Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 426 - The Imjin War: Part 1

Episode Date: August 9, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON AND GET OUR NEXT EPISODE RIGHT NOW! https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys/posts/early-episode-2-166213298 COME SEE US LIVE SEPTEMBER 26TH IN CORK, IRELAND! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-cork-26th-september-tickets-1993823733459 CAN'T MAKE IT? WE'RE STREAMING IT! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-cork-26th-september-2026-tickets-1993900928351 BUY JOE'S BOOK! https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Fo%E2%80%A6ok/dp/B0GSG5CNXX/ In 1592 a newly unified Japan, under the control of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, launched an invasion of the Joseon Kingdom with an army numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The war would eventually consist of two different invasions over the course of almost 6 years and suck in most of Asia, killing well over 1 million people in the process, all while Japan accomplished absolutely nothing. SOURCES: Hawley, Samuel (2014). The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China (2nd ed.). Conquistador Press. Turnbull, Stephen (2012). The Samurai Invasion of Korea 1592–98. Osprey Publishing. Andrade, Tonio (2016). The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History Brown, Delmer M. (May 1948). "The Impact of Firearms on Japanese Warfare, 1543–1598". The Far Eastern Quarterly Park, Yune-hee (1978). Admiral Yi Sun-shin and His Turtleboat Armada. Hanjin Publishing Company Rockstein, Edward D. (1993). Strategic And Operational Aspects of Japan's Invasions of Korea 1592–1598. Naval War College. Kang, Etsuko Hae-jin (1997). Diplomacy and ideology in Japanese–Korean relations: from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Palgrave Macmillan Lewis, James B. (2004). "The Book of Corrections: Reflections on the National Crisis during the Japanese Invasion of Korea, 1592–1598. By Sôngnyong Yu. Translated by Choi Byonghyon. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies". The Journal of Asian Studies.

Come see us live, September 26th in Cork, Ireland at the Kino Events House. Tickets are available now, both live show and live stream. If you can't make it, the live stream will also have video on demand so you can watch it later for whatever reason, time zones or whatnot. We'll have new merch, we'll have some old merch. I might even have some books available. So come on down, get your tickets, and we'll see you in Cork. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on

Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode, one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys. and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hello and welcome to the Lions by Donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast in the entire known world.

I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate. Fellas, how are we doing today? I had a very interesting morning. One, I have to refute Joe's claim on a previous episode. This is an update section. I can actually pass the Line Bike sobriety test and I have a screenshot to prove it and two

I was cycling through the tube this morning one got hit by a car as standard but then I'm fine I didn't get hurt or whatever it just like kind of clipped the back wheel but I was on the tube on the way to work

and they have upgraded the like network availability on London Underground but occasionally on some of the lines there is a dropout so I got on the tube to work trundling along listening to music And then I put on, Jet, are you going to be my girl?

And then the signal drops. And for some reason, Spotify will not let me choose any of my other saved music. So do you know what I did? What's that? Listen to, are you going to be my girl over and over again? I listened to Jets, are you going to be my girl six times until I got to Lambeth North. This guy who's only ever heard one song in his life, it's like, you know, I actually could see you home with me, but you were, with another guy?

I think by the fourth time it played, I was starting to develop like psychosis. I have one for you. And then we move on to our serious topic. So I cured myself with my Tia Bout tendencies by actually living in Britain for six years and experiencing it up close. But I definitely was a huge fan of British music. And I mean, I still am. There's stuff that's awesome. I still love. But I was the rare bird. I was the fan of Blur in America. And I saw Blur when they toured for their album Think Tank in 2003. And my friend then I drove up from Indianapolis to Chicago and back in the same night. So it was probably like a nine and a half, 10 hour drive total. We got in. The show started late and we absolutely were like,

we want to be up front. So we got into the general admission area and like got as close as as we could. So at that point, it's like can't move because you'll lose your spot and you won't get it back. Well, I don't know what was going on why it took so long for them to start and there wasn't an opening act. The house music they'd set up was clearly like a mix CD and they accidentally hit repeat track. And it played the deep cut song, Mind from the Talking Heads album, Fear of Music. 17 times in a row. It's not a bad song, but it took me like decades

to be able to listen to that album all the way through without skipping that song. It's like, yep. Like, that song's gonna come on. Like, I was like, oh my God, I'm back in Chicago in 2003

getting fucking Manuel Noriega by blur band I like. It's a song that really only grows on you after about the 15th time you listen to it, thankfully. I think it's somewhere between 13 and 17 times. I can't remember because like, but there was a point where everyone

the crowd was like, is it going to go? It's going to go. Oh, it's fucking mine again. It's just, oh, over and over again. If you want to, it's an old article now,

but you need to look it up of the article of the guy who went into the bar and pull on thin lizies, the boys are back in town like, I know that story. 50 times. I've read that too.

I've also read that article. It's a fucking classic. My brother now is mercifully sober for everyone's, everyone's benefit. But when he wasn't sober, mine too. Fuck me,

Joe. You tee them up, I knock him down, buddy. Am I even allowed to make a joke about that? Is this a landlord? Nope. Only me!

I mean, obviously there's a response I'd make, but I'll text you when we're both in an earnest and gentle state of mind. My brother was in a bar after a work event in Portland and saw that they had the Velvet Underground's white light white heat on the album, like the full album on the jukebox. And he was getting ready to leave. So he put the song Sister Ray on, which if you ever listen to it, you have to understand. It's 10 minutes getting worse and worse and worse and worse until it's just unlistenable. Anyway, he left the bar for setting it.

I don't know how long they lasted, but then he came back like the next day and they wouldn't let him in the bar. And now for, are you going to be my context? Are you going to be my Shogun? Because today we're going back to feudal Japan amongst other places for the next several weeks. Big long swords. That's right. Some wars, thanks to how history sometimes unfortunately works out, kind of gets lost under the stories of what comes later.

Most people know about, maybe let's call it, the animosity between the modern states of Japan and Korea, both north and south. And you'd be right in thinking that most of this is based on the brutal Japanese occupation of Korea between the years of 1910 and the end of World War II. And I'm not here to argue with that. But the idea that Korea was rightfully part of Japan was not an idea that came from nowhere. It wasn't even an idea birthed from the post-Miji Restoration, modernized, centralized, and industrialized empire of Japan.

Instead, it was an idea born in the mad brain of a commoner who had risen up to force Japan to unify the dual tips of sword and pen. Or, I suppose, since we're going back to the 1500s in Japan on this one, the tip of a tiny animal hair brush. whatever, you get my point. It doesn't roll off the tongue quite so well. This is the story of how Japan stumbled out of that civil war and ran off sprinting towards empire building that would bring them into open war against Korea and Imperial China, produce Asia's first mass formations of gunpowder weapon wielding armies, and by the end of it all, completely devastate the Korean Peninsula, all while accomplishing zero of their fucking goals.

This is part one of our series on the Immune. M-Gin War. Hell yeah. It's back to Japan, baby. I had to do it. It's been on the list of series that I've wanted to do for years now. It's just funny because you see the Imgen war,

and I immediately thought of the Z, like the M-Gin near the DMZ in the 60s when it was kind of like an actual shooting war. I did not expect. I was like, he's going to be talking about Cold War in Korea again. And then it's like, no, actually,

not even close. As everybody knows, the Korean War as a topic is something of I'm not allowed to touch by force of nature. But first, we have to get to the land of the rising context. Booboo me all you want. I'm not going to stop. Boo.

Bo. Bo. But to understand where all of this begins, we have to go back quite a while and look back at the rise of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He's the guy we've talked about before on the show. He is something of a recurring character, we've never really talked about where he came from. Kedioshi was born in 1537, smack dab in the middle of the warring states period and the collapse of the Ashikaga Shogunate.

We've talked before about the dynamics at play here regarding the Shogunits on the show. We've done series where we've talked about this. But for a quick refresher, they were, in short, the military dictator of Japan. They were technically meant to serve under the emperor, who was supposed to have the ultimate, literally godly authority to run Japan. But the Shogun controlled the armies, he controlled the taxes, he controlled the land, and this gave him every lever of power in the country. It did not take long for a series of Shogans to realize that I don't actually need the emperor at all to run this country. And rather than overthrowing him, though this did happen from time to time, they would use him as a figurehead, a divine figurehead, to rule Japan. But would instead rule in his place.

