Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 427 - The Imjin War: Part 2

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

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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 Head by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. With me, it's Tom and Nate

Bellas. How we doing? I still have that half-eaten terrible protein bar sitting in front of me and it's like taunting me with its shittness. It beckons to you. Yeah, just take a little nibble, a little the interstitial nibble in the middle of the episode. Like a rabbit eating lettuce. Your lips are just moving over it. Just get one of those like water feeders that they use for rabbits and fill it up with like a protein shake. So in the middle of recording, I just lean to sign and go,

Oh. Tom the Jacked Rabbit. If you've ever heard the lover boy song Blinded by the Light, I'm in a permutation of that called Mind Fucked from the Heat. And I'm still kind of getting my bearings. And of course, it's going to get hot again very soon. But last night, basically at night, I've been trying to get in more steps because it's actually kind of cool.

And I'm like, fuck it. I'll just go out and like clear my head by walking. And last night I decided to walk a lot. And I walked like 10 kilometers. I got like 16,000 steps. But while I was out, I was like, you know what? Fuck it. I'm going to get a beer.

Buy street beer. I live in Europe. I can do that. But then the corner shop I went to didn't sell alcohol because like very few of them do here. And it was a five, five franc card minimum to buy anything. So I wound up buying a Pepsi Max and a bottle of hot sauce and it was eight francs. And the Pepsi Max was like from Belgium and it tasted like shit. It was the worst Pepsi Max I've ever had in my life.

And so I was just like, this is what God wants for me. And I just walked all over. And yeah, got my steps in. But even when I wanted to break the diet to get a little bit alcohol, I had like nice little street beer, I was struck down. Sharia law was enforced in Servette slash Vernier. And so I am healthy and in compliance. and apparently unable to transgress because the angels will prevent it.

So that's how I am today. I do love the idea that there's different vintages of Pepsi Max. Like, oh, this is from the fields of Belgium. It's, you know, has too much sun. It just tasted like shit. I don't know, man. Like, normally Pepsi Max tastes fine and it was actually cold. But this tasted like if you got a Pepsi at like the vending machine

in a movie theater and it melted into the ice and it was like the liquidy ice. And someone had like ground up some aspirin and put it in. That's what it tasted like. It was bad. It wasn't counterfeit. It was just bad. I don't know why. Maybe it was old. You said a bad vintage. Maybe they make it weird in Belgium because Belgium's a fucked up country. I don't know. At the soda bar and the soda sommelier comes over and pours you a glass and you swirl it, sniff it and take a sip. It's like, hmm, ah yes. Domain Romani Pepsi. Yeah, look, man, I don't care. Like I said, I'm not, I still drank the fucking thing. Like, I don't care. Like, whatever. But there are times when you're like, damn, I could use a softener.

really nice right now. When you kind of gotten over the mental hurdle, like, I'm going to have a soft drink. And then you drink it. You're like, this tastes like dog shit. Like, you still drink it. Because I mean, like, it's just, you know, we drank fake, Fago and gas station coffee growing up. I did something similar. I was in a very rural village somewhere in Armenia. I cannot remember if it was the north or south anymore. It was several years ago. And I just wanted water. And the village corner store did not just have a bottle of water. I was like, fuck. And I wasn't in Yuravan where they have like water fountains everywhere. And there was this incredibly cheap local pop.

I believe it was called Vaughn or something. Someone is yelling at me the correct answer and was certainly a producer. It was probably like 150 drum tops. So like less than a dollar, which is never a good sign. I was like, you know, fuck it. I'll take it. It was flat already. Like upon opening.

I'm drinking it. Even the guy behind the counter looked at me weird that I was buying it. This is like when I was in Eastern Europe and then drank kovass for the first time. A kvass rules. But it was a bottle of kovas that was like rolling around on the floor in the back of this car. Good call. Good call. For an entire day. I saw a video of people in, I want to say it was in Romania making, I don't know what the word in Romania is for the plumber.

brandy that they make. Mm-hmm. But it's, you know what I mean. It's basically, yeah. Of dry and goat. Yeah, yeah. And the best way I could describe the barn and the still where they were making it and the level of just aggregate filth was it looked like the thing they dig the Urrachi out of.

You want to drink the Uruguay water? But the brandy looked good as fuck. It was probably really, really strong. I also saw one of those starter pack memes about growing up in rural post-war Bosnia. I was like, okay, this is all foreign to me, except in the bottom was an image of a young guy dressed in religious garb. It says bisexual awakening imam. I was like, all right. Now that's a fucking story. Whatever that is.

Speaking of the bisexual awakening imam. Actually, speaking of man in robes, Toyota Mahidiyoshi. It's all I got. It's a bad pivot. It's a segue. Man in Robs. A time for the bisexual awakening of context. When we left you last time on the Imjean War part one, a lot happened. you should probably go and listen to it. But the Japanese court of definitely not the Shogun, but still kind of the Shogun, Hideyoshi,

pissed off every single facet of the Korean government and then threatened to attack them in the summer of 1591. Korea told them to eat shit, and so the gears of war had begun to turn. The gears of context. Hideyoshi began to gather soldiers, ordering his various daimyo's to call up their men. He also picked a place to act as a headquarters for the operation

for as much as this operation would have a headquarter. quarters in Nagoya. Each daimyo would have a mandatory number of men that would be required to supply based on how large each lord's domain was. And this is how Hideyoshi ran everything. It was even how he requisitioned labor. That's how he requisitioned money for building projects. He would demand lords give him warm bodies and everybody knew what would happen if they

didn't. Telling your subordinates run those pockets and they just pull out a load of guys. they just have a sack that's hanging on the wall full of soldiers that means that like every Japanese Lord is wearing the world's widest leg cargo pockets who could fit all these guys in it wearing like jinko size like pockets on your kimono and it's like just pulling guys out of it hell he is the jinko samurai yeah but instead of having anime

figurines because anime people embroidered into it hadn't been invented yet It's just got like Uki-e woodblock print characters. It's got characters from no theater and stuff like that in your huge ass pockets. Hell yeah. He's somehow still doing the thing that I see now with like people who are between the age of maybe 18 and 25 who are wearing like the giant knockoff jinkos and trying to figure out like what they can fit in the pocket. I saw a photo of you remember those like small Sony Veo laptops like the skinny ones. A guy just pulled one of those out of his pocket and opened it up. And I'm like, I imagine the Jinko samurai is doing the exact same thing.

Sony Veo in the pocket of his Jinko's kimono. It's a shitty locally made laptop that's got Sony guts. You know, with them in, of course, he demands money. And those closest to the headquarters or the front line of the war would be required to give more of those things. While people further away would give less. So through that process, it makes sense that most of the army and most of the money, came from the Lords of Kewshu. The same went with the Navy he was actively trying to build for the invasion,

but we'll talk about more on the various navies at play in a little bit. There was a sliding scale of what would be required from who, based on size and distance, but there's also more to it than that. Remember our first episode how I said Hideyoshi cut countless deals with Daimyo in order to unify Japan? Well, those would come into play too. Some lords had tax exemptions that made their taxable domain size

legally smaller than what it really was, meaning they would have to give less men and less money for the war effort. I love that they're just doing the foreign direct investment strategy of Ireland. They've got to set up their own dock where all of the tech ghouls can live in Xushu. If they get lost, they have to have someone shepherd them back. This is also suggesting to me that similar to Grand Canal Dock in Dublin, there's just a giant. and Brue Dog? Yeah, I don't want to think about 16th century Bruehawt. I don't want to think about punk IPA.

Brew Hachi. Yeah. It said, he shot Kidoishi. Somehow, we find out that the Japanese invented bribing people with brown envelopes full of cash. Yeah, there's a Japanese court tier in the Shogun's court who won't shut up about the rhododendrons.

Like, it's just full Irish Japan. As far as we know, there's at least one Irish guy there, as is a through line for our show. There's at least one Irish samurai that nobody asks questions about. Yeah, as a friend, my friend and fellow podcaster, Garrett Dennis, he sent me a photo.

He was in Dublin recently, and he was on the bus from the airport. And like, the brew dog in Dublin is fucking huge. Like, it is one of the biggest, like, pubs I've ever seen.

