1. Why this case is the suite’s most acute instance of the central cruelty
The phenomenon, in most of its instances, completes its work after the deliverance is accomplished, the regime turning on the savior once the danger has passed and the deliverer’s capability is no longer needed. Saul hunted David after the Philistine champion was slain; Athens exiled Themistocles after Salamis; the Chinese founders destroyed their generals after the empire was won; the late Roman court killed its defenders after the invasions were broken. The Yi Sun-sin case is different, and its difference is the source of its peculiar horror and the reason the suite treats it as the most acute instance of the phenomenon’s central cruelty. For the Korean court turned on its admiral not after the war was won but in the midst of it, not when his capability was spent but when it was still desperately needed, and it tortured and imprisoned the one man who was winning the war while the war still hung in the balance and the enemy still threatened the kingdom. The regime did not wait for the deliverance to be complete before destroying the deliverer; it nearly destroyed the deliverer and the deliverance together, removing the admiral in the midst of his victories and very nearly losing the war as the immediate and direct consequence.
This is the phenomenon’s cruelty in its most concentrated form, the deliverer literally tortured by the regime he was in the act of rescuing, and the case displays a feature that the others show only in the longer view, the immediate and near-fatal self-defeat of the regime’s fear. When the late Roman court killed Stilicho, Rome was sacked within two years; the interval, though short, was an interval. When the Korean court removed Yi Sun-sin, the fleet was destroyed within months by his replacement, and the kingdom stood on the edge of the catastrophe the admiral had been preventing, and the court was compelled to recall him, to acknowledge by the recall that no one else could do what he did, and to restore to the man it had tortured the command it had stripped from him. The self-defeat in this case is not merely visible but undeniable and immediate, the removal of the deliverer producing within months the disaster he had prevented, and the recall constituting the regime’s own confession that its fear had nearly cost it the war.
The second reason the case is central is the richness of the deliverer’s own testimony, for Yi Sun-sin kept a war diary throughout the conflict, a record in his own hand of the campaigns, the court politics, the slander, the imprisonment, and the torture, and this diary gives the suite something it has nowhere else, the voice of the deliverer himself recording in his own words the deliverance he wrought and the ingratitude he suffered (Yi, 1592–1598/1977). The other cases reach the deliverer’s experience through the report of historians; the Yi Sun-sin case reaches it through the deliverer’s own pen, and the diary’s record of a man winning a war for a court that imprisoned and tortured him is among the most affecting documents the phenomenon has produced.
The third reason is the completeness of the deliverance and the clarity of the deliverer’s skill, for Yi Sun-sin was a commander of the very first rank, undefeated in a long series of naval engagements, the designer of innovative warships, and the architect of victories so lopsided and so consequential that his standing among the great commanders of naval history is secure. The case presents a deliverer whose capability is beyond dispute, whose victories saved the kingdom, and whose destruction by the court he saved is therefore the destruction of a manifest and indispensable savior, the phenomenon’s pattern displayed with a deliverer of unquestionable greatness.
2. The deliverance: the command of the sea against the Japanese invasion
The deliverance Yi Sun-sin rendered, the first criterion of the phenomenon, was the command of the sea against the Japanese invasion of Korea in the 1590s, the war known as the Imjin War, in which Yi Sun-sin’s naval victories severed the Japanese supply lines, frustrated the invasion’s strategy, and saved the kingdom from the conquest that the Japanese armies, victorious on land, had seemed certain to accomplish (Hawley, 2005; Turnbull, 2002).
The Japanese invasion was a vast enterprise, the attempt of the Japanese ruler to conquer Korea as the prelude to an invasion of China, and the Japanese armies, landing in great numbers and equipped with firearms, swept up the Korean peninsula, taking the capital and driving the Korean court into flight, the war on land going disastrously for Korea (Hawley, 2005; Turnbull, 2002). But the Japanese strategy depended on the sea, on the shipment of supplies and reinforcements along the coast to support the advancing armies, and it was at sea that the invasion was frustrated, for there the Korean navy, under Yi Sun-sin, won a series of victories that severed the supply lines on which the land campaign depended and denied the Japanese the command of the sea their strategy required.