I should point out here that this is something of an oversimplification. We have gone into this in much more detail before, but we really cannot go into 600 years of Shogun-emperor relationships here. We're already going to be covering several hundred years of history just in this episode. But there were times that this was not the case, and there were even times with the emperor led armed rebellion against his own government and Shogun. But by the time that we are talking about, this relationship is pretty much set until the restoration era. But Hideyoshi was not born with any known samurai lineage. He was not born of

any high class or lordship. He was the son of an Ashigaru, a peasant soldier employed by a samurai lord. As was common for a man of his lowly standing, he didn't even have a surname when he was born. He was prince, but without the prestige. There were accounts of the day that his family was so desperately poor that at various points Hideyoshi was left to beg on the street so he might get something to eat and not die. Eventually he grows up and there are stories that

as like a favor, his father's samurai lord paid his way to enter a temple school to study. So maybe he could, you know, get into administration as was fitting for someone of his standing, not into the government necessarily. But he dropped out.

Yeah, see, once again, we're being hit with the civil service exams. You know things are about to really fucking well now. Oh, Tom. Hold that thought, baby. Yes. We're getting back into civil service exams because those don't exist

in Japan, but they do exist in Korea and China, and that's coming. After dropping out the temple school, he became an Ashigaru himself in the service of the Oda clan. You probably know this clan best because of Oda Nobunaga, who happened to be

Gideyoshi's lord. Oda Nobibu Bha. A lot of things, and we really do not have time to get into that because he is a man that deserves his own series at some point in the future. And you can bank on it that we will eventually do it. If we did it today, we would end up producing Lions at Bodeonkey's first ever four-hour long episode. Yeah, yeah. I have a very quick aside about this because the only thing I know about besides Wikipedia skimming was that as a kid, I thought the cover art for romance of the Three Kingdoms or it was a spinoff game for the NES was really cool. And I I rented it and I wound up renting a game called No Bonaga's Ambition, which was far too advanced for a six year old. I followed those exact footsteps, Nate. I did the same. It's like a 4K strategy game and I was like nine.

I cannot handle that. I was six and I literally thought it was Nobunga's ambition and my parents probably should have taken that as a cue that it was too advanced of a game for me. They're like the turtles, man. It's no bunga, dude. Exactly. Anyway, that's my assign. I did this a lot.

When I was a kid and it had to read fucking stories for like, you know, sort of like general spectrum Hebrew school stuff. I pronounced Nebuchadnezzar's Nabucazar because I was too ambitious in the words I was going to say aloud and I refused to ask for help. That has not changed. Ever. Couldn't be me. Yeah, we all know about Nobonga's ambition and his honorable San Ray Lords, Michael Angelo, Donatello and the other. Nobunga sounds like someone got really, really confused trying to get mad about Obama in like 2009. Yeah, that's fair. That's that's good. Barak, who's,

And now there's a statue of him outside a petrol station. Hey, that's daimyo, Barack of Hussein, nobonga. Like I said, nobunaga was a lot of things. But one thing he was good at in the context of this episode was certainly thinking outside of the box in so far as society in Japan worked at the time. This included after Hideyoshi proved himself in battle and most importantly proved himself to be loyal, charismatic, and this dude could talk. His speech skills were at a 10, and Nobunaga began to promote him way above his social standing.

He's hitting them all with like Dracula flow quotes. He could spit fire. If the samurai could do a kind of freestyle poetry rap battle, I assume in a dimly lit warehouse somewhere in Japanese Detroit. Hideyoshi would win. I would go in a different route, actually. I would imagine feudal Japanese version of Jets, are you going to be my girl? Are you gonna be my lord? No, it's gonna be more like

in order to entreat the you know, sort of peasant, the Ashigaru class of like infantry auxiliaries to serve under a samurai you would sing. I could see you serving me. I could be your samurai. Show you things that we could see.

It's my feudal isa kai. No bunga. I said, are you going to be my kuhai? Anyway, you guys are going to love this in Shami, said. We actually don't know exactly how Hideyoshi proved himself to Nobunaga, because there are several conflicting stories, which is very common throughout his early life. But they all boil down to him impressing his lord with his cunning,

as well as a certain level of not giving a fuck about norms, which was something that Nobunaga was a pretty big fan of himself. For example, one story goes that he discovered the route that Nobunaga was taking for his morning horse ride and just waited in the bushes to jump out and tell him like, I want a fucking job. Like, I'm sick of being this rank and file nothing. I want something better. Another is he used his connections that he made amongst fellow servants and got a one-on-one

meeting with him. And both of these are bold moves for a common-born person. person to do in Japan at the time. Remember, Nobunaga is one of the most powerful lords in Japan. By social right, Hideyoshi could have his head cut off for just looking at him in the eyes. Odu Nobunaga is like he's doing his odd ADHD like hyper-focused morning like trot on the horse or like re-arranging and this just dickhead shows up and he's like, oh my day's ruin now. All my tasks will be unfulfilled. Now I just have to deal with this little weirdo

And I should point out here Hidioshi's a little guy By all accounts He is not an impressive looking man He's like oh no you can't execute me I'm just a little guy I'm just a little guy It's my birthday

My head's too small for your wall He was maybe 5 foot something weighed 110 pounds soaking wet He was apparently stringy Thin skin and bones With again I don't know how to fully explain this, but with bad hair, this is something that's often remarked on is that he had bad hair.

So he was basically a little gremlin, but he was goofy with it. Yeah, yeah. He was impetuous and disrespectful of norms. It was sort of a bad boy character if you get down to it, except typically the bad boy character you're supposed to like and he has good hair. So he's got bad hair. You've heard of Becky with the good hair. He's Hide Yoshi with the bad hair. Ashigaru with the bad hair.

Being chopped in the 16th century is a curse that you would not wish on many people. He isn't a man that is going to impress anyone by standing in front of them and making demands. He would have to convince them of his worth through the things that he was good at. He was not someone who looked like a line soldier or a warrior, both things that were prized back that in Japan. And it was a job that he had, but nobody's going to pretend that he shined the brightest while holding a spear. But despite all of this, Nobunaga sees something in him, mostly that this little rat,

as he starts calling him, is really smart. Nobunaga then grants him the position of sandal bearer. And I know being the dude tasked with carrying your boss's Jordans around sounds pretty lame, but this was something meant for people

of a much higher social standing than Hideyoshi was, you know, because he didn't have any. Yeah. Hidiochi's just carrying around. like a sack full of like crisp white Air Force ones and as soon as Nogunaga gets a single crease and then he's like new shoes please get me by Jordan man I feel like in a film adaptation of this he's got to be played by Japanese Barry Keogan like there's just something that's sort

of rat mode about this guy but like rat mode but he's the protagonist you got to be a little freak a little weirdo I was thinking uh Japanese Andy circus going full like Gallum mode but both of these suitable. And there was something else that this position allowed him to do. Enter the halls of power. The sandal bearer was with him at all times, including in important meetings with his inner circle. And while he's attending these meetings and he was absolutely not supposed to talk at, he quickly showed a natural grasp for logistics and management. Two things that any military leader with a fucking brain cell knows are important. Again, this is impressive. He had, at most, a few months of formal education in his life at this point. But also to Nobunaga, he showed an intense unbreaking loyalty,

which obviously your samurai lord is going to love. And think of the meetings that this guy is in at the time. Samurai lords who have murdered countless people just like Hideyoshi for daring to peek their head above their social standing. And meanwhile, he's navigating it like a natural. Particularly at this period, there is like exceptions of people who really, rise quite quickly, despite like lacking in social standing and like through initiative, like being smart with like court politics and like being very useful. Like this period is really marked by like a lot of these types of people kind of breaking the social structure by like, oh, I'm really useful to this lord or I maybe hold some small lands that's like strategic,

suddenly really strategically important. I would say also you can find a modern. parallel or relatively modern parallel in this. If you look at stuff like in the First World War, where people were battlefield commissioned or, you know, recruited as commissioned officers who had absolutely none of the class education markers, but because like they had proven themselves that not being complete idiots and or not getting killed.

Yeah. And so like you'll find, not to say that it's a direct parallel, but you'll find in some of these situations where when there is a need and someone proves themselves to be competent, those sort of ironclad distinctions can sometimes, but not all the time. And people don't like to acknowledge that that's what,

being done, but you'll find that some of those fall away. And I think he kind of hit the nail on the head there. Hideyoshi's good at one thing, being constantly useful. And this was something that could not have been easy, because by all accounts, Nobunaga was, in short, a fucking asshole. He was offensive and insulting, and hardly a meeting went by that didn't include everyone in the room being roasted verbally. And these are samurai of standing, very powerful daimios,

and Hideyoshi. Nobunaga would also occasionally get drunk and mess with people, but would get bored when he got no reaction from the person he was messing with, which I understand personally. All right, so Guy, we have to find Japanese Ben Kingsley and Sexy Beast to play Odo Nobunaga. That's right. Tom gets the reference. I've seen Sexy Beast. Thank you. All right. We're living in sexy beast right now because it's roasting, boiling. Fucking what? Cunt.

Nobunaga's favorite insults for Hideyoshi included, of course, calling him a rat, thanks to his shitty hair, but also monkey, because he would make him dance around like a monkey. There were other people around him as well, but these guys clearly got way more mad and drew more attention from Nobunaga. Hideyoshi never flinched. He didn't care that he was being abused, and when, you know, Nobunaga sobered up or was handing out tasks to be done, he would volunteer for every job available. Even the ones he didn't know the first thing about. Like, for example, building castles,

but would universally succeed at them? I mean, I feel like if your life station was to be the guy who walks around with a really leaky barrel to collect piss as sort of like the imperial piss factory, where you then boil piss to make some sort of, I don't know, some sort of phosphate. And like all you have to look forward to and all your children can look forward to is up,

perhaps slightly less leaky barrel with which to collect piss. You probably are okay with having a drunk guy. What's he going to do? Spill piss all over you. I mean, that's literally all you had looking forward to. So, you know, I understand this. This was a guy that was just begging on the side of the road a few years ago. He's like, do you think this is the first lord to fucking make fun of me?

I don't care. Yeah, yeah. It's like people who joined the military. And it's like, you know, coming from like a really fucked up background, especially like if they were like working on a farm or something and we're really dirt poor. And it's just sort of like, yeah, the military sucks. but you also get time to sleep and you get meals and you're not just like basically living

in sort of patriotic children of men, fucking Montana or whatever. You know what I mean? Nobunaga in turn kept promoting him, eventually making him a general. It was almost entirely unheard of for a commoner to rise up and hold such a rank outside of the chaos of the era we're talking about.

And even within the fragmented insanity of the Singaku period, it was incredibly rare. He was a commoner sitting equally among samurai lords. And Nobunaga, for his part, treated him as an equal and expected all of the landed dime yote that made up his inner circle to treat him equally as well. Yeah, don't fuck with my loser chopped homeboy. He sits with us. Yeah, he's weird as shit, but how many castles have you built me? Yeah, he's weird as shit, but he's low-key nice with it when it comes to building castle. I also want to say this too, is that like, I just happened to check Odo Nobanaga's Wikipedia, Wikipedia, and I'm going to read this really quickly without derailing.

Nobanaga mostly spent his time between the age of 13, the age of maturity at the time in 18, hunting, riding and practicing archery and shooting archibus, still a novelty in Japan at the time, but also wrestling, swimming, watching sumo, and visiting taverns and brothels with his friends. What I'm saying is rat mode, recognize rat mode and game recognized game. Then in 1582, Nobunaga and his heir were assassinated by one of his generals, Akechi Mitsuhide. We've touched on this before in the past, but this happened because Nobunaga had insulted him, just one too many times.

And I know this has nothing to do with their series here, but quite honestly, I have to go into it because I can't help but to think Nobunaga kind of had it coming at at least a personal level. For starters,

when he fucked with Akechie, he'd put him in a headlock and then drum the top of his head in front of everyone and tell people to dance to the resulting skin slapping sounds. I mean, the headline newspaper

headline of no bongo could apply to this situation or bongo in this case. Or also like when Sylvia Berlusconi was removed from power. Look man, I agree with you. I feel like there comes a certain point when you're of equal

standing and of your various sort of like social rank and so on and so forth and most that's bullshit but like you becomes an age of life where you are no longer willing to tolerate that an atomic wedgee might be a threat. Might be a thing you have to contend with. And it feels like You know, he basically did like a, you know, U.S. Postal Service workplace shooting, but

feudal Japanese version. Imagine giving someone a Nogi so bad that you end up dying for it. I mean, that's kind of America. It's like you honk your horn and McDonald's drive-thru and somebody fucking dumps a mag into your car. That's dumber. It actually gets a little worse because Nobunaga just keeps fucking with the catchy. Because at some point, he charges him with sitting up a banquet so Nobunaga can meet one

of his rivals, Tokugawa Iyasu. Now, these guys are actually quite. close. They had grown up together because Iyasu had been held as a hostage by Otis Klan and that's where he was brought up. Very normal for back of the day. That's how all endearing male friendships are formed. So this was something of bringing the two sides together and it was meant to be very over the top, very expensive as a show of respect to Iyasu. So Akechie spends a ton of his own money setting this whole thing up, thinking he would be included as the banquet as a thank you, not to mention the rung on the social ladder he'd be able to climb thanks to being present for such a meeting.

So of course, Nobunaga told him to fuck off and go join Hideyoshi, an ongoing siege at Takamatsu Castle, where Hideyoshi was in command. Sliding on the ops drank all their wine, now their reputation depleted. So Ketchi storms off, gathers his army, and instead of going to help Hideyoshi, he instead goes and attacks Nobunaga, cornering him and his son, who both kill themselves rather than fall into captivity. This leads directly to Hideyoshi's rise to power. It's fair to say that Hideyoshi saw the obvious power vacuum that was created once Nobunaga had killed himself and he wanted to fill it. He had risen to such a place that nobody could question him. Sure, he was a commoner, but he was one of the best generals and had what been Nobunaga's army and was now in the command of thousands of men and had the respect of no shit samurai lords on all sides of him.

But he was also deathly loyal to Nobunaga. he swore an oath to kill every single person responsible for his death. This was very practical. Acting like you were so loyal is obviously going to help you win more people over, and it would look really good if you happen to be Nobunaga's general, who managed to complete this quest for vengeance. But it spawned something of a race between various lords, most importantly against Iyasu to be the first one to find and kill Akechi

and be the guy who got to claim that they were, were Nobunaga's Avengers and all the resulting political power that came with it. But Hideyoshi would win the murder race. He caught and killed Akechi just 13 days later at the Battle of Yamazaki. With that, Hideyoshi became Nobunaga's unofficial heir and took up his mantle of unification, but did away with a lot of Nobunaga's tactics. For example, Nobunaga was pretty well known for being brutal. He conquered at the end of a sword. Hideyoshi would leave rivals in place rather than killing them, assuming that they swore loyalty to him. He would cut deals, he would

forgive people that fucked him over in the past, or as he put in a letter to a rival quote, I don't inquiry closely in the past of those who surrendered to me. That's the law of heaven. So if you swear allegiance to me, we're good. I don't care what you're doing before this. Yeah, well, it's like, it's

super smart because you know, at this period, there's like so many different, like, warring kind of bands and like plans. And it makes sense that, like, oh, if you like overtake someone and make a strategic decision like he has been making his entire life

up until this point. He will have a better outcome and be able to overpower people subsequently who then try and turn against it. Yeah, and also then more in a more prosaic sense, I think too, like if you reduce the stakes for switching sides, a lot more people are going to switch sides.

Yeah, make it worth their while. It's like, oh, you switch sides, you surrender. Now I'm going to kill you. That people are typically not going to volunteer for that. Or I'm going to come and take your lands by four I don't give a shit what you say. I am going to return you to the ranks of the piss bucket. And it's like, yeah, people wouldn't want that.

