Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 428 - The Imjin War: Part 3

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

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I'm Joe. With me is Tom and Nate. Fellas, how are you doing? I had a fun morning getting roasted by one of my friends in the building because I got a new pair of shorts that are, I didn't realize when I bought them are fishing shorts under like a khaki beige color and I walked in and one of my mates just goes, here comes the wild thornberries. Right.

Absolutely fucking got my ass. Damn, Nigel. My mom's here, which is nice, but it's about to get hotter than balls for about a week. And my mom is staying in a place that doesn't have any air conditioning at all. And it's going to be like, well, they're estimating as high as like 39 one of these days. So you know what? I'm just living life. I'm living life.

I live in the fastest warming country and the fastest warming continent on earth. And my job involves shutting myself up in a room to talk with big screens in front of my face for hours on end. So you know what? I'm going to melt. I'm going to turn into a puddle. I'm going to look like, you know, when they do an anime that someone is sweating and there's like how many beads of sweat and red face and steam lines can you draw on a human being? That's just going to be me in real life. But the good news is we're talking about a country where people wore big ass suits of armor with lacquer and stuff when it was like,

100 degrees Fahrenheit and 100% humidity all the time. So if they could suffer through it while wielding those gigantic like berserk-ass huge blades, who am I to complain? All I have to do is podcast. I don't have to follow the way of Bishito. To be honest, now, maybe with the combined heat of the screens and the environment and everything, you're just like preparing for the eventual heat death of the planet in the same way as a guy who would like build a catamaran in the prequel to water world. Well, I mean, that kind of implies that I'm somehow going to be like by podcasting and listening to you guys, you know, for hours each week, that I'm getting the kind of UV exposure from my screen that's slowly proofing me and changing my DNA and by the end of it, I'll have gills like

Kevin Costner in Waterworld. And be drinking your own pee. Also, it was a try, it was a tri-maran, actually. I saw Waterworld in theaters. It sucked. It was a terrible movie. There's nothing about the sentence that you know exactly the kind of boat that they're on. That surprises me. What do I remember from seeing Waterwell when I was 10, almost 11 in theaters. He drinks his own pee. He nails a lady on a raft. There's a guy that they have the Exxon Valdez,

a guy who likes shooting a gun a lot, a car that says nuke the whales, water, he's a fish. That's all I remember. I topped out at ice. The only thing I remember about that movie is that he has gills and drinks pee. But literally nothing we talked about has anything to do with we're talking about today.

There's zero people with gills. Nobody's drinking pee that I'm aware of. And we're on part three of the Imgen War. When we left you last time on part two, the disjointed argumentative but terrifying Japanese forces under a collection of different lords landed in Korea and quickly began war-crimeing their way across the southern part of the country. That was, of course, when the Korean Navy wasn't too busy sinking itself. Because one of the parts we talked about in part two is how only about a quarter of the Korea Navy was left, despite the fact they had fought zero battles. And after the battle of Chongju, the Japanese leadership meant to discuss their advance towards Seoul.

Even Kato Kiyamaasa, the man who stood back from the battle, hoping it would possibly kill Konishi Yukonawa, walked into the meeting, pretending he just tried to fuck him over. The meeting was almost entirely an argument between the two men with, as the story goes,

Kato constantly trying to insult Konishi and Konishi never taking the bait. Until he did. Okay, I was trying to try. really hard not to go into this in too much detail, but honestly, this whole thing is just so wonderfully petty. It's

kind of tailor made for us. For these insults to make sense, you have to know that Konishi's birth family were medicinal herb merchants. I mean, it's a big thing. It's a big thing there, man. Fucking red ginseng. His family sold medicine. And he

was eventually adopted by a lord. Like, we've talked about a million times in the show totally normal. But everybody knew about his family's background. And it wasn't a background he was particularly ashamed of. He never tried to hide it. His personal banner that he carried referenced

his birth family's profession. It's just a big weed leaf. I got my battle banner at Hot Topic, Circa 2001. I mean, to be fair, you know, the right honorable career of being a weed dealer like these guys are riding around on horseback,

you know, selling their wares. I'm buying weed off a Bengali guy on a scooter. Yeah. The world goes around a drought. I can't imagine that it's actually weed. It's stuff that's good for the blood and stuff that lets you get a hard on when you're old. That's like I've seen a lot of the herbal medicine shit. So I mean, if weed does that, then I mean, okay, cool.

Maybe if I'm going to believe the guy that, uh, that I knew in high school, weed can do everything you want it to, uh, mostly just, uh, make him incredibly annoying to talk to. smoking weed to get hard because I love coming and being scared at the same time. It's like a jump scare. Yeah, exactly. You thought that it was going to be the best night ever. You were going to smoke weed and smash and listen to Peter Tosh just legalize it. But when you hear those reggae organs, you think of vampire is coming.

In your own head, it sounds like fucking Phantom of the Opera. Yeah, I'm sorry. One time I smoked really strong weed in Hawaii and then we listened to a reggae station on the radio because Hawaiians love and I just thought I was in a vampire castle. I'm like, I'm really scared right now. This is vampire music. So, horrible shit. During the meeting, Kato pointed out to, there's a street in Seoul that was labeled in Chinese

on the map as pharmacy street, owing to the fact that that was where a lot of medicinal herbs were sold and said, oh, Kodishi, you should attack here because you would know your way around it. Then after it was decided that each of the contingents should take separate routes towards soul. Kato asked how they should decide which army took which road. And Koneshi kind of sick of the constant back and forth suggested a very fair way of deciding by simply pulling lots, right? Kato said, yeah, of course you would suggest that. That's how common tradesmen settled disputes. At this, Koneishi finally lost his shit. They got into a fist fight and nearly pulled his sword on

Kato. They had to be physically restrained until they calmed down. Japanese samurai tradition of hold me back, bro. Is it safe to assume that blast lines appeared in the screen when this happened? Yeah, eventually it came down to Konishi throwing up his hands, saying, take whatever road you want, I don't give a shit, I just want this meeting to be over. So as was expected, Kato picked the most direct route towards Seoul and marched his army out that night. Now, we talked about how Korean general Sin Ip had gone. absolutely dusted in our last episode.

But back in Seoul, nobody had heard about that yet. And if you remember how desperate Ips mission was and how scratched together his army was, everyone was waiting desperately for news of a victory, since they knew it was the last army between them and the Korean capital. It wasn't until after the Japanese began marching towards the capital that a single Korean survivor from Chung-Ju apparently butt naked and covered in blood and made it back into Seoul to deliver the news. why there's so many messengers who are naked so far or mostly naked.

Like, I know a lot of it has to do with throwing off their armor so they could run fast. But this guy's like, the only thing stopping me from being Usain Bolt is this fucking underwear. My chonis have got to go. I have to run faster. There's a part of me that feels like I don't want to constantly make reference to stuff like video games in this, because obviously it's, you know, that's a stupid semantic connection. But there is something very funny about like every time that your enemies get scared or you've defeated them. They're close, disappear and they run away. There's something

like deeply comical about that. That also kind of lends itself to the envisioning like an 8-bit or 16-bit sort of pixel art thing in a video game that suddenly like their faces are red because they're embarrassed and they run away naked every time that you defeat them. And this is basically happening. Uh, there is a literal video game where you have to do that. There's a game called Akeba's trip, which is absolutely dog shit. It is the most fan service steaming pile of shit you've ever seen, but you defeat vampires by punching them until their clothes come off. It's awful. It's as bad as it sounds, but I assume this is what happened to this messenger. Fair enough. Now, when he starts delivering the message, the city begins emptying out immediately as people tried to get

the hell out of there, which was easy to do because soldiers meant to guard souls gates had simply run away, leaving the gates wide open. So that's what that killer song is about. I got so, but I God, no soldiers. Those guards had precisely one job, keep the doors closed. I've never failed to any of my jobs

more than those guys. All I can think of is changing it to the pharmacist's banner and singing the chorus of Mr. Briseide as I'm Mr. Wheat guy. In the Korean court, everyone insisted

that the king must stay in Seoul other than his prime minister, Yisan Hay, who said, like, look, back in the day when the capital was threatened, the king's left all of the time. Like, there's no reason for you to stay here.

But he got shouted down by just everyone else in the cabinet. That being said, none of the shouting changed the king's mind. He knew Seoul was doomed. He wasn't some warrior king going to lead his army from the front. And even if he was, he didn't really have an army left. There's only about 7,000 guys in Seoul, badly armed and trained, just like all the other ones we talked about. So he got up and decided he was going to move the seat of the government to Pyong Gang,

which, if you remember from episode one, was Korean. is historical capital. The king left two days later on June 9th. They left so quickly that they left we had virtually all of the government paperwork behind. Not to mention the actual food that had been set aside for their march to Pyongyang. Mark that off your bingo card? This is not the first or last time this will happen during this very long series. We've already ticked off Hungary and fans of the show who've been listening for a while are already anticipating they get to tick off diarrhea at some point. Oh, diarrhea is kind of, it's not a main character in this series.