And he asked me, he was like, oh, I didn't even know that was still there. And I was like, yeah, I don't know if it's open. And it was like,

it's haunted by the ghosts of like, overpriced pines and post work sexual harassment. I know that we have to continue on topic, but I'm going to say this one thing. The one thing that Brewdog reminds me of in this entire aesthetic and annoyingness was a bar I never went to, but saw quite often named after Tyler Durdon in the East

Village called Durdon. I've heard of that. I've definitely also not gone. Fred of mine said that if you were a trans woman, that is the place where like ostensibly straight dudes who were trans chasers would absolutely hit on you nonstop. And apparently it was awful. It was as bad as you just can imagine it being.

And I was like, In Britain, they were like, what if we made this basically our national identity? What if we put this in like the British Airways lounge and airports? The Heathrow Durden Bar? Yeah, the fact that they've colonized Ireland with a great big ass brew dog. Like, it's basically British imperialism Durden. So, yeah, anyway, thinking of a different imperialism. Well, there was also differing levels of loyalty amongst the lords, those he had conquered,

and those who had joined him willingly. The ones whose loyalty was suspect were also required to give less in order to keep them happy. It just goes to show that while Japan was unified, this unification was pretty tenuous. Within a year, Kiteoshi had gathered quite possibly up to 335,000 men, of which about a quarter of a million would be tabbed for the invasion of Korea, at least on paper. As we'll discover, that will not technically be the capes. Others would be sent across the country to garrison the places that had to give a few too many men in order to keep law and order.

But it's the late 1500s we're talking about. You can't just move a quarter of a million men into a single area and expect them to not immediately start dying of starvation. And this was something everyone was well aware of. Remember, Japan had just been fighting a civil war for decades. Logistics is something they kind of have figured out. Instead of doing the Samurai and Archibis version of a zirgrush, a non-exact science was done,

splitting this mass into different-sized contingents. Continges is a not-exact, definition here. There's no real unit breakdown of the Japanese army at this point because there isn't a Japanese army. It's a feudal army split up amongst

lords. All of their armies are different sizes. But some of these contingents could be a few thousand and some could be up to 10,000. And like I said, each would be under the command of a lord who had raised them. These are guys from their territory.

The Japanese did have maps, which I know it feels weird to point that out, but that is more than we can say for some invasions we've talked about on this show. This was thanks to So Yoshitoshi's diplomatic mission. He managed to get a full map of Korea as a gift. He then had it duplicated multiple times in Japan, and each of the Korean provinces were given a color code.

Because nobody knew anything about Korea other than the diplomatic mission who had been there. They had no idea really where anything was or what it meant. So instead of trying to figure that, like, you are going to go conquer purple. All right. Purple is a fruit. To be fair, again, kind of a better plan than several we've talked about before on this show. You would think that they would know a bit more about Korea, given a relative proximity of the two countries.

Well, I mean, when you think about it, they've had very limited contact, mostly through these diplomatic missions from the last few years. And they spent most of those diplomatic missions just pissing off the other group. They didn't really do an in-depth survey. I mean, to be fair, the entire country was kind of in its Hakikimori, like, era. It was like, we're staying in the house, we don't need to go anywhere, you got your big jinkos full of guys, you can chill. And Hideyoshi had to go and ruin it all. The overall Japanese invasion plan was very simple. From the headquarters at Nagoya, they would travel to Tsushima and from there to Busan.

The first invasion would be led by four lords and their contingents. Konishi Yuki Yuki Naga, So Yositoshi, Motsonori, Motsonori. Shiginobu and Arima Horonobu would lead around 18,000 men give or take. Some of these names might sound familiar to listeners of this show, especially people who listen to our series on the Shemabara Rebellion. But the contingents would simply go north. More contingents would be sent in as needed, and they would just take over everything on their way to the Chinese border. Interestingly, all of the lords leading the initial invasion were Christian, or at least had Christian connections like Shiginobu who had Christians in his family.

Hideyoshi had previously banned Christian missionaries a few years before and considered the very concept of Christianity as a threat to Japan. While there was no blanket ban of the faith outright, there were persecutions, but those persecutions were also very uneven. It would certainly get worse in the future, we've talked about that before, and he strongly encouraged his Christian daimyo to, abandon the church because as we talked about in the Shima Barre rebellion, when a lord converted, he would then force his people to convert. And the idea was, and it wasn't incorrect, the people

went with their lord by force or by choice. So if they could force them away from the faith, the people would follow. There are some arguments as to why so many Christian lords were sent to Korea. It is generally agreed upon that this is for multiple reasons. One was he saw it as an opportunity to dump the lords and their men who he saw as possibly disloyal or suspicious into a war to get rid of them. It is true that he saw Christians as just generally untrustworthy. But it's also true that he sent any lords regardless of their religion to Korea based more on how they swore allegiance to him and if they consider them loyal, based more on personal and political relationships than religious. There's also still more to this as well.

He was sending so many men in what would become the largest war in Japanese history up into that point that nobody was going to get a pass regardless of what God or gods they worshipped. And the subjugation of Korea was concerned such a foregone conclusion to Hideyoshi that it was like a bullet point. On top of this, he already had planned to just continually invade into China and then India in rapid fire succession. He was like, oh, Korea, don't worry about Korea. doing, we know the meme of like Jeb Bush where it's the election and the entire American map is yellow. It's just Jeb. He's just doing that except it's the entirety of the like Asian content as a greater concept. That's just Japanese. Yeah. Hideyoshi doing the Jeb meme for all of the world as he knows it currently. We could have lived in a different world. We all could have been Japanese. We could all be Jinko Samurai.

With that, we should probably talk about what this army looked like. For starters, like I kind of already said, this is not a Japanese national army. The Meiji Restoration has not happened. Will not happen for another 300 years. Yeah, like this industrialized centralization of a national army is not even a glimmer in Hideyoshi's eye. Even if Japan is unified, it kind of isn't. This is more of a loose collection of feudal armies. Sure, they all answered to Hideyoshi, hypothetically.

But remember, Hideyoshi is not going to Korea. They were raised, equipped, paid, and commanded by the daimyo who owned their land. The feudal lords that were in charge of the area where these men had been drawn from. There's no real concrete command structure. There's no functional supreme commander organizing them all on the ground. To make it very simple, everyone is out for themselves. but there is interpersonal and political relationships at play amongst the lords that kind of formed an ad hoc chain of command

but that was also quite fluid and depended out of which lord you're talking about each lord and each army or each contingent could and often did act completely on their own decades of warfare trade and evolutions and mass murder had changed the makeup of what we'll call the Japanese army ceremonially politically and socially, samurai are obviously the top of the pile here. Their katana was still the symbol of their position in

Japanese life. They're still technically the pinnacle of it all. But practically, they fucking were not. Portugal had introduced to Arcuba to Japan via Tangashima Island, which is how they got their nickname, the Tangasima guns. This happened a few decades ago in

1547. Before long, these guns were copied by local blacksmiths and spread throughout Japan. These were very simple firearms, but revolutionary for their day. They were snap matchlock guns that were terribly inaccurate, but cheap, portable by a single man and able to be used by one guy with very little training and could puncture any armor on the battlefield. Yeah, thinking about the small domino, big domino effects of, you know, the Portuguese go to Japan to try and convert them all to Jesus.

And then on a long enough timeline, we get the cinematic masterpiece that is Ghost Dog. I fucking love Ghost Dog. That movie is so good, man. Oh, man, it's got Forrest Whitaker. It's got members of the Wu-Tang Clan in it. That movie is awesome. It's some premium tier Jim Jarmish stuff. Yeah, for real.

I was going to say, it's like, Ghost Dog is like for me up there on the list of movies that, like, your drug dealer would have on DVDs in their house? Just so you can better picture what my barracks room looked like, I had a ghost dog theater poster. I love this movie. I fucking love. It was the only poster that I had. This makes so much sense.

