too critical of the Koreans here, for the same situation exists in Washington DC and just about every any other Western capital today: governments growing bigger and bigger, with officials thinking they know better than the professionals how to run things. There is actually the notion that government officials are somehow more virtuous than professionals in the private sector. It’s a mindset that would have been quite at home in King Sonjo’s Confucian-scholar government in 1592.)

SA: But based on Korea’s experience with previous devastating Japanese-led pirate (wako) raids, was the Korean court really naïve in thinking that the “robber-dwarves” posed no serious threat?
SH: Naïve? I don’t know. In hindsight, they were certainly mistaken. But again, we should try to look at it from the Koreans’ perspective, considering their time, their mindset, and the information available to them. What Hideyoshi said he was going to do, march through Korea and conquer China, was really huge. It would have been easy, being a Korean and without the benefit of hindsight, to have discounted this as just a lot of hot air, an attempt to intimidate Korea. To put it in perspective, let’s draw a parallel to Iran today. President Dinner-Jacket threatens, “Do such-and-such or we will destroy Israel!” Or North Korea’s Dear Leader: “Cave in to my demands or you will feel my wrath!” Don’t we tend to brush aside such threats? And then something like 9-11 happens and everyone says, “Why were we so blind? Who dropped the ball? Who can we blame?” The moral: everything is clear in hindsight.

SA: Considering it was the ineptitude of the royal court and partisan politics that led to Korea’s ill-preparedness for the invasion, why do you suppose that the Korean people stuck with King Sonjo and the Choson Dynasty after the cessation of hostilities? One would think that there would have been enough popular discontent and anger with the government and the sovereign’s failure to protect his people would have led to a serious revolt. Yes?
SH: Sonjo was acutely aware of the discontent among his subjects. It was Koreans, after all, not the Japanese, who burned a lot of Seoul in May 1592. So Sonjo knew he was balancing on the edge of a razor. When things were at their worst he even flirted with the idea of crossing the Yalu River and leaving Korea, which would have amounted to abdication.

One very important service the Ming Chinese did in sending armed forces to Korea was to put some heart back into Sonjo, who was in despair. Another important service was that they propped up his throne and in turn the Choson dynasty. I don’t know how close the dynasty came to falling during and immediately after the war, but it was obviously teetering. Even if the Japanese had eventually worn themselves out in northern Korean and withdrawn without Ming interference, the lack of a Ming presence in Korea might very well have ensured the dynasty’s collapse.

To be continued. The second part of this interview will be posted on April 28.

Jōi and Pain: Trying to Make Sense of Tokugawa Nariaki

Tokugawa Nariaki: Devil or Saint? Who knows?!?

If anybody was the living embodiment of Mitogaku and all of its inherent contradictions, it had to be the retired lord of Mito himself, Tokugawa Nariaki. Outspoken, brash, lecherous and just plain clever, Nariaki was certainly one of the more colorful personalities that strutted across the early Bakumatsu stage. In the theater-in-the-round that Japanese politics devolved into as a result of the Perry expedition, all eyes were on Nariaki, who certainly dominated a large part of the action on center-stage. Wherever he went, whatever he said or wrote, controversy and riotous debate followed. He had a powerful voice that projected his message to all corners of the empire, no doubt rankling the ears of the Bakufu and certain powerful fudai daimyo. However, Nariaki’s soliloquies on how to remedy Japan’s ills and successfully deal with the ‘foreign issue’ found an adoring audience among reform-minded daimyo, courtiers within the halls of the imperial palace, and among all strata of samurai and commoners alike. Yet just what was Tokugawa Nariaki’s message?

To a lot of us living in the here and now, at first glance, the message looks garbled if not just downright confusing. Trying to decipher the message has led to many of those now famous ‘Bakumatsu headaches’ that some of us have been complaining to each other about recently. How can it not? Nariaki was a walking bag of contradictions. It’s a lot like some of the contradictions we all studied in high school world history classes about Europe in the age of ‘enlightened despotism’. I think it is safe to say that Nariaki was an enlightened feudal lord cut from a mold very similar those of the ‘enlightened despots’ of the European variety, and in some ways, he’s even more difficult to analyze than Frederick the Great, Louis XIV, or Catherine the Great. When it comes to Tokugawa Nariaki, “pro-reform/reactionary conservative; xenophobic/eager to import foreign ideas and technology; pro-Tokugawa/pro-Imperialist” are all words and phrases that are commonly used to describe him. To unravel his message, let’s take a look at his policies and what he stood for and in the process clarify some of these contradictions.

Pro-Reform/Reactionary Conservative Nariaki’s reforms were focused on the preservation of han unity and harmony on a local level and national unity and harmony on a macro level. As written by Aizawa and others, Nariaki firmly believed that harmony could only be maintained if all classes of society respected the existing social hierarchy and political institutions. And the political institutions and social orders were dependent on being sanctioned by the imperial throne—the source of all legitimacy in Japan. Therefore, full-hearted and proper respect must be shown to the emperor in order for Japan to enjoy the benefits of peace and prosperity. Without the proper level of respect being shown for the throne or the political and social orders, Japan would sink into chaos and misery. To Nariaki, the famines and the resulting turmoil of the Tempō period validated his Mitogaku inspired political theory. This is evident in a memorial Nariaki wrote to the Bakufu in 1839 that William Beasley quoted in The Meiji Restoration: “When superiors ignore the hunger and death of farmers in bad years, when they are remiss in making military preparations, when the samurai are weak and idle, then inferiors hate their superiors and do not fear them.” This is in reference to the peasant revolts that were rocking the nation at the time. Taking this a step further, a letter written to Mizuno Tadakuni in 1842, that also appears in Beasley’s book aptly sums up the essence of Nariaki’s beliefs about political and social order: “If the shogun takes the lead in showing respect for the throne, the whole country will inevitably unite in so doing; but it is vital that in this each should observe his proper place. The samurai shows respect for his lord, the lord shows respect for the shogun, the shogun shows respect for the emperor. To forget one’s place and take matters into one’s own hands is an evil act, worthy of the name of rebel.”