I would say it's like the drummer in a band. Most of the time you don't know who he is, but he's always there. Yeah, it's the rhythm section, basically. It's the thing that ties everything together. It's the rhythm section for your intestines. And the King's March is very funny to me, even though I try not to go into it in too much depth because we have a lot more to cover here.

The march towards Pyongyang is hampered by constant rain, obviously they didn't bring enough food so government ministers and the king's concubines just start dropping like flies and they're left behind they get to the Imgen River half of the entourage

king included of course is loaded into one of those ferries that get pulled across rivers by a rope and once they cross they just cut the rope and sink the fairy and abandon the other half on the other side who soon as the people who remained in Seoul saw the government

was leaving they turned around and began stealing just about anything that wasn't nailed down and a lot of which that was. Others got really mad that the king was abandoning them and began torching the now unguarded royal palaces around the city. Angers spread to other government departments and before long hundreds of buildings were burning. We're going to talk about soul being set on fire multiple times throughout the series. Just know this is the first time. The Japanese were marching through the same rainstorm as the king was, which of course is a massive problem for them as they're going to have to now cross the very swollen Han River in order to attack Seoul.

Easy though, right? Boats exist for that. The Han is a river that's constantly ferried. But Konishi, knowing that the route that he was taking would take way longer to get to the city of Seoul and the one Kato was taking had an equalizer hidden up his sleeve. He was also kind of a bastard. I know I've been kind of framing Konishi as the more moderate of all the warlords, which is kind of true.

But he's still who he is. he grows up in this political monster that is the Japanese court. He's no better than the people around him. So he sends guys ahead to destroy all the boats at the south side of the hot river so Cato can't cross. All right.

This constant beef between Cato and Coneishi is sometimes framed as Cato just being an abrasive dick head at every turn, which isn't necessarily untrue, but it tends to make Konishi seem innocent. He is not. He is not above doing the same shit that Cato's doing. But Cato's so close to Seoul that he can see it

and he can see the defenders dug on the north side of the river. Neither had weapons that could reach the other, of course, but he rolled the dice, assuming that the Koreans wouldn't know the limitations on the Japanese muskets. So he ordered it was meant to open fire anyway, knowing the muskawals had no chance of hitting the people on the other side of it. But the Koreans began to run. Their commander, the recently appointed commander-in-chief,

who we talked about in our last episode, Kim Jong-Huan, stripped off his armor, put on civilian clothes, and rode away on horseback. Doesn't he know you can flee better if you're butt-ass naked? I know. He isn't sharing notes with the other guy who ran away. They're not doing proper sports science with running away. Yeah, you've got to quickly shave yourself bear like a swimmer, strip down butt naked and just sprint through the forest.

Yeah, I don't think really the Koreans had a sports science research center that looked like the 50 cent Inde Club video. I was thinking slightly different. To me, it's like, I'm sure I've seen some kind of like German art house cinema film from the 90s involving someone sprinting butt ass naked through the forest. Like, that's just a thing that occurs to people. But you never think of it in a military context. Nate, I'm also sure you've seen that film. Yeah.

Everyone saw Run Lola Run. Like, I could do this, but more. What if they were naked? It just makes you go faster. Either that or suddenly produce a spandex body suit. Yeah, it's because the farts act like, you know, a. jet engine like on the Batmobile. Yeah, it's just science. You know, Mark Spitz, the American Olympic swimmer just liked wearing a mustache because he thought it looked cool because

it was the 70s and he wanted to look like a gay flight attendant. But he convinced the Soviet swimmers that he actually helped move air out of your nostrils and like him streamlined you more when you were swimming. And he just said that as a joke. And then at the next Olympics, all of the Soviet swimmers had moustaches like him. So they were all flight attendants. There reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the very stupid history of bodybuilding when Arnold Schwarzenegger was still competing notorious dickhead back in the day and a young

bodybuilder asked him for advice and posing on stage. So Arnold told him well it's all the rage in Europe now that when you're on stage and you pose you scream. Which for people who have never watched bodybuilding for one congratulations

two, that is not something you do. You remain dead silent. And so this guy takes the stage, it just starts posing and screaming and horrifying all the people around him. And I still love that story so much. I'm probably certain I've probably told this story over on Linesl by robots before. Arnold Schwarzeninger might be a uniquely evil man, but he also has an incredible sense of humor. Yeah. Pumping Iron is a great film. I was going to reference pumping iron specifically because like even all of the horrible shit about him that we know

everything across his life, when you see him take a hit of a joint and start lifting. doing bench press with a shirt that says Arnold is Numero Uno. You're just like, okay, this guy rules. You're misremembering that part. It's at the end of the film. He has won the Olympia. He is eating a whole birthday cake to himself, smoking a joint,

wearing a shirt that says Arnold is Numero Uno. I have seen that film so many times. I haven't memorized. This is my own personal German art house film. Once again, Pumping Iron, incredible movie. If you watch it every 18 months, you will forget the distinct transition when it goes to South Africa. Yeah, it's best you just kind of blanked that part out.

Otherwise, the film was hard to enjoy. Now, at this, when Kim Jong-Kwan starts fleeing, the Japanese, of course, now have to build boats because Kodishi had wrecked them all. Meanwhile, I should point out that Kanishi has marched all the way down the Han River to a point where it's easier to cross and is already on the other side heading towards Seoul. So Kato and his men are chopping down trees, trying to build rafts. By the time they finish, it takes in their two days to slowly ferry thousands of men over the Han because these rafts are very small. They only carry a couple guys. The Koreans had all retreated,

leaving Seoul wide open. Kato triumphantly marches to the walls of Seoul on June 12th, only to find that Kanishi was already there. Soul had fallen without a fight and Kato still came in second place again. Nobody is really happy in the situation. It's the first city, it's the capital of Korea that fell to the Japanese. But they had nobody to fight, and they didn't have anybody to murder, which is obviously what they're all about. There was hardly anybody left inside,

and the population had burned about a quarter of the city on the way out. And it was here that the blistering march that the Japanese had taken up from the south finally paused, at least for a little while. This was so that their supply line could finally be established up through Korea's various rivers to Seoul,

which of course would be connected going further and further north, due to the Japanese ultimate goal of invading China. They knew this riverine supply route was their only way to be successful in the future. Interestingly, the full-scale butchering of people in Seoul, because there were people there, did not take place. At least for now. This is because of orders given to them all by Hideyoshi.

They were to just let people go about their lives, and any bad treatment of the Koreans by his lords was forbidden. Though I should point out here, that most of the main Japanese lords follow this order. Of course, they're the senior ones at play. A lot of others did not. And furthermore, further down the line, as you got further and further away

from the immediate orbit of these warlords, when soldiers were just left on their own, they just butchered people left right and center. But Hideyoshi wanted life to go back to normal in Korea. As of course, this benefits any conqueror. At this point, Hideyoshi thought, that the war was effectively decided and everything that was going to come next was predetermined, adding, of course, to his growing lore that he was building, that he was destined by the stars to

conquer the known world. And soon Koreans did start trickling back into Seoul, which is hardly surprising. Think of how desperate everything in Korea is right now. The Japanese had money, they had goods that were unknown to Koreans, the Koreans had food and other things the Japanese were willing to trade for them. Not to mention the Korean state had effectively collapsed at this point, right? Like for people to survive, they're going to do what they got to do. Yeah, like, to be honest, if you're just a regular Korean citizen, does it really fucking matter who is in charge? Not really. As long as you're not being killed, like, who fucking cares? Yeah, and that's going to come up more and more as we go on. In this immediate case, like if you're in

Seoul itself. You are probably fine. That will change, which we'll get into, especially in part four, but for now, for a lot of Koreans, the state had failed them so badly that they did not see the difference. The Japanese commander of Seoul, Ukita Hidier, took up residence in the only palace that hadn't been burned, but he would only be there temporarily. This is because he got scared. What? Was it haunted? Nate, you somehow nailed it.

He believed that the palace is haunted by ghosts. So he quickly moved out and burned it down behind him. Now, did he run away with his clothes off just to make sure? You have to be fast to get away from the ghosts. This had a huge effect on the Koreans. This palace specifically was thought to have like a spiritual place in their lives and seeing the Japanese burn it. there's a lot of things that the Japanese do in their very weak attempt

to appeal to the Koreans that they just fuck up every step of the way. This is just one of them. Hedier is sometimes called the supreme commander of Japanese forces in Korea. And this is not exactly true. He held no position of privilege

that the other lords would be forced to be sworn to him. They were not his retainers. They were Hidioshis. They had no reason to follow his orders and most of the time, they didn't. The only real position he held was commander of the reserve soldiers. But other than that little ghost-related speed bump,

another sentence I never thought I was going to say as a historian, Hideyoshi's forces had been even more successful than he ever thought that they would be. They had taken soul in 20 days. This did not help Hideyoshi's little ego problem we talked about before, his idea that he was meant to conquer the world. Now he was writing to his mother, saying he's in takeover all of China by October.

