There is a small stone mound in Kyoto that most tourists walk straight past. It sits in a scruffy little park across from the grand Toyokuni Shrine, crowned with a modest stone stupa, and unless you already know what it is, you would take it for nothing more than an odd bit of garden furniture. I found it almost by accident, years ago, on a research trip that had nothing whatsoever to do with it. The plaque, when I finally located it, explained the matter with a bureaucratic flatness that somehow made the horror worse rather than better: beneath this mound lie the noses, and in the war's earlier phase the ears, of some 126,000 Korean soldiers and civilians, salted, crated, and shipped home to Japan as proof of a job well done.
I mention it now, a good many years later, because I have been reading a rather different sort of book. Not one written by the victors who built that mound, but by a man on the losing side of the same catastrophe, trying, in his own retirement, to work out precisely how his country had allowed this to happen to itself.
A Confession Disguised as a Chronicle
That book is the Jingbirok, usually rendered in English as The Book of Corrections, and its author, Yu Seong-ryong, deserves rather more attention in the West than he currently receives. In the war's first year, he served as the Joseon court's chief minister and as the officer charged with overseeing its military command, a rare concentration of civil and military authority in one exhausted man's hands. He had personally recommended Yi Sun-sin, at the time an obscure county magistrate, for the naval command that would, within a few years, help save what remained of the kingdom. It was a run of promotions so rapid it carried the man some seven ranks up the official hierarchy within a single year. By any reasonable measure, Yu Seong-ryong is one of the few genuine heroes to emerge from that war.
Which makes what he confesses to, in the opening pages of his own book, rather harder to forgive him for.
Let me deal with the obvious objection first, since I suspect some of you are already forming it: this is not a novel. It is, on its face, a retired statesman's private record of seven catastrophic years, finished in 1604 and now sitting, as South Korea's National Treasure No. 132, in a research institute outside Andong. Why, then, does a literary blog concern itself with it at all?
Because of what happens a year before the war even begins. In 1591, two Joseon envoys returned from a mission to Japan, sent the year before to determine whether Toyotomi Hideyoshi truly intended to invade. They came back with flatly contradictory reports. The senior envoy warned that war was certain, describing Hideyoshi as a man with cunning, dangerous eyes. His deputy insisted there was nothing to fear at all; the same eyes, he said, were "like a rat's," unworthy of concern. The court needed to choose one account or the other. And Yu Seong-ryong, a man of formidable intelligence by his own book's evidence, sided with his fellow partisan's comfortable reassurance over the correct, inconvenient warning from a rival faction. The king believed the comfortable story. A year later, the comfortable story was catastrophically wrong. It is worth pausing on the fact that we know this at all only because Yu Seong-ryong himself chose to record it. He alone controlled what went into his book, and a lesser man, or a vainer one, would simply have left the episode out.
I find this detail more illuminating than any battle scene the book contains. Here was a nation brought to the edge of ruin not by a shortage of intelligence, but by an entirely ordinary, entirely human refusal to believe intelligence that was politically inconvenient. One rather suspects that every war in history has, somewhere in its prologue, some version of the same scene: two reports on a desk, and a room full of powerful men choosing whichever one lets them sleep that night.
This is why I would gently resist anyone who tells you the Jingbirok is of interest only to specialists in Korean military history. It is that, certainly, but it is also something closer to a confession, written by a man who had been, by his own hand, complicit in the disaster he then spent the remainder of his life documenting. The genuine Western parallel here is not, as one might expect, Churchill's stately, rather self-congratulatory history of the Second World War. It is Thucydides. The Athenian general, exiled after arriving too late to save Amphipolis from the Spartans, spent his twenty years of banishment writing his history of the Peloponnesian War, a work made great precisely by its author's proximity to failure and his refusal to flatter either side, including his own. Yu Seong-ryong belongs to that lineage far more than to the lineage of triumphant memoirists. This, to my mind, is exactly what qualifies the Jingbirok as literature rather than mere administrative record: not its style, which is plain and largely unadorned, but its posture. A man turning the same unflinching eye on himself that he turns on his enemies.
Modern Korea has, understandably, tended to dramatise this war rather differently. A national television adaptation a decade or so ago ran to some fifty episodes and found room, as such things generally do, for a great deal of heroism and comparatively little confession. Yu Seong-ryong's original affords rather less comfort than his television descendants. He is not especially interested in absolving his country, and still less interested in absolving himself.