Yi Sun-sin’s victories were a succession of triumphs without defeat, won through superior tactics, superior gunnery, and the innovative warships he employed, including the armored vessels known as turtle ships, covered craft bristling with guns that proved formidable in the close fighting of the Korean coast (Hawley, 2005; Turnbull, 2002). In engagement after engagement Yi Sun-sin destroyed Japanese fleets while losing few or no ships of his own, his tactical mastery and the discipline of his fleet producing victories so lopsided that they astonished both sides, and by these victories he severed the Japanese supply lines, frustrated the invasion’s strategy, and saved the kingdom from the conquest that the land campaign had threatened. The deliverance was real, decisive, and attributable to the admiral’s skill, for it was Yi Sun-sin’s command of the sea that denied the Japanese the supply and reinforcement their strategy required and turned the course of a war that had been going disastrously on land, and the first criterion is met as fully as anywhere in the suite, for Yi Sun-sin was the commander whose capability saved Korea from the Japanese conquest.
3. The turn: the slander, the false intelligence, and the court’s credulity
The phenomenon’s third criterion, fear as the operative factor in the destruction, takes in the Yi Sun-sin case the form of the slander and faction at court that worked on the king’s suspicion and credulity, the rivalry and intrigue that turned the court against its victorious admiral in the midst of the war, and the case shows the destruction proceeding not from a single sovereign’s dread but from the combination of court faction, rival ambition, and a king disposed to believe the worst of a subject whose success and prestige had grown great.
Yi Sun-sin’s very success made him a figure of consequence and therefore a target for the faction and rivalry of the court, and his prestige, the standing his victories had given him, made him an object of the suspicion and jealousy that great success provokes. The court was riven by faction, and Yi Sun-sin had rivals, in particular another commander whose partisans worked to advance their man at Yi Sun-sin’s expense and to discredit the victorious admiral (Hawley, 2005; Turnbull, 2002). The occasion of the destruction came through a piece of false intelligence, a stratagem by which the Japanese, who had every reason to wish Yi Sun-sin removed, fed the Korean court a deceptive report designed to induce the court to order the admiral into a trap or to discredit him when he refused to act on the false information (Hawley, 2005; Turnbull, 2002). The court, credulous and worked upon by the faction hostile to Yi Sun-sin, accepted the false intelligence and ordered the admiral to act upon it, and when Yi Sun-sin, recognizing the report as a deception or judging the ordered movement to be a trap, declined to act as ordered, his disobedience, in fact the sound judgment of a commander refusing to lead his fleet into a trap, was made the ground of the charge against him.
The king, disposed by the slander and the faction to believe the worst of his admiral, and offended by the disobedience, turned against Yi Sun-sin, and the case shows the operative cause of the destruction to be the combination of the court faction’s hostility, the rival’s ambition, the Japanese deception, and the king’s credulity and suspicion, all working on the prestige and the success that had made the admiral a target. The historian must consider, as the method requires, whether Yi Sun-sin’s disobedience was a genuine offense that justified his punishment, and the answer the case yields is a clear negative, for the disobedience was the refusal of a commander to lead his fleet into a trap set by a deceptive report, the sound judgment of a man who knew the sea and the enemy better than the court did, and the subsequent destruction of the fleet by his replacement, who did act as the court wished, demonstrated that Yi Sun-sin’s judgment had been correct and the court’s order disastrous. The operative cause of the destruction was the fear and suspicion that the admiral’s success and prestige had provoked, worked on by faction and deception; the charge of disobedience was the instrument, the offense seized upon to accomplish the destruction that the hostility sought.
4. The destruction and the proof of its folly: torture, demotion, and the catastrophe of the replacement
The destruction itself was accomplished through the admiral’s arrest, imprisonment, torture, and demotion, and its folly was demonstrated, more immediately and more completely than in any other case in the suite, by the catastrophe that followed his removal, the destruction of the fleet by his replacement and the kingdom’s descent toward the disaster the admiral had been preventing.