Arguably, Hideyoshi being brought up as a commoner, understood samurai lords better than other samurai lords. And he made siding with him an easy proposition for former rivals. Why risk your life, your money, your lands fighting him when you can just take the deal he was offering? You know, you supply soldiers for the army, some taxes, one of your shitty young relatives to be held hostages to make sure you stay in line. and joining him would have a benefits package too. Not all lords would take the deal. Hideyoshi knew this. So they would march in, kick their teeth in,

split their holdings amongst loyal lords, and they could benefit. It was a good deal all things considered. The price tag was cheaper than a war against him. Because for the ones who told the once peasant beggar to eat shit, utter destruction awaited them. And this was a lesson for the ones that hadn't yet made up their minds. Even Iiyasu, who did fight a few battles against Hideyoshi,

but none of them serious, as it seemed that neither of them really wanted to commit to fight the other, eventually caved. As a sign of respect, Hideyoshi set his own mother over as a hostage in exchange, as well as offered his sister's hand in marriage.

This is despite the fact that she was already married. And he just said, no, you're not. Fuck my brother-in-law. Iyasu in turn gave him his own son to hold as a hostage. Through these alliances and conquest, By 1585, Hideyoshi was more powerful than Nobunaga ever was and controlled about half of Japan.

As his quest towards unification continued, Hideosi's birth finally did catch up to him and start causing him problems. He had no real title. He was still just a general, and he knew he would need a lordly title, one of the court, if he wanted to continue his rise. As was common in Japan of the day, a man could easily, depending on who he was, get adopted into a more important family as an adult. and regardless of a man's birth, that new adoption name would be the only name that matter. An important family would willingly adopt these people of no social standing because if their star continued to rise, well, the family standing rose with them. I have to go and collect my large adoptive son in the same way you go and pick a dog at the shelter. Yeah, it's like a football academy.

We'll take this kid in. If he's useful to us, great. If not, good luck bag at grocery. I'm sending scouts to the large adult son combine. He's a D1 large adult son. His first attempt was writing the former Shogun, Yoshiaki, an attempt to be adopted by him so he could then use his lineage to make a claim on the title of Shogun. Yoshiaki was in Kusu at the time, when the few places not under Hideyoshi's control, so Yoshiaki felt pretty comfortable saying, no. And he couldn't force him into doing it. His next move was the gun for an adoption by the Fujiwara clan. This was a calculated move, as the Fujiwara held dominion over a court title of Kampaku or Imperial Region.

This was a totally useless title at the period we're talking about, though it did hold status, but it hadn't really held any power for like 300 years. But a title was a title, especially when you have none of them. So he gets adopted, he gets given the title, and the emperor grants him the surname Toyuton. so he finally becomes Toyotomi Gideyoshi. Now he was a man of power in the court, but he didn't actually know the first thing about the court in general or court life at all. He was a soldier, a schemer, a literal beggar who worked his way up from the actual dirt. You better learn how to pour that tea boy.

That's exactly what he did. But it seems like this is a guy who's pretty savvy about paying attention and just sort of like getting with it. So, like, it doesn't sound, I mean, from what we've heard so far, it doesn't sound like this is going to be a, I'm sure there's going to be ups and downs, but, you know, not like suddenly he's like, oh, my plans are foiled because I don't know how to write a haiku. Like, he's just going to find the world's best haiku writer and put a knife in his neck until he writes it. He's going to pull up to the, you know, court meeting and he's just going to do like a money spread with all of his tea pets. He hired the best tutors he could find to teach him everything to do with tea ceremony, poetry, like this special kind of poetry called, like, like linkage poetry and theater to the point that not only was the imperial region acting in theater, but writing his own. So he could fit into this new world he now completely controlled. This guy is, I mean, it's very hard. I don't know if we're going to discover more and more stuff

that's going to make us cringe, but. Oh, he's a fucking bastard. Don't get me wrong. There's so much in this to like, you know, you sort of want to root for this guy because it's just like, you just see him coming from a background that no other person in an equivalent position has been allowed to have and just stunting on everybody nonstop. And it's just like normally like the, you know, the sort of fish out of water in the story is like, oh, well, uh, he's not going to, we'll recognize he's low born because he doesn't know. It's like, no, I'm going to learn it better than you and then he does.

That is a compelling story. Yeah, it really is. And if, you know, the story ended there. All right. And by 1591, he was the uncontested ruler of Japan. But he was still not Shogun, nor would he ever be. Mm-hmm. as regent and eventually Taiko or retired regent, which functionally means nothing different

in the case of Hideyoshi, as a way to get around the lack of title of Shogun, his government simply did not have one. If he wasn't going to get the title, nobody would. But on the like learning like the tea ceremonies, poetry, theater, like the really interesting thing about this period in Japan is that like this stuff served as kind of like an informal language between like the upper class. It was like a thing that. was completely inaccessible to people unless you were born into that class or had money to pay someone. And it's like stuff as small as like, who do you pour the tea for first? That is like conveying social status, but also kind of like in diplomacy.

It's like, oh, you're pouring the tea for this person first so it shows you respect them more than the other people at the table. And everything has to be done perfectly. It's very similar to, as we'll talk about how the Chinese and Korean core. work in a different way in that you had to have a wrote memorization of various ceremonies in the case of Korea and Japan, a wrote memorization of a pile of Confucianist texts. Were they actually important? No, but they played a role in showing how important you were. Yeah, I mean, there's a famous example of this. It's somewhat apocryphal, but the story about the surrender message recorded by the Emperor of Japan at the end of World War II being spoken in

court Japanese that the emperor would use that like people can understand it but not really that makes sense they can understand what he's saying but not pour out what he actually means yeah because it's it's so oblique and uses constructions that are not used in normal speech and it's like yeah we think about that that's in the 20th century imagine how esoteric this would have seemed to somebody who like you said had only a couple of months at most of formal education arguably he learned more after taking over Japan from various tutors that he did before. Well, yeah, but you look at Odo Novanaga's background. It's like, you know, it's like he is born into this level of privilege and has this,

this education. And he's like in the ages of sort of early, what we would consider adolescence, but they're sort of like early adulthood in that time in Japan. He's like, fuck learning. They invented a big ass crossbow and I'm going to shoot this shit all day long. So it's like, it's not as if the sort of princeling class didn't act like princelings. There was some area of, there was room for maneuver, if you will. And the big ass weapons will become important in a little bit.

Hideochi would have loved Facebook and setting his status to graduate from the School of Hard Knocks, full-time employed at being a full-time mad bastard. Yeah, this is really kind of like grind set of Aunt Lelatra, isn't it? Kind of. And with that, Hidioshi brought a kind of peace to Japan. But with that, came other questions. Namely, how is he going to keep it? Hidioshi was smart enough to know that the various lords that had since sworn allegiance to him

were not exactly as forgiving of old beefs as he was. With enough time, they would simply, once again, get back to working to further their own goals rather than his or those of Japan, which should be clear here, he saw no difference between the two of his goals and the goals of Japan. One of the few things that Hideoshi did, or at the very least, carried over from Nobunaga and others,

was giving everyone a general goal, unification. Of course, this only motivated so many people. A lot of lords joined him. Most, I'd argue, were practical people that saw this as the right train to jump on in order to further their own wealth, power, and status. They gain money, they gain lands, they gain prestige, with unification being a fine thing to talk about. But now with Japan unified, there are no more lands to conquer, no more lords to depose and split their holdings up to enrich those that remain loyal to him. Worse still, there are now tens, if not hundreds of thousands of men who only knew war is a conflict. career, who were now unemployed. At least, that is one way of looking how Hidi-Osi began to look

outwards for Japanese expansion and settling on Korea. Hidi-yoshi was obviously known for his smarts, his thinking outside the box. So he definitely saw another war in Korea as a way to kind of sort of, if not solve these problems, kick the can down the road, at least for a little while. He really cared about men's mental health and Madri hadn't been invented yet. So he was like, What do we do to support the lads? They can go to the battlefield and die instead of talking about their feelings. That's a very important option to give men. But it certainly wasn't the only reason.

The other reason is Hideyoshi was also maybe a little insane. In the years before unification was complete, he told a lot of people, one of whom was a Jesuit priest who made sure to make note of it, that Hideyoshi believed was his destiny to rule an empire that, as he put it, overlooked the four seas. meaning not just Korea, but China and India as well. He wrote his wife saying he would slash his way into China, Korea, and India. He claimed that he would command China within his lifetime.

In essence, he wanted to dominate the world as it was known to him at the time. It was an idea he started saying that it was his right as bestowed upon him by the stars and told to his mother by a fortune teller at the time of his birth, which we know is not true. Before unification, and back in 1589, he fired off letter after letter to Korea, which was then a protectorate of Ming China and threatened them repeatedly.

Now, I did say Hideyoshi may have been a bit crazy, due to the fact that he thought it was his destiny to conquer the world, but there are some practicalities to it as well. Ming China had been declined for a very long time at this point. Its armies were large, at least on paper, but weak in the field. Hidioshi also saw the court of China, entrenched with and run by bureaucrats as weak. And they were just waiting for a conqueror to come in and beat their ass.

And to be clear here, Hidiyoshi did command one of the largest and arguably most powerful land armies in the world after he unified Japan. This is a quarter of a million men standing, but he could get more. He had modern-ish muskets. He had cannons. Even if we're not talking about the whole world, he certainly had the most powerful army in Asia. So it does make a little bit of sense for him to think that he could be the one to go and kick down the Ming and feed off of their protectorates

with the ultimate goal of conquering all of China. So with that, we should probably talk about China. Yeah. Wait, it's China time, guys. All right. As it often is on this show. It kind of goes without saying, like I said, on paper, China is a massive empire. It covers virtually much of what modern China does today, but also is a large tributary

system in place, which covers most of Southeast Asia, chunks of Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines. It had the largest economy in the world, with one of the largest populations to go with it. The Ming had ruled China for about 200 years, but the cracks were definitely starting to show. There are a lot of reasons for this, but most of them boil down to plain old mismanagement. We've talked about the Imperial Civil Service exam system here on the show before, thanks to our good friend Hong Christ during our series on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. We sure have. But during the upheaval that led to the rise of the Ming, the testing system kind of fell apart. Eventually, the Hong Wu Emperor restored them. He would get rid of them for a little while

because he didn't like them, but then would bring them back again. And then they never really left. Curriculum for these exams required decades of studying in specialized schools or with tutors, something only the wealthiest Chinese families could afford. The subjects covered Confucianist texts, poetry, classic virtues, and just generally philosophy, to make a long story short. The test was so rigid and so exhausting, the only way to pass was to memorize all of this shit. Mm-hmm. Thousands upon thousands of people would test for only a few positions, and anyone who got one,

was set up for not only themselves, but their family for a lifetime of privilege. But not exactly wealth. More on that in a little bit. But one major downside to this test is that it didn't create any kind of organizational or technical skill or really any applied skill at all other than reading, writing, and memorization of very specific piles of literature, which I suppose are, especially the reading and writing part,

are important if you want to run anything. but it didn't actually test on their ability to do anything. Yeah, like a lot of, you know, historians kind of argue about the function of the test. And there's kind of an idea that it served mainly as a kind of ideological indoctrination to, because China was so large in order to have some sort of like governmental coherence across the entirety of it. Everyone had to think the exact same. Yeah, and that is a really good way of looking at it. my opinion, it created a unified culture somewhere.

And that was the government. And if you want a centralized government, which is what Hong Wu emperor wanted, you kind of have to do that. And while the state administration ballooned with these civil servants, it didn't at the top of the government. The Ming government became incredibly centralized under the Hongwu emperor, mostly thanks to his intense paranoia. He executed tens of thousands of his perceived enemies within the halls of government,

including his entire cabinet, prime minister included. And it was these men's jobs to wrangle the army of civil servants that had been created that handled the day-to-day everything of the government apparatus at every level of this massive empire. In their place, Hong Wu did not replace any of these cabinet positions. He just left himself and his inner circle of court eunuchs to do. everything. Yeah, it's not really easy to run an empire when you're like geeked

out on petrol station, cratum. And like you think there's spiders under your skin and you think all the eunuchs are scheming against you? To be fair, they probably were. They probably are. The Piss and Jasmine brigade, you know? Yeah, yeah. Going back to our series on the Boxer rebellion, we know that these eunuchs smelled

terrible. Mm-hmm. And yeah, Tom, you have a good point. You can't build this massive government and then have one guy at the top of it, which is exactly what Hongwu tried to do. But there's also more to this as well. Like Hideyoshi, the Hongwu emperor began life as a peasant and came to power in a rebellion for a lack of a better term for Hideyoshi, let's say. He believed that spending money to alleviate the suffering of peasants was simply a waste. If the peasants wanted to do better

in life, they should just try harder like he did and pull themselves up by their proto bootstraps. I'm so happy that the American government is like applying Mingist thought to meritocracy. Jesus Christ. Neo-Confucianist Donald Trump. I'm pretty sure I've seen a video like that on TikTok. Probably. In fact, as centralized as a state that the Hongwu emperor made, he believed very little in managing it on a day-to-day basis. I'd argue is because he made that impossible, because you can't do all this on your own, but because that would require massive spending

and oversight. Two things he did not believe in. Instead, he charged administrators, landlords, and every person in charge of anything down to the lowest level to become self-sufficient and whatever it was that they were doing. We got Ming Ju-Juche, effectively.

Moo-Ce, if you will. He thought communities, cities, towns, townships, places of work. everything. Should be able to police themselves, collect their own taxes, and simply send what the government is owed when they're done, with the government only sending intervention in the form of soldiers or bureaucrats or whatever, if they failed at those basic tasks. And this belief carried through every part of the government. Administrators are meant to support themselves, as were soldiers. If a town or a region wanted infrastructure, a road, a school, a hospital, whatever, they need to build it,

fund it and find labor on their own. This meant that the central government paid and did very little while reaping the benefits of everyone else's work. And I know the joke is, isn't that what governments always do? They're not supposed to. I know that's how we live now. But in short, like, this created instead of a centralized government, it accidentally remade a feudal system. Right. And in the short term, this did work. Almost entirely because Hong Wu and his willingness to butcher anyone who did not go along with his plan, but also benefited from civil servants and bureaucrats who were around before this system took over. They knew how to make the system work, even if the guy at the top didn't want to do his job. But like in all systems ran by a strong

man at the point of a sword, Hongwu dies, passes the throne off, then his heirs die, pass the throne off more and more. And after a few generations of this, this massive Chinese bureaucracy that had been pretty much doing everything, just decided, we actually don't need the emperor for this. This is the heir of the sidelined emperor of China. We get rulers to effectively prisoners within the Forbidden City and reduce to being as much of a figurehead chained by crazy routines of undending ceremony to keep them busy as his Japanese counterpart was.

We talked about this more during our Boxer Rebellion series, where, in the long term, this creates a string of Chinese emperors who rarely leave the castle walls and most of the time are simply not allowed to because it's considered beneath him. This was a system put in place by bureaucrats. However, there were other problems, namely trade, building, and power flourished under Hong Wu and his immediate successors because at least for a while, you still had guys who knew how a different system worked. They knew what needed to be done. They knew the importance of trade and how to make money. They were fine cutting deals with foreigners or invading neighbors.

Which I'm not saying are great, but it is how empires are kept up. But through generations of Confucianism indoctrination at various levels of power, things changed. Without going into all the tenets of Confucianism here, because that is hardly something I'm qualified to do, and I don't think it's something you want to listen to. Yes, they do, Joe. We're going to do it for our episode. But it's a way of thinking that treasures eight. few things over almost anything else.

It was intensely progeny and a kind of sage-like learning from a form of self-improvement through self-stabilization with a prize on virtue. And most importantly, the idea of only learning about those things was important, and anything outside of them was not considered learning at all and therefore should be discouraged. So as the early Ming expanded through war, trade, and diplomacy, funneling those benefits inwards, even if, admittedly, most of those benefits were a trickle most of the time, the preceding Ming rulers discouraged them. Foreign trade was outright banned because it was seen as possibly destabilizing,

and the very quest for personal profit was seen as distasteful and a violation of personal virtue, Virtue being the most important thing about you as a person and nation. As much as the concept of nation existed. And like in this context, virtue is personal actions, but is also kind of like a metaphysical spirit of you and like how that is interpreted by others. And like, yeah, like you said, extends to the state as a collective of the virtue of everyone in it. And there's all sorts of little side stories I didn't really want to go into, but there's,

kind of internal investigations of virtueism within the Chinese court to look into people who could possibly be violating this, which turns into all of these guys who, remember, have all of the shit memorized in order to get their job, arguing and bending the rules over what kind of thing was allowed and what wasn't, which produces incredible amounts of factionalism within the court. We got Ming Dynasty woke police. kind of. Yeah. And we'll talk about Korean a little bit, but they're going to end up having a lot of the same problems. They ended up prising the purity of this state religion slash philosophy much more than running the state. And I'm not saying that anybody who follows the tenants of Confuciism today is bad or whatever. But like, I'm just saying a theocracy is not a way to run a country. It's not a good thing to do. We can see a great example in me and Joe's home country of what. happens when you're really into following of specific ideology, even if it's completely incoherent versus running the state. But then also, as you said, I mean, that's been the point of contention

in Korea as well. There's definitely been an argument socially in that country that, like, there is a kind of an adherence to this hierarchy that is rooted in Confucianism that has led to some things that really shouldn't have happened happening. And oh boy, are we going to get to how that started? Instead, this massive empire that had been built on trade and occasionally of conquest, had been reduced over time to be an agricultural one. And that's not really a good way to run a place this big. And I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing either, but there's more to it as well. The Hongwu emperor was a cheap ass and expected everyone else to be a cheap ass with him. And they were, at least for a while. But as soon as he was dead and in the ground, that shit got thrown out the window.

Other emperors spent lavishly, but the idea of self-governance and self-sufficiency continued, right into the hands of the people who could just not do the job. The Enlightenment of Confucianist education did not spread to the poor, so most were illiterate and could not understand why they were being taxed and what for. There wasn't even a universal measurement system in place across the empire to do taxation. The poor were seemingly taxed at random, and a lot of the confusions stemmed with just how badly the administration and, military of the empire were running things. Remember how I said civil servants would get status but

but not wealth? Well, that's because their paychecks came from the government. And the government believed that paying you well would violate your virtue. Overpayment went against the entrenched Hongwu belief in not spending money, which in turn morphed over time to being that this is profit. It's bad. God, I love ice soup for dinner. It's so fucking virtuous. Oh, it's delicious. At least on its surface, anyway, because you can slap whatever label you want on it. But if you pay the people who run your government badly, they're always going to find a way to make extra money using the power you've given them. So they resort to using their official capacity to steal whenever they could.

Most of the time, this came from bribes, which the way they did it was like everybody needs to submit certain things to do X, Y or Z, submit your taxes, submit livestock calculations, whatever, and then that guy in charge of taking those numbers from you would charge you a fee to do that. And that was just a bribe. And in a long enough timeline, nothing is working because the people in charge do not know how to make it work anymore. But they also don't know that they don't know how to make it work anymore thanks to their education. Personal virtue and memorization of the classics to them meant they were more than qualified to do any job, even if they had not experience or knowledge on a given subject.

So everyone in the military to the administration is woefully unqualified to do their jobs, but completely convinced that they are, all while everything is falling down around them. Stop me if you've heard this before. When are they all going to get explosive diarrhea? Oh, don't worry, buddy. That's coming. And with that, we should turn our focus to the Chinese army, because you can see a little bit more how this corruption and mismanagement seeps into everyday life.

Being an officer in the Chinese Army was a very low posting. It had prestige, but not much. And then the title was passed down from father to son with no formal education or training involved. As long as one person in your family managed to pass the military exam, which was much easier than the civil service exam, all your sons were upset for having that title forever. And no matter what rank one held in the army, they would, always be subordinate to the civilian administration. Even when it came to literally every part of military planning, stopping only when it came to leading men into legitimate combat. No amount of experience in the field could or would put an officer

over the guy who had memorized some Confucianist books. I will say that it's also interesting. I don't know a ton about this, but I have experience this, that there is a pretty strong throughline, call it a cultural tendency in Chinese culture that Yuma can only really describe as fuck the troops. like they really being, especially being an enlisted soldier, but also being an officer is seen as quite not high status. There's an expression about you don't use the best metal to make nails and you don't use the best people to make soldiers, things along those lines. Which is just very interesting because like, I don't know. And still true in most countries to this day, if we're being honest. Yeah, but sometimes those nails start a podcast and people like it.

That's right. We already talked about how the army had been ordered to become self-sufficient. And that did not go well. Garrisons of thousands of soldiers quickly turned into little more than farming communities because when a mostly peacetime army suddenly has to worry about turnip farming or whatever in order to survive, the whole being a soldier thing becomes much less important. And they weren't even good at farming, which isn't surprising. You can't just take a bunch of dudes, throw them in a field, and expect them to create their own self-sustaining community.

Yeah, Confucianism doesn't really say. that much about horticulture, you know? I must examine the virtue of the turn up first. This is literally like through a mirror darkly of like the Bob the Angry Flower cartoon about what happens after Atlas shrugged when it's like, we've destroyed society time to build utopia. And I was like,

well, I don't know fucking shit about planting crops. I just know how to make rare alloys. And that everybody is just tilling the soil like fucking being peasants. Like, yeah. And that job is fucking hard. Yeah, there's a lot more to it than manual labor as well. And this is certainly not a program other governments will try to do it the future and fail miserably at too.

Garrisons never became able to support themselves. This forced the government to ship them grain and money, so they didn't just turn to banditry to survive, which they often did anyway. But shipping stuff to the army didn't work either, given the fact that these were supposed to be self-sustaining communities with zero oversight. These shipments were given to officers who were expected to pass it down so the men didn't starve. They didn't. In turn, officers would ask for bribes to allow soldiers to leave the garrison to go get work

at the community that would actually feed them, and then those guys would never come back. The officers would never report them missing so they could keep requesting the same amount of money and grain from the central government. The officers didn't record deaths or desertions or anything else that hit their bottom line. That meant over time, China had fewer and fewer soldiers, but the military was costing them more and more. And since the officer title was passed down through the family, this became a multi-generational fraud that carry on for so long that nobody had any idea how many soldiers China actually had at any given time. This also never happened in any other country ever.

That's right. This got to the point that some entire garrisons straight up did not exist anymore other than on paper. But enough about our deployments to Afghanistan. For the soldiers who were still real, they were soldiers in name only because they received no real training. They had no understanding of what the job of a soldier was because for the most of their service, they were farmers. So when like Alton Khan began raiding through the north of the mid-1500s, nobody knew how to stop him. And when soldiers were deployed into battle, they ran at the first set of combat and then just raided their own towns. There's just one guy hiding behind the wall

flicking through a Confucianist text He doesn't say anything about being shot with narrow in here I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die! It's like the circular economy of the Austrian economics about, you know, steal the manhole cover, sell it for scrap, buy drugs, city replaces manhole cover. But it's that cycle.

Hell yeah. People running each other for their shoes nonstop. Just it's like the wheel of getting your shoes stolen Somsura. We call that Casabian economics. Each of the spokes on the wheel is a single flip love. That finally brings us to Korea, the kingdom that had long since been influenced by China,

which is hardly surprising when you look at a map. However, with the rise of the Ming against Yuan Dynasty next door, there were competing factions within Korea, one who favored the Hongwu Emperor's rebellion, and one who favored the guy that they knew in the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. As part of this factionalization, the king attempted to send part of the pro-Ming faction, a general named Ying Song Guy to invade a portion of Manchuria he had a claim on.

Kind of like a catchy, he gathered his army, turned it around and invaded Pyongyang, which was then the capital of Korea. And I suppose it's still technically a capital of A-Korea. Yeah, we're starting to get into hardcore Confucianism,

like Chosen Dynasty stuff is... Wow. It's going to get deep. We're going into deep waters, boys. Eventually, the king is overthrown. This ends a 500-year dynasty. And the new king takes the name Taijo and begins the Chosen dynasty. But first things first, he needs recognition.

And the only real way that he could do that was to become part of China's massive tributary system. This required them to recognize the Ming Emperor's mandate of heaven, which in turn gave Taijo the right to rule as an extension of that mandate. This required him to do the same thing every vassal does every now and again. Give them taxes, give them soldiers. But otherwise, it's a pretty good deal when you're other, options are no trade and probably war at some point. Chinese culture influence an overall society flowed in afterwards as a kind of requirement.

The Korean court would need to follow Chinese norms, follow Chinese ceremonial protocols, follow Chinese standards, use Chinese titles, and of course, dump in a bucket of Confucianism into their civil service exams, which are now popping up as well. In the norms of the tributary system of China, Korea was not technically seen as a Rather, the term uses little brother under the protection of big brother that is obviously China. And it's a system that Korea benefited from massively. The Chinese empire at this point had turned into the insular country that we've already

talked about, but the tributary system was for everyone involved very lucrative. The money just didn't go so far in a country's largest China with all of their needs. Free trade with outsiders was generally frowned upon. you know, personal profit and all that. It was sometimes it was outright banned, but within the tributary system, you create a massive locked-in trade alliance with the largest economy in the world.

So not such a bad deal on paper. Obviously, it's going to have some speed bumps. China treated Korea with a light hand and rarely got involved with anything to do with Korean leaders. But to be clear here, the system had already been in place in Korea for about a thousand years before Taijah. But the relationship had collapsed somewhat under the Yuan

because the Mongol leaders ruled it with much more of an iron fist that anybody really liked to deal with. The thing that makes the tributary system good for the people in it that aren't China is China generally was supposed to leave them alone. It was Taijo that refreshed them in that way, showing the paranoid Hongwu emperor how good of a boy he could be.

And whether you see this is a good thing or a bad thing, it did work. Korea had peace, other than with maraudering bands of pirates from Japan known as the Waco. They mostly came from Japanese ports,

specifically from Sushima Island, but they weren't all Japanese. There were a lot of Chinese people there, a lot of Japanese, and the occasional very lost Portuguese man. Because remember, the Portuguese are already in Japan as well,

and more than one Portuguese sailor would be like, yo, fuck this. I'm going to go do pirate stuff with my new homies next door. I'm sure the people on the Korean Peninsula will love these small custard tarts. There's also the occasional raider from Manchuria, but by the time of Hideyoshi's unification, these threats were all checked thanks to a functioning navy, which will become more important later on in our series for sure.

And the northern border of Korea was garrison. For the Korean leadership in Seoul, where Taijo had moved the government several hundred years before, everything was looking good, kind of. They had adopted everything China did, including the intense factionalization that governed the large civil service full of Confucianist hardliners with political backbiting and all the fun stuff that came with it. This split them largely into two camps, Eastern and Western. This isn't two different parts of Korea, mind you. This is specifically two different parts of Seoul. And the two people had no real difference in political ideology.

Rather, it was mostly a factionalism based on deep personal resentment. Going back so far, nobody is entirely sure how one person ended up hating the other, because it carries on through generations. Everyone knew it was a bad way to run things, including the king at the time that we're now talking about the reunification of Japan, King Sanjo. At the time, kind of like in Japan and in Korea, he had become much more of a figurehead than a functioning head of state. He had lost control of his own court.

He's not imprisoned through ceremony, like is often done. He's kind of just sidelined and doesn't know how to control the people around him. Occasionally, this leads to funny episodes like when King Sanjo attempts to use his education and Confucianism to get his bickering court people in line, but he found it impossible because everyone in the civil service knew this shit way better than he did. And whenever he made a virtue-based argument or something to his... stabilization, they would just talk circles around him. And by the end of the argument, he would look stupid compared to everybody else. This is like when I try and debate theory with my friends

who are anarchists and I just get hit with like conquest of bread level response. And I'm like, okay. You can't compete with that. I respect you. Yeah. If you're a king in that situation, you just go back to your bed chambers, like, all right, fine. I'm leaving. Yeah, exactly. You get in an argument with your anarchist friends and they let the offset press bark just start handing fucking fracts and pamphlets at you. And so he tried to build his own faction, what he called superior men. And he thought these were dudes who were above factionalism. But he had lost control of the very intricate weave of these different

Eastern and Western factions that he didn't realize that these dudes were still part of those parties and then accidentally found himself in the middle of these petty squabbles or on one side or the other. The politics of his court had become devolved. water and he did not know how to swim. Korea had followed China through the golden age and into the age of duct tape effectively. That brings us full circle back to Japan and Korea. Korea fully in the realm of Chinese influence, governance, religion, and society, but run by Koreans, saw Japan the same way China did. They were backwards. They literally called them Eastern barbarians after

having several interactions with the Japanese court. This is because of the simple fact that how Korea saw themselves in a China-centric worldview. They were the pinnacle of civilization, and anything outside of the light of the mandate of heaven was below them. They saw the bickering people of Japan, with their years of war and leadership made of a warrior cast as just pure caveman shit. Japan, in turn, saw the exact same thing in reverse. They were the pinnacle of civilization because of the concept of might-makes right.

They were the strongest. They were ruled by warriors. which obviously means your civilization is better. This led to several funny exchanges between Korea and Japan. Like Korea refusing to call the Japanese emperor, emperor, and instead calling him king, as according to the Chinese-centric worldview, there's only one person on earth with that title,

and that was the celestial emperor of China. King was a lesser title, and the Japanese knew it. And this infuriated them. He's not walking up. He's not walking up. What up, king? And dapping him up. Pidioshi's never been more offended

by an attempt at dapping in his life. Get hit with the Confucian dapp. Hideyoshi in the process of unification had benefited massively through his vassals on Tsushima Island from trade with Korea. But now that unification was complete, his daimyo's board,

hundreds of thousands of people out of work, and the idea that it was his destiny to rule the known world, he no longer gave a shit about trade. He wanted to conquer. And he made his thoughts known directly to King Sanjo. Hideyoshi ordered the daimyo of Tsushima, Yoshishige, to send a ship to Korea with orders to submit to Japan or face attack. This threatening form of diplomacy, if you could

call it that, had worked during his campaign of reunification. He was so used to bullying people in the submission as the biggest dog in the yard, he didn't really see another way of doing it. But Yoshisig was used dealing with Koreans, and he knew this shit would not work. So rather than telling him that, because that was not something you told Heidiya's, he was. Yoshi. He simply did not go and deliver the message himself. He sent his retainer, a man named Utani. Uthani, it turned out, was an asshole. He arrived in Korea and insulted the quarters they put him up in. When they brought him out to see a military honor guard to like celebrate him coming there, he made fun of how short their spears were and the fact that they didn't have any

guns. That is so fucking funny. You can't fuck with them. I'm sorry. Like, the man's got a point. When a local Korean administrator held a banquet for him, Utani that made fun of his appearance, as well as the food and drinks that he was offered. Spears short as fuck. No guns. Food is whack. You're short. What is this? Me? I'm fresh as fuck. What is this fucking dwarf kingdom shit? Man, give me some real food. Damn. Get yourself something that can shoot bullets. Maybe if you get rid of those yee-e-ey-ey-a spears, you'll get some emperor on your dick. Yeah, man, for real, how in the fuck did I wind up in bitch-ass Narnia? You know the guy in charge of our government has a guy carrying around a sack full of Jordans for him.

Where's your Jordan guy? Get these microspears away from me. Damn, what size are those non-jordans? Oh, my size. And the Koreans knew this guy was not someone to fuck with. Like, they knew that this man, so abrasive and mean, must have been sent there to scare him, which was not the point.

Yutani was just a dick. But it still kind of worked. They weren't sure what to do with Hideyoshi. They didn't really know anything about him or anything to do with him at all. But they did know he was threatening them quite openly. But there were other problems too. The letter that Hideyoshi sent was of course written in Chinese, but the symbol he made sure to use for himself was the Chinese symbol of Chin,

which was reserved only for the first person use of the Chinese emperor. This confused the Koreans even more, because they understood that the Japanese had a man they called emperor, and that was not Hideyoshi. So this was very confusing to them, but the letter was also threatening, discounted any diplomacy, and just treated Korea

as if it was some long-lost Japanese territory that needed to be brought into line. In short, the combination of the letter and Utani did nothing but reinforce all of the stereotypes that the Korean court already thought about the Japanese. In fact, they were so insulting, in every conceivable way, they saw little purpose of continuing

any relationship with Japan at all, including trade. When word of the mission's failure got back to Hidi Yoshi, he was pissed. He had Yutani and his entire family killed, suspecting they must be secretly working for the Koreans. How do you fuck up that bad? You get the whole clan slimed? I'm wiping your seed from the earth because you're so bad at diplomacy. Yoshishe was also deposed for putting a dip shit like Yutani in charge and replaced

with his adopted son. So Yoshitoshi, who through adoption and marriage was also the son-in-law of one of Hideyoshi's favorite generals, Konishi Yuki-Naga. Now listeners of the show might remember Konishi from our series in the Shima Barra Rebellion as one of Japan's most prominent and most powerful Christian daimyo's. Hideyoshi then ordered Yoshitoshi to send another mission to Korea and another letter. This letter changed somewhat, saying that, look, I want to invade China. And if you join me, you'll best. He also adds that whole point about the fortune teller telling his mother at birth that he's going to rule the world, and the implied threat of what would happen to Korea if they didn't. You can see that he's trying the same play once again that worked for him while he was unifying Japan.

Join me and it's good for you. You have all of this land I'll give you, or I'll kill you. King Sanjo found this even more insulting than the first letter because he threatened to invade China. But at this point, the king's advisors said they should probably do something to keep. the Japanese happy because these fuckers mean business. So they proposed a counteroffer. They'd send a goodwill mission to Kyoto if the Japanese intern sent a band of Japanese pirates to Korea to face justice. This is a trade that both sides agreed to. King Sanjo then granted Yoshitoshi a personal audience, where Yoshitoshi gifted the king a peacock and a gun. Some accounts is like several crates of guns,

and these were the first firearms in Korea that a single man could use in war. They were arcupuses. I'm just laughing at the idea of what if it was the opposite? What if it was one gun and crates and crates of peacocks? We weren't sure which one you would like more. So, uh, you know, have some colorful birds. Big colorful birds. I think I'd rather have peacocks. Now, rather than studying these weapons to learn from them, because Korea had no knowledge of man-portable muskets. They were just chucked into a warehouse where the king puts gifts he doesn't like. I assume he kept the peacock. The Korean goodwill mission to Japan went terribly. Every step along the way the Korean emissaries were insulted, either on purpose or on accident.

They found the Japanese court and Hideyoshi personally is uncivilized and common. There's this whole episode where they have like a banquet. Hideyoshi does not discuss anything to do with matters of state. He serves them very little food, like commoner food. And at one point he brings out his newborn son who then just pisses all over him and he finds it hilarious. and the Koreans are just disgusted by all of this. What is really interesting to me here is they're so quick to look down their noses at the Japanese.

They thought so little, so nothing, of Hideyoshi. They didn't even bother to try to get a measure on Japan's military strength or his ability to invade. They simply saw backwards aggravating barbarians and one man who was covered in child piss. The Koreans also made their intention known. They would never submit to the Japanese. But Japan was welcome to join them in the civilized world of China.

Those intentions, in turn, were never relayed to Hideyoshi by Yoshitoshi or the other daimios because nobody wanted to be the guy to tell Hideyoshi that after what had just happened to Yutani. In fact, Yoshitoshi didn't even tell Hideyoshi that the Koreans were a goodwill mission and not a tributary mission of submission. So when the Koreans left, Hideyoshi thought he had successfully taken over Korea. All right. After this, Hideyoshi writes a letter to King Sancho and gives it to the Korean mission to take back with them.

To the Koreans, the letter is the most confusing thing that the Japan has ever sent them. I talked about tribute, thanking them for, quote, surrendering Korea to the Japanese court, and ordered him to gather his army for the plain invasion of China. Meanwhile, King Sanjo's looking down. this with his new peacock friend is like, what the fuck did you guys do over there? The emissaries returned to Korea and in 1591

gave the report to King Sanjo. But like everything else in the Korean court, the emissaries were split between Eastern and Western factions. The Western emissary said Hideyoshi was a dangerous man and they needed to immediately prepare for war. The Eastern emissary said, nah, that guy's

a fucking idiot. He's backwards. They called him a rat, which is ironic. They both him and Nobunaga fell out the same insultic nickname for him. And most importantly, they have nothing to worry about. Hideyoshi is a paper tiger. And because the Eastern faction was more powerful at court, King Sanjo elected to listen to him.

In turn, King Sanjo sends a letter to Japan, rejecting any war with China, saying in part, and honestly, probably the best letter that I found in this entire conflict, that, quote, we shall certainly not desert our Lord and Father nation, China, and joined with a neighboring nation in her unjust an unwise military undertaking.

Moreover, to invade another nation is an act of which men of culture and intellectual attainments should feel ashamed. All right. This in turn is reported back to Hideyoshi, who is also confused. He thought he was in control of Korea,

and now suddenly he isn't. Due to misunderstandings, both willingly and unwillingly, shit being lost in translation and people hiding things from him, he saw this as King Sanjo going back on his word of submission. So he sent him.

one last letter, submit or die. Enter a fun little side character here as we close out our episode. King Shonai of the Ryukyuan Islands. Yes. We did an episode on the Japanese invasion of the kingdom of Ryukyu before, and you might remember it best for the Ryukyuan defenders dumping buckets full of snakes on the top of the head of the samurai. It was fun.

Go listen to it. But at this point, the Ryukyans are still a tributary state of China, just like Korea. And Hideyoshi was already threatening them too. King Shonai, in his threat he received from Japan, was to join him in his invasion of Korea or face an invasion. So King Shonai's like, yo, why is Korea involved in all this? And the first thing he does is alert to Chinese court. China hadn't been told anything that was going on between Korea and Japan at this point. He had not heard about any trade.

He had not heard about any threats of war. And he certainly hadn't heard about all these diplomatic missions going back and forth. This did not have the effect that you would think, for when China, as we know from our episode, did not send assistance to the reju's. They simply couldn't. They had more than enough to handle at home. And the emperor of China, Juan Lee at the time, began to suspect Korea was hiding something from him. Why hadn't their little brother, their most loyal tributary state, not told him they being threatened? Everything Korea was doing was also technically against the agreement to be a tributary. They were not allowed to just do this shit on their

her own. So Juan Lee began to believe he had been betrayed by his beloved little brother Korea. With that, in the summer of 1591, Hideyoshi began preparations for war. And that is where we'll pick up next time on the Imgen War part two. Hell yeah. All right. We could summarize this first episode of, uh, I never thought I'd see my dogs turn into snakes. I never thought my dogs would turn to snakes and get dumped on my head. came strapped with a peacock because I kind of mixed the two things up not really familiar with either of them

I would just really like to continue the series thinking that the peacock has become the confidant of King Sondro because he's so alone in the halls of power yeah exactly it's just like I got my peacock that other shit is just like some wooden metal

who cares that will not be important in a few months sure it won't be but fellas that is the Imgen Ward part one how you feeling? I am excited for so many things to go wrong. I'm excited to learn more about superior men. I'm excited to learn more about

the hierarchy and systems and tests that take forever to study for. I'm excited to learn about what I used to about the extent to which Korea is so often the site of Japan attacking both Korea and also China that it's just sort of caught in the middle in a really bad way. I think it's going to be interesting. Part two, we're going to go into the Korean military and of course the Japanese invasion and it's going to get really wild from there. But folks, if you like what you're hearing and you happen to skip our intro. We have a live show coming up. September 26th in Cork, Ireland. Tickets are available now. If you can't make it, we're doing a live stream with video on demand so you can watch it whenever you want. You can find the links in the show notes below.

We'll have new merch, old merch, I'll have some books. It's going to be a good time. We also have a Patreon. Everything we do here is completely on our own. We have no investors, no ads, and we'd like to keep it that way. So support the show on Patreon. just five bucks a month gets you like almost a decade of bonus episodes, Discord access, every regular episode early, ebooks, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merch, and possibly a peacock, but we'll have to work out the logistics there. But my fine co-hosts here, host their own show.

Yeah. Fellas, plug those shows. Well, I've got a show called Trash Shooter. It's about the tech industry and UK politics, but both being bad. I produced Kill James Bond, a feminist film podcast, and I'm in a band called Second Homes and our first dollar. album is available everywhere you can stream. But if you really like it, you should buy it on bandcamp. So we actually get some money from it. Thank you.

Listen to Beneathskin show about the history of everything told through the history of tattoos or blood work show about the economy of violence. If you've made it this far, consider buying my book, The Highlands Burn. You can get in an ebook, paperback. And if you're not sick of my voice already, audiobook, read by me. Those links will also be in the show notes. Until next time, gift your homie a peacock. It's the gift that keeps on giving. You can keep the gun for yourself. He doesn't even want it.