Hell yes. It is very funny to imagine you as like a one-off Jarmish head. Yeah. I literally can't name a single other film that he made. This would have been the real sequel to Jarhead. It just would have been a movie about Joe. Watching Ghost Dog and jerking off in a portal. Instead of Jarhead is Jarmehead, but yeah, it only applies to one of his films.

I'm a big charm head, but of the ghost variety. If you haven't seen it, watch Ghost Dog. Stick it on. It fucking rules. It's got easily the most over-the-top cartoonish version of movie Mafia dudes ever in But it's so good. Now, when it came to these guns, the muskets, not the ones that Ghost Dogs using, what made them arguably even more important than their ease of transport, their ability to puncture armor,

was the total lack of training that someone needed to be useful in combat. Bowman obviously take years to train. Spearmen could take months to get on the field. And not to mention all the collective difficulty, that comes with trying to keep these guys in line in the horrors of hand-to-hand combat, right? Like, you can teach a guy to stab a wooden block with a spear pretty quickly,

but it takes a long time to get him to do that in actual combat and not run away when another man is trying to take his fucking head off. A gun is simple. A gun is effective from 100 yards away, even if it kind of was more to a, when you fired it, it was more of a to whom it may consider.

concern type situation because of how inaccurate they were. A dime you could conscript a man, give him a gun, and have him be decently effective on the battlefield in a matter of days or a week at most. Ashigaro gun units took the field during the Sengaku period. And even purpose-built samurai guns were made and they look pretty fucking sick. Yeah. Oda Nobunaga was notable for being the first warlord to adopt the weapon quickly and at scale, making it the center point of his army

and winning entire battles at the barrel of a gun Oh shit, I just remembered I saw an archibus in real life the other day I've seen a few in museums I would love to fire one if I didn't think it would kill me

No, it was like I was visiting someone and they had like a Polynesian archibus that like had been like custom carved and everything just on the wall sick

Imagine getting killed by something with so much drip it's like being a British soldier in the mountains of Afghanistan and like the 1800s and you get clapped by a Jazeel like yeah it hurts whatever catching a musket ball between the shoulder blades it's got to be unpleasant but you you die knowing that guy had more style than anything you've ever seen before yeah getting obliterated by a samurai on the battlefield whose armor just makes them look like cat Williams

yeah yeah I mean there is like you said it's like the archibus is going to be bedazzled you know it's going to be If you're going to get, you know, executed, fucking getting the death penalty. It's like, well, at least I'm getting executed in this bizarre, you know, Venetian, Baroque jail where they do executions, as opposed to like a fucking shipping container. You know what I mean? Yeah, at least I'm not just getting my head caved in with a rock. It's got style.

Yeah, I'm getting my head blasted apart by the world's coolest gun. Doing gun tricks like I'm fucking Mercutio in Romeo plus Juliet with my Archibus. Archibus called Longsword. That would actually be an interesting style if they're like actually it's still set in weird sort of fake imaginary Miami Verona but they're only using 16th century guns for some reason. Netflix call me. Now, because of this, samurai, as we know them, didn't make up much of the actual fighting force of the invasion. They would be best described as officers, though each of them brought their full ceremonial party with them. This included attendance, people to work on all.

of their stuff, sandal bearers, people to carry their various collection of war masks and swords, as well as multiple horses. These horses, of course, could trace their lineage back to samurai horse Jesus or whatever, because this was an important thing to them. The most honorable position of being a mask bearer who brings the mask that looks like Cat Williams with a jerry curl. I love the idea of like, oh, so what's your job in the samurai war party? Like, I'm the horse lineage guy. Yeah. That's all I do.

I just tell people about how cool as horse's grandfather was. Interestingly, cavalry, despite being an important part of Japanese warfare, was largely left behind along with a lot of what you could consider normal samurai. A lot of this had to do with the practicalities of ship travel, because obviously they're going to have to go from Japan to Korea and the spread of gunpowder weapons made the daimios think that these would be largely unnecessary. Packing a ton of horses onto boats in the 1500s was not really a good thing to do. They also had hand-to-hand weapons, of course. We're not talking about 1800-style armies here of

nothing but muskets as far as the eye can see. The Ashigaru also carried swords, spears, and boats. There was also your average samurai who was with them. And it was easy to equip such a large army, thanks to Hideyoshi's massive so-called sword hunts that he did after he unified Japan. These were his attempts to disarm the Japanese population from all the shit they had piled up after so many years of war. And like I said, this is not a full army of musket wielding Ashigaru or samurai or anybody else. We don't have the exact numbers of how many muskets they brought. But the numbers that we do have are wildly inflated. for example, some Korean chronicles put the number of firearm wielding Japanese soldiers at 300,000, which just cannot be true.

Each contingent of Japanese soldiers wasn't even majority gunmen, from what anybody can tell at least. They could be anywhere from 10% to 50% of the fighting strength of any one contingent, because like I said, they were all different. But what they did have was pretty much the same tactics across the board for how firearms would be used. And it does go to explain why Koreans believe there were just so many Archibus-armed Asi-Garu in the Japanese military.

The gunmen would be the vanguard. They would march forward firing volleys, blasting holes in enemy formations, with the goal of mass volley fire scaring them off or killing them. Once the enemy was put to flight, then the spears and the swords would be sent in. at that point

if you're on the receiving end of a volley you're probably not remembering who's chasing you you just remember the guys who blew up your friend's chest in front of you you know what I mean I had to stone down the ops

blow up their whole quadrant another thing we can be sure of as well even if there's no real good metric to base this on heidioshi amassed one the largest armies in the world at the time the only other empire in the world that could feasibly put 100,000 men in the field at this point was Imperial China.

But Hideyoshi did have a glaring weakness, and one we will be talking about at length as the series goes on, the Navy, where Korea, for example, and more on their Navy and Army in just a little bit, had embraced evolutions in naval warfare. Japan absolutely did not. In 1592, the Navy Japan had slapped together, looked about the same as it would have, a hundred years before. Ships were little more than transportation, and naval battles were still considered

little more than land battles at sea. You would slam your ships together and board one another. And Hideyoshi did build a massive navy within his naval framework, even if it was inferior. He had about 700 of these transports built, but he also ordered the construction of some no-shit warships,

at least within the Japanese, context. With a crew of 100, they would only carry three cannons. He also tried to simply buy warships from the Portuguese, like men of warships because he knew they were better. But the Portuguese just laughed at his face and fuck no, we're not selling you these. We'll sell you the cannons. We'll sell you the muskets. We'll even train you how to build your own ships, but we're not selling you one of ours. By the time he was done collecting his navy, with these purpose-built warships included, he had nearly a thousand ships. But again, most of these were those firearmless transports.

As for those few hundred purpose-built cannon-armed warships, well, they would be commanded by Daimyo who had no real experience in the kind of naval warfare they were soon going to find themselves in. Meanwhile, in Korea, they have absolutely no idea any of this is happening. Don't get me wrong. They knew Japan was definitely planning something. After all, it's not like Hideyoshi hid this fact from them. he literally wrote them a letter telling them he was going to do it.

But Korea hadn't, and as long as anyone could remember, fought an actual no-shit war. We've talked about the Waco Pirates that happened a long time before this period we're talking about. There were still smaller groups as well. They had what were known as Jurchin Raiders coming over the northern border in Manchuria, but nothing you could consider an actual war. So they contextualize the war with the Japanese within the scale that they understood, which is a Japanese attack

might just look like a really big pirate raid. Mm-hmm. Which I suppose is true, as long as you only rate military operations on an exclusively pirate-themed scale. Yeah, you're lifting up your, your telescope and you're seeing an entire fleet of denim soldiers

on jotes coming towards you. Also, like the idea that every single boat can fire basically three times. So they have 700 boats just kind of like launching a big spitball at you. It's both intimidating. You're also like, I almost empathize for how annoying your job must be. It's like watching white people do a rap cipher.