Yi Sun-sin was arrested, brought to the capital, imprisoned, and subjected to torture, the victorious admiral who had saved the kingdom from the Japanese fleet treated as a criminal by the court he had saved, interrogated under torture, and very nearly put to death (Hawley, 2005; Turnbull, 2002). That the man who was winning the war should be tortured by the court he was winning it for is the phenomenon’s central cruelty in its most concentrated form, and the diary and the records of the period preserve the bitter fact of it, the deliverer in the hands of the regime’s torturers while the enemy he had defeated waited offshore. Yi Sun-sin escaped execution, in part through the intercession of those who recognized his value, but he was stripped of his command and demoted to the ranks, reduced from the admiral who commanded the fleet to a common soldier, the deliverer humiliated and degraded by the court he had saved (Hawley, 2005; Turnbull, 2002).
The folly of the destruction was demonstrated at once. Yi Sun-sin’s command of the fleet passed to his rival, the commander whose faction had worked against him, and this replacement, acting as the court wished and lacking Yi Sun-sin’s skill, led the fleet to catastrophe, engaging the Japanese in circumstances that Yi Sun-sin would have avoided and suffering a disastrous defeat in which the Korean fleet that Yi Sun-sin had built and led to victory after victory was almost entirely destroyed (Hawley, 2005; Turnbull, 2002). The command of the sea that Yi Sun-sin had won and held was lost in a single battle by his replacement, the supply lines the admiral had severed were reopened, and the kingdom stood again on the edge of the conquest that Yi Sun-sin’s victories had prevented, the catastrophe following directly and immediately from the removal of the admiral. The self-defeat of the regime’s fear was thus demonstrated with a completeness and an immediacy unmatched in the suite, for within months of removing the deliverer the court had lost the fleet, lost the command of the sea, and brought upon itself the disaster the deliverer had been holding off, and the connection between the removal and the catastrophe was undeniable, the replacement’s defeat the direct proof that the court had destroyed the one man capable of its defense.
5. The recall and the final victory: the court’s confession and the deliverer’s death
The sequel to the catastrophe is the case’s most telling demonstration of the phenomenon’s self-defeat and the regime’s dependence on the deliverer it had destroyed, for the court, faced with the disaster its fear had produced, was compelled to recall the man it had tortured, to restore to him the command it had stripped from him, and thereby to confess, by the recall itself, that no one else could do what he did and that its destruction of the deliverer had been a catastrophic error.
With the fleet destroyed and the kingdom in peril, the court recalled Yi Sun-sin and restored him to the command, the man who had been tortured and demoted to the ranks raised again to the admiralty because the catastrophe had proved that he alone could save the situation (Hawley, 2005; Turnbull, 2002). The recall is the regime’s confession, the acknowledgment, forced by the disaster, that the deliverer it had destroyed was indispensable, that its fear had nearly lost it the war, and that it had no choice but to restore the man it had wronged. And Yi Sun-sin, restored to a command that was now almost nothing, for the fleet had been all but destroyed and he is said to have had only a handful of ships remaining, accomplished the most famous of all his victories, the battle in which, with his tiny remnant fleet, he confronted a vast Japanese armada in a narrow strait and, exploiting the currents and the terrain as he had always done, destroyed a large part of the enemy fleet and turned back the advance, a victory against odds so overwhelming that it stands among the most remarkable in naval history (Hawley, 2005; Turnbull, 2002). The deliverer, restored to the command the court had stripped from him, rebuilt the shattered navy and once more denied the Japanese the command of the sea, saving the kingdom a second time after the court’s fear had nearly thrown away the salvation he had first achieved.
The end came in the hour of his final victory. In the last great battle of the war, as the Japanese sought to withdraw and Yi Sun-sin pressed the attack to destroy the retreating enemy fleet, the admiral was struck by a bullet and killed in the moment of his triumph, dying as the battle was being won, and it is recorded that, knowing his wound was mortal, he ordered his death to be concealed lest it dishearten his men and cost them the victory, so that the battle was won and the enemy destroyed before his death was made known (Hawley, 2005; Turnbull, 2002; Yi, 1592–1598/1977). The deliverer died in the act of his final deliverance, killed in the hour of the victory that completed the salvation of the kingdom, and the manner of his death, the concealment of his wound that the victory might be won, is the last testimony to the devotion of a man who had been tortured by the court he served and who served it still, unto death, in the winning of its war. He died the savior of Korea, the admiral undefeated in battle, killed by the enemy in the moment of victory after he had been tortured by the kingdom he saved, and the contrast between the court’s treatment of him and his service to the court is the phenomenon’s cruelty and the deliverer’s fidelity displayed in their starkest opposition.
6. The phenomenon analyzed: the four concepts in the Korean case
The four analytical concepts of Paper 1 are present in the destruction of Yi Sun-sin, and the case displays them in the particular register of the mid-war destruction and the immediate self-defeat.
The convertibility of capability into threat appears in the Yi Sun-sin case in the form of the admiral’s success and prestige making him a figure of consequence and therefore a target for the faction and suspicion of the court, his very victories, the proof of his capability, drawing upon him the jealousy and hostility that great success provokes. The capability that saved the kingdom made the admiral a great figure, and his greatness made him a target, the success converting into the prestige that drew the factional attack and the suspicion. The case shows the convertibility operating even in the midst of the war, the admiral’s success making him so great a figure that his greatness became a liability at court while his capability was still needed at sea, the very victories that saved the kingdom feeding the prestige that endangered him.
Prestige as a rival source of legitimacy appears in Yi Sun-sin’s standing as the victorious admiral, the savior of the kingdom at sea, whose prestige made him a person of consequence in the factional struggles of the court and a rival whose standing the hostile faction sought to diminish. The admiral’s prestige, rooted in his victories, was a form of standing that the court faction found threatening and that the rival commander coveted, and the destruction of the admiral was, in part, the removal of a prestige that stood in the way of the faction’s ambitions. The case shows the prestige of the deliverer becoming a stake in the factional struggles, the standing that the victories had earned made the object of the rivalry and the slander that sought to bring the admiral down.
The asymmetry between the irreplaceable individual and the self-preserving institution appears in the Yi Sun-sin case with a cruel twist, for here the institution’s act against the individual was nearly its own destruction, and the immediacy of the self-defeat exposed the asymmetry with unusual clarity. The court, acting on the faction’s hostility and the king’s suspicion, removed the admiral whose capability was the kingdom’s defense, and the removal at once produced the catastrophe, the destruction of the fleet and the loss of the command of the sea, so that the institution’s action against the individual nearly destroyed the institution itself. The recall was the institution’s forced acknowledgment of the asymmetry, the confession that the individual was indispensable and that its action against him had been a catastrophic error, and the case shows the asymmetry resolved first in favor of the institution’s fear, with near-fatal consequences, and then, under the compulsion of the disaster, reversed by the recall that restored the indispensable individual. The Korean case is the suite’s clearest demonstration that the institution’s fear of the deliverer can be not merely costly but immediately and nearly fatally self-defeating, the removal of the indispensable individual producing at once the disaster he had prevented.
The use of legal form to legitimate the destruction appears in the charge of disobedience, the offense seized upon to accomplish the destruction, the admiral’s sound refusal to lead his fleet into a trap made the ground of his arrest and punishment. The court did not destroy the admiral openly as the removal of a too-great subject; it charged him with disobedience to the king’s order, the legal form by which his correct judgment was made an offense and his destruction given the color of justice. And the subsequent catastrophe, the destruction of the fleet by the replacement who obeyed the order the admiral had refused, demonstrated that the order itself had been disastrous and the admiral’s disobedience correct, exposing the charge as the instrument of the destruction rather than the punishment of a real offense. The legal form in the Korean case served, as in the others, to clothe the destruction in the appearance of justice, the charge of disobedience providing the ground, and the proof of its emptiness came swiftly in the disaster that followed the obedience the court had demanded.
7. The Korean variant and the standard of the suite
Read against the cases that precede it, the Yi Sun-sin case confirms the phenomenon’s structure and contributes its most acute instance, the destruction of the deliverer in the midst of the war he was winning, the torture of the savior by the court he was saving, and the immediate and near-fatal self-defeat of the regime’s fear. As in Saul’s pursuit of David, in Athens’s exile of Themistocles, in Rome’s persecution of Scipio, in the Chinese executions, in the late Roman murders, in Justinian’s suspicion of Belisarius, in the judicial murder of Yue Fei, in the abandonment of Joan of Arc, and in the extermination of Nguyễn Trãi, a genuine deliverer is destroyed in consequence of the regime’s fear of the success and prestige the deliverance created. The Yi Sun-sin case is distinguished by the timing of the destruction, in the midst of the war rather than after it, by the central cruelty of the torture of the savior by the court he was saving, and by the immediacy and completeness of the self-defeat, the removal of the deliverer producing within months the catastrophe he had prevented and compelling the recall that confessed his indispensability.
The Korean case gives the suite its sharpest demonstration of the self-defeat that the closing paper will argue, for here the connection between the destruction of the deliverer and the disaster is not merely visible but immediate and undeniable, the removal of the admiral followed within months by the destruction of the fleet and the loss of the command of the sea, and the recall constituting the regime’s own confession that its fear had nearly cost it the war. Where the late Roman cases showed the self-defeat in the sack that followed the killing by an interval of years, the Korean case shows it in the catastrophe that followed the removal by an interval of months, and where the late Roman regime did not survive to confess its error, the Korean court was compelled by the disaster to recall the deliverer it had tortured and thereby to acknowledge, in the act of recall, that no one else could do what he did. The case is the suite’s clearest proof that the destruction of the deliverer is self-defeating, the regime’s fear producing the very disaster the deliverer had prevented, and the recall the regime’s forced confession of the folly of its fear.
The Yi Sun-sin case also gives the suite its most affecting testimony to the deliverer’s fidelity, for the admiral, tortured and demoted by the court he had saved, served that court still, accepting the recall, rebuilding the shattered fleet, winning the impossible victory in the strait, and dying in the hour of his final triumph, faithful unto death to the kingdom that had wronged him. The contrast between the court’s treatment of the admiral and the admiral’s service to the court is the phenomenon’s cruelty and the deliverer’s devotion displayed in their starkest opposition, the regime tturing and degrading the savior while the savior, undeterred by the wrong, served on to the death in the winning of the regime’s war. The deliverer’s diary, his record in his own hand of the deliverance he wrought and the ingratitude he suffered, is the suite’s most direct testimony to the experience of the phenomenon’s victim, the voice of a man winning a war for a court that imprisoned and tortured him, and it stands as the deliverer’s own witness to the cruelty the suite examines and to the fidelity that the cruelty could not break. Yi Sun-sin died the savior of Korea, undefeated in battle, killed by the enemy in the moment of victory after he had been tortured by the kingdom he saved, and his memory is honored in Korea as that of the supreme national hero, the verdict of history elevating the deliverer whom the court had tortured to the highest place in the nation’s regard, the savior the regime had wronged becoming the figure the nation reveres above all others.
References
Hawley, S. (2005). The Imjin War: Japan’s sixteenth-century invasion of Korea and attempt to conquer China. Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch.
Turnbull, S. (2002). Samurai invasion: Japan’s Korean war 1592–1598. Cassell.
Yi, S.-s. (1977). Nanjung ilgi: War diary of Admiral Yi Sun-sin (T.-h. Ha, Trans.; P.-h. Lee, Ed.). Yonsei University Press. (Original work written 1592–1598)