Thus, as we can see, Nariaki’s views quite neatly fit inside the Mitogaku interpretation of the Confucian social hierarchy triangle. And to help ensure that merchants remembered their proper place in the pyramid’s lowest rung, Nariaki enacted strict anti-commerce policies that were designed to discourage the growth of the merchant class’ power as well as to help keep farmers on the land, rather than try their luck as shop keepers or traders in urban centers. As for samurai, Nariaki felt that their decline in fighting ability and moral righteousness were due in part to commercial-related activities, giving him another reason to crack down on the merchant class. He, like Shimazu Nariakira, was also against the giving of two swords and a surname to merchants who sought to buy samurai status. It was an outrage to allow bushi status to be bought. And by allowing this sort of thing to happen, samurai morale, morals as well as ethics would erode.

So, what is the substance of Nariaki’s domestic political reforms? He seems like a classic Confucian conservative, does he not? If you agree with that statement, than it shouldn’t surprise you that in essence, Nariaki strove to bring his han back into a traditional Confucian framework that was envisioned by Ieyasu, but of course, with the emperor at the very top of the pyramid. Strong and just leadership combined with the enforcement and study of strict moral and ethical guidelines that constantly reminded all classes of their place, duties and obligation to respect society’s structure, would serve as a bulwark against the erosion of domain strength. Nariaki believed, as did many of his fellow daimyo, that if enactment of this ideal ‘reactionary’ neo-Confucian social structure could be replicated in every han, all would be well and Japan’s domestic troubles, as experienced in the Tempō period, would not and could not occur again.

In nearly all that he did, Nariaki strove to instill his ‘reactionary’ domestic reforms in a way that would preserve his ability as an individual daimyo and that of his beloved han to operate as independently as possible from Bakufu control. This makes perfectly good sense if you agree with Beasley that a feudal daimyo like Nariaki only had three things to be afraid of: Bakufu intrusion from above, peasant rebellion from below and foreign attack from outside. Makes you think Nariaki is really in it for himself, doesn’t it?

Xenophobic/Eager to Import Foreign Ideas and Technology It was Mitogaku that first coined the catchphrase sonnō jōi, and as spokesman for the movement, it is clear that Nariaki didn’t want Japan’s ports opened to the West nor did he want foreigners on Japanese soil in any large numbers. However, Nariaki wasn’t opposed to the importation of foreign ideas, education and technology--if it could be used to strengthen Mito and the various han throughout Japan. Again, Shimazu Nariakira, daimyo of Satsuma, held similar views to Nariaki—after all, he too, was a follower of Mitogaku, Nariakira built Japan’s first steam powered ship, established a telegraph line, started making modern weapons and other products—all aimed at strengthening Satsuma’s military and economic strength. Mito, not having the financial means as Satsuma, followed similar lines, but Nariaki’s economic view of the world was more agrarian-centric, as rice, not industrial products, served as the backbone of the Japanese economy and society. Nevertheless, from the 1840s, Nariaki argued to have the Bakufu’s prohibition on building large-ocean going ships overturned as he felt that there was a need for a strong navy. And once the Bakufu reversed course on the building of large blue water ships after Perry’s first expedition, almost immediately, Mito ordered one of Japan’s first western warships from the Dutch. Nariaki also tirelessly called for an overhaul of the baku-han military system in order to ensure Japan could enact jōi when the time came. In other words, it was acceptable to hold foreigners in contempt, but their goods, services and ideas, if they could be used to defeat or hold at bay those same foreigners, were perfectly okay! I just can’t help to wonder how if Nariaki really felt that in order to import all of these concepts and build up Japan’s defensive capabilities, was the open port of Nagasaki, along with its heavy restrictions placed on the Chinese and Dutch traders, enough to guarantee a big enough trickle of practical ‘barbarian’ ideas and goods?

Pro-Tokugawa/Pro-Imperialist This is the last contradiction that I’d like to take a look at. We know that Nariaki was probably the loudest daimyo when it came to preaching loyalty to the emperor, as espoused in Mitogaku. As a Tokugawa, and a descendent of Ieyasu and a blood relative of the shogun, it may strike people as odd that Nariaki sought to put the emperor above the shogun in the social and political order. But that’s exactly what he did. He even would go out of his way to point out, as he did in a letter to Abe Masahiro in 1846, that although Japan had been a ‘Tokugawa’ country since Sekigahara, there was no law or guideline saying that it should always remain this way. If the Bakufu failed to act to secure the safety of Japan in a time of crisis, others, such as some tozama daimyo, may accuse the Bakufu of failing to live up to its obligations, and an overthrow of the Tokugawa could then become a reality. To avoid this from happening, Nariaki argued that remaining passive and awaiting the outcome of events before making decisions was not an option. He continuously pushed for more proactive policy-making and planning on the part of the Bakufu.

Looking at the above paraphrased letter, it makes Nariaki look like soothsayer, as what he said could happen, eventually did in 1868. And it is clear, that although Nariaki noisily advocated that everything and everyone was subservient to the imperial throne, he did not want to see the Tokugawa fall from power. After all, Nariaki was a Tokugawa and he owed his own life of privilege to the very system that was in place. He clearly did not want the system to fail!

Whether regarded as an devil a saint or a walking bag of contradictions, Tokugawa Nariaki is truly one of the more interesting, yet puzzling figures of the Bakumatsu era.