Yeah, the rap cipher is 700 guys, but they're all on boats. They have to get the boats. That's basically who elected Trump. Guy who's only ever seen a pirate raid. Wow, this looks like a pirate raid to me. But the court at least finally agreed on something. The Japanese are going to attack us. And that is a groundbreaking.

unification of Korean court thought at this point because they fucking hate one another. But they were panicking about something else. We should probably really get around to telling China about all of this, which of course caused the court to start arguing again. One faction demanded that they tell China because it's their duty to do so as China's sociopolitical little brother. I feel really sympathetic with this because I remember when I was maybe 12 or 13, my brother got a bow and arrow.

and used to fire arrows at slates, like, outside the house. And I used it one time, but fucked up, like, you know, pulling the bow string back and, like, fucked up my finger. And I was like, this really, really hurts. I can't tell my parents because then they'll know I stole his bow to use it. And then he's going to beat the shit out of me. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I was also a little brother. So I empathize with Korea in that I don't want to tell my big brother anything. Because it only ends with me, A, getting yelled at and being called gay. or B, getting the shit kicked out of me? Like, I'm going to keep this to myself. Also, the difference is, is China is still alive as well. Well, it's also true. Imperial China, however, is not.

I don't want to tell my brother that the guys who normally throw hubcaps at me and call me the F slur, there's 700 of them, and they each have three hop caps. They all are in one horizontal line and they're going to move slowly up the line, throwing hobcaps at you. Well, actually, the Midwest tween bully equivalent of this is that they're 700 teams where there's three kids on trick bikes with front end back pegs. And so there's actually three kids per bike and they're all armed with a hubcap. Yeah, I will say though, Korea is wrong in one front here because as much of a little shithead that I was and I,

and I was, whenever I eventually picked a fight that was too much for me, the first thing I would do is go run and get my brother. And it always worked. Because yes, because like my brother is the one that spiritually taught me the concept of the grand unifying theory of fuck that guy. Because we hated each other until I was like 20. But if anybody was going to beat my ass, it was going to be him. And he'd be goddamn to be someone else to it. Yeah, sadly, uh, my brother was, uh, not much assistance in this regard. So, um, uh, I, I, I unfortunately had to become the, the little brother Ronan going around

and just picking fights, but, uh, finding a, you were the, uh, a jing. go samurai. Yeah, I had to fucking find a bullying daimyo to align myself with. You need to find your local Nelson Monce dymio. Yeah, it led me on quests such as what if we played inside a construction site and I went up stepping on fiberglass and falling through the ceiling of a halfway built garage. I didn't hurt myself though. So you know what? Statue limitations was expired on that too. And you know, kind of similar to our big brother, little brother relationships that we had personally, that was how Korea saw. things in a sense because one faction of the Korean court was like, well, if we tell them now,

they're going to be mad that we waited so long to tell them. Yep. Yeah. So we should. Little brother behavior. Yeah. It's spiritually little brother behavior. Like, so we should just keep our mouths shut.

But also, neither party within the Korean court had any idea that China already knew. Remember we talked about in our first episode that the king of Ryukyu had told China that Japan reached out to them for help to invade Korea. Korea. So they already know. They're just waiting to be told. I, one time, this is when 2009, so Modern Morpher 2 had come out. And my brother had like, wouldn't let me play it. And I got so pissed off that he went away for the weekend. So I stole the power plug for his Xbox 360 and hit it in the house in the attic. And he came home and went to play. I'd like nearly threw me down the stairs. He was so mad. King Little Brother behavior.

Yeah. And Korea would eventually. break down and tell China, hey, Japan's picking on us. But they did leave out all of the four years of diplomatic missions that they had with Japan because that would have pissed them off. And militarily, let's talk about Korea, because they're not prepared for war in the fucking slightest. Their military is exactly as it had been prior to the rise of the Chosen dynasty, about 200 years before this, which it turns out was based on the Chinese model that existed prior to the Ming Dynasty. Garrisons in Korea followed what was known as the Five Guards model.

Each garrison was a guard. Within this included both the army and the Navy stationed within a province, commanded by generals of this Five Guard. If that sounds like a semi-modern centralized command structure, it should have been, but in reality it wasn't. The generals, the guards, were stationed in Seoul and not allowed to leave to command the units that were supposed to be in command of

until a war began. The idea behind this was, it's like, well, if we keep the guards generals in Seoul, they can't go and organize a rebellion. But basically, then all the soldiers are all hanging out basically doing jack shit the entire time and there's not actually any cohesion. They're all just basically playing 16th century Xbox.

Yeah, and as a former soldier myself, I can tell you that you should ever allow soldiers to be on their own under any circumstance. with our mortar platoon and their mortar shed and their supposed mortar training that involves Xbox 360 and not mortars.

So yeah, I know we're talking about, you know, the tradition is unbroken. Oh, man. To be fair, there was never any rebellions. So I guess it was successful

in that front. But the generals had no real idea of what their military or the area that they were supposed to command looked like. A general didn't know the size of their garrison, the weapons they had,

the supply situation, if they were training or even if they'd been paid. That definitely would never repeat itself in a landlocked country elsewhere in the Asian continent. That's right. Never again. It just wouldn't happen. This would all be left to the garrison commanders.

Though no difference was made between the garrison commanders of the army or navy. A man could command one or the other or both, regardless of their experience or lack thereof. And then it gets a little weird. For every military commander, the same title was held by the civilian governor of the province in the same garrison. They also appointed more commanders to areas they believed were important, thinking, well, more commanders will make this run better.

It will solve problems rather than create them. And there was no chain of command amongst the various commanders. Some areas would have one commander, others would have eight, both military and civilians. And there was some breakdown below this, again, depending on where you were. None of this is uniform. Some were better organized. Others had just one guy doing everything. And that brings us to the quality of these officers.

One became an officer via surprise, you probably already guessed, more exams. Yes. But these were sort of practical. An officer was tested on his ability to use a bow, ride a horse, and of course, memorize Sun Tzu. But just like the... their civilian administrator counterparts, it required no practical knowledge of logistics, leadership, training, organizational maneuvers and movement, nothing. And of course, just like the Chinese system, an officer's position was considered very low on the scale of importance. It was

the test to take if you had nothing else going for you or if you failed the civil service exam or couldn't afford the education to attempt the civil service exam. This created a massive gap between the to with civilian administrators thinking that their military counterparts must be complete and total idiots because they pass the lesser of the two exams. And remember these civilian administrators, if they're a governor, are also technically equal to them in the military command structure. They could and often did simply sideline the military from commanding the military because they believe they were better at it. This became such a normal thing within the hallways of civilian governance that by the time of Hideyoshi's threats, the military itself controlled

very little of the actual military. As for the rank and file conscripts, top to bottom. It was required for everyone other than the upper class, of course. This system was pretty unique as far as conscription systems went. It was kind of a life sentence in a way. But instead of doing long halls in uniform as was common, for example, in our series about Napoleon's invasion Russia where a Russian conscripts family would hold a funeral for him before he left to the military because I knew he was never coming home. These conscripts would serve short halls of like a couple months per year and then go home to go about their normal day, normally working the fields or maybe they had a normal job. And it would just go on like that until they reached 60.

There's also a way out of the rotation or service altogether if you paid a tax. And by tax, I mean, you bribed the officer. As it become more and more common, via bribery or simply not showing up, roles were meant to be updated every few years. Keeping track of everyone, but in reality, as the military became more and more of an afterthought run by men who didn't give a shit about it and had no idea how to keep up with the paperwork, the system just fell apart. This is effectively what the phenomenon is referred to as ghost soldiers in Afghanistan.

stand. So you're basically having ghost soldiers in Korea, you know, sort of 16th century Korea. You basically have almost ghost dog the way of the samurai. It's starting to form here. It's all ghost dog. It's just like when we talked about Imperial China on our first episode. And that is, it's like a generational graft that on a long enough timeline, nobody's actually aware of how much has been stolen and how much the system has collapsed under them as long as they keep being able to steal things. Yeah. Everyone's just been. reading from the second edition of the Art of War where there's no real lessons in like military tactics or like outsmarting your enemy. It's just one page that says, I don't know, chill.

Yeah, it's basically your copy of the Art of War is just one page between two hardbacks. It's just like steal more from your soldiers. All right. Yeah, it's woodblock print calligraphy hustle memes about passive income. No, you open it up and it's a single woodblock print of the SpongeBob Money meme. Officers themselves, sidelined from actual command by civilian administrators, just began to sell conscription exemptions to anybody with enough money. Hell, by the 1500s, civilian administrators were just selling officer commissions altogether

and just forging the exams. Nobody gave a shit on either front at this point. By the time Hideyoshi was mustering his army, literally nobody in Korea knew the actual size or composition of the Korean military. The thing is, everyone had an idea that this had happened. Like, they knew, at least in some way, that they had kind of fucked themselves, that they had wrecked their own military. Because one of the first things they did, after Hideyoshi began threatening them, was immediately replaced the governors in the South, the place where the invasion would certainly take place. And begin shaking up the military structure, sending more competent people to become commanders, but again, not generals, they still have to stay in Seoul.

One of these men sent to command what was those the left navy of the Cholidot province, because everything in Korea is split between left and right. It's not even a geographical designation. It's just a breakdown of command. It's kind of unimportant. And this man would become arguably one of the most famous commanders in all of Korean history, Ye Sun Sin. At this point of his life, he was a 46-year-old career soldier of absolutely no note.

He's the fourth child of a middle class family and not really a lot is known about his upbringing. But he ended up getting a military commission. It could have been for a lot of different reasons. Some people have said that his parents had spent all their money sending his siblings to civil service schools so they could take the bigger exam. Others is they couldn't send any of their kids to any exam and decided to send him to get a military commission because he seemed like the most physically capable to get it. Whatever happens. A commission the military is better than. than nothing.

Yeah, you've just got to line up all your kids and see which is the largest son, which is the most profitable large son. Yeah, that's called my mother's way of raising a family. We're all quite large. I mean, to be fair, that was literally just parenthood until maybe what, like 150 years ago. I was like, who is the most profitable large son? Okay, you're being sold, you're being sold, you're working on the farm. Yep.

And even then, the military exam took him two tries to pass at the ripe age of 31. Now, he didn't fail the first time because of incompetence or anything. He had fallen off his horse and broken his leg and nearly died. Ooh. In the 15 years since, Yi did not exactly get along well within the ranks of the Korean military. Life in the Korean military, as we've established, is an exercise in political glad-handing and corruption. It was a process he flatly refused to engage. agent. So while every time he was set off to fight pirates or Jurchin Raiders, he was always the best

man in the field hands down. And he would be rewarded by getting sent to like a cushy gig in Seoul. And then he would immediately piss off everyone around him by not doing them favors, not taking bribes and refusing promotions to people that he didn't think deserve them on their abilities alone. So this would in turn have him sent back off to the frontier demoted and occasionally. accused of crimes against the state tried to get him out of the way. It was there in the middle of the pact, kept down by not being a total corrupt piece of shit,

that his career probably would have stayed if he wasn't eventually executed for a trumped-up crime. But he did have one friend within the Korean court, Chief State Counselor Yusung Yang, who was his childhood friend. So when war with Japan was clearly on the horizon, he pulled

his friend from the dead end career he found himself in, and suddenly promoted him to commander in what would become the front line. This is why, for all of you listening, it's really important to treat the people that you are friends with really well on your way up because you will meet them again either on the way down or at a very fortuitous moment, aka you are just like a military administrator and then suddenly your friend is like, yeah, we need you. The Japanese are coming.

Yeah, you never know when your street hockey friend will end up being prime minister. Yeah. There were other things that Korean leadership did as well. They ordered all local men to undergo six months of training to prepare for an invasion. But all of the old corruption still existed. So the able-bodied or anybody with a few coins that were able to pay their way out of it did. This left only the very young, the very old, and any local homeless guy that would show up thanks to the promise of a meal while undergoing training. In other places, they began building fortifications, stockpiling weapons and supplies, all of the stuff you would hypothetically need for.

becoming invasion. And everybody hated it. The local administrators, the local people, everyone. Local administrators hate the idea of the military doing anything because they're like, we should be doing that. The military is full of idiots. Local people saw it as just another way to take their money, either through taxes or bribes or combination of both or take their food for stockpiling purposes. As a result, most of the fortifications they began building were never finished. Over so half-assed, they might as well have not even started. I saw one that they worked on for like two months and they built like 10 feet of wall.

Because nobody wanted to go to work. All right. All right. I could respect that. I don't want to get corvade into manual labor either. As for weapons for land warfare, Korea was several decades behind Japan. Hand-to-hand weapons, mostly short spears, bows, or maces were pretty much the only game in town. But there were also the occasional sick fucking trident, or my personal favorite,

the Zhang Chong, a four meter long spear with a big ass blade at the end of it. Four meters long? Yes. So we're talking like 17, 18 feet long. Yeah. And I mean, if you think of the history of spear-based warfare, some spears are cartoonishly long, because obviously the goal is to keep the other person so far away so they can't hit you. But yeah, these are huge. We got a man who's about to pole vault with the lance of Langeness. He's going to stab every one of our enemies. The spear version of the fucking dragon slayer sword from Berserk.

Unfortunately, if you're the guy with a four meter long spear with the goal of keeping the enemy at bay with like a pincushion-esque formation, it doesn't really do a lot if other guy has gun. Yeah, also I'm thinking how fucking Jack do you have to be to effectively wield a four meter long spear? That's one of the problems that comes with maybe a lot of people don't think about it, is that these weapons require a lot of training. One presumes, yeah. Is this like a crew served pointy object? Do you have to have multiple guys? It's just one guy?

No, no. It's meant to be part of a formation of guys with this weapon. So it requires fair amount of training and conditioning. It requires a good diet to be able to withstand the weight and the stress of carrying it. And again, a lot of this doesn't mean a whole lot when other guy just has a gun. But speaking of guns, Korea did have some, kind of. Were they in a warehouse put away? The warehouse guns, those never come into play.

Aw, I was hoping that they would be like, damn, we picked the colorful bird and we needed these guns, but we finally corrected our problem. On the bright side, they do have a peacock. They do. These were mostly something called a Fo Ling Chi. This is a hundred-year-old heavy musket that more looked like a cannon. It was like a big crew served normally with two or three men weapon on a bipod. They were also incredibly unreliable, badly made, and having one explode was not uncommon.

Oftentimes when you describe these weapons, the first thing I can think of is that they remind me of a sort of like grim dark fantasy art gun or some sort of like what a villain in the in the doom franchise would carry. But then you're like, no, it's real. They sucked. They were really inaccurate and dangerous to use. And it's like, instead of it being like, cool, we have, you know, like Henry Rollins's Winnebago from Johnny Nomonic and it's cool as shit. Instead of just sort of like, it's like going to war with, I don't know, like trying to like do cyber defense and like every you've got like actual sort of like you know military trained hackers versus like you've got the vacuum tube computer from the 1940s that like can print out boobs

on a punch card if you program it really hard and it's like cool this is really actually there's nothing cool or stylish about this it's just going to suck for you if they had it opened up the warehouse they could have been like I let that Korean stick bark all you hear is boom and pop pop up oh god and consequently due to the reputation as being insanely inaccurate and unreliable and hard to build, Koreans never really bothered to build the things in large number. As a result, the Koreans didn't have really any base of knowledge or understanding on the concept of a single-man portable firearm.

This is actually true in Korean films to this day because guns are incredibly uncommon and completely illegal in Korea, so instead they find every other sharp and or blunt object to kill people with in action films because guns are actually. guns just don't enter into the imagination. That's way more fun anyway. It is. Yeah. If you've ever seen the movie Huangheer, Yellow Sea, there's a dude who beats a guy to death

with a gigantic soup bone, for example. But, hey, and maybe that happens. Maybe it does happen. The problem is, is that like a soup bone, a 18 foot long spear, they're all really cool. But as you said, when the other side has guns that are accurate and don't kill you, you know, 66% of the time, you the fireer 66% of the time, it does start to be a little bit unfair. You're sort of like, wait, I reshaped my body and trained my entire life to carry long stick. And now this guy can just fucking kill me from any.

anywhere. It's every single battle ends up being that scene from Indiana Jones. I get my small business is being shaken down by the Korean mafia and I refuse to pay and they send in the guy with the trident. But what the Koreans did have and had a lot more of them that were better than the Japanese were cannons. These were made from a combination of iron, copper or whatever else they needed at the time. And these were from very small, team weapons to 400 kilo beasts, the largest of which was the heaven class canon, which sounds like some 40K shit. This thing was, like I said, 400 kilos, two meters long.

It fired stone balls, iron balls, but my personal favorite, a giant arrow the size of a man. Fuck, yes, this is so cool. I'm sorry, the heaven class canon sounds like text that would pop up on a display in Evangelion. Like, it's just up. It gets cooler. All I have to say is the Koreans when it comes to naming cannons are undefeated. I just want a Korean guy to show up like Barrett from Final Fantasy 7 with a cannon on his arm. This shoots one big arrow.

Immediately rips his arm off, but it's worth it. It shoots a cannonball that's shaped like a face. The Koreans deployed most of their cannons within their Navy rather than on land. But again, more on that later. Probably the most infamous of all Korean weapon systems was the Huatcha or fire wagon. The fire wagon looked more just like a wooden box on wheels than anything that you should be afraid of. But it was a box with about a hundred holes. And inside each was a tube loaded with a giant iron arrow backed by a gunpowder charge.

Fuck. Yes. All of these would be fired at once. Like early days Sabo round, basically. Yeah. I mean, you don't really need. to Sable Round for a person, but they're going to use one. It's just funny because it's like, you know, obviously direct fire and direct fire weapons.

Like typically it's not, you know, big bullet nowadays. It's exploding things and stuff like Sabor. Saboes are meant for penetrating armor. And they were like, well, arrows hurts. We made a big fucking arrow. Well, also, each fire wagon had a hundred of them. And they would have dozens of fire wagons pulled up alongside each other. They weren't the most accurate thing on Earth.

But if you have several hundred of these things firing off all at one, That's fucking terrified. I'm there iron arrows as well. So you've got a wagon that's basically like 16th century Merv. Like a, what is it, a multiple independent reentry vehicle, like shooting a ton of fucking rockets at once, but instead it's arrows. Yeah. I mean, if you get hit by one, you're dead, for sure.

Yeah, so someone has actually cast arrow rain in real life. Yes. That's so cool. And this wasn't the only horror-inducing weapon that Koreans had. One had quite possibly the sickest name in the history of warfare. The flying, striking earthquake, heaven thunder. Fuck yes, Joe, do I have permission to deploy the sound? Yes.

I mean, when you say, horror-inducing Korean weapons, if you're a fan of Korean cinema, your mind goes to many places, because as you just described... Yeah, that's just the ending of old boy. I was going to say, oh, exactly what I was going to say. It's like, the horror inducing weapon could be, like you said,

you know, shoot 100 huge arrows at once, or a guy kidnaps you and makes you eat mononel. do every day for 10 years. Sometimes this is simplified to the flying thunderbolt. This is something that is common to us today, which is simply an air-bursting mortar round, designed to be fired over walls or fortifications to blow up over the heads of the enemy, and rain shrapnel down on their heads. But for back then, and especially for the Korean military, it was pretty cutting edge.

And that leaves us to the Korean Navy and the soon-to-be hero, Yi Sun Sin. He now found himself in the most tactically important position, with the most tactically important Navy in all of Korea. He had spent the majority of his career on land and had no experience commanding at sea. So rather than just assuming he would know what he was doing, due to passing an entrance exam once, he sat down and read every single book he could find about naval warfare, as well as he tried to build his navy up.

However, the government really didn't care about his request for simple things like money, men, or resources. So he had to do it all himself. running his own building projects, conscription drives, and since he now had five ports he needed to protect, building fortifications. And while ye might have been the best military mine in Korea,

arguably at least, and a man who is not really corrupt, I really do not mean to make it sound like he was a nice person. He was a man of his era, and by that I mean, his navy was a place of utter brutality. Training was reinforced with constant physical punishment. Any minor break in the rules led to a man being whipped,

and anything beyond that led to him being beheaded and his body thrown into the sea. In order to stop men from deserting after being conscripted, he would simply have them chained inside of their ships for the first few days until it was all out of their system. Slowly, his navy, less than 50 ships, began to take shape and, well, not large, every single ship under his command was better than anything the Japanese had. This included the Panach Sun, which was kind of a reinforced wooden ore-powered battleship. had a thick wooden roof for protection to protect it from arrows coming down on it.

And as was common for most Korean ships, tons of cannons. He inherited a lot of these, so they were kind of unseaworthy when he got them. They had been allowed to fall into disrepair. But he's also one of the creators, arguably this is somewhat debated, of the most famous ship of any period of Korean naval history. They're known as the turtle ships. Yep. These are squat, heavily armored, heavily armed ships that came equipped with really thick wooden sides and a roof. Sometimes the roof had iron spikes on it to stop people from trying to board it, as well as cannons on every single side of it.

They were made to slug it out with the enemy or simply crash directly into them and fire at point blank range. like there's so much wood on these turtle ships that it might as well have been steel it was impenetrable for its day this fucking rocks the iron roof thing is heavily debated because there wasn't a lot of iron forging capability within Korea at the time

it could have had iron some of them may have some of them maybe some people just stuck parts of spears on top of them the goal was they had obstacles on top so you could not board the turtle It was on May 23rd, 1592 that a massive fleet was spod off the coast of Pusan by the commander of the area who was out hunting. He ran back and set off the alert. As lookouts continued to watch the fleet, it only grew in number. By nightfall, 300 ships had appeared to drop anchor off

of Pusan Bay. For whatever reason, the Korean naval commanders in the area, who had a combined force of at least 150 ships under their command, did nothing. This is despite the fact that the entire Japanese fleet were quite literally sitting ducks. Despite Hideyoshi building some purpose-built warships to protect them, none of them had been sent. The Koreans could have mauled the Japanese at this point. But, of course, they didn't know that at the time. On the 24th, the landings began at Pusan, completely and totally unopposed. With so Yoshitoshi leading them, he and his fellow samurai officers wearing their sick war masks,

banners flying overhead, and their entire ceremonial parade behind them. After him came Konishi and Matsura, and then the others. Soon, 18,000 Japanese soldiers were advancing into Busan, with not a single shot being fired. It was only when Konishi led his contingent towards Tadapo Fort on the Naktong River that the Korean garrison seemingly realized that, oh God, we're at war. While the Koreans held off Konishi for a little while, they soon fell in short order. So Yoshitoshi marched up to Busan Castle and demanded its surrender. effectively saying, hey man, we got no beef with the Koreans.

Just step aside, surrender, let us march to China. All is cool. The castle commander, Chong Paul, told him that he was duty and honor bound to fight, but he would prefer, if so, Yoshitoshi simply went home. I didn't realize that was an option, you know? What happened next was the Koreans' first experience under a mass volley of relatively well-drilled and accurate musket fire. They discovered their fortifications with no firestep,

or gun loops, only a short wall for their archers to hide behind. We're not ready for this kind of smoke. We talked about this during our Ryukyu episode as well. They ran into the same problem. The muskets tore them apart in short order and drove them in that didn't get shot into fleeing. By the time the Japanese even began to climb over the walls, the Koreans were already defeated. Everyone alive inside was trying to surrender, a surrender that the Japanese would not accept. virtually everyone inside.

8,000 people, as well as even the cats and dogs, were beheaded. What is kind of wild here is the Japanese had so little understanding of the people they are invading. According to Korean chroniclers of the day, they assumed the Koreans were begging for mercy in Chinese to them because they didn't know the Korean language even existed. Oh, wow.

Because in court, the Koreans would speak Chinese. Yeah. So whenever the Korean and the Japanese court conversed, they used the Chinese characters of the alphabet to communicate with one another. They didn't know Korean was a thing. And your average everyday Korean conscript wouldn't have spoken Chinese. Yeah, I mean, so for context, like, Korean, although Korean has an alphabet, Korean uses Chinese characters.

And like the, kind of like, ubiquity of the Korean alphabet is actually a relatively recent thing. Because for a very long time into the 20th century, they used, in the written language, they use Chinese characters significantly with kind of a mixture with. kind of like the way Japanese language works. But the language itself is, I mean, there's lots of Chinese roots to words. It's completely unintelligible. So, yeah, so that's wild. So they literally were unaware of the fact that Koreans have their own language.