For those who wish to test my claim against the original, Choi Byonghyon's annotated English translation, published by the University of California's Institute of East Asian Studies in 2002, remains the standard text for Western readers, and one of the very few Korean classics to have made that crossing successfully at all. The book was written, as any serious document of its era would have been, in classical Chinese rather than in vernacular Korean, which is one small, unglamorous reason so few such texts have ever reached Western shelves at all: someone first has to want to do the years of unrewarded labour it takes to carry them across.
What the Confession Costs
What that unflinching eye records, when it turns to the war itself, is not easily softened for a modern reader, nor should it be. The seven years of fighting brought with them a famine so severe, spanning the winter of 1592 through the summer of 1594, that Korean scholarship has documented instances of people being killed for their flesh in the desperate arithmetic of starvation. I include this detail not for its shock value but because Yu Seong-ryong himself did not flinch from recording it, and a Western reader who wishes to understand the book on its own terms ought not flinch from reading it either.
Nor was the cruelty confined to hunger. In the war's second, more savage phase, Hideyoshi's commanders, finding severed heads too cumbersome to ship home as proof of their kill counts, ordered noses cut instead, salted, and crated for Japan. That is the origin of the mound with which I began. The population records of the period are notoriously difficult to interpret with any precision, since Korea's household registries collapsed along with everything else, and the surviving figures reflect administrative breakdown as much as literal mortality. But the broad outline on which historians agree is a demographic catastrophe of the first order, one from which the peninsula took generations to recover.
I set these details down not to compete with other historians in grimness, but because the Jingbirok's genuine achievement is its refusal to let policy failure remain an abstraction. Yu Seong-ryong does not merely tell you that a warning was ignored. He makes you sit, a few pages later, with what ignoring it cost. That, too, is a very old literary technique, and a remarkably effective one, and one that any decent novelist would recognise as their own.
A Report Somebody Chose Not to Believe
I am aware, naturally, that I write this in the middle of two wars rather than from some safely distant peacetime. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is now in its fifth year, with no settlement in sight despite periodic bursts of diplomatic optimism. And a war between the United States, Israel, and Iran, which began in the closing days of this last February, continues as I write these words, drawing in an unsettling number of neighbouring countries. I raise neither to argue a political case; readers of every persuasion will, quite reasonably, disagree about where the greater responsibility lies in each. What I would ask instead is simpler: did either conflict begin, somewhere in its own quiet prologue, with a version of the scene Yu Seong-ryong describes? Two competing assessments on somebody's desk, and a decision made not on the strength of the evidence but on the comfort of the story it allowed people to keep telling themselves?
I suspect it did. I suspect it very nearly always does.
We Scots are not strangers to this kind of reckoning ourselves. Every November, our own war memorials fill with poppies, and every November some newspaper columnist asks, gravely, whether we learnt anything at all from the wars that emptied so many of our villages of young men. Whole streets of them, sometimes, in towns barely large enough to notice the gap until the telegrams arrived within days of one another. I have written such a column myself, more than once, in my more solemn moods, and I confess I have never arrived at an answer I found genuinely reassuring. The honest ones rarely do.
This, I think, is the peculiar value of reading a four-hundred-year-old Korean minister's memoir in the summer of 2026: not that it offers any comfort about human progress, but that it firmly refuses the comforting idea that our own era's catastrophes are somehow more sophisticated, or more forgivable, than his.
I went back to that mound in Kyoto once more, on the evening before my flight home. The light was going, and a woman walked her dog past it without breaking stride, which struck me, at the time, as exactly right. Whatever else war becomes, it eventually becomes something the living walk past on their way to somewhere else, a park bench with an unfortunate history, a line in a guidebook that most readers skip. I think Yu Seong-ryong wrote his book precisely so that a few of us might stop walking, if only for the length of a chapter, and ask what it actually cost, and whether we are, once again, quietly declining to hear the report that isn't comfortable.
Recommended Resources
☞ English Translation: The Book of Corrections, trans. Choi Byonghyon (Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, 2002) — Amazon
☞ Korean Edition: 징비록, 유성룡 (돋을새김, 2024 개정2판) — 알라딘
☞ Korean Edition: 징비록, 유성룡 (돋을새김, 2024 개정2판) — 알라딘
Ex Oriente, Lux.
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh