The Tiger and the Turtle: Samurai Invasion of Korea
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the hard questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. I'm your host, Zach Cornwell, and this is episode two, The Tiger and the Turtle. Tucked away in a sleepy suburban neighborhood in the city of Kyoto, Japan, there's a small man-made hill.

It doesn't get many visitors, you won't find tourists snapping selfies, you won't find packed food stalls or crowded gift shops, and you definitely won't find a whole lot of locals willing to talk about it. Historian Stephen Turnbull once called it, quote, "...Kyoto's least mentioned and most often avoided tourist attraction."

Because this unassuming 35-foot hill, encircled by a simple iron gate and situated next to a children's playground, is a grim reminder of one of the most devastating conflicts East Asia has ever seen. A conflict so horrifying and violent that it has left deep perennial scars on the countries involved for nearly five centuries.

The cruelty of that war and the tremendous loss of life and suffering inflicted on the people who experienced it has resulted in a lingering resentment and enmity, the echoes of which can still be felt to this day. This place, this hill, is called Mimizuka, which in Japanese translates to Ear Mound.

But centuries earlier, at the time of its creation, it was more accurately called Hanazuka, which means nose mound. And that's because buried in the earth, forming the towering mass of this hill, are the remains of at least 38,000 severed human noses. Noses cut from the faces of Korean men, women, and children, packed into wooden barrels and shipped back to Japan as war trophies.

It happened so long ago that many Kyoto residents don't even know what it is. It's just another quiet shrine in an ancient city filled with quiet shrines. You'd be hard-pressed to find a mention of it in any Japanese school textbook, and it's rarely featured in any tourist guidebook. This historical amnesia doesn't signify a lack of importance, but rather reinforces the existence of it. It is a deep source of shame for the Japanese.

a bloodthirsty blemish on their history and the genesis of a rift between Japan and Korea that has never fully healed. And as hard as Japanese politicians have tried to expunge it from the cultural memory, the Koreans have never been able to simply forgive and forget. Our story begins 450 years ago in central Japan with a young peasant soldier named Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi had been born into a world of war.

His entire life, Japan had been in a state of prolonged civil war. Now it's not a two-sided conflict, as the term might suggest, but a suspended state of anarchy and infighting between hundreds of rival clans. Endless battles and blood feuds, assassinations and betrayals. At this time, Japan was not a unified country. In fact, the term Japan did not even exist yet.

The country was an ugly mosaic of competing feudal warlords, each clawing for every scrap of land they could consolidate or conquer from their neighbors. Battles were often fought over the same patch of terrain, between the same combatants, between the same warlords, multiple times over. Entire generations were born, lived, and died in what was called the Sengoku Jidai, or the Age of the Country at War.

This is what you might think of as the prototypical samurai period. Now that word, samurai, is so loaded with Hollywood baggage and decades of Western film culture that it's almost become a cliche. But this was the time period where they truly existed as we think of them. Career killers in service of feudal warlords called daimyo. So into this chaos stepped the young man, Hideyoshi.

He didn't come into this life with many advantages. He was poor, for one. A peasant. So destitute and so low on the totem pole that his family did not even have a last name. He was just Hideyoshi. And he couldn't exactly skate by on his good looks either. Hideyoshi was a notoriously ugly man.

His peers called him the bald rat, a reference to his rodent-like facial structure. And if they got bored slinging that insult around, they'd switch it up and call him monkey face. And to top it all off, he was a scrawny and short guy, even for a malnourished peasant living 450 years ago. He clocked in at about 5 feet, 110 pounds. But Hideyoshi possessed something special.

something intangible. He had what people today might call an "it factor" some rare mix of sparkling intelligence, sharp instincts, and social cunning. You know what I'm talking about, right? I'm sure you've known people like this in your life. You can't quite put your finger on it, but there's just something special about them that draws people into their orbit. Something that makes them special even if you can't quite put into words what exactly it is. Well, Hideyoshi was one of those people.

When he was 21 years old, Hideyoshi entered into the service of an up-and-coming young warlord from the Oda family, a man named Nobunaga. Hideyoshi initially served as a lowly foot soldier, but his intelligence and resourcefulness quickly earned him more responsibility. He started out supervising firewood gatherers, then he became a foreman of castle construction,

Until finally, he caught the eye of Lord Nobunaga himself, who, impressed by the young man's ingenuity and talent, brought him in to his inner circle as one of his personal sandal bearers. Hideyoshi didn't know it yet, but he had just scored himself a gig that would alter the fate of Japan, Korea, and even China for centuries to come. When Hideyoshi first met Oda Nobunaga...

The latter was a small-time warlord with few lands to his name. But Nobunaga was not like other Japanese lords. He was calculating, cruel, and a visionary battle commander. Hideyoshi had, without realizing it, started working for the Steve Jobs of 16th century Japanese warfare.

Within the span of a few years, Nobunaga has crushed rival clans, turned his small patch of land into a wealthy swath of territory, and even installed a puppet emperor in the capital of Kyoto who obeyed his every command. As Nobunaga's star rose, so did Hideyoshi's. The peasant turned sandal bear was now a respected samurai commander, one of Nobunaga's chief vassals.

He had nice clothes and servants, beautiful armor, fine weapons, and devoted concubines. Hideyoshi was a baller now. But serving the prolific Nobunaga was not all gravy and glory. Nobunaga was a merciless bully, endowing his vassals with demeaning pet names, constant mockery, and even outright humiliation.

Hideyoshi himself was a frequent target. Nobunaga even went so far as to use the humiliating bald rat nickname in front of Hideyoshi's own wife. A day in the life at Nobunaga's court must have been like something straight out of Game of Thrones. But Hideyoshi was not an idiot. Far from it. He gritted his teeth through the petty insults and focused on achieving his master's ultimate goal.

the slow and steady unification of the entire Japanese archipelago. Hideyoshi learned many things from his lord, Nobunaga. Not only the arts of war, but the finer points of culture. Walking through the muddy streets of his home village in central Japan, it's unlikely Hideyoshi, the peasant, could have ever imagined himself participating in elaborate tea ceremonies with the most powerful warlord in the islands.

But here he was, against all odds, cradling delicate teapots and wearing the finest robes money could buy. As vicious and murderous as Nobunaga could be, there was another side to him that had a deep respect for cultural arts like poetry, tea, and theater. And Hideyoshi inherited these refined tastes from his ruthless overlord. Cut to the year 1582.

Hideyoshi was commanding one of Nobunaga's powerful armies in western Japan. He had been tasked with besieging the castle of a rival samurai family and was pretty close to achieving that goal. Hideyoshi might have been sitting in his command tent, surrounded by his own loyal retinue of samurai servants and lieutenants, when a dispatch arrived from the capital of Kyoto. Lord Oda Nobunaga had been murdered.

One of Nobunaga's other generals, tired of the taunts and the bullying and Nobunaga's role in the death of one of his family members, had finally snapped. This general had surrounded one of Nobunaga's favorite leisure spots, a temple called Hanoji, and burned it to the ground with Nobunaga inside. Nobunaga, attempting to preserve some of his honor, had committed seppuku, slitting his belly open with a sword.

To quote historian Samuel Hawley, this mercurial leader had, quote, died twitching on the floor. Hideyoshi had to have been in a state of shock. His mentor, his lord, the man who had plucked him from obscurity and elevated him to become one of the most powerful samurai in the islands, was suddenly gone. For most people, this would be a paralyzing development. A time to step back and soak all this information in.

But the cunning, quick-minded Hideyoshi saw a golden opportunity and sprang into action. He quickly negotiated a ceasefire with the castle he was besieging and raced back to Kyoto with his army to confront the traitorous general. The two forces met on the slopes of a mountain just south of Kyoto on a hot July morning.

By this time, Hideyoshi was an experienced field commander. Nobunaga had taught him everything he knew, and Hideyoshi used that knowledge to crush the traitor in a short, decisive battle. Nobunaga's murderer was soon captured, beheaded, and Hideyoshi himself presented the severed head in front of Nobunaga's grave, supposedly to appease his restless spirit. When he avenged Nobunaga...

Hideyoshi didn't just put down a traitor and a rival, he secured a huge measure of legitimacy for himself. He quickly stepped into the power vacuum left in the wake of Nobunaga's death and continued the process of conquering the entire length and breadth of Japan, clan by clan, province by province, battle by battle.

But while Nobunaga preferred to bully, burn, or butcher his enemies, Hideyoshi had a more tactful approach. He'd seen the weakness in Nobunaga's governing style. Fear and cruelty were effective, but they left you open to plots and betrayals. Hideyoshi believed he could do better.

So instead of ruthless conquest, he opted for a diplomacy-based approach, where he would give his enemies the opportunity to keep much of their lands and privileges in exchange for oaths of loyalty. There were a few powerful clans who resisted, but after giving them every chance to come to their senses, only then would Hideyoshi crush them and redistribute their lands to more loyal families.

Under pressure from Hideyoshi, the puppet emperor in Kyoto granted him a noble surname, a last name of Hideyoshi's own choosing. He chose Toyotomi as his official clan name, one which he believed his descendants would proudly bear until the end of time. It meant "bountiful minister." By 1591, Toyotomi Hideyoshi was the undisputed master of all Japan.

Now that you know the origin story, I can tip my hand a little bit. Toyotomi Hideyoshi is a colossal figure in Japanese history. Now, to be fair, any discussion of Asia in the U.S. educational system usually begins and ends with Vietnam. So there's a 99% chance you've never heard of this guy before. But trust me, he is easily one of the most important men to have ever lived in Asia. Not only because of his unification of Japan, but because of what he's about to do.

It's a bit of a trope, but there is something about absolute power that legitimately seems to change people. To quote a very scholarly source, one, let's see if I have the name right here, Batman, you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Anyway, back to the story. In 1591, Hideyoshi was the overlord of all the main Japanese islands.

He had subjugated 66 provinces across three massive islands and brought dozens of lesser lords and their armies to heel. By the age of 54, the peasant boy from the backwater village had achieved what hundreds of brilliant generals and noble lords had failed to do over a century of bitter warfare. And he had done it in less than a decade since Lord Nobunaga's murder.

And no one was more impressed with the improbable rise of Toyotomi Hideyoshi than Hideyoshi himself. And he wasn't content to live out his days presiding over his hard-won cluster of Pacific islands like a benevolent grandfather king. If he could unite Japan in a mere 10 years, what else could he do? What other great kingdoms could he subjugate?

But while matters of expansion stimulated his mind, another more personal matter weighed on his heart. Hideyoshi had never been able to conceive a child with his wife of 28 years, a woman named One. They had no doubt tried countless times, but eventually realized that it just wasn't going to happen. And it's also worth noting that Hideyoshi was far from monogamous. He tended to mess around. Nobunaga even chastised him about it on one occasion, saying, and I'm paraphrasing here,

Monkey face, my dude. Quit wasting your time with all these side pieces, man. You've got a smoking hot wife at home. What's wrong with you? But despite Hideyoshi's player status, none of those hookups had ever produced a child. Hideyoshi had all this wealth, all this power, and no children to give it to. No one to carry on his legacy and make his decades of struggle worthwhile.

But then, almost out of the blue, one of his concubines became pregnant. And it was a boy. For Hideyoshi, this was nothing short of a miracle. He was overjoyed. His son was born small and sickly, but he was alive. Hideyoshi showers this little baby with attention and affection, fretting over his condition constantly. In one letter to the boy's mother, a woman named Yodogimi, Hideyoshi writes, quote,

With his line seemingly secured, Hideyoshi's mind was free to focus on more ambitious projects.

Because to the west, across the sea, there was a massive country. A land brimming with wealth and riches and resources just waiting to be taken. Its leaders were weak, its officials soft, and its armies disorganized. To Hideyoshi, it seemed, China was ripe for conquest. It's not exactly clear when this idea started forming in his head, but once it did, he couldn't get it out.

In a letter to his wife One, before he'd even finished unifying Japan, he said, quote, Even China will enter my grip. I will command it during my lifetime. End quote. Like a weed, this obsession starts to take root and grow. Hideyoshi is absolutely convinced not only of his plan to conquer China, but the feasibility of it.

Hundreds of years before Hideyoshi was born, before the civil war tore the country apart, Japan had paid regular yearly tribute to the emperors of China. But those collectors hadn't returned in a century. To Hideyoshi, that indicated that China's hold on its empire was weak and that he could easily, as he put it, quote, slash his way straight to Beijing.

The idea of toppling yet another established order, achieving another seemingly impossible feat, proving them all wrong again, had to have been extremely appetizing to the defiant peasant from backwater Japan. But conquering China could also serve another useful purpose.

Japan was at peace for the first time in a century, but that left an entire generation of samurai, career soldiers who devoted their whole lives to the art of killing with nothing to do. No other talents or trades to practice. The sole meaning of their lives had been war, and with no outlet for their very particular set of skills, how long would it take for the lesser lords under Hideyoshi to start hatching schemes and ambitious plans of their own?

How long before this idle population of samurai plunged the country back into the endless cycle of civil war? In a campaign against China, Hideyoshi saw a convenient solution to this little problem.

If he could direct his vassals towards an external goal, keep them busy fighting and dying for the glory of Hideyoshi, the bountiful minister, they couldn't threaten his power base at home. He could satisfy their appetites with rich new lands and promises of primo real estate on the Chinese mainland. Before long, he totally rationalized this plan in his mind. Not only did he want it to happen, he needed it to happen. If not for his own sake, for the sake of his young son, Suramatsu.

If the boy was to grow up and inherit a true Japanese empire, Hideyoshi had to do this. There was no other way. So Hideyoshi starts planning this thing out, but he soon realizes he can't sail his army straight to China. The coast is too well defended and his supply lines could never reach and support a direct invasion. He would need to find a different route. He would need to invade Korea.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.

Have you ever had a job where in order to get promoted, you felt you had to play the game a little bit? Like in order to get ahead, you had to schmooze and shit talk and actively navigate office politics? A job where it didn't really matter how good you were, it mattered who your friends were. Well, a 46-year-old Korean naval officer named Yi Sun-shin knew exactly what that was like.

Early in life, Yi had disappointed his parents right off the bat. When, as a young man, he'd chosen to enlist in the Korean army. His parents would have much preferred he pursue a job in the government, which in 16th century Korea was a very distinguished line of work. Plus, that was where the money was at. To get a government gig, you had to pass something called the Civil Service Exam. And it basically came down to how well you could quote Confucian philosophy.

Well, that didn't sound very interesting to Yi Sun-shin. So the strong, strapping 27-year-old had said, screw you, mom and dad, and went to enlist in the military. And there was a test for that, too. And during the test, Yi Sun-shin falls off his horse and breaks his leg. Instant fail. So he goes back home and spends the next four years healing and getting into shape, and likely weathering a ton of I-told-you-sos from his parents.

Well, Yi goes back and nails the test and gets into the Korean military. At 31 years old, he starts his career as an officer at the lowest possible rank. Yi Sun-shin was a very ethical man. He had firm principles and believed in the concept of fairness and accountability.

This did not gel with the prevailing culture of the Korean military, which was riddled with corruption, bribes, nepotism, and incompetence. This was not a meritocracy, and Yi did not thrive in an environment where he was pressured to dole out favors, give preferential treatment, look the other way for a few bucks under the table, and all manner of other dubious stuff.

Yi Sun-shin stays stranded in middle management hell for many, many years. While he was serving in one of the many remote, unglamorous locales he was periodically dumped in for not indulging in corrupt side hustles, he might have wondered if he'd made a mistake by not going into government. Maybe mom and dad had been right. Well, they weren't.

The Korean government was just as corrupt and dysfunctional as the military. In 1591, the whole of the Korean peninsula, a mountainous area about the size of Montana, was ruled by a monarchy that had been in place for 600 years. But beneath that august institution was a bloated, fetid bureaucracy. The government was riven in two by a factional struggle that would make our modern-day partisan politics look downright adorable by comparison.

These politicians and advisors to the king were locked in a never-ending tug of war for favor, wealth, and influence. And although there were good men in the mix, men like Yi Sun-shin, they were often crushed under the weight of dysfunction. Sounds a bit depressingly familiar, right? Anyway, presiding over all of this was the monarch of Korea, King Song-jo. We remember his name not because of the man he was, but because of the times he lived in.

That's a fancy way of saying that there wasn't anything all that special about him. I guess that's a bit harsh. Apologies to all the King Songjo fanboys out there, but he was kind of just a guy. But as often happens in history, unremarkable people often find themselves suddenly living in remarkable times. On a cold February morning, a group of 25 foreigners arrive in the Korean capital city of Seoul. They're carrying a message.

At the head of this procession was a young samurai from the cluster of distant islands the Koreans called Nippon, or the Rising Sun. The Koreans were specifically unnerved at the command this warrior had over his entourage, noting, quote, He was young and fierce. The other Japanese all feared him. Prostrating themselves, they crawled before him, not daring to gaze upward, end quote.

This strange procession is allowed into the court of King Songjo, and they read a message, which they say is from their lord and master, a bountiful minister and supreme regent named Hideyoshi. The message read, quote, When my mother conceived me, it was by a beam of sunlight that entered her bosom in a dream. After my birth, a fortune teller said that all the land the sun shone on would be mine when I became a man.

End quote.

The Koreans have no idea how to respond to this. Imagine it from their perspective. A scary-ass samurai just marched into your capital and read out a message from their, I guess, king, maybe, who's making claims of immaculate conception and professing plans to literally conquer the world. And not only that, he's asking for, well, demanding, your cooperation in an invasion of the most powerful political entity in the Eastern Hemisphere.

First of all, this is a fundamentally offensive proposal. Korea and China were connected in almost every way, culturally, politically, economically. The Koreans thought of themselves as a little brother kingdom to their much larger neighbor. And the idea of turning against them and biting the hand that feeds was deeply repugnant to them.

But King Song Jo, rather than dismiss this brazen delegation as a gaggle of insane people, wisely agrees to send a reciprocal delegation to Japan to see what this Toyotomi Hideyoshi guy is all about, if only to satisfy his curiosity. But he decides to cover his bases, and he sends another message to the Southwest, to the Celestial Empire, to the Kingdom of Heaven, to China.

The first thing to understand about China is that it's old. In Hideyoshi's time, it was already ancient for two millennia. It had not only been a political power, but a cultural one. If Korea was the flower, China was the soil. It was the wellspring of philosophy, art, learning, literacy, and technology for the entire Asian world. In fact, Hideyoshi had written his demanding correspondence to the Koreans in Chinese characters.

But in 1591, China is a troubled giant, a decaying hulk, weakened by the same things that were destabilizing Korea. Corruption, bribes, incompetence. During this time period, China is ruled by what's called the Ming Dynasty, headed up by a supreme leader in the form of an emperor.

Chinese dynastic history has a general, fairly predictable flow, and it's more or less one big circle. Dynasties rise from disorder and political chaos, buoyed by a central figure or ruling family. This new regime usually spurs hope and prosperity, and the nation gets rich, and then decadent, and then complacent,

and then corruption becomes commonplace. Liberties are stepped on, the people get resentful, rebellion occurs, and a new family or central personality rises to establish a new dynasty in the ashes of the old one. It's cyclical, but it's stable in a weird paradoxical kind of way. China would always be China, but the emperor might have a different family name.

No amount of turbulence could change the fact that China was a huge regional power with great wealth, resources, and a massive population from which to draw soldiers from. When the message from the Korean King Song Jo reaches the Imperial Palace in Beijing, the Chinese are also somewhat confused.

As far as the Chinese were concerned, the Japanese were backward barbarians, an inferior people who were too busy incessantly fighting each other on their godforsaken islands across the sea. At the time, both the Chinese and the Koreans referred to them as dwarfs. So when this message about a threatening delegation from an upjumped warlord named Hideyoshi arrives in the Forbidden City, the Chinese basically laugh it off.

They tell the Koreans, "Yeah, yeah, whatever. This guy's clearly nuts. This entire letter is bluster. Just relax. You might have to deal with some coastal raids or a little pirate activity, but nothing serious. You got this. Call us back when you have something worth our time, okay?" Meanwhile, before this correspondence has even reached the Chinese, the Korean emissaries are stepping foot onto the shores of Japan. They are taken to Kyoto, the seat of Hideyoshi's authority.

They're led into a reception hall filled with Japanese courtiers, lords, and advisors, and at the head of the hall, they see a little, middle-aged man in a simple black robe. The Korean emissaries thought, quote, He looked short and common-looking, with the dark skin of a peasant, but his eyeballs gleamed, and rays of light shined upon his people, end quote.

In that brief moment, the Koreans saw a flash of what dozens of Japanese lords had seen for years in Hideyoshi. An ugly, scrawny man imbued with a powerful, frightening intellect. These Koreans deliver their message in which they congratulate him on his unification of Japan and relay the hope that their two nations can have friendly relations. Hideyoshi sits there without saying a word.

just looking at these men with his dark, shining eyes. He listens as it's translated to him into Japanese by an interpreter. Then he stands up, turns around, and walks out of the hall. The Koreans are confused and a little pissed off, honestly. They were expecting a little more pomp and circumstance. They expected someone a little more regal.

They leave immediately, convinced that this rude, little upjumped peasant could never pose any real threat to their kingdom, much less their big brother China. Hideyoshi went to sleep that night very content. In his mind, he had just received a tribute mission from the Koreans. They had ostensibly agreed to submit to his plans to move against China. All was good in the world. So obviously we have a massive miscommunication here.

A message goes back to Korea from the Japanese, thanking them for their submission and agreement to the plan to invade China. Now, if you could just prepare your lands to receive our armies as we make our way through your country, on our way towards China, that would be great.

The Koreans are horrified at this miscommunication, so they send another letter back to Hideyoshi, clarifying in no uncertain terms that he cannot bring his armies into Korea, and if he moves against China, they have a serious problem. The message said, quote, We shall certainly not desert our lord and father nation, China, and join with a neighboring nation in her unjust and unwise military undertaking.

Moreover, to invade another nation is an act of which men of culture and intellectual attainment should feel ashamed. We shall certainly not take up arms against the Supreme Nation. As all the members of our nation are just and righteous persons, as well as cultured and intellectual in their attainments, we know how to revere our Lord and Father Nation. We urgently hope that you will reflect on these things and will come to understand your own situation as well as ours.

We would conclude this letter by saying that your proposed undertaking is the most reckless, imprudent, and daring of any which we have ever heard. You can imagine how well this goes over with Hideyoshi. So, he sends them a final ultimatum. And I'm paraphrasing here. The Koreans do not send a reply.

And back in Japan, the gears of war begin to turn. The Koreans did not yet fully grasp what they had just done. The Japanese had been preparing for a full-scale regional war, whether they realized it or not, for more than a century. The samurai had been fighting and killing each other, getting better and better, smarter and stronger, and more vicious for generations. They were salivating for a new challenge.

Hideyoshi had the dogs of war straining against their leashes. They were ready for a fight. The Koreans were not. They hadn't faced a large-scale conflict in generations. Most of the men serving in the Korean military had little, if any, real combat experience. The officers weren't much better. According to one Korean official, quote, Not one in a hundred officers knew the methods of drilling soldiers. End quote.

They were woefully unprepared to repel any kind of invasion, a fact the long-suffering middle manager Yi Sun-shin was all too aware of. Despite the fact that he had a resume full of pesky things like ethics and scruples and a moral compass, the 46-year-old middle manager had recently swung a promotion. A big promotion, in fact. He'd made a few like-minded friends in the government who'd advocated for him and gotten him bumped up to an admiral role.

Suddenly, he had a decent-sized fleet under his command. Once Yi Sun-shin has some clout, he goes to work trying to remake the new fleet in his image. The way he accomplishes this is discipline. Very, very harsh discipline. He has his men whipped for even the most minor infractions, hoping that by setting such harsh punishments for small offenses, the idea of committing the big offenses would be unthinkable. And it worked.

His men were soon some of the bravest and the most disciplined soldiers in the entire Korean military apparatus. But Yi Sun-shin wasn't content yet. He also had some ideas about the kinds of ships his men would be fighting in. He wanted something that would be impervious to any seaborne enemy, that could protect his sailors during battle and maximize the potential of the heavy iron cannons the Koreans had adopted from the Chinese.

So he sits down with his shipbuilders and starts drawing up a prototype. A prototype for a secret weapon. On May 23rd, 1592, an elderly Korean soldier is hunting in the woods outside of the Korean port city of Busan, situated at the southernmost tip of the peninsula. He was hunting for deer, and after a successful morning, he leaves the cluster of trees to look out over the choppy waters of the East Sea.

His blood runs cold as he sees a different kind of forest emerging from the blanket of mist hanging over the waves. Hundreds of ships were sailing into the harbor. According to the elderly soldier, quote, they covered all of the sea. The Japanese armada had arrived. Leading this armada were three of Hideyoshi's most trusted generals.

But the one we're going to concern ourselves with was a young samurai commander named Keito Kiyomasa. Keito was a favorite cousin of Hideyoshi. He had grown up in the same backwater village that Hideyoshi had and absolutely idolized his older relative, who'd elevated their family from poverty to the most powerful clan in Japan.

When he was a child, Keito had been an angry, fierce little boy. And the people in the village quickly started calling him Toranosuke, which means "the young tiger." The name stuck, and now in 1592, as a 30-year-old commander, Keito was simply known as Tora, or "the tiger."

Keito was fanatically devoted to Hideyoshi. He was a true believer, a gifted killer, and a merciless enforcer. He wore jet black armor and a huge ostentatious helmet in the shape of a golden shark fin, emblazoned with the red circle of the rising sun. Unlike most other samurai who preferred to be clean-shaven, Keito had a thick black beard and seemed to enjoy the reactions his unorthodox style provoked.

Kato was also a religious zealot. He was a follower of a homegrown sub-branch of Buddhism, and this translated to a very austere approach to life. He was a no-nonsense guy, a soldier's soldier, deeply feared and admired by his subordinates. His views on the proper conduct for a samurai are summed up in his personal writings. Quote,

If one should require diversions, one should make them such outdoor pastimes as falconry, deer hunting, and wrestling. The practice of dancing is absolutely forbidden. As all things are born from what lies in the heart, a samurai who practices dancing, which lies outside the martial arts, should be ordered to commit suicide. Having been born into the house of a warrior, one's intention should be to take hold of a long and a short sword and die.

The man does not explore the nature of Bushido every day. It will be difficult for him to die a brave and manly death. Eesh. Like to dance? Kill yourself. Kevin Bacon would not have thrived under the command of Keito Kiyomasa.

As the Koreans look out into Busan Harbor, they see the Japanese ships swarming into their waters, and they are terrified. Hideyoshi has mobilized a quarter of a million men for this invasion. To explain its immensity and quality, I'm going to turn it over to historian Samuel Hawley. Quote, The Japanese army in the spring of 1592 was the largest army ever assembled in Japan up to that time, and the most professional.

A well-organized, well-supplied, and well-equipped war machine designed to project massive killing power. There was not an army anywhere in the world at that time that was superior to it, or probably even its equal. Hideyoshi, in fact, possessed the most powerful military machine the world had ever seen. In Europe at that time, even the best armies would probably not have been a match for the disciplined forces of Alexander the Great.

Against Hideyoshi, however, neither Alexander's hoplites nor any 16th century European army would have stood a chance. The largest single-state armies in Europe rarely topped 50,000." As the Japanese army splashed ashore, the sight would have been awe-inducing for the Koreans. Samurai encased in scaled black armor with blood-red flags fluttering on their backs.

They would have worn helmets decorated with showy extensions like deer antlers and bull horns. Some helmets would have been shaped to look like rabbit ears, seashells, or butterfly wings. Over their faces were grotesque war masks, carved to resemble the expressions of demons and ghosts. They carried curved swords, the famous katana, which historian Stephen Turnbull called "the finest edged weapon in the history of warfare."

Blades that could easily cut through bone. On their flags, you would have seen family crests featuring flowers and birds and elaborate Buddhist symbols. Even the occasional Christian cross. In fact, many Japanese soldiers, especially from the southern island of Kyushu, were practicing Christians. This was the result of contact with Jesuits from Portugal. The Europeans had introduced their religion to Japan, but they'd also brought something else. Guns.

Behind the higher-ranking samurai came thousands of peasant soldiers armed with muskets. They would form tight formations and fire in concentrated volleys, sending a wall of lead towards enemy soldiers. Guns had only been around for about 50 years in Japan, but Hideyoshi's mentor, the visionary Lord Nobunaga, had instantly seized on him as being the future of warfare.

Before he was murdered, Nobunaga taught his student Hideyoshi how to incorporate these strange new weapons into his armies. And the great thing about guns, Nobunaga realized, was that they were as cheap as they were deadly, and took almost no time to learn how to use. While a samurai had to spend his entire adult life mastering the use of the sword, the bow, and the spear, you could teach a peasant how to use a musket in the better part of an afternoon.

Hideyoshi had taken his master's innovative thinking to heart and now brought all that knowledge to bear against the Koreans, who'd never seen anything like the thin, devastating firearms they referred to as, quote, dog legs. The Koreans, like the Chinese, were experts in large gunpowder cannons, but a portable, accurate gun like the Portuguese musket was a whole new ballgame. So the Japanese assault the port fortress overlooking Busan Harbor.

The musket fire is incredibly effective, and it just tears the Korean soldiers to pieces, who are wearing no armor at all. According to one of those soldiers, the white hot lead balls, quote, fell like rain. The Koreans cannot stand up against this furious assault and quickly surrender. What followed was absolute slaughter. As one samurai remembered, quote,

Holy shit. The Japanese established a beachhead and quickly moved deeper into the country.

In a kind of 16th century blitzkrieg, they move insanely fast into the interior, covering serious ground and crushing every army the Koreans send against them. In only 20 days, they had made it all the way to the Korean capital of Seoul, 300 miles to the north. That's roughly the same pace that Hitler's armies moved through Poland in 1939. Before the Japanese arrive at the capital, King Songjo and his court flee for their lives into the remote northern regions of Korea.

He sends his two sons and heirs into hiding in the east of the country. And in contrast to the unstoppable power of his armies, Hideyoshi, holed up in his palace back in Kyoto, is fragile and wracked with grief. His son, the toddler Surumatsu, had died several months earlier. The jewel of his life, the precious baby whom he'd wanted to bequeath a world-spanning empire, was gone.

Hideyoshi is heartbroken, and in his grief he is beginning to feel his old age. His eyesight is getting very bad, he has virtually no appetite, and now his only son was dead. But when he receives word from across the East Sea that Korea had apparently been conquered in less than a month, he gets a shot of life back into him. This was the news he needed, and he starts making plans for the invasion of China.

He starts drawing up governmental structures for how he wants to divide power in his new empire. And to give you an idea of just how confident he was, here's a letter he sent during this time. He said that some lords, quote, would be liberally rewarded with grants of extensive states near India, with the privilege of conquering India and extending their domains into that vast empire, end quote. Hideyoshi had completely fallen in love with his own legend.

He not only envisioned a Pan-Asian empire, but one extending into India as well. Sadly for him, a former middle manager turned admiral had other plans. While the young tiger, Keito Kiyomasa, and the rest of the Japanese commanders are tearing through the papier-mâché defenses of the Korean army, Admiral Yi Sun-shin is putting the finishing touches on his secret weapon.

He and his shipwrights had constructed a small number of specially made warships, designed specifically to counter the Japanese weapons. Admiral Yi called his creations "Turtle Ships." They were heavily armed gunboats, equipped with rows of heavy cannons on either side, and the top was completely covered by a heavy wooden roof, curved like a turtle shell and bristling with hundreds of iron spikes.

On the prow, there was a huge dragon's head, carved from wood, and a cannon could be fired from within its mouth. Korean warships were already pretty good, but this thing is like a tank. The Japanese, confident in their invincibility, start sailing small convoys of ships along the coast, looting and raiding and burning along the way. As deadly as the Japanese were on land, their navy left something to be desired. It mostly consisted of glorified transport ships, lightly armed and armored.

The Japanese figured the way you fight at sea is just the way you fight on land. That you sail up to another ship, board it, and fight hand-to-hand until all the other guys are dead. Ships weren't weapons in and of themselves, just floating battlefields. Well, the Korean Admiral Yi Sun-shin knows better. By now he's getting frantic messages from the Korean court begging him to move against the Japanese and slow their lightning advance.

Admiral Yi and his fleet, supported by three turtle ships, strike against the Japanese navy in a series of engagements. The turtle ships work like a charm. The hail of Japanese musket balls, so effective against the lightly armored Korean land forces, barely put a dent in the heavy wooden frames of Admiral Yi's creations. When the samurai try and board these seaborne tanks, they impale their feet on the iron spikes covering the roof.

They dull their expensive katanas, hacking at the wooden roof, trying to get at the well-protected sailors inside. And the turtle ships used their heavy cannons to blast the Japanese ships to splinters. And over the next several weeks, hundreds of broken Japanese wrecks were littering the Korean coast. One Korean sailor described the remnants of a sea battle that had washed up on the shore and been buried by Japanese survivors. Quote,

There were charred bones and severed hands and legs scattered on the ground, and blood was spattered everywhere, turning the land and sea red." As good as things are starting to look at sea for the Koreans, mainland Korea is still being devastated. Kato and his fellow samurai are turning every city and town they enter into a hellscape of destruction, murder, and rape.

Hideyoshi had actually specifically ordered his men to take it easy on the Korean people. In his mind, Korea would soon be a Japanese territory and he didn't want the people to hate their new overlords. But Hideyoshi was far away and the tiger was off the leash. But human life and dignity were not the only casualties of the Japanese invasion. Priceless cultural and historical records were being lost almost every day.

Temples and shrines that had stood for hundreds of years were burned to ash. Tombs holding the bodies of important Korean rulers were ransacked. And not all of this is being done by the Japanese armies. When King Songjo left the capital of Seoul and fled north with his court, he dealt a huge psychological blow to his people. They felt abandoned. And soon they're looting and robbing and burning their own cities in a fugue state of greed and grief. Personally, I think this is one of the biggest tragedies of the war.

So much priceless history was casually destroyed. There are things that we will never know, never see, never read. An entire culture was being gutted, and no one seemed to care. There was a minor miracle, though. The Koreans were very dedicated to chronicling their own history, and they kept exhaustive, objective records on every single reign of every single king. And when a king died, they'd write it all up and create four identical copies of the document.

The copies would be sent to four vaults in different parts of the country, so that if anything happened to one, they'd have three other backups. In the early months of the war, the Japanese had already found and destroyed three of these four vaults, and turned centuries of historical memory to dust. The fourth and final city holding this wealth of knowledge is soon besieged by the Japanese, but miraculously they manage to hold out.

The samurai get impatient and move on to bigger, better targets. In that moment, the history of Korea had been saved. The samurai lord Kato Kiyomasa, the tiger, who the Korean soldiers were now referring to as the Demon General, was getting irritated. They had captured Seoul in less than a month, and still the Korean court had not surrendered. They couldn't find the king anywhere.

They had a vague idea of where he was, but if they moved to capture him, he would just slip away. And on top of all this, a bitter rivalry was developing between the Japanese commanders, each one wanting to earn themselves more glory and look good in front of Hideyoshi. The 30-year-old Keito was the hungriest of them all. So he takes his army northeast to subdue one of the last corners of the country.

Cato's army covers a huge amount of ground, miraculously fast, easily brushing aside any Korean resistance. All told, when measured from the starting point of the invasion to the northernmost point Cato reaches, historian Samuel Hawley says the distance was, quote, almost equivalent to Napoleon's march from Paris to Moscow in 1812. Along the way, Cato gets a little bored.

We know he's not a fan of dancing or theater or anything frivolous like fun, so he gets his kicks going hunting, specifically tiger hunting. You can actually find tons of block print paintings of Keito from later periods depicting him crunching through the snow or navigating a dense bamboo forest towards a snarling tiger. He would spear them, skin them, and send their pelts back to Japan as gifts for Hideyoshi.

The tiger nickname had become very literal. As Kato marches northward, he stumbles across a local village, the leader of whom says he has two important prisoners that they'd like to give to him. Kato, likely skeptical, agrees, and two young boys are brought in front of him. They're tied up and bound. Kato asks who they are, and the terrified boys tell him.

They were King Songjo's sons, the two young princes of Korea. Kato was nothing short of delighted. This was an invaluable chess piece, potentially a war-winning one. But while he was basking in the glow of his valuable new captives, something was happening across the Korean countryside in the south. King Songjo was in hiding. His armies were crushed, and the capital of Seoul was a graveyard.

But the Korean people, tired of the endless suffering and humiliation at the hands of the, quote, Japanese robbers, as they call them, start to come alive. The Buddhist monks come down from their mountain monasteries, weapons in hand. The Korean farmers and merchants start forming guerrilla resistance movements and militias. And before long, the Japanese find themselves in the center of an angry, swarming beehive of vengeful Korean civilians.

These groups start launching small-scale attacks at Japanese forces all over the peninsula, nothing big or decisive, but little prods and pricks designed to chip away at the invincible strength of the Japanese war machine. The other factor plaguing the Japanese is a lack of supplies and food. Admiral Yi Sun-shin's victories on the southern coast had destroyed the Japanese Navy's ability to establish supply lines to their armies in the field.

Every day that those vital arteries of new supplies and men remained closed by Admiral Yi, the weaker and weaker the Japanese got. And if that wasn't bad enough, the sleeping giant to the southwest had woken up. China, now fully aware of the threat Hideyoshi posed, had answered Korea's call for help. A huge Chinese army was on the way.

The Korean army may have been a stranger to real war, but the Chinese army was not. They'd had plenty of practice putting down raids and rebellions, and their commanders were competent and often very brave.

The Koreans are overjoyed to finally have some help, and with this massive relief force, they push the starving Japanese forces out of the northern city of Pyongyang, then the capital city of Seoul. The Japanese are being driven back south, harassed by guerrillas, pursued by the Chinese, and wasting away from cold and hunger. One samurai, remembering the experience of the retreat, wrote, quote,

Wounded men were abandoned, while those who were not wounded but simply exhausted crawled along the road. It is a cold country. There is ice and deep snow, and hands and feet are burned by the snow, and this gives rise to frostbite, which makes them swell up. The only clothes they had were the garments worn under their armor, and even men who were normally gallant resembled scarecrows on the mountains and fields because of their fatigue and were indistinguishable from the dead."

The Japanese forces, once a fearful thing to behold, were now a pitiful sight. The Chinese send an emissary to the demon general, Keito Kiyomasa in the east, whose army is also retreating south. The Chinese tell him to lay down his weapons and surrender immediately. First, Keito tells them that he has King Songjo's two boys, the prince's.

Then he picks out a young woman from the group of Korean prisoners, a girl who was said to be the most beautiful in the entire country. He ties her to a tree and with the Chinese emissary watching, impales her with his spear. As the Japanese armies evacuate and continue their march to the coast, the Koreans find what's left of their cities and towns. To quote historian Samuel Hawley again, cities and towns lay in ruins from Busan to Pyongyang.

He goes on, quote,

End quote.

And finally, quote, it is said that when a drunken Chinese soldier vomited on the street, starving men crawled to the spot and fought over the right to eat the steaming mess, end quote. In spite of all the misery, the Japanese threat seemed to be shrinking back to the southern coast. The war had turned with the arrival of the Chinese and the deployment of Admiral Yi's ingenious turtle ships and the valiant efforts of Korean guerrillas and warrior monks.

The Japanese were exhausted and enraged. In less than a year, they'd seen their blitzkrieg advance completely reversed and their armies withered down to a shadow of their former strength. Marching through the streets of Beijing or lounging in comfortable palaces in India now seemed like a distant dream, an insane fantasy, and maybe it had been all along.

But, like Kato's spiteful murder of the beautiful young Korean girl, they wanted to inflict one last horrible wound on the stubborn civilian population that had thwarted them so thoroughly. On their way back to the safety of their coastal beachheads, the Japanese descend upon a city called Shinju. It had resisted attack once before, and now they were determined to wipe it off the map.

After a short, nasty siege, the samurai breach the walls in the middle of a torrential downpour and butcher the Koreans inside, soldiers and civilians alike. According to historian Stephen Turnbull, some of them try and escape by jumping into the river, but the Japanese fish them out and behead as many as they can. They take upwards of 20,000 human heads.

After the battle, the samurai force many of the local women into service as sex slaves. One of them, a 20-year-old dancer named Nongai, asks one of Kato's best samurai to follow her to the walls so they can look out at the river below. She seductively pulls him close, wraps her arms around him in a tight embrace, she locks her fingers together, and flings herself over the side.

dragging the samurai down with her to drown in the river. There's a shrine still standing in South Korea today called Righteous Rock that honors her story. Kato and the other generals go berserk on what remains of the city. I'm going to quote Hawley again, quote, "...they did not leave a cow or dog or chicken alive. In a frenzy of revenge against a nation that refused to be conquered, they pulled down the walls and burned all the buildings."

They filled the wells with stones. They cut down every tree. When the destruction was finished, Shinju ceased to exist." The decision to destroy the city had not been an impulsive one. It wasn't a vicious last-minute call made by the demon general in a fit of bloodlust. In fact, the bountiful minister Hideyoshi decided,

furious at the reversal of fortune in Korea, had personally ordered this horrific massacre from the halls of his plush palace in Japan. The wise, diplomacy-loving Hideyoshi had slowly become just as bloodthirsty as his long-dead mentor, Oda Nobunaga.

But rather than reflect on the way absolute power had affected him, he enjoyed a life of frivolity and comfort at his palatial castle at Fushimi, known as Momoyama, or Peach Mountain. There, he threw elaborate costume balls, where the most powerful lords in Japan would come to pay tribute. One of these balls had a theme, where the aristocrats would attend dressed as commoners.

They got a big kick out of coming as everything from reed merchants and monks to nuns and melon vendors. Quote, End quote.

Hideyoshi also enjoyed theater, and he commissioned plays to be written about his victories and achievements. In a display of mind-boggling narcissism, the almost 60-year-old Hideyoshi chose to play himself in these compositions. You could almost see him straining under the beautiful samurai armor he'd worn in his youth, and doddering around on stage, stiffly reciting dialogue he'd likely dictated to the playwright.

Around the same time that Keito and the other samurai commanders are butchering and raping their way through the doomed city of Shinju, Hideyoshi is weeping with joy at Peach Mountain. His concubine, Yodogimi, had miraculously become pregnant again, and a boy was soon born. Hideyoshi named him Hideyori, and he was healthy and strong.

After his first son, the two-year-old Tsurumatsu, had died, Hideyoshi had, in desperation, named his nephew as the heir to the throne. But once Hideyori was born, Hideyoshi could not abide any challenge to his true-born son's legitimacy. He orders his nephew to kill himself. And the nephew, Hidetsugu, did his duty and committed seppuku. But that was not enough for Hideyoshi.

From Samuel Hawley again, quote, The eldest was only five.

With the future of his house secure, but his invasion of mainland Asia neutered, Hideyoshi begins dictating a list of demands to the Chinese emperor. He knows he's lost any chance of conquering China, but he's hoping that he's shown just how much killing power he can bring to bear, and that the Chinese will at the very least sign a generous treaty. Three years pass. Back in Beijing, the Chinese receive a letter from Hideyoshi containing some spit-take-inducing demands.

In exchange for peace, Hideyoshi wants to arrange a marriage between the royal families of China and Japan. And he wants complete control and sovereignty over the southern provinces of Korea. And he wants hostages from the Korean family in exchange for the two young princes Keito Kiyomasa had captured, who he releases as a gesture of good faith.

But after years of war and the devastation of their ally Korea, the Chinese are absolutely sick of this guy. They're having none of this bullshit. They know the emperor can never accept Hideyoshi's demands, so they soften the message and make it seem like Hideyoshi is asking for much less in much meeker language than he actually is. Months later, a Chinese delegation arrives at Peach Mountain in Japan, bearing a message for Hideyoshi. It says, quote,

You, Hideyoshi, are hereby instructed to comply with our demands and to stand ready to fulfill your obligations to our throne as a loyal subject. You are also instructed reverently to conform with the Imperial desire and to maintain your everlasting existence by following the Imperial guidance and by cheerfully obeying our Imperial commands.

Hideyoshi is told to remove his armies from Korea, forget any kind of trade relations, and basically bend the knee, to borrow a little Game of Thrones vocabulary here. Hideyoshi had likely not felt that humiliated and disrespected since he was a young man, when Oda Nobunaga had regularly laughed at him and called him the bald rat. Shaking with rage, he sends word to his loyal enforcer, the demon general Keito Kiyomasa,

that the war was back on. This time, the Koreans would truly understand what suffering meant. And Hideyoshi knew exactly why his first invasion had failed. He knew of the defiant admiral whose turtle ships had blasted his navy to pieces and deprived his glorious samurai armies of their much-needed supplies. If the Koreans were to truly bleed, first thing was first. Admiral Yi Sun-shin had to be eliminated.

My name is Cindy Burnett, and each week I interview at least two traditionally published authors on my podcast, Thoughts From a Page. We talk spoiler-free about their books, so you can listen whether you have read the book or not. And then we delve into things that you most likely won't hear about anywhere else. The importance of the cover design, why they included various aspects of the story, personal details about both the books and the authors' lives, and so much more. You can find the podcast on every major platform, and

and learn more about it on my website, thoughtsfromapage.com. Thanks so much for checking it out. When we think of pre-modern wars, we tend to think of them as only being waged in terms of physical violence between armies on battlefields. We tend to forget the role that espionage, intelligence, and counterintelligence can play. Spycraft has always been a huge part of warfare, and it's about to play a pretty pivotal role in this conflict.

To get Admiral Yi Sun-shin out of the picture, the Japanese realized they need to get a little creative. If their second invasion is going to have any chance of success, they've got to establish reliable supply lines, and that can't happen while Admiral Yi is blasting all of their ships apart. So what they decide to do is deploy a double agent to seed disinformation into the Korean chain of command.

The goal was to sow chaos and exploit the factional nature of the Korean government. So a Japanese spy, a guy named Yojiro, walks into a Korean army camp and says he wants to defect to the Korean side. He says he's tired of fighting in Hideyoshi's pointless war and wants to make a home for himself in Korea. To prove his loyalty, he offers a bombshell piece of information.

According to Yojiro, the hated Keito Kiyomasa, the Demon General himself would be traveling down the coast via ship, and Yojiro knew the exact time and location of this voyage. For the Koreans, this was an incredible opportunity, a chance to capture and kill the commander who had inflicted so much suffering and destruction over the last several years.

So, word gets sent up the chain to King Songjo. He'd only recently gotten his two sons back, the princes that Kato had kidnapped, and so the king is chomping at the bit to get this guy. He emphatically gives his permission to move forward with this operation and sends word to Admiral Yi Sunshin to intercept, capture, and kill Kato. Admiral Yi is instantly skeptical.

It all seems a little too good to be true, and he wasn't exactly psyched about sending his navy out at a specific time to a specific place dictated to them by a shady defector. He smells a trap, honestly. So he holds off on going, wanting to gather a little more info.

A few weeks pass, and Yojiro soon comes back and says, well, guys, you missed your chance. Keito got away. In fact, the information had been a lie in the first place. Keito was not traveling anywhere. He was safely guarded in a coastal fortress, well protected by his armies.

But the Korean king doesn't know that. All he knows is that Admiral Yi Sun-shin disobeyed a direct command and let a potentially war-winning opportunity wither on the vine. The king, in a fit of rage, orders Admiral Yi stripped of his rank, imprisoned, and tortured within an inch of his life. Yi's buddies at the court beg the king not to execute him for insubordination. They're like, look, this guy's a hero. He's the reason we still have a country at all right now.

and King Songzhao relents, but he demotes Yi Sunshin from admiral to the lowest possible rank and exiles him to the mountains.

In his place, he promotes one of Admiral Yi's rivals, an incompetent drunk named Won Kyun, to supreme command of the navy. Well, before long, the double agent Yojiro is back with some more juicy intelligence. He tells the Koreans that a huge fleet of Japanese reinforcements is en route to the Korean peninsula, and if the Korean navy can catch them out at sea and destroy them, the second invasion is over before it starts.

The new admiral takes the Korean navy out to intercept the Japanese. Unfortunately, Yi Sun-shin's instincts about the double agent were correct, because the spy warns the Japanese, and on August 20th, 1597, the Koreans sail headfirst into an ambush. To quote a different admiral, a space admiral, it's a trap. As many as 1,000 Japanese ships are waiting for the Koreans in full battle formation.

In this time, Admiral Yi Sun-shin is not there to outmaneuver them. In a matter of hours, the entire Korean navy has been completely destroyed. Hideyoshi was pleased. Now, unhindered by Korean naval activity, his samurai were free to do what they had returned to Korea to do. Hideyoshi told his commanders, quote,

mow down everyone, universally, without discriminating between young and old, men and women, the clergy and the laity, high-ranking soldiers on the battlefield, that goes without saying, but also the hill folk, down to the poorest and the meanest, and send the heads back to Japan.

Hideyoshi had just sanctioned a full-scale genocide against the Korean people. Keito Kiyomasa and the other generals go to work. They butcher and behead every Korean they can find. And the numbers are staggering. They kill so many that the Japanese quickly realize sending heads back to Hideyoshi is impractical.

So instead, they cut the noses off the severed heads, pack them in barrels, pickle them with salt, and send them back to Hideyoshi. It's also gruesome and sensational that it's tempting to think of it as like a hyperbole or an embellishment or like a colorful bit of Korean propaganda. But it is not. And we know it's not because the Japanese kept exhaustive records of the severed noses they took and which samurai took them.

There were even designated nose collection officers, whose sole job it was to catalog, count, and ship these trophies. Here's an example of some of those records. Kikawa Hiroie's men took 437 noses on the 11th of September, 1597. Nabashima Katsushige's men took 1,551 noses two days later. 300 noses for Kuroda Nakamasa a week after that.

10,040 more for Kekawa Hiroie a week later, in a single day. All of these noses are sent back to Hideyoshi and gathered in a massive pile in the center of Kyoto. This became the Mimizuka, the nose mound, which still stands in Kyoto to this very day. I've seen it, and it's huge. The obscenity of it is made even worse by the fact that it is directly next door to a children's playground.

While this daily slaughter is going on, the disgraced Admiral Yi Sun-shin is wasting away in an isolated mountain cabin. But after the destruction of the Korean Navy, the King sends a messenger begging for his help. They've got nowhere else to turn, and they need his guidance and intuition now more than ever. Admiral Yi takes control of what's left of the Navy. He only has 13 ships left, 13 vessels with which to defeat the Japanese.

All of his famous turtle ships, the secret weapons that had so effectively countered the Japanese during the first invasion, were gone. Destroyed, along with the rest of the fleet, at the double agent's ambush. But Admiral Yi wasn't ready to throw in the towel just yet. Even after he had been tortured and humiliated at the hands of the very country he was trying to defend, he was determined to find some way, however hopeless, to stop the Japanese.

So what he decided to do was lure them into a final, decisive battle. A last stand. And the Japanese are all too willing to oblige him. They send a huge fleet of ships to pursue Admiral Yi and kill him once and for all. They find him and his 13 Korean ships waiting for them at a place called the Myeongyang Straits. The Koreans are in a single line on the far side of a narrow channel,

Admiral Yi instantly sees how outnumbered he is. The Japanese have a numerical superiority of about 20 to 1. But he doesn't run away. He has a plan. Admiral Yi's plan was to bait the much larger Japanese fleet into following his ships into this narrow, thin little strait where the currents were very, very strong. And by limiting the space in which the Japanese could fight, he'd nullify their numerical advantage.

Korean ships could fight the Japanese ships in small batches rather than being engulfed all at once. And also, that strong current was going to keep the Japanese ships locked within the strait, capable of only sluggish movement, so they couldn't escape. Now, if you're about to have a decisive, climactic battle, the rule is that you have to give an epic speech. That's just how it is. And Yi does give an epic speech, and we actually know what he said that day. And it goes a little like this. Quote,

We are under orders from the king. Since the situation has reached this extremity, we must resolve to die together. Why should we hesitate to repay the royal bounty with our glorious deaths? There is only one choice for us now to make. Victory or death. And those who cling to life will find death. Those who seek death will find victory.

So the battle begins and it plays out exactly as Admiral Yi Sun-shin had planned. The Japanese have to engage the Koreans in small groups and those currents start throwing their ships off course and send them smashing into each other. All the while, the Korean cannons are just roaring and shredding them apart. In the thick of the fighting, a high-ranking samurai commander is killed and Admiral Yi orders his body pulled out of the water.

Then he has his men chop the samurai's body into pieces and has the head and limbs nailed to the mast to frighten the Japanese. It works. The Japanese turn tail and run, and many of their ships are destroyed by the turbulent currents and cannon fire from the Korean fleet. In the end, Admiral Yi had stopped the Japanese armada without losing a single ship. According to survivors, Yi's flagship stood, quote, "...like a castle in the middle of the sea."

End quote. And things were not going great for the Japanese elsewhere either. The Chinese army had returned to combat Hideyoshi's second invasion, and now Keito Kiyomasa found himself holed up in his coastal fortress surrounded on all sides in the dead of winter. The Chinese and the Koreans had the tiger cornered. A siege ensues. Keito is nearly killed when a cannonball shears one of his bodyguards in half,

And on top of all the constant attacks, the Japanese have barely any food, and it's freezing cold. Samuel Hawley says that Kato and his men resorted to eating their horses, been single, burnt grains of rice. Then they eat the mud off the walls. To stay hydrated, they drink their own urine. But just as defeat looks certain, a reinforcing Japanese army comes to their rescue, and the Chinese and Korean forces are driven off.

Shortly after, Keito receives some bad news from Japan. Toyotomi Hideyoshi is on his deathbed. As a young man serving under the visionary warlord Oda Nobunaga, Hideyoshi had no doubt cut an impressive figure. Riding at the head of his armies, wearing his trademark helmet that featured a fan of golden spikes meant to evoke the rays of the sun,

A long life of glory, wealth, and conquest was laid out before him. Hideyoshi looked much different now. Gaunt, shriveled, nearly blind, and dying, Hideyoshi summoned his five most powerful lords to his castle at Peach Mountain. There, he literally begged them to support and protect his young son, the five-year-old Hideyori. They all swore an oath to do just that.

And with one of his final breaths, Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered all Japanese forces to leave Korea and return home. His last words were supposedly something like, quote, And with that, the bountiful minister was dead at the age of 62, and the war was over. The Imjin War, as it came to be known, ended with a whimper rather than a bang.

A dragon's head with a snake's tail, as the Japanese would later call it. Admiral Yi Sun-shin, now a full-blown national hero, decides to take the fight to the devastated Japanese navy one more time as they prepare to ferry their troops back to Japan. The two sides clashed in a ferocious sea battle, and as they pursued the Japanese, Admiral Yi was struck by a stray bullet under his arm. The wound was fatal, and he knew it.

Fearing that news of his death would cripple morale, his last words to his captains were, quote, They did as he instructed, and they won the battle. As for Admiral Yi, he bled out right there, on the deck of his ship. The Japanese sailed home two weeks later, and the war ended on December 24th, 1598.

Half a world away, Central Europe was celebrating Christmas Eve. Admiral Yi Sun-shin was enshrined as a national hero and a god of war. His death was even mourned in the Chinese capital. So deep was the respect for the brave commander. He's considered South Korea's greatest hero to this day. Hideyoshi's son and heir, the precious Hideyori, would inherit no empire. In fact, he wouldn't live past the age of 21.

He was eventually betrayed and murdered by one of the five men who'd sworn an oath to protect him. And Keito Kiyomasa, the young tiger, the demon general, wasn't there to save him. Keito died choking on poison, according to some accounts, likely courtesy of the same treacherous rival.

In the 1970s, the South Korean government emphatically urged Japanese government officials to level the mimizuka, the nose mound in central Kyoto. It ignited a fierce debate. Did this shrine glorify Hideyoshi's aggressive genocidal war? Or was it, in fact, a memorial to the lives lost, a potent reminder of the harm inflicted, and a warning for future generations? Should it be disinterred and moved to Korea, where the descendants of the victims could properly honor them?

It's a series of questions that has been further complicated by what has happened between Japan and Korea in the century since the Imjin War. I wish I could say Hideyoshi's genocidal invasion was the last time that Koreans suffered at the hands of the Japanese, but that's just not the case. The Empire of Japan invaded again in the early 20th century, and for more than 35 years, Koreans suffered greatly under the oppressive rule of the Japanese imperial forces.

It's a period of rape, slavery, and cultural suppression that still hangs like a cloud over the diplomatic ties between the two countries. Between the Imjin War and the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in Korea during World War II, the hard feelings and historical tension between the two countries are extremely touchy. A large portion of South Koreans in particular harbor some really intense negative feelings toward their Japanese neighbors.

It raises the question, do we inherit our enemies? To what extent are we born with cultural grievances pre-installed? When your entire upbringing tells you that another group or country or religion or political ideology is the enemy, how do you resist that? How do you break out of those ingrained patterns and forge friendships with ancient adversaries? Are we just locked into fighting the same squabbles our ancestors did over and over again?

It's a tough question, one that millions of Japanese and Korean people are wrestling with to this very day. Unfortunately, even after several high-profile agreements, some reparations, and even a formal apology, the Japanese have never been able to really step out of the shadow of their crimes against Korea, and the Koreans have never fully forgiven them. And it all can be traced back to Hideyoshi's invasion in pursuit of a pan-Pacific empire.

The sad fact is, any lessons from that first horrible war in 1592 seem to remain buried with the 38,000 severed noses at the Minizuka. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

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