resulted in the sinking of over 70 Japanese vessels, transports and fighting ships combined, which formed the main part of a flotilla carrying reinforcements by sea to the van of the invading army. This despatch of troops and supplies by water had been a leading feature of Hideyoshi’s plan of campaign, and the destruction of the flotilla to which the duty was entrusted may be said to have sealed the fate of the war by isolating the army in Korea from its home base. It is true that Konishi Yukinaga, who commanded the first division, would have continued his northward march from Phyong-yang without delay. He argued that China was wholly unprepared, and that the best hope of ultimate victory lay in not giving her time to collect her forces. But the commander-in-chief, Ukida Hideiye, refused to endorse this plan. He took the view that since the Korean provinces were still offering desperate resistance, supplies could not be drawn from them, neither could the troops engaged in subjugating them be freed for service at the front. Therefore it was essential to await the consummation of the second phase of Hideyoshi’s plan, namely, the despatch of reinforcements and munitions by water to Phyong-yang. The reader has seen how that second phase fared. The Japanese commander at Phyong-yang never received any accession of strength. His force suffered constant diminution from casualties, and the question of commissariat became daily more difficult. It is further plain to any reader of history—and Japanese historians themselves admit the fact—that no wise effort was made to conciliate the Korean people. They were treated so harshly that even the humble peasant took up arms, and thus the peninsula, instead of serving as a basis of supplies, had to be garrisoned perpetually by a strong army.
The Koreans, having suffered for their loyalty to China, naturally looked to her for succour. Again and again appeals were made to Peking, and at length a force of 5000 men, which had been mobilized in the Liaotung peninsula, crossed the Yalu and moved south to Chinese Intervention. Phyong-yang, where the Japanese van had been lying idle for over two months. This was early in October 1592. Memorable as the first encounter between Japanese and Chinese, the incident also illustrated China’s supreme confidence in her own ineffable superiority. The whole of the Korean forces had been driven northward throughout the entire length of the peninsula by the Japanese armies, yet Peking considered that 5000 Chinese “braves” would suffice to roll back this tide of invasion. Three thousand of the Chinese were killed and the remainder fled pell-mell across the Yalu. China now began to be seriously alarmed. She collected an army variously estimated at from 51,000 to 200,000 men, and marching it across Manchuria in the dead of winter, hurled it against Phyong-yang during the first week of February 1593. The Japanese garrison did not exceed 20,000, nearly one-half of its original number having been detached to hold a line of forts which guarded the communications with Seoul. Moreover, the Chinese, though their swords were much inferior to the Japanese weapon, possessed great superiority in artillery and cavalry, as well as in the fact that their troopers wore iron mail which defied the keenest blade. Thus, after a severe fight, the Japanese had to evacuate Phyong-yang and fall back upon Seoul. But this one victory alone stands to China’s credit. In all subsequent encounters of any magnitude her army suffered heavy defeats, losing on one occasion some 10,000 men, on another 4000, and on a third 39,000. But the presence of her forces and the determined resistance offered by the Koreans effectually saved China from invasion. Indeed, after the evacuation of Seoul, on the 9th of May 1593, Hideyoshi abandoned all idea of carrying the war into Chinese territory, and devoted his attention to obtaining honourable terms of peace, the Japanese troops meanwhile holding a line of forts along the southern coast of Korea. He died before that end had been accomplished. Had he lived a few days longer, he would have learned of a crushing defeat inflicted on the Chinese forces (at Sö-chhön, October 30, 1598), when the Satsuma men under Shimazu Yoshihiro took 38,700 Chinese heads and sent the noses and ears to Japan, where they now lie buried under a tumulus (mimizuka, ear-mound) near the temple of Daibutsu in Kiōto. Thereafter the statesmen to whom the regent on his death-bed had entrusted the duty of terminating the struggle and recalling the troops, intimated to the enemy that the evacuation of the peninsula might be obtained if a Korean prince repaired to Japan as envoy, and if some tiger-skins and ginseng were sent to Kiōto in token of amity. So ended one of the greatest over-sea campaigns recorded in history. It had lasted 612 years, had seen 200,000 Japanese troops at one time on Korean soil, and had cost something like a quarter of a million lives.
From the recall of the Korea expedition in 1598 to the resumption
of intercourse with the Occident in modern times, Japan
enjoyed uninterrupted peace with foreign nations.
Thereafter she had to engage in four wars. It is a
striking contrast. During the first eleven centuries
Contrast between Foreign Relations
in Medieval and Modern Times.
of her historical existence she was involved in only
one contest abroad; during the next half century she
fought four times beyond the sea and was confronted
by many complications. Whatever material or moral
advantages her association with the West conferred on her, it
did not bring peace.
The first menacing foreign complication with which the Japanese government of the Meiji era had to deal was connected with the traffic in Chinese labour, an abuse not yet wholly eradicated. In 1872, a Peruvian ship, the “Maria Luz,” put into port at Yokohama, carrying The “Maria Luz” Complication. 200 contract labourers. One of the unfortunate men succeeded in reaching the shore and made a piteous appeal to the Japanese authorities, who at once seized the vessel and released her freight of slaves, for they were little better. The Japanese had not always been so particular. In the days of early foreign intercourse, before England’s attitude towards slavery had established a new code of ethics, Portuguese ships had been permitted to carry away from Hirado, as they did from Macao, cargoes of men and women, doomed to a life of enforced toil if they survived the horrors of the voyage. But modern Japan followed the tenets of modern morality in such matters. Of course the Peruvian government protested, and for a time relations were strained almost to the point of rupture; but it was finally agreed that the question should be submitted to the arbitration of the tsar, who decided in Japan’s favour. Japan’s attitude in this affair elicited applause, not merely from the point of view of humanity, but also because of the confidence she showed in Occidental justice.
Another complication which occupied the attention of the Tōkyō government from the beginning of the Meiji era was in truth a legacy from the days of feudalism. In those days the island of Yezo, as well as Sakhalin on its north-west and the Kurile group on its north, The Sakhalin Complication. could scarcely be said to be in effective Japanese occupation. It is true that the feudal chief of Matsumae (now Fuku-yama), the remains of whose castle may still be seen on the coast at the southern extremity of the island of Yezo, exercised nominal jurisdiction; but his functions did not greatly exceed the levying of taxes on the aboriginal inhabitants of Yezo, the Kuriles and southern Sakhalin. Thus from the beginning of the 18th century Russian fishermen began to settle in the Kuriles and Russian ships menaced Sakhalin. There can be no doubt that the first explorers of Sakhalin were Japanese. As early as 1620, some vassals of the feudal chief of Matsumae visited the place and passed a winter there. It was then supposed to be a peninsula forming part of the Asiatic mainland, but in 1806 a daring Japanese traveller, by name Mamiya Rinzo, made his way to Manchuria, voyaged up and down the Amur, and, crossing to Sakhalin, discovered that a narrow strait separated it from the mainland. There still prevails in the minds of many Occidentals a belief that the discovery of Sakhalin’s insular character was reserved for Captain Nevelskoy, a Russian, who visited the place in 1849, but in Japan the fact had then been known for 43 years. Muravief, the great Russian empire-builder in East Asia, under whose orders Nevelskoy acted, quickly appreciated the necessity of acquiring Sakhalin, which commands the estuary of the Amur.
