90 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTYthe soldiers even during the period of truce. Since peasants would rotate on and
off duty, requiring some travel between their home villages and the place of duty,
whether the capital or a garrison, their absence from home interfered with the
production of grain. He found a remedy for this situation in the Nei-cheng (Inter-
nalAdministration) chapter ofthe Kuan-tzu, according to which squad, platoon,
and company officers would be recruited from the rural villages and put in charge
of the peacetime training of peasant-soldiers during slack times when the men
were not needed in the fields.
Yu explained that this was the basis for his sago system by which military
units corresponded in size to the popUlation inhabiting villages and districts. All
the troops would be assigned to units near their homes and undergo training in
their villages. During large-scale field-training exercises, all the soldiers of a
regiment (yon,!?) might be assembled in one place, or in the case of Kyonggi
Province, all four regiments outside the capital could be assembled for inspec-
tion at the capital. Otherwise, the men would remain at home freed from the
bother and expense of traveling long distances for military duty and training,
and they would have sufficient time to ensure sufficient grain production.^94
In other words, Yu Songnyong was arguing that in a time of almost total des-
peration, when the nation was virtually gasping for breath, the destruction of
grain reserves and production meant that an approximation of the militia ideal
was the only practical method for training a provincial reserve army. The cen-
tralized, bureaucratic state was only capablc of maintaining a small force of crack
bowmen, swordsmen, and new musketeers in the capital under the Military Train-
ing Agency; it could not also maintain a large, permanent force of professional
soldiers in the provinces. The flaw of the chin 'gwan system of early Choson
was the assignment of men to posts some distance from their villages and the
increase oftravel and tax burdens on them, which caused many men to flee their
homes and the army recruiters. He hoped to eliminate that problem by adopt-
ing the sog()'S system of making a military hierarchy out of the villages, sub-
districts, and districts of the countryside.^95
No sooner was the fighting over in 1598, however, than conuption of the sago
soldiers began. The Office of Censor General (Sagan won) complained in 1599
that the district magistrates were using the soldiers for labor service as well as
military service, putting them to work as yamen helpers even during training
sessions, subjecting the men to whippings and beatings, signing up all male mem-
bers of families for sago service in violation of quotas, and providing none of
the duty soldiers with support taxpayersy6 Furthermore, district magistrates tired
of maintaining their responsibilities as regimental and battalion commanders,
turned control of the troops over to company commanders they recruited from
the villages, and neglected training. Service in the so,!?o units became so bad
that the men compared it to consignment to hel1.^97
Furthermore, overall troop strength in Korea had not been built up by the gov-
ernment at the end of the war. Yi Sugwang, one of the tlrst independent state-
craft scholars in the seventeenth century, wrote in his Chiballg yusol that