Okay, I think you're getting a little bit ahead of yourself. A little bit. A little bit. You know, you're still in Seoul, which admittedly is impressive. But I should point out here that this is not a modern military operation. There has not been a large offensive from the beachhead at Pusan all the way up to Seoul to the peninsula. it is effectively one pathway directly from Pusan to Seoul.

Everything else around it is out of Japanese control. The modern perliances, we have a samurai thunder run going into Seoul, right? But they lack the ability, as we will discover, to actually expand their route of control.

Also as well, like power in China is devolved enough to the regional levels at like even if you manage to capture Beijing, like nothing's going to change. I mean, that's effectively the problem they're going to run into in Korea as well. Yeah.

Well, we took over Seoul. All of Korea should be collapsing any moment now. And meanwhile, I swear in Korea, people are like, well, I haven't seen shit coming over those mountains. So no change. Life goes on. But don't worry.

China is definitely not bigger than Korea. I'm still just the local weed dealer. Like, it doesn't make a difference to me. I got my weed banner and I'm waving. Everybody knows, you know, they see they're like, ah, it's the weed man right there. Yeah, I'm just subletting on pharmacy street. None of this matters to me.

And by the end of June, he was making plans to travel to Korea, go to Seoul, and take personal command of the army. Some of this was political. Some of it was also not him wanting to miss that on personal glory. But a lot of it had to do with him getting constant reports that Kunishi and Kato were constantly at each other's throats to the point it was harming the operation. And the only person that they would listen to, I mean, effectively have no choice but to listen to, was Hideyoshi personally. But before he left, he had already begun to outline how Korea and China would be governed as a part of this new Japanese empire, which to be honest was so simple, it's kind of stupid. His son, Hidetsugu, who was technically the Kampaku of Japan, the regent,

while Hideyoshi had become the retired regent, or Tycho, but again, he still has all the real power. These titles are meaningless. Hidesugu would be in charge of all of China. He would be proclaimed the Kampaku of Great China. The Japanese emperor would then confusingly be moved to Beijing and take up his throne in the forbidden city. What happened to the emperor of China is kind of left in the gray zone so we can assume he's murdered or whatever. In Japan, while Hideyoshi was gone, commanding the troops on the ground, he would simply leave Tokugawa Iyasu in charge and assume that would go great. And to be fair, the two men are still quite close. That's the only part of his plan that makes any sense at all.

A lot of people in his personal orbit, to include members of his immediate family, thought that this was insane. For starters, I should point out that Hideyoshi is in his mid-50s. And that is a little old for the era, but you have to remember, he just spent 30 years on the campaign. He has lived a very hard life. By all accounts, he was also sick. He wasn't eating.

He was very skinny. Some people say he was wasting away is the term they often use. He was losing his eyesight to the point that someone had to read his letters for him and then pen their response. The common modern reading on his deteriorating condition was, you probably already guessed, syphilis. Ah. This goes on to explain some, let's say, very erratic behavior that he has shown and will continue to show as he gets older. He only has like a couple years to live at this point. but he's also getting very short-tempered.

His, like, cunning that kind of got him to this point is rapidly slipping away to the point he's just kind of designing new castles and wandering through his garden. Like, he's very obviously losing his mind here. Yeah, the real downfall of all kings is sucking and fucking. Yeah, comes for us all eventually.

Health aside, though, there was a small problem that if he left Japan, he would leave a massive power vacuum. It had only been two years since he unified Japan. Almost nobody outside of Hideyoshi himself believe the complex web of alliances and deals he struck to end the war would hold without him being there. Even Tokugawa Iyasu was like,

you should probably not leave. I don't think I could hold this together without killing a lot of people. And as if to underline this, there was a samurai uprising in the Higa prefecture. Now, it was quickly crushed, But the point was made that things aren't exactly as stable as Hideyoshi wanted to think they were, as much as he thought much of anything at this point. While the military leaders he surrounded himself with didn't care to comment on politics or his health,

they did point out another problem with his idea of traveling to Korea at this point. It was typhoon season. Not a great time to just head out to sea. Yeah, they should have learned about what happened a couple of hundred years ago when the Mongols tried to land on Japan and the wind won them the war. also importantly, they had left from Korea. It's almost like they came up with a term for this, like a kamikaze or something.

Yeah, some kind of wind, which was divine. I was going to say, yeah. What if the wind had divine powers to solve problems by fucking up boats? Because it was the time of year when the wind is huge. Oh, well, I'm sure that will... RIP to those guys, I'm different. It'll go great. Hideyoshi is built different.

The emperor himself, wrote a letter to Hideyoshi, begging him to keep his old sick ass at home. Finally, Hideyoshi postponed, but did not cancel his trip to Korea until the coming spring. More on that in part four. While all of this is going on, the Korean Navy is about to finally stop sitting themselves on fire and fight back. We talked about this in our last episode, but like I said, only about a quarter of the entire Navy is left floating after 20 solid days of doing nothing.

When Seoul was abandoned, one of the last orders they passed down to the Navy, specifically in the case we're talking about Y-sun-Sin, was that he had the freedom to do whatever the fuck he wanted. He no longer was bound to his post in Chola Doe. He could just do anything. While he wanted to join forces with his Chola's co-commander, Yi Ok-Kee, the orders instead asked him to join with the remnants of Wan Kuhn's Kyeongsang Fleet, which if you remember, was the fleet that only had four ships left because Wan had done. destroyed the rest after getting scared and seeing fishing boats. This is because Juan had been writing to the government saying Yisun Sin had been refusing to give him aid, when in reality, Yisun Sin had just been training his sailors and getting them ready for war. This will not be the last time we talk about the beef between these two men.

This is a series defined by petty grievances. It's one of my favorite ingredients to the stew that makes a good series. I hate a military chain of command that just does their duty without yelling at one another. It's so boring to me. It's the jockeying for position that makes it interesting. It's the secret sauce. Yep. It's messy individuals who love drama.

We simply want to read more about them. As you said, if it was straightforward, it's like, cool, well, that's just boring. That reads like a Boy Scout manual. I want to hear about people with problems and people who are like, this person, I don't know, gave me a side eye 30 years ago and I've never stopped being pissed off about it. And that's why I'm going to build an absurd siege engine

to wreck their shit, extirpate their lineage, etc. That's why I like the samurai so much as a faction to do podcasts on. Because everybody was led to believe that they're all duty bound to follow orders to the letter. When in reality, they fucking hate doing that

and they almost never do. So, Yi Sonsen leaves for Tang Poe to meet him and Juan shows up a day late with his four ships. And this is when Yis Sunsen discovers for the first time that he only has this many ships. He's supposed to have like a hundred ships.

Juan informs him that the Japanese had some ships over at Kojido Island in the port of Akpo, where they had been working to set up their logistic system that would eventually hypothetically, chain into the logistic system for the Japanese on the mainland. They quickly set sail towards them. When the Koreans found the Japanese ships at anchor, they're almost entirely unmanned

because the Japanese sailors and soldiers had simply all gone to shore to loot Aqpo, completely ignoring Hidiotoshi's orders not to do that. And not to mention, this kind of underlines how little the Japanese were thinking of the Korean Navy. At no point do they ever leave scouts or even lookouts to keep an eye out for any enemy ships. They just assume it won't happen. So as the town burns, they saw the Koreans approaching and tried to run back to their ships, but it's way too late.

The Japanese tried to fire at them with muskets, which are completely worthless against the armored Korean ships, all while the Koreans tear their ships to pieces with cannon fire and fire arrows. Finally, the Japanese who did manage to get aboard their ships dive overboard and swim for the shore trying to save their own lives. And a lot of them do, they flee into the hills of the island. And of the 50 ships at Akpo, half are destroyed, and the Koreans didn't lose a single man. Tactics of the day demand that ye send his men ashore to chase down the enemy. Collect heads. This is something that will constantly come up.

But instead, he remains at sea. He knows that the Japanese are much better on land and their navy, if what he just exists, experiences anything to go by was a fucking joke. He decided to remain in the water. And the next day he got word of another group of Japanese ships a short way away and the battle at Akpo repeated itself. The Japanese had gone a short of loot. The Koreans sailed up and surprised them. The Japanese ships were blown to hell without much of a fight and the survivors fled inland. From there, Guy and his combined fleet looted the Japanese ships, split up, and returned back to their home ports. During the entire Akpo operation, Korea took a while.

only three wounded, though two of those were thanks to friendly fire when Juan's men accidentally opened fire on one of Yi's ships. Whoops. All right. Ye wrote to the Korean court complaining about Juan almost entirely, and this would add to the growing beef between the two men once again, though Ye did himself no favors when writing the court. As Juan, when he wrote the court, he never engaged in court politics.