Yeah, they brought their favorite white YouTuber who could speak Chinese and found them completely useless. Yeah, exactly. He was unable to shock surrendering Garrison with perfect communication skills because he spoke Chinese. He was so good at ordering flawlessly to get, you know, comically oversized meals. Instead, he was like, well, I guess we got a kid. I can't hate on that. I would love a comically oversized Chinese meal right at this moment. I'm pretty humble. Yeah, me too, man.

I absolutely would too. Instead, he's like, we have to comically oversized war crime these people. The effect of this devastating victory on the southern Korean defenses was immediate. Pack Hong, one of Kyeongsang's naval commanders, watched the entire thing unfold from a nearby hilltop. Did he rally his ships? Did he prepare for battle? Did he send word to Seoul that an apparent fucking apocalypse has come to Korea?

Nope. Instead, he turns around, he runs back to the port that he commands and orders his fleet of 100 ships to immediately be destroyed, as well as all of their supplies and weapons for fear they fall into the hands of the Japanese. Then he jumps on a horse and rides for Seoul, leaving thousands of sailors very confused behind as he did. He's just like, oh, fuck, China's going to be so bad. What do I do? Al-Konishi ends up walking up the same hill and sees a hundred sunken ships in the bay. And he's like, this must be a sign from my personal Christian god. And he goes on the march the next day heading for Tong-Nay Castle under the command of Song-Seng-Hung.

Tong-Nay was a human crush at this point. It's not a very big castle. And there is 20,000 people packed inside of it. They ended up being something of a collection point for everyone fleeing. the Japanese in Pusan. This includes civilians, soldiers who had retreated, anyone. Konishi built a large sign

in Chinese characters, the man he's surrender and let them pass, or quote, fight if you want to fight. Hyeong then built his own large sign and chucked it over the wall. It read, Fighting and dying is easy, but letting you pass is something I cannot do. They're just doing the 16 candles

like with the boom box back and forth. The really early 2000s YouTube videos of the placards with the different messages on them. Or the fucking Bob Dylan subterranean homesick blues Jackers. Instead of free hugs, this is free getting killed by me.

Do you want head? Flip card. Not that way. We cut off 8,000 heads at the last city. Would you like to have one? There's just one Korean commander in the castle who's really confused. He's like, so no head jumps on his sword. God damn it. Song knew

he was doomed and had no chance of holding the Japanese off. His own aides advised him to run while he still had a chance to save his own life, but he refused. Instead, he gave that same aid different advice, telling him, I have a distinct mole on my lower back, knowing that it would be easier for his aid to find and claim his body after the fighting was over, assuming that he would both be dead and looted naked by the Japanese. When the attack began, the Koreans made no difference between the soldiers and civilians within the walls, because it was clear from the news coming from Busan that it didn't matter.

men, women, and children formed battle lines. They fired cannons and made human chains to ferry powder and shot up to the walls. There wasn't enough weapons to go around, though, so people just chucked any heavy thing that they could pick up over the walls. Bricks, stones, pots, pans, even rusty swords that were thought to be unsuitable for hand-to-hand combat. They're like, well, if you throw it over the wall, it might land point down on a Japanese person. Unfortunately, there were Yukuans and their buckets of scabets. Snakes were unavailable for mutual aid. Mm-hmm.

The Japanese, though, were undeterred. Their tactics made standing toe-to-to-to with defenders, unleashing volley after volley of musket fire, meant that none of these desperate weapons in the world were going to hold them back. They simply parked themselves just out of reach and unloaded onto the walls until this hail of various oblong objects ceased. Then they put their ladders up to the wall and began to climb. Konishi led his men from the front.

and the Koreans did not make his job easy. Despite knowing that they were defeated, they still charged directly into the Japanese to try and stop them. Thousands of Koreans died. The Japanese took only 100 casualties. Jesus. Song was captured and Konishi demanded that he kneel before him and swear allegiance to Hideyoshi.

The man spat at Konishi's feet. So he had him butchered. Didn't even cut off his head. He just had people step forward and slash him to death. Oh. So Yoshitoshi, the guy who had traveled to Korea before this on diplomatic missions, actually knew Song personally, and they had gotten along quite well. So he had his body pulled from the massacre and buried with honors on a nearby hill,

which is interesting because the Japanese normally burned their bodies. Like, religiously, it was considered totally fine. This isn't like a disrespectful thing. But remember, these guys are all loosely connected to Christianity in one way or another, who bury their dead. So Yoshitoshi is like, well, I'll bury him because that's, he would probably like that.

He probably wouldn't. That brings us to the other Kyeong-Sang naval commander, Wang Kuhn. He had held his ground, but he hadn't done anything yet. While he waited for word from Seoul, he had instead gotten reports of the taking of Pusong, then Tongne.

Then the fact that his co-commander, Pakyong, had burned everything and run. So he ordered his fleet, another 100 ships to do the exact same thing. It was only when he ordered his own flagships to be burned that some of his aides reminded him that like, yo, if you do this, the king is definitely going to kill you.

Maybe you should send a messenger to Yisun Sen, perhaps join forces, and fight the Japanese. Juan Kuhn said that's actually a really good idea, and he decided to do it. Unfortunately, by the time he stopped destroying his own fleet, he only had four ships left. Oh, darn. At this point, two-thirds of the Korea Navy had been destroyed, despite not fighting a single battle.

All of the power left in Southern Korea was left to Yi Sun Sen and his co-commander, Yi Oki in Cholodoh. In the meantime, Konishi, Yoshitoshi, and the first wave began marching straight for Seoul, 450 kilometers away, even though they were supposed to wait for the other contingents to land. The reason for this is obvious, as we already, said. They want to go forward and get as much glory as possible as fast as possible. Though Konishi writes that he had a more practical reason to do so, which was if they pushed out immediately, it would stop the cranes from organizing a counterattack and threatening the

Pusan Beachhead. I argue that both of these things are probably true. The Japanese march was incredibly fast, covering 20 kilometers a day, which I know isn't the most we've talked about here. But it's important to point out that forced marches over long distances was not something the Japanese trained their Ashigaru on. It was considered something they were just expected to pick up on the job. And that's not how campaign marching really works. These guys are forced to trudge through Korean hills and mountains suffering horribly, and it would have been a good place for the Koreans to check them if they had any defenses

in the area, which they didn't. Instead of running into an organized second line or arguably even an organized first one, the several thousand men of the first contingent only to brush aside some small bands of a few hundred soldiers at best. Other Korean leaders like the governor of Kyeongseng got word of the fall of Tongne, and despite having sent out a call to arms, immediately canceled it and just ordered everybody to run for their lives. At this point, the way to Seoul was almost completely wide open. All while the government in Seoul had no idea, an invasion had even started until Japan had already

been thoroughly wrecking their shit for four days. It was only then that the king finally released the generals from Seoul and dispatched them into the areas they were in command of, some of which was already under Japanese control. They also selected an overall commander-in-chief, of course defaulting to a civil servant, Kim Jong-wan, rather than anyone with any understanding of the military. It was only under him, Sin Ip, a career military man was given any position at all. Everyone in Seoul knew how the Japanese would attack towards them, thanks to just how Korea was in general. There's only three decent routes from the south to the north that cut through passable terrain. The central route,

the fastest one to Seoul, and the one Kanishi was taking, was thought to be the most important place to defend at Chor Young Pass. With that agreed upon, they began calling their soldiers to duty only to find surprise, surprise, we don't have as many soldiers as we thought we did. Oh darn, we just figured they'd all be doing their jobs, just like we expected. General Yi Ill, assigned to command what should have been an army of elite soldiers and block the central route, was instead marching off with 300 conscripted students with no training. Though he did have 60 men on horseback as well that were generally thought to have been decently trained, almost everybody was just some dudes they scraped together.

Along the way to the pass, he stole grain from nearby storehouses and conscripted anyone he could find, assuming he would have at least a week before the Japanese got to him to train them how to use a spear or a sword or whatever looked like a weapon. because they cannot comprehend how fast the Japanese are moving. Meanwhile, King Sanjo orders Sinip to conscript anyone and take anything he needs in order to build something that looks like an army. Anyone who doesn't comply with Sinip's orders are immediately to be executed. The only functioning part of the crane defenses in the south, at this point,

was the navy in the hands of Yi Sun Sin and Yi Oki, and they quickly combine their forces together. but he doesn't rush into battle. Instead, he sits back and prepares. He makes sure to study charts of rivers and reefs. He prepares his men for war. He even holds training while all of this is going on. All of this is happening when Juan Kuhn had already sent for help,

leading him to accuse Yi of refusing to give him assistance to the Korean government. But in reality, he was just making sure when he went out to fight, he would win. Instead of, you know, doing what everybody else had done, and that is, burning all of my ships and running away. The second contingent of the Japanese army finally lands, maybe 10,000 men at Pusan under the command of Cato, Kiomasa. This army is incredibly weird. It's made up entirely of evangelical Buddhist warrior monks.

Okay. All right. Yeah, it kind of rules. After him comes the third contingent under Karata Nagamasa. Then, as they land in Pusan, they learn that, oh yeah, everybody already ditched you and they're marching for soul. Catch up. Yep. And that's immediately what he ordered.

like we have to run all of the way to Seoul to catch up. And if everything isn't going bad enough for the Koreans, Yi Ill discovers he wouldn't have a week at Chor Young Pass to prepare for the Japanese. He would have a single day. One of his conscripts warned him that the Japanese are already marching on the town of Sosan a few kilometers away. Yi Ill thought this tempo of advance was so impossible that this man must be lying, or more probably a Japanese agent sent to sow discord in the ranks.

So he had him executed. I mean, what else am I supposed to believe that the Japanese army made it halfway to Seoul in 10 days? That can't happen. Mm-hmm. Now, this obviously sends, you could call it, a cooling effect into his army. Because the next day, Yi ill, a man who previously said the Japanese muskets were nothing to worry about because they couldn't aim them anyway. A raid has 900 or so men on a hill outside of the town of Songju, having no idea that the Japanese had already taken the town itself. One of the officers saw smoke rising from the town, a symbol that the town is,

already being looted and burned, but didn't want to tell the guy because he saw what happened to the last one. Against him was the entire first contingent. Konishi, learning of this small army, ordered 7,000 men to advance and destroy them. Yi Ill thought so little of the Japanese, he didn't even post forward scouts, allowing them to simply walk through the surrounding forest unseen. To the Koreans, it would have looked like the Japanese came out of no one. advancing uphill towards them muskets at the front. Yi Il's men, armed with bows and, with maybe a few hours of training under their belt,

didn't stand a single fucking chance. The Japanese marched firing volley after volley of musket fire into their ranks. They fired and advanced. The Koreans only withstood three volleys before breaking and trying to run away, and you could hardly blame them. One day before, these guys were all students, laborers, or farmers. They didn't know they were going to be shot at in less than 24 hours. Yeah, no kidding.

Yeah, I mean, if you were warned with a 24 hour advance that you were going to be obliterated. Yeah, I would also run away. Yeah. At that point, the sword and spearwielding men behind the musk gets charged. Yi Il's army, if you can even call out that, was destroyed in minutes. Yi Ill himself ran for his life. He ditched his horse.

He ditched his armor. He ditched every other sign of his rank in office and fled towards General Ipsin, who was in Chengju, leaving the pass wide open. To be honest, I would also flee if I saw someone in samurai armor that looked like Cat Williams running up the hill. Yeah, you can't fight the denim Ronan. Sinip at first meant to rush his army of 8,000 men into the pass. Like you have the other Korean body we've talked about. They're almost entirely untrained or recently conscripted outside of a core of highly trained cavalry.

But it's because he thought he was rushing his army into the past to reinforce Yi ill. But then Yi ill appears half naked and tail. terrified to tell him the news. So he decides the past must have fallen, even though it hadn't, and decides instead to fight the Japanese of Chongju, which is a wide open flat ground, backed up to a hill, and then beyond that, the river, meaning there was no quick route of withdrawal or escape. Ipsin's argument was that if he pulled back into Korea's natural defenses, he wouldn't be able to deploy his favored cavalry. That needs to be done over wide open ground. Also, Sinip thought the Japanese were nothing. They were uneducated barbarians and their muskets were nothing to fear. There's also the

classics he was educated and trained on that said, when in doubt, you should put your army in a position where retreat was not an option because it meant that your soldiers would simply fight better. When in doubt, horses out. Get your horses out, go on. Get to rotate that horse in your mind. With the Japanese, Cato had caught up to Konishi and demanded that he be allowed to move ahead to fight. Konishi, of course, refused, so the two lords got into something of a foot race towards Chengju, only for Kato to hit the brakes, because at the last second, he had captured a deserting Korean soldier who warned them that the army that was garrasing Chengju was the best of the best in all of Korea, and they would fight savagely. So Kato, in a way to give Koneishi the

middle finger, let him march into what he had been told would be a brutal battle. The plan was to let Koneshi get his teeth kicked in, and then he would ride in to rescue him and steal all of his glory. On June 6th, Konishi reaches the town. He phases up with Ipsen's army. Exactly what you thought was going to happen happened. Koneshi's army annihilated them. Ipsen's memorization of the classics did nothing to stop his men from running after taking a volley or two from the Japanese. And the retreat quickly turned into a route. Thousands of men trying to run away in every direction, making them easy targets for the sword and spear-wielding headhunters that rushed forward after the muskets were finished going to work.

Again, in the matter of about an hour, the fields outside of Chungju were turned into a charnel house, all while once again, Ipsen and the rest of his commanders ran for their lives, leaving their men behind to die. But they fell victim to their own tactics. They also had no decent way out of this mess. They had a river behind them. There was also the small detail that Ipsen had promised King Sanjo publicly that he would either stop the Japanese invasion or die trying. So he told his officers, you guys go on now.

I can't go back. He bid everybody farewell and then jumped into the river to die. All right. I mean, it sticks to his principles, I suppose. Yeah, at least, you know, he may have been a bad commander, but at least he wasn't a liar. The Japanese then continued to abhor. obliterate the town in front of them. They'd be headed up to 3,000 people.

But normally how this is supposed to work is that the heads are a way to prove your metal in combat. You're what you've done on the battlefield. You show them to your commander that, see? Look how many enemies I killed. Small problem, though. They need to show this off to Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi is in Japan. And shipping 3,000 fucking heads back is a logistical hurdle that they have not quite figured out.

So instead, they cut off the. noses. They pack them in salt and they ship them back to Japan. And with that severed nose inflation, Israel will pick up next time on the Imjean War, part three. Yeah, real case of

dudes underestimating their enemy and then getting their shit absolutely rocked. Yeah, it's classic, they can't hit the broad side of a barn from here as a musket ball ventilates your skull. Yeah, it's like we definitely had our moment of awe hearing about the insanely cool weapons of

Koreans had, but it's like, unfortunately, there were some other great big shortcomings. Those, the really cool, like, fire wagons haven't really been deployed yet. The Koreans at this point are just so disorganized. They don't really have a chance. Yeah, fair enough. To really get their feet under them. Because this is all, like, within 10 days. Yeah. Yeah. That's incredibly fast to get an army together in 1592. But fellas, that is the. Imjean War part two. How you feel it? How do you like the creation of a nose-based economy? I mean, personally, as a man of the large nose, I'm afraid of it. I heard that the nose, aka the human horn, is the greatest aphrodisiac known to the galaxy. Yeah, perhaps I should

have it jerked like my chicken. Jerked nose. I'm also a Futurama and Joyer, Tom. I guess I keep hoping when you describe some of the very varying approaches of the various Korean commanders that there's going to be a surprise and so far. And then they were slaughtered. And then they were also slaughtered. Next episode on part three, we're going to get to what Yisun Sin is going to get up to along the southern coast of Korea. And that is a whole other different kind of lopsided battle.

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Set your ships on fire, flee the Japanese. That's right.