倭寇의 침략과 鄭夢周의 日本 使行

Abstract

The Japanese pirates' incursions upon the Goryeo soil became more frequent and not to mention extremely violent after the year of 1350, which was the second year of King Chungjeong-wang's reign. They not only violated the coastal areas, but also came deeply into the inland, raided civilian households and threatened the safety of supply ships(漕運船)transporting goods from local areas to governmental depots. Their plundering of the Goryeo people's properties not only severely disrupted the civilian economy, but also ultimately damaged the Goryeo government's financial status. In 1377 alone, there were total of 29 incursions that inflicted heavy damages upon the Goryeo population. Yet at the time, the Japanese Islands was going through a Civil war period between the ‘North dynasty’ and the ‘South dynasty’, so the Japanese government was not able to control or subdue the pirates' activities on the sea. The Kyushu area in the South was also out of control, so even if the Japanese government wanted to detain the Japanese pirates somehow, it was simply not able to. Po'eun(pen name) Jeong Mong-ju was dispatched to Japan as an emissary,in a year which was witnessing more pirates' incursions than any other year. At the time, a Japanese official named Imagawa Ryosun[今川了俊, 源了俊] was appointed as the new commander of the Kyushu Tandai[九州探題]Defense Post, under orders to destroy the Southern dynasty on Kyushu. Yet his appointment unexpectedly produced an entirely different kind of experience for both Korea and Japan. Po'eun Jeong Mong-ju, being one of the most renowned Neo-Confucian scholars in Goryeo at the time, upon his arrival at Japan finally came to meet this Imagawa Ryosun, who was other than being a military figure also one of the most noteworthy singers(歌人)in Japan at the time. Imagawa's presence and his encounter with Jeong turned out to be a meaningful occasion, in the light of establishing an amicable cultural relationship between Korea and Japan. Although two or three other envoys continued to visit Japan after Po'eun Jeong Mong-ju completed his mission and returned to Goryeo, the efforts of the Japanese government to stop the pirates began actually immediately after Jeong's departure, and the Goryeo people who were captured by the pirates were also sent back to Korea not before long. This means that the efforts of Jeong Mong-ju, which he continued during his nine-month stay in Japan, significantly contributed to the resolution of the Japanese pirate problem for Goryeo. The only text that lets us know what his life was like during his stay in Japan, are 13 poems which he wrote at the time and now remain with us today. We can reconstruct Jeong Mong-ju's thoughts and actions of the time based upon the contents of those poems, but the end result would only be part of what Jeong Mong-ju really thought and did at the time. We can only understand how he sometimes felt, how determined he was to succeed in his mission, and how much he was loyal to his country and his government.