Japanese castles and the Korean campaigns
To surround a European city with the elaborate and mathematically intricate
trace italienne castles built of stone was a very expensive undertaking,
so many used the same design but employed earthworks instead. As in the
Japanese experience in Korea and at Osaka these were found to have the
advantage of both speed and cost, and provided a deep area of absorbency
for cannon shot. So far the parallels are clear, but, as noted above,
we have to envisage a contemporary Japanese castle either without its
tower keep, or with many other encircling walls and bastions if we are
to appreciate the reality of siege warfare at the end of the Sengoku-jidai
and the similarities to European artillery fortresses. This is not always
easy to do in Japan, but when the Japanese invaded Korea they established
a chain of coastal fortresses called wajô to protect their communications
with Japan. As the wajô never received the tower keeps added later
to Japanese castles their remains provide useful information about contemporary
castle design and allow a direct comparison with European models. Instead
of the Chinese and Korean styles of walls snaking up and down the mountains
we see the more labour-intensive Japanese model of large scale excavations
to provide horizontal surfaces, and the use of carefully designed sloping
walls rather than the simpler Korean walls of flat stone. Some castles
had to be built very quickly, and thousands of Japanese labourers were
shipped over to help with construction work, where they joined many thousands
more captive Koreans. At Ulsan even the walls and gateways were incomplete
as the Ming forces advanced upon it in the winter of 1597, and an eyewitness
recorded the brutality meted out by the commanders to the Korean and Japanese
labourers impressed to the task. Earthworks and palisades added to the
hasty defences where there was no time to build with stone, and a chronicler
noted how it gave the illusion that the third bailey was complete. When
the Chinese attacks began many samurai were still encamped outside the
unfinished walls.
The fact that nearly all Korean castles had collapsed before the initial
Japanese advance, spearheaded by volleys from massed ranks of gunners,
was the main reason why the invaders spurned the native style of fortress
design. One other reason why native Korean models was rejected was that
a coastal location makes its own demands upon a castle designer. There
was a requirement for excellent visibility, particularly out to sea, and
a vital need to provide a well-defended anchorage that could in some way
be linked securely to the fortress on the hill behind, where one existed.
The best example of this is Sunchôn, which is very well preserved.
The whole area is exactly as it was once the mountain had been scooped
away and the stone facings added. As probably little else was built in
the form of superstructure Sunchôn may well be one of the best preserved
Japanese castle sites in the world.
When the Chinese launched their attacks on the wajô the theory held
good, and the combination of gunfire covering every angle of a simple
but solid series of bastions meant that the Japanese did not lose a single
one of their castles. However, the overall progress of the war meant that
the Japanese wajô in Korea ended up being purely defensive structures
to cover the Japanese withdrawal rather than as the outposts of empire.
Had things gone differently then the wajô might well have represented
a parallel with the coastal forts of the Europeans, who established garrisons
defended by artillery at places like Mombasa, Havana and Manila to serve
as bases for overseas expansion and colonisation. Instead the samurai
returned home in defeat, and put into practice the lessons they had learned
from the successful repulse of the huge assaults the Chinese had mounted
on their wajô. The results were to be seen in the defence systems
and attacking practices used in the sieges of Otsu and Fushimi in the
Sekigahara campaign of 1600, the siege of Osaka in 1615, and the overall
design of many of the castles we see in Japan today. Once again it was
the combination of wall and gun in the trace japonaise that had held them
off. In Korea the lesson originally learned at Nagashino had been subjected
to its most searching test and had passed with flying colours. The evolution
in castle design from mountain stockade to an artillery fortress of stone
was therefore complete, and owed much to the initial confirmation of the
power of guns in a fortified position that was demonstrated so powerfully
for the first time on the bloody field of Nagashino.
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