What Ryu Seong-ryong Wanted Joseon to Remember About the Imjin War

Ryu Seong-ryong drafted the Jingbirok after leaving office and returning to his home in Andong. He had served in senior government and military posts during the Japanese invasions of Korea. His surviving handwritten draft was designated a South Korean National Treasure on November 12, 1969.

The title’s two elements, jingbi, come from a line in the Book of Songs about learning from what has happened and guarding against future trouble. The character 懲 points to taking a warning from the past, while 毖 points to taking precautions. The book follows the causes and course of the invasions from 1592 to 1598.

The work and the edition I read

The book was written in Classical Chinese. Modern readers generally encounter it in translation, although the manuscript itself survives.

I read Kim Hong-sik’s Korean translation. Its subtitle calls the Imjin War a war from hell and the book a record of reflection. After a few pages, I could see how often the two parts of that description would belong together.

Reading the war up close

I knew the outlines from school. Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s forces invaded Korea in 1592, and Admiral Yi Sun-sin’s victories at sea later became the subject of films. The story is familiar enough that it is easy to forget how little the people living through it could know about what would happen next.

Yi’s naval campaigns mattered greatly. Joseon also fought alongside Ming forces on land, and Japanese forces eventually withdrew. Ryu’s account keeps bringing us back to what the war had already cost by then.

There were stretches where the detail made an event I had heard of as a date or a battle name feel close. I could follow what an official knew and what he was slow to find out.

Some commanders had grown used to peace and fled when an enemy appeared. Others rushed forward with more confidence than information. I felt the frustration of watching one defeat follow another while people with authority still disagreed about how to respond.

The victory report that came too late

Sin Gak won an early land victory after breaking from the retreating forces under Kim Myeong-won. Kim had reported him for disobeying orders. According to Ryu’s account, the court sent someone to execute Sin before the report of his victory could save him.

The episode made me think about what happens when an institution moves faster to punish a person than to find out what they have done.

King Seonjo eventually fled the capital. Yi Sun-sin was later arrested and stripped of command amid court suspicions and accusations, then served without his former rank before being reinstated. Ryu also records what he thought Yi brought to the work, a question I cared about more after seeing how close Joseon came to losing him.

What Ryu noticed about Yi Sun-sin

Ryu remembers Yi as someone willing to hear a proposal from a soldier, whatever that soldier’s standing. The picture of leadership here comes through the opportunity he gave others to speak.

That openness must have mattered when resources were scarce and a decision had to be made on the strength of information somebody else had gathered.

One passage about raising provisions through a system of passes made me think of Zhuge Liang and the borrowed arrows in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. What the two episodes shared for me was the ingenuity it takes to get something your force cannot spare.

Notes for the people who would come after

The miscellaneous notes appended to the work turn some of its episodes into questions of preparation. Ryu writes about organizing troops and defending a country before the same failures recur.

His interest in the signs that precede a disaster struck me. A warning only helps if somebody can recognize what it means while there is still time to act.

The cost of the war

Some passages were painful to read. I was grateful that someone who had taken part in the decisions also wanted to leave a record of what went wrong.

When I wrote this, Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Israel–Hamas war were giving the news a much more immediate vocabulary of loss. They made me read the cost Ryu describes with less distance.

The book left me thinking about the work of prevention that has to happen long before anyone can call a war a victory.

Book details

Jingbirok (The Book of Corrections)

Author

Ryu Seong-ryong (modern Korean translation by Kim Hong-sik)

Korean edition published

November 20, 2014

ISBN-13

9788974831745

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