ROYAL DIVISION MODEL 415service. It would be impossible, for example, to establish a system of truly uni-
versal service in which all adult males except for those serving as court offi-
cials, passers of the highest civil and military examinations, students in school,
and men employed in the Inner (Palace) Forbidden Guards (Naegumwi), would
be enrolled for military service as long as the practice of individual registration
was in effect.
The reason was because everyone in society, "from soldiers and local gentry
up to the noblemen at court, from the lowliest clerks and district magistrates to
the generalissimo of the armies in the field, everyone had their own private inter-
ests." To have a system of individual registration where the registrar would have
to make a decision on each individual "opened the path to corruption," and cre-
ated the circumstances for "the evil of requesting favors and paying bribes to
spread throughout the world."62 The only way to eliminate the system of indi-
vidual registration was to carry out land reform, shifting the basis of registra-
tion from individuals to unit areas of land, thus eliminating the opportunity for
negotiation on each person's status or situation. Yu was emphatic on the absolute
necessity of land reform for rectification of military service:
Once the land system is carried out, then the grand framework of things will be
established, and everything will work out as a matter of course and very easily.
But if land reform is not carried out, there will be great confusion in the grand
outline of things. and everything wi II be contrary and difficult to achieve. What
hardship could there be [from land reform] that would he a reason for not doing
it? Outside of this method, I know of no other way of [bringing the military ser-
vice system] under contro!."3Unfortunately, he did not say what should be done if land reform could not
be carried out. Radical land reform and redistribution was so central to his plan
for military service that one wonders whether he intended any of his proposals
to be considered separately from his land allotment scheme. As we will see later
on, some of his proposals for reform of the military service system were, in fact,
divorced from his land reform program by his admirers, but this was a disser-
vice to the logic of his views. Furthermore, he was not consistent in his ideal-
ism. As mentioned in previous chaptcrs, he believed that radical land reform
was not a Utopian pipe dream, but a distinct possibility once a resolute king
could be persuaded of its advantages.
Unfortunately, slavery was also an important component of the current
Chason dynasty system of military service, and slavery was not part and parcel
of the well-field model. Despite his opposition to it, Yu was willing to tolerate
it for the time being because it was so firmly entrenched in Korean social prac-
tice; it could only be eliminated by subLle and gradual methods.
Nonetheless, his flexibility on slavery did not shake his conviction that land
reform was both necessary and possible, and military service could not be rec-