Yi Sun-sin was a Seoulite

I was recently invited to give the keynote speech for a conference held at Seoul City Hall to honor Yi Sun-sin and to share knowledge about his life and times, including his life in Seoul. He was born in Seoul, where there are two different plaques that each claim he was born on that spot. They are 150 meters apart, but that’s probably as close as we are going to get to the actual location. He moved to Asan when he was 14, and Asan has a shrine to honor him and claims him as their native son. However, he was born in Seoul.

Seoul city leaders are about to set history straight by building a commemorative hall for him in the next few years. They are looking for the right place and examining some building plans.

Who was Yi Sun-sin? We may well need to answer that question, but most people who have anything to do with Korea already know. It is his huge statue that stands guard over the central intersection in Gwanghwamun. He was the admiral who fought the Japanese in the 1592-98 Imjin War. But there is more to the story — a lot more.

My presentation outlined nine crises in his life, any one of which could have convinced him to take another path, to take the safe way out. But he was doggedly persistent.

Twice in his career, once early on, and once at the height of the Japanese invasion, he was falsely accused of desertion, stripped of his rank, incarcerated and tortured. The second time was for disobeying an order to pursue the Japanese navy when there was a report that they were in harbor at a certain place. He smelled a rat. In Korean, they say he had good “nunchi” that told him it was a trap. He refused to obey the king’s direct order. It turns out he was right, and the foolish replacement who led the Korean navy into the trap lost most of their ships, along with his life along and the lives of hundreds of Korean sailors. He also lost his reputation — everyone in Korea knows of the foolish failure of Won Gyun.

In both cases when Yi was arrested, he asked to be released to fight as a foot soldier. He did not resign himself to his fate.

When he was restored to the rank of admiral, he was ordered to fight on land, and give up the navy, since they had lost most of their fleet. He refused the king’s order again and asked to take to the seas, but this time the king supported him. His famous response to his sovereign was “I still have 12 ships.”

With those remaining 12 ships, plus one more that was quickly repaired, he fought a Japanese fleet of over 133 ships. Without reasonable hope of success, he lured the Japanese navy, convinced they could finish off the Koreans, into a narrow strait were the tide washed back-and-forth every four hours. While the Japanese ships were flailing he kept his distance and bombarded them with the superior Korean cannons.

The Korean cannons were bigger and could fire farther than their Japanese counterparts, and the Korean ships were bigger and made of harder wood. The softer wood of the Japanese ships could not withstand the Koreans' fire. In the Battle of Myeongnyang, Yi destroyed over 30 Japanese ships while not losing a single one of his own. Only 10 men died on the Korean side. The movie “The Admiral: Roaring Currents” (2014) tells the story.

He died tragically in the final battle of the war, as the Japanese were retreating. Even in death he was heroic. He ordered his nephew, who was also his deputy, to take his place, wearing the admiral’s armor on the flagship as they went into battle, lest the solders become disheartened at the death of their leader.

He is considered, along with Horatio Nelson, as one of the two greatest admirals of all time. Nelson also died in battle while still winning at Trafalgar, and like Yi, Nelson’s statue stands atop a stone pillar, but overlooking London.

Unlike Nelson, however, Yi was known for his strict, upright character. He once refused to meet a cousin who had a powerful position because he thought people would say he was trying to curry favor. Nelson, on the other hand, was a scoundrel on the personal level, with all kinds of rumors and accusations surrounding him.

Maybe the greatest praise for Yi came from the nation of his enemies. Togo Heihachiro, the Japanese commander at the Battle of Tsushima — where an Asian power defeated a European power, the Russians, for the first time — praised Yi as one of the greatest naval heroes of all time, allegedly saying, “There was none greater than Yi Sun-sin.”

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is associate professor of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.