He never complained about the government. He just shit talk to Ys Sunsen. Ye, on the other hand, as he had done, his entire life pissed everyone off. It's always very fortuitous to be the second biggest cult in a room. Like his letters outlined to the court that say, hey, remember all those times that I told you when you said the Japanese were coming that I needed money, I needed men, I needed resources. and you just told me to go fuck myself and do it on my own.

Well, I bet you feel real stupid now, don't you? Because we're the only ones winning anything. Now, the king was fine with ignoring that part. Like, King Sanjo, despite his literally countless flaws at this point, at least knew not to piss off the guy that was winning literally their only victory. While the ministers of the court were incredibly pissed off that Yis Sunsen had dared to point out that they had been wrong about something. For the Japanese who had thought so little about the creed,

Navy, they hadn't even bothered to defend their beachheads. Losing more than 40 ships in two days is a bit of an eye-opener. But they still weren't worried. All they did was put together a squadron of more of the same kind of ships that we talked about to begin patrolling Korea's southern coast. Word of this gets back to Yi about three weeks after the last battle. Juan Kuhn said they were clearly heading towards Yi's home port, which is a pretty big problem because Yi knew this would require him to fight a battle on the Japanese terms, which meant he would lose. you need to rush out and meet them at sea. That's where his strength was and that's exactly what he did.

He joins up with Juan Cune again and again about as quickly as the two men joined forces, they begin arguing. Juan is insisting that he sent men to shore to collect the heads of the dead Japanese, to which Yi said that's a waste of time and energy. You should save all that to kill the ones that happen to still be alive. But he can't stop Juan from doing it. He doesn't outrank him, but also he's happy just to get rid of him. They get to Satchan port and they find the Japanese ships at anchor,

but also several hundred men dug into the hills that overlooked the port. Ye knew if he stomped into the port like he did last time, the Japanese on the hill could hit him while he's trying to destroy the ships. So he rode in, hung out, turned around, and ran, hoping the Japanese would take the bait and sail out to meet him. And that's exactly what they did. Was he naked? I mean, I would argue technically the ship is naked, right?

It's not wearing like pants. How would his ship wear pants? I need the dog diagram, but for a ship. Very important question. Yeah, I mean, a sail isn't over the ship, so doesn't count as clothes. It's more like if you're naked and wearing a cape, I would argue. Shut the fuck up. Hey, you're the one that brought it up, not me.

Now we're getting into the ethics of clothing a ship. Now, once about half of the Japanese ship set sail, he turned around and began opening fire. This is when the Korean turtle ships crash into the Japanese and fire at point-blank range, while other ships hang back and make it rain fire arrows and cannonballs. The Japanese Navy doesn't stand a chance. Then, on the hill, Yisi's several hundred men dressed in Korean clothing. Figuring correctly, they were Koreans in Japanese service, almost certainly conscripted by force.

But this infuriates him. he orders his ships to getting closer and begin bombing the hell out of them for being traitors. Now this of course brings them within musket range of these hilltop positions resulting them catching several volleys.

Ye catches a bullet in the shoulder but does his best to try to play it off so he does it like scare his men? He covers the wound puts his shirt back on over it and just starts acting like he's not a horrible agonizing pain.

Oh yeah, I'm fine. Ah, yeah, I'm okay, dude. Normally I just let my arm hang motionless at my side. What are you talking about? Yeah, one arm has always been longer than the other. Uncovered in blood. After he drives away the soldiers on the hill, he pulls his fleet back.

The next day, he does the same thing at Tangpo, where another 20 or so Japanese ships were anchored, as well as the Lorden Command of the Japanese Navy to Western Korea, Karasima Michiuki. The battle played out the exact same, way. Their turtle ships leading the charge against a totally unprepared Japanese Navy that thought that they had nothing to worry about. Kiroshima himself was relaxing on the deck of his several story tall pavilioned flagship under a parasol when the Koreans appeared. Basically fully having his

vacation wrecked. Yeah, he's enjoying the Korean son, you know? If he was in Juju, he would just be on the beach. But a turtle ship instead slams into the side of his flagship. Cannonballs and arrows start flying in Kurasima, catches an arrow directly between the eyes and falls overboard. Yeah, nothing beats a jet two holiday until a turtle ship fucks your things up. Just starts laying scunnion

all over the beach. And you're like, and also you know that you're going to have to fucking get rebooked on, I don't know, easy jet the next day. It's going to be worse. Yeah, that's why you prefer to get shot in the head. Is that you only have to make one of those flights. You're just like looking over the starboard of the ship

and you're like, oh, this is really nice. You know, the Korean sun is nice. I can't wait until we like take over this island, you know, getting nice place by the beach. Mokhali tastes good as hell. I'm feeling like nice, drunk. I'm feeling, I'm not feeling mean drunk right now. I'm loving this. And then all of a sudden. And then all you hear is hyper armor Korean turtles. Hyper armor Korean turtles. Blowing up your fucking ship. Yeasman find his corpse floating in the water. Pull him aboard the ship, cut his head off, and show it to the other Japanese soldiers and sailors, which terrifies them and cause them to flee

for their inland rather than try and fight. Once again, the Koreans lose zero ships before pulling away. He was doing the thing where when you go on holiday for longer than a week, and you're like, you know, this is really nice. I'm going to pull up whatever their version of like right move or Zillow is. Yeah, they start looking at local real estate. Look at our local real estate next to his head just gets obliterated by an arrow. And the Korean Navy just keeps doing this all across the southern Korean coast until July 18th,

when the combined fleet breaks up to head back to their home ports for rest and repair. At that point, they had taken out 78 enemy ships and lost none of their own for only 11 dead. In Yee's report to the Korean government, he made sure to name all of his officers he believed should be rewarded for their service, which included like money, land, promotions, and he makes sure to not mention Juan Cuen whatsoever. Juan hears about this, Gets Mad writes his own report to the government saying he totally deserves a promotion.

Yee Sun Sit is just jealous of his abilities and the government, sick of both of these guys, simply promote everyone that they brought up to make them both happy. I assume this is how I would have finally got promoted into the higher ranks. It's like, my boss is just an asshole and negged the government into getting me the job,

which, to be fair, 21-year-old me would not have been against. It's the only way I would ever make staff sergeant points. While things were very one-sided at sea, they continued being the same on land just in the other direction. King Sanja was forced by the cabinet to blame someone other than himself for everything, so we fired his prime minister. who had fallen out of favor with the other bickering ministers. King Sanjo, either being the most clueless man or history or possibly the dumbest,

decided to try to comfort the people of Korea by making a public address in K-Song. Now, at this point, everyone in the fucking country is pissed at him. For one reason or another, it could have been for leaving the capital, abandoning them to their fate. But as he leaves and moves towards Pyongyang, thousands of people are fleeing with him because they see the royal convoy of wagons or whatnot heading north and they realize shit's about to get really bad down here. We should follow that.

So the public that he's addressing in Ksong is mostly made up of people who have been fleeing the Japanese. So as he starts trying to talk to them, they just start screaming insults at him to the point that he can't get anything across. then he opens what amounts to be a comment box asking anyone if you, you know, have a certain, if you feel a certain kind of way about the government, drop a letter in the box, and I will hold it against you.

And just make sure to leave your full name and address on the letter. Just for administrative purposes so we can figure out, okay, does this district need more roaming dog killers to kill all the feral dogs? Yeah. Do I need to send. someone to your house and pull out your fingernails for calling me an asshole. What actually happens is he gets a series of letters telling him that he should fucking

kill himself. Well done. Now you know what the experience is of being a podcaster. Yeah. This is just me being on Twitter in 2016. You just mix up like, I don't know, two different Gundam series and then someone's in my DM saying that I should like jump off at the roof of my house. I call it the.

experience of being a left-wing person who once was in the military. They didn't realize this, but they went viral on Tumblr 550 years before anyone else. He's getting literally a diluge of letters demanding that he kill himself for abandoning soul to the Japanese. It's because he had a cancelable shape of one piece. You know, like his shaping couple wasn't acceptable within the community and hence he had to kill himself. Yeah, it's the only way forward. You're basically saying that there is a handshake between, you know, feudal Japan and wars with China and Korea and basically fan fiction drama.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. I mean, internet drama in general, it always comes down to some dickhead telling you to kill yourself. Which kind of implies that back then, too, people were talking like Sephiroth. I mean, if you read the letters between the Chinese, the Japanese, the Japanese, and the Koreans, everybody is Seperoth posting. I will be reading some of them in the future. And King Sanjo distraught and desperate to please the people telling him that he should die,

listens to one man who just kind of like pushes ahead of a crowd, manages to get into the palace and says, you should really reinstate this man named Chong Chol. He was a former minister from the Western government faction who had been fired and sent into exile for falling on the wrong side of some meaningless argument in government. So King Sanjo does just that. The problem is he already reappointed the prime minister the day before after firing the previous one. So he fires him a second time after holding the job for one whole day and appoints this guy on the advice of some random dude in K-Song.

This not only confuses everyone in government, but makes him seem very stupid to normal people. Because when you have a monarchy, especially one kind of built in a foreign. of spiritual worship and a pseudo-religious kind of way. And you're suddenly just following the advice of a strange man on the street. It takes you down a peg. Even more confusing

is the small fact that King Sanjo had still not requested help from China. And this does sound weird, but the king and his ministers had admittedly some good reasons for doing this. At least until Seoul fell and they were forced to run and leave half of the cabinet on the other side of the river.

They were worried that if they asked China for help, they would be giving up what little freedom the Chinese had allowed them to have. Because remember, there was a period of Korean history where even though they had this so-called little brother status, that they were more ruled with an iron fist directly by China. They believed that it could go back to being that way. There was also the problem of if China sends their massive army into Korea. It would be on the Koreans to find a way to feed and supply them, which was something they couldn't even manage for their own army or people at the time.

So this would lead to some pretty serious problems. But now sitting in Pyongyang with Japanese soldiers advancing north from the capital and their own people insisting that the king commits suicide, it became clear to everyone that the Korean court needed help from the Chinese, not just to defend themselves from the Japanese, but also their own people. Like people were getting pretty fucking mad. Yeah, this is like being in a family. where there's like three brothers

and like two of them are closer in age and you beat the shit out of each other and it's like, okay, we actually need to come to some sort of detente. We need to call in the big brother. Yeah, this is just again, little brother behavior. Yeah. However, still, the letters that the Koreans said to China were incredibly unclear.

This could be chalked up to a bunch of guys really not wanting to admit how badly they were getting their asses kicked. But after four different letters, the Koreans finally broke down and said, quite plainly, if you don't send us aid, we are definitely going to get conquered. Even still, the speed in which Seoul fell

added to China's previous suspicions. If you remember that we touched upon, China already knows that Korea needs help, thanks to the king of Ryukyu, Shone. And the Chinese are suspicious as to why the Koreans haven't asked for help, making them believe that they might be in league with the Japanese. And then Seoul falls in 20 days.

This also gets back to the Chinese. And they start thinking that the only way that could have happened is if the Koreans were in on it. Okay. So the Chinese were so suspicious about how quickly the Koreans were losing that the first thing they did was actually sent two agents to Pyongyang to figure out what exactly was going on. And thankfully for the Koreans, I suppose,

all suspicions were immediately dropped when the agents make it back into China and they're like, oh, no, no. They're just getting their fucking teeth kicked in. Yeah, boss, shit's fucked. We might need to help them. Yeah, like, they're trying to fight. Like, they're not giving up. They're just losing really badly.

However, it's not as though the Chinese could exactly leap into action. There was the Ordos rebellion going, tearing through northern China, where this is a very confusing rebellion. It's another example of the unifying theory of fuck that guy that we always talk about. it starts with a group of soldiers get really mad that they're not getting paid, which we talked about. That's how the Chinese military worked. That happens all the time.

They rebel. They kill their officers. They start tearing shit apart. And then they meet some local Mongol raiders in the north. We're like, you know? Hell. Yeah. I respect your game.

How would you like to go pro and raid together? So they do. And this rapidly runs out of control as other people with other grievances join the rebellion. The Chinese military is gutted from generations of corruption, so they're allowed to just run wild across the frontier. I mean, it's almost kind of similar to how the Taiping rebellion starts off. A lot of people who have nothing in common join forces, and the Chinese military just lacks the ability to stop them

to the point it grows out of control. The Chinese eventually send a large army to the north to try and put this to an end, but that's around the same time they figure out they need to send an army to Korea. Thanks to all the problems in the army that we've already come, They just did not have the capability of slapping together another full army and marching into Korea. So they dispatched a thousand Chinese soldiers, which they happen to have on hand, to be something of a vanguard. In the meantime, Kinmyong Wan, the guy who had been in charge of defending the Han River before changing and running away,

had somehow escaped any kind of punishment, kept his job, and was given another army to lead. This time, it was meant to defend the Imgen River, the major obstacle. in the way of the Japanese on their march to Pyongyang. This army was made up of the remnants of all of the other armies had been retreating north from the various disasters in the south. This eventually numbered about 10,000 men, and they gathered on the northern bank of the river. As Kim waited, one of his sub-commanders from the Han River,

Sincac refused to follow his orders, openly calling him a coward for fleeing from Seoul. Instead, he keeps his army in the area around Seoul and is kind of working as a guerrilla force. Kim then sends a letter to the Korean court, demanding the man's execution for defying his orders. The court agrees that this is a murderable offense, and they dispatch a team to go and kill him.

Meanwhile, Sincac, using his small band of soldiers, is launching raids against the Japanese, and he's the one that wins the first Korean land victories. They're small, like very minor, largely meaningless engagements, but he kills maybe anywhere from 60 to 100 Japanese soldiers. But that's the kind of morale victory we're talking about here. Word of this gets back to Pyongyang. And the king quickly realizes,

oh, fuck, I just dispatched an execution squad to kill this guy. So he sends a different messenger out to catch the execution squad so they don't kill Sincac. Okay. But there's no heartwarming ending of this. The messengers are late. Sincac's already dead. Despite all this, Kim Jong-wan managed to anchor in a decent defense on the shores of the Imgen.

He had picked a position where there'd only be one small place narrow enough for the Japanese to try to cross, where he would be able to meet them on the shore immediately. And like in all other cases, they would only be able to get across the river in small boats. So this idea of him being able to kind of snuff out these small groups of Japanese soldiers as they made it across would be an advantage over the fact that they still are vastly inferior when it comes to weapons. They were outnumbered and outgunned, but in this manner, they could level the playing field. He was also reinforced to 3,000 actually experienced soldiers from the northern border under the command of Han-ung-in. Though this does throw a pretty big wrench and to anything resembling a functioning chain of command for the Koreans,

Han had been sent to make sure Kim did not run a second time. but Han had been given orders from the king to not accept orders from Kim, who I should remind you, was also appointed by the king to be the commander in chief of the Korean military. Everyone is also still pissed about the whole I accidentally ordered the execution of Sin Khak

situation. And this all happened without the king firing Kim. So that meant that the Korean army had a commander in Kim that cannot give orders to his vice commander, Han and everybody knew it, meaning that the various sub-commanders within the army just began following orders from the person that they just personally liked more, or didn't hate due to the fact that, you know, everybody knew about Kim running away. So Kunishi, Kato, and Yoshitoshi

saw this army pretty clearly when they rocked up. They knew crossing the river and facing them head-on would be incredibly stupid. So they decided to try something else. They would wait, fire their muskets across the river once again and hope that Koreans would lose their nerve and run away. I mean, it had already happened once. But after 10 days, that had not worked. The Japanese decided they need to try something else and they would fake a retreat. They pulled back into the nearby forest trying to convince the Koreans that they decided they didn't want none of that smoke and called it a day. And this was greeted with cheers of victory from the Korean side. This would have been their first serious victory on land during the war. So like in several episodes we've talked about before,

One of the lower Korean commanders, Sun Kiel, immediately ordered his men to cross the river and attack the retreating Japanese. Sun Kiel was not young or inexperienced, which is normally the case when these things happen. So he had some level of gravity to his orders, but a lot of his peers said to wait from orders from Han or Kim, one of the two, before they went marching out. So Sun instead goes over to Han and says,

this is what we should do, and Han agrees. They should launch a counterattack immediately. And Kim points out, this could be a trap. They've never retreated before. And also, we haven't done anything to them that would have forced them to retreat. So maybe let's just hang out over here. But again, this is coming from a guy who had just fled soul. So people are like, oh, fuck you, you're just a coward.

And they immediately disregard him. though a lot of Kim's soldiers do follow his order, so you get about a quarter of the army following Han into rafts to cross the river to chase after the Japanese. And the other three quarters just kind of watching. The Japanese had only pulled back into the woods overlooking their side of the river, and they waited for Han's detachment to ferry themselves

all the way across everyone off the boats before they opened fire. Within minutes, what they thought was about to be a crushing victory collapses into a total panic, and they're massacred by volley after volley of musket fire. Sun Kil dies on the shore with his men. Han manages to survive, and the Koreans who had not taken part in the crossing, watched in horror as thousands were killed in short order. The panic spread to the other side of the river, and when one of the commanders, who, like Kim Jong-wan, was a civil administrator and therefore had the same kind of roe,

that they wore, turned and ran, everyone thought it was Kim running again. So they rushed to keep up. Kim himself does not run or order a retreat. He's just standing there an utter confusion as his army simply melts around him. And before long, he is no army to command. So he's forced to keep up with them. He's just like, what the fuck guys? I'm still here.

You run once. Doesn't mean you run every time. I told you I wouldn't do it again. Nobody believes me. I think he swore. we're just wearing the same sick drip. Now this leaves the river crossing wide open and the Japanese cross unopposed,

march in and they take K-Song without a fight. I assume they also seize the comment box meant for the king and just like sit around in a circle, reading them off and laughing. Yeah, they're just doing like Jimmy Fallon reads mean tweets. He's just, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself. Oh, man, they really need to get new material.

Your robes are raggedy, your hairline is whack. Kill yourself. And this is where the Japanese combined army was meant to pause and go about their separate ways, like we talked about previously. Meanwhile, the Korean government in Pyongyang began to discuss once again what they should do now that the Japanese had crossed the Imgen. Of course, several ministers wanted to fight in the city until the death, but the king, turns out, not too fond of that plan. It was decided that this time the royal court should flee to Yongbian, near the Chinese. border. But as they left, Pyongyang was meant to be held and slow the Japanese down, and it was a good place to do that. Pyongyang was a fortress city. It had strong walls, good defenses, a decent amount of

supplies, and the cabinet believed it could withstand a siege for maybe months. This is not what happened. The people saw the government packing up their shit, and this time, instead of rushing to keep up, they get mad. People grabbed weapons and blocked the royal convoys that were carrying out like royal treasures further north and another mob invaded the king's palace getting as far as the inner courtyard demanding that he's staying the city with them.

The prime minister who had just taken up the job thanks to some Rando's advice was forced to walk down the stairs and just kind of shame everyone for how they were acting in front of the king. Like this is impolite. You should moderate the way you tell the king to kill himself.

Hitting the shame. Shame. Shame. Your posts are weak. Shame. Shame. And this does work. The other option was send in the Royal Guard and start killing people. And I think everybody probably knew that.

So people turn around and go home. But it was kind of clear to the king and everyone else that nobody was going to try to defend the city. So much like Seoul, the city empties out as the king runs. A garrison was held back with Kim Jong-Wan in command once again with eventually 11,000. Kim was joined in command by two other government administrators, Yun-Tu-Su-Su and Yi Oak-Ik. And together they came to the conclusion that, you know what, this fucking city is impossible to hold.

We only get 11,000 people. There's nobody inside the city, like no civilians. So there's a good chance that the soldiers aren't going to want to stand and fight because there's really nothing to defend. You know, if you're not protecting a civilian population, holding a city is just defending some bricks. So they decided, we'll go on the offensive this time. The first offensive, really. Pyongyang sits on the Tejong River and thus the Japanese were camped on the other side.

And it was clear to the Koreans that the Japanese did not see them as a threat because they had barely posted any guards at night and seemed completely relaxed in their camps. So they load up on boats, cross the river under the cover of darkness, and then hit the Japanese completely by surprise while it was still dark. The plan was great on paper. and as one was put into action that the inexperience of just about everyone involved ruined it. Kim kind of underestimated how long it would take to move several thousand people across the Tejong River. And by the time their attack started, the sun was already coming up.

So their element of surprise was ruined from step one. Kim and his men were quickly pushed back. The Koreans broke and ran for the river, trying to make it back the Pyongyang. However, they ran into a pretty big problem. The oarsmen for the boats that had taken them across the tae d'ang had seen how badly everything was going and they decided to get the fuck out of there, abandoning them on the other side of the river. Hit the bricks, you can just leave. Quit your job. You can't just leave.

Yeah. This war can't happen if I'm not here. Yep, exactly. This forced Kim and a large number of his soldiers to retreat north down the river where they knew there's a shallow crossing of the tae d'ong. This allowed them to simply wade across without boats and save their lives, which is great. However, small problem. This is something the Japanese had been looking for for two weeks, and they just shown it to them. When Kim made it back to Pyongyang, all ideas of holding the city were abandoned.

Instead, they began chucking as many weapons as they could into a nearby pond so the Japanese couldn't get their hands on them. And then they ordered a retreat towards Sunan about 20 kilometers away. Meanwhile, Yon Tusu reported to King Sanjo. As the senior government administrator, which because of how civilian heavy the Korean military was, as we've talked about, he technically outranked Juan in that capacity, even though Juan was given the commander chief role in the military. It's stupid. And he presents himself to the king saying, Pyongyang was abandoned and it's all my fault. As the senior man, I accept and welcome any punishment you deem necessary for me. And in what must have been one of the most motivational speeches in military history, the king simply said, quote, the country is already ruined. Any talk of punishment is useless. All right.

And it's all your fault. We have the emo king of Korea. King Sanjo's openly giving up hope and asking his court, like, look, what if I just fucking packed it up? Went another 10 kilometers and moved into China, like exile. You know, like, what's the point of all of this? What are we even fighting for anymore? Because tonight will be the night my kingdom falls for you over again. Don't make me change my mind.

Don't make me defend these walls. I hate both of you so much. I won't live to see another Japanese invasion. I swear it's true. Now, the, I don't. idea of exile may have seemed good on paper, I guess, like Juan's battle plan. But it brought up legal questions in the Korean court. Like, well, if you leave the country, that might count as abdication. And one of your sons could become king. And King Sanjo's response to that was, I think that hardly

fucking matters at this point. I think the fuck not. King of what? I mean, it's quite literally the fucking Aquaman joke about selling houses that H-bomber guy made like, who are you going to sell the houses to? Underwater.

Yeah, king of what now? What kingdom? The kingdom of dreams? The kingdom of the mind? There was another question as well. Like, will the Chinese even welcome him as an exile?

Like, king or not? This time it was the Japanese who were suspicious, though. Seeing that they were just walking into yet another city unopposed when Pyongyang was supposed to be easily the most defendable city in Korea. So the inch forward carefully,

looking for the trap. And they saw, oh, nope, I guess we won again. Cities are. And losing Pyongyang was a real gut punch for the Koreans in more than one way.

Obviously, it's an important city. It's a historical capital. It's a defendable fortress. It's incredibly demoralizing. It's forcing the king to run a second time. But really, the biggest problem is it,

how is the entire Korean rice reserve? which they failed to take with them. Korea, famously a country that has a high rate of rice consumption in their diet, much like China and Japan. Well, most importantly, most of the agricultural land in Korea is in the South. Correct. The irritable land, famously so that will never lead to problems ever again. And the North is extremely mountainous.

Even though the South is mountainous, the north is way more. It's not a place that you want to depend on for your food supply. But I'd also say this, too, that Korea's climate is. incredibly harsh. And so, like, losing your food supply means there's not shit food until the next harvest. That will become a problem in a little bit, Nate, I promise. Because think of it this way. They invaded in the spring. They're eating those springs crops. But now there's war. Nobody's planting during a war. Everybody's too busy, you know, running for their lives, which means nobody's around to plant for the next season. This will not become important as we go on, I promise. This left a Korean government

panicking. They had Chinese troops on the way. They knew they were going to have to feed, but they had just lost their biggest supply of food. They had taken some with them, but certainly not enough. Elsewhere, civilians were looting regional food stockpiles. So the Koreans were forced to deploy soldiers to quite literally loot it back from the people in order to have any hope of having a reserve when the Chinese arrived. This is literally the thing in the army, but there's only one thief in the army and everyone else is trying to get their shit back. But yes, for your food supply. Except now the army is just the whole country. There's only one thief in Korea. Everybody else was just trying to get their fucking food. And it was then as the Koreans ran around stealing rice back from the people. And King Sanjo was writing sad poetry about his future. But a thousand Chinese soldiers finally arrived in the town of Ouija on the border. Like we had pointed out in other series in the past,

when an army advances, they have to leave soldiers behind for various reasons. This could be to man garrisons, hold strategic points, secure supplies, leading all the way back to wherever they started. I'm gonna guess that they didn't do that and they made the fatal mistake of don't leave enough guys behind. Well, yes, yes and no. So kind of like I pointed out,

they just have that straight line going from Busan to Seoul. That is plenty staff. Nowhere else. Really? They haven't really branched out much. That's coming in the future, but not as many as you'd hope.

Yeah, the Japanese using the Joker Sabian style of navigation. That's right. What if you just go in a street? Right line. Famously, a really easy place to do that is the Korean peninsula where there's no terrain, no mountains, no concerns, nothing whatsoever. I was a Konishi's closest navigational advisor. Well, yeah, it's called Dead Reckoning, but there's also the added navigational technique

of total self-hatred, just wily coyoteing, fucking walking into Painted on Caves and making a cave somehow by sheer force of will. Dead reckoning. Oh, you reckon you're going to end up dead? Maybe. That's the goal. I find the two compliment each other well. So more and more people are forced to be left behind to cover this terrible supply line.

And that supply line requires people and only people to hump the supplies that are required over the mountains and shitty roads. Because remember, the Japanese really didn't bring many horses. This bleeds off Mormon. They've created the human pack mule. Looking into the future for what was certain to be the entrance of the Ming on the battlefield, every Japanese warlord knew this system was completely and totally untenable. They needed to solidify their seaborne supply line through the Yellow Sea and up Korea's various rivers. This is something that has absolutely not happened, and while Yisun Sin have been scoring victories,

those were small in the grand scheme of things. But they were big enough to force Hideyoshi to order Wakazawa Yasaharu, the lord of Awaji Island, to form a combined fleet with two other lords with the express purpose of destroying the Korean Navy. Weirdly, this is the first time the Japanese would target the Korean Navy. I mean, to be fair, the Korean Navy was doing a good job of targeting the Korean Navy up until this point. They're arguably undefeated only to themselves. Number one champion of punching yourself in the day. You can't beat me?

I'll beat me. Push red button in case of naval combat. It's like, why did we build naval combat vessels? It's like, I don't know. We're not supposed to do that. I have an idea. I'm opening my Korean guide to naval warfare, circa the 1500s. It just says light my own ship on fire.

No, the burn the boats thing was supposed to be like an exhortation to be brave, not just burn your boats every single time. They misremembered the myth. They heard about the burn your boats, the burn the boats thing. And they only came up with Joe Rogan's stand-up special that really, really sucks. Fuck off. It's the one where he's sweating from his nipples the whole time. I feel like you're just opening the portal to envision Chosen Dynasty Joe Rogan is, I don't know, I feel like. Josen Rogan.

I fucking hate us for this. Josan Rogan's, you can't say anything anymore. Yeah, but he'd have an honorific because he's a teacher, so he would be Rogan's son singing. He was like, he's basically a, he's a leader in masculine thought. Number one leader in masculine Confucian thought. Confucius actually said it was really good for your mental health to roll around on the floor with guys. Yeah, it's true. and take HGH like a lot.

HGH, you're buying it from the pharmacy. It's high-grade whewed. I feel like if you were famous in the Chosen Dynasty, if you came up in the world because you were putting people in boxes full of bugs on Chosen Dynasty Fear Factor, it would be a whole different vibe across the board. The Japanese had considered the Korean Navy

such an afterthought that every lord tasked with naval operations had just left their ships and gone ashore and was advancing with the army. So like Waki Zakao was in, in Seoul when he got his orders to rush back to Pusan and assemble his fleet. And of course, as I'm sure you already assumed, he did not wait for the other two lords to get back

so they could actually combine their naval fleet like Hideyoshi had told them to. Yeah, he was waiting on young lord and lord infamous. They're about to drop the worst mixtape you've ever heard. Word got back to Yisun Sin the first week of August that the Japanese fleet was moving west from Pusan. So Yiyok-O-Khi and Y-Sun-Sin quickly combined the force since they'll out to meet them. The combined fleet also had a new battle tactic up their sleeve. Historically, and so far, their fleet had been fighting in a simple line formation. Makes sense.

They got fire superiority, but it had obvious downsides. For example, a lot of the enemy had been getting away, running inland because they have an opening, right? They're not surrounded. Enter the crane wing naval formation. This was a naval tactic we've talked about before, just obviously. of the context of Korea. Sail the ships in a half moon surround the enemy. Lighter ships on the flanks. So once they're in the middle

of this half moon shape, the lighter ships can simply go around and close it off. Thank God there was no Armenians that showed up in the Japanese Navy because they're like, oh my God, the crescent moon, no. It finds us anywhere we go.

We can't get away from it. The moon Turk controls the moon ocean. The moon Turk controls the Turk ocean. This is how the world works. I mean, that's what they call the big flat expanse. on the moon. They call them Lunar Mare. It's like

Lunar seas, what implies the Moon Turk has a Moon Navy. They're doing Moon Lepanto. Kind of. I mean, this is the formation that they deployed at Lepanto. The Koreans quickly found Waki Zaka's fleet of about 70 ships, and this isn't a great place for naval combat. The port is very shallow, it's full of rocks, and of course, it's close to shore. All things Yis Sun Sin did not want to deal with.

So he held back at Han San Island, where there was nothing but open water, and dotted around them were small, tiny little deserted islands. He didn't want to win another battle, just allow the Japanese to get away inland. And it's pretty clear at this point that Sunsen understood the Japanese battle tactics at this point. They would charge him most of the time if he baited them. So that's what he did. Again, he sent a ship in, baited them out of the port, and they chased him to fight in the open ocean.

Once again, another last page of Sun Tzu, the art of war is rage bait your enemy. he's just standing on the bow of the ship doing the L on the forehead doing like the fortnight dance The samurai cannot possibly take that You have to commission like an Okioe wood block print And be like this guy's boat is chopped All your commanders are own

Shit's busted Once again This works and starts the Battle of Hanson Island However this time there's a huge difference The Japanese are not riding on shitty unarmed transport boats though admittedly the difference would mean nothing. I know I had you in the first half there.

Even the best Japanese warships of the day was no match for its Korean counterpart. The Japanese ships, armed with bows, muskets, and the very occasional cannon, couldn't even dent the Korean ships with their thick wooden and occasionally iron armor. In return, Korean cannons blasted the Japanese warships apart, and a rain of fire arrows set off sails and pavilions. Once the gap was closed and the encirclement was complete, Korean ships continued hammering the Japanese, sweeping the decks with gunfire before setting boarding parties across and capturing samurai and Ashigaru, cutting off their heads and holding them aloft in victory. This is such a lopsided battle that it only ended when the sun went down and the Koreans decided to pull back.

Of the 70 ships in the Japanese fleet, only 14 managed to survive. Not every man that went into the water died, and a few hundred were able to swim to the nearby islands. only to discover, they were death traps. I'm going to guess, uh, please, Alex, for 500, can I have poisonous snakes and scorpions? Surprisingly no.

Oh. These were islands so barren and lifeless, even poison snakes and scorpions didn't want to live there. But there would be zero cover whatsoever. Zero cover. No clean water. No food. No good way to get back to the mainland.

They were stranded there and most would just sit there and starve to death. Unless, of course, they killed themselves, which is always an option. It must be interesting when you go through historical maps and you have like skeleton island numbers one through 150. It's just like, oh yeah. Long story, but we have a lot of skeleton islands. I wonder how depression dough got its name.

Weird. Yeah, kill yourself dough. Have other guy kill you dough. Doe is a Korean word for island. So yeah. Hungry dough. Weird. Thirsty dough.

There was just the one guy who landed on white monster dough who was like really happy. I wish there were poisonous snakes dough. At least you could eat them. Yeah, exactly. Or they'd have to kill you. Either way, you win. One of these men was Wakizaka, though he didn't die. He laid low until the Korean fleet pulled away,

and he survived off of eating seaweed and getting violently ill from drinking sea water until he was eventually picked up. He probably wishes he died, though. It only took hours for the word of the Koreans crushing victory to make it back to the two other Japanese warlords, who were supposed to be part of the combined fleet. that Wakizaka had ignored. Kuki Yoshitaka and Kato Yoshiyosaki,

who were anchored at Anglopo Port. Both of these men were old hands at the Navy game. They've been fighting at sea for decades during the previous Japanese Civil War. So you would think, hypothetically, they might be able to counter Yisan Sin. Nope, not even a little bit. Though, to be fair,

when the Koreans pulled up to Anglopo and tried to do the same thing again, they did not fall for it. Instead, Kato and Kuki stuck to the port. knowing they were in a strong position and if the Koreans came in close they'd be able to be supported from the shore.

However, Yisun Sen was more than welcome to fight them there too. He simply changed his tactics. Instead of trying to surround them, which he knew of course was not going to work because their backs were to the shore, he'd just sent in turtle ships to ram the shit out of them and fire at them at point blank range.

Heavily armored Korean turtles. The Japanese really have nothing to penetrate these things. It's one of those things where it's like, matter how much military or naval strategy you try to employ. It's like the guy's actually manning the muskets and occasional cannon on the Japanese boats. They're like, they're just going to do that twisted metal shit on us again, aren't they? And then sure enough, what do they do? Just start ramming. Korean Axel, two boats on either side held together with the strength

of his arms. Absolute worst twisted metal character ever is Axel. Fucking dumb as shit. It's literally just a guy holding a wheel at either side of... medical is what Julie Bindle thinks will happen if you let your son play with Barbies. Twisted medical sounds like a, yeah, it sounds like a pay-as-you-go, cash-only clinic in the Pacific Northwest where everyone is on meth and monsters. Medicinal meth. It was not quick and it was not pretty, but it worked. The Japanese pinned in, couldn't maneuver to get away from the turtle ships. The water was shallow. The harbor is small,

so there's no way to get around them. And like in a lot of battles before, they just fled inland. But, like the Battle of Han-San Island, the Koreans only ended the battle because the sun began to go down and they couldn't kick the shit out of them in the dark. By the time Ysonson pulled back, only three of the original 42 Japanese ships survived. Like before, both commanders survived, but the disaster was as clear as day. Despite Japan marching across Korea nearly unopposed, the Korean Navy controlled the sea, and Japan had no answer for it. In two days, another 100 Japanese ships were at the bottom of the ocean for the cost of just

19 dead Koreans. Not 19 ships. 19 Koreans. Period. I like those odds. You know, those are good numbers. Yeah, this is a good KD ratio. We have no idea how many Japanese were killed and what Yisun Sen dubbed the slaughter operations. But it could be as many as 9,000. Whatever the numbers were, Hideyoshi realized that he was well and truly fucked. The path he believed that would have been wide open to senden reinforcements in supplies have been slammed shut in his face. I Ideas of invading China were one thing, but now he might not even be able to finish off Korea. He only had about 130,000 soldiers in Korea, give or take. That number is quite fluid.

And it was being slowly sapped away by everything we talked about. Well, yeah, and if you're losing men at a 500 to 1 ratio in terms of this engagement you've just described, that 130,000 is going to dwindle quite quickly. Yeah, and I mean, they're not losing a lot in land battles. And these are all things that any battlefield commander would plan for. But when you plan for those things, you have a solution for them, which is reinforcement, of course. But without those reinforcements, without those supplies, and suddenly the 100-something thousand men are trapped. They're not campaigning anymore.

They're trapped with a Korean resistance that is slowly coming together and a Chinese army that is finally understanding the serious situation Korea found itself in. China ordered a full mobilization of their army in August, which, admittedly, is going to take a long time. And they sent an army of 5,000 men from the Liaodong just over the border under the command of General Zhao Zhang Sun, who declared, can remember how he's talked about Separatth posting before? Yeah, he's probably the best one yet. He declares the Japanese robber army will be a swarm of insects, ants, and wasps.

They will soon be scattered to the four winds. They would not be. He would be very wrong about this. But he launches the first large-scale offensive of the war on the side of Korea. By the end of August 1592, he's marching towards Pyongyang with his 6,000 men, which I should remind you, there's at least 20,000 instead of Pyongyang. The weather is terrible, it's lashing down rain, and forces the Chinese soldiers to march in ankle-deep mud as their armor is completely soaked through.

But this also benefited them. They knew the Japanese favored gunpowder weapons and the rain would make those useless. The rain, gloom, and darkness also covered their approach to the city, to the point that when they arrived, the Japanese garrison had no idea that they were there. The Japanese are encountering the Roy Mustang problem. You're just completely useless when it fucking raised. Now, this would be true if you cannot counter this with one simple trick. Being indoors, which is exactly what the Japanese did. If you would like to be like the Japanese and be indoors, you can come and see our live show and Cork on the 26th of the 6th of the 6th of.

September. Nailed it. Tickets available in the description. Nailed it. Not wanting to give up such an advantage, Changsun ordered his army to storm Pyongyang's seven-star gate. Sick name. This works incredibly well. They burst right through the gate. The Chinese start advancing into Pyongyang almost immediately. And then Konishi's men realize, there's actually not that many Chinese soldiers. Again, there's only 6,000 of them.

And rather than confronting them at the gate, standing in a line outside and fighting them, they pull back further into the city, into the buildings, out of the rain from where they could fire their guns. The Chinese take off down the roads, trying to chase them down. But in turn, this splits up the advancing mass of their army.

And they just get fed down these various streets into a musket-related buzzsaw. The Chinese eventually break. They run out of the city into the muddy bullshit outside. and they're tired from their march and hours of fighting, so they're easily chased down and butchered by counterattacking Japanese forces. By the time the Japanese give up their counterattack,

half of the Chinese army is gone, as well as its second in command. Changsun makes sure to tell the Koreans that he had simply ordered a tactical retreat. He hadn't lost at all. I'm just thinking of Shang Song from... We all are. He's just like summoning the soul out of all of the soldiers. your soul is mine. You can make the argument like, well, we didn't run away naked, so it wasn't actually a retreat.

We had our clothes on. That was tactical. That was orderly. Yeah, it was orderly because we didn't get naked to run away faster. Getting attacked by Shang Song the soul sucker. And then what's even funnier is that's the letter to the Koreans. To his own government, he blames everything on the Koreans. He's like, no, I totally would have won.

But the Korean soldiers, they slowed me down. And then, you know, they have spies in the city. they refused to get naked. They kept their clothes on. They wouldn't go at max speed. Yeah, exactly. Then he packs up his shit and marches back over the border to China. As ridiculous as his whole saga was, and was yet another land victory for the Japanese, Konishi and the other warlords were starting to get a bit nervous.

They'd expected supplies and reinforcements to already be streaming up from the Korean rivers to replenish them, but that just wasn't happening. Furthermore, the strung out garrisons of the Japanese were increasingly getting bled out by hit and run attacks, by small bands of Korean soldiers that would emerge from the mountains and forests, hit them and then retreat, knowing that the Japanese couldn't hope to trek them down. These bands of Korean guerrillas would become known as righteous armies. Oh, hell, yes. In a series of that has had some great names for things, yes, righteous guerrillas.

It's a great hardcore band name as well. Righteous gorillas would slap. I would go to that show. I would get kicked in the head at that show. as long as it's over by 1030. It's a hardcore show. They're all over by half nine, Joe. These were a mishmash of broken formations of soldiers,

untrained civilians, bands of warrior monks and government officials. For the everyday people, they were pushed to arms by the outright brutality of the Japanese. For the middle class landowners, the loss of their land and income. And to be fair, most of those landlords,

landowners of the upper middle class of Korean society would end up leading most of these righteous armies. Now, for the monks, that's just interesting. Because as we've touched on, Buddhists had been pretty heavily persecuted by the Korean government up until this point. However, a very respected, very old monk named Hual Jong, who's like close to 80, answered the king's call for all Koreans to resist the Japanese and declared it a Buddhist duty to go and fight the invaders.

fuck, yes, I just want this dude to like, he walks up at the walking sick and he's really feeble, and he rips off his shirt and he looks like Yu Jira Hanma from Bakke. That's the only way I can imagine it, because otherwise this is a very frail 80-year-old man. That does lead attacks, I should point out. The imagination just gets set alight by the phrase warrior monks. There's something about it. There's just sort of like, I've seen this before, whether it's Sabin from Final Fantasy 6 or somewhere else, you're just like, he's going to do some chakras shit. he's going to pick up a train and suplex it. There's no limit to his monk power.

I've never been more convinced that Hugh Jung could suplex a train. And these aren't just a few monks either. Tens of thousands end up joining the righteous armies. They pick up weapons. Now, to be fair, these aren't great weapons. Most of these early righteous armies, they're mostly armed with farming tools, like pitchforks, sides, whatnot, some rocks. Maybe they have a sword laying around.

And the monks fall into their own units. They end up being the most regimented of all of the righteous armies because they just fall under the abbots of their monastery, who is now in charge of military operations. Everyone had their own reason to go out and do some local ultraviolence. While the Korean government and civil society collapsed under the weight of the Japanese invasion, the righteous armies kind of just reformed it

under the greater unifying theory of fuck that guy. with Confucianist characteristics. Because all of the things involved with the Korean government are also involved with the righteous armies. Civil servants are heavily involved. Military officers.

You get the Buddhist clergy. It's just like society itself shattered and then reformed as a parallel government. And the Confucian version of the unifying theory of fuck that guy is if the wind blows in the same direction

between all four of your enemies and converges at the same point, one must all march together. There's like a harmonious cycle, and it's, you know, they've painted mandolas of it, and you realize that every illustration is an oblong object that can be used to strike a Japanese person. That's right.

Could be a hoe, could be a stick, cane, a odd piece of rock. Who knows? Every piece has its part. We might get a sword eventually. This form of grassroots, largely leaderless resistance, at least leaderless from a centralized point of view,

against the Japanese. was not something the Japanese had ever thought was possible. They thought similar to a war in Japan, when they went into an area and beat the shit out of the Lord, or the Lord surrendered, the people would just generally follow suit, that the Koreans would simply submit when it was clear that they had lost. Instead, the righteous armies began hitting the Japanese in the one place.

They could not bear to suffer losses. That long winding supply route from Busan up to Pyongyang. And that is where we'll pick up next next. time on part four. Fuck yeah, we got warrior monks in the mix. It's like that scene in The Simpsons when the Yakuza show up. It was like, no, the little guy hasn't done anything yet. You know he's going to do something cool.

It's just funny because, I mean, like, that's a long clip over some bad terrain. That's your supply line all the way from the very, pretty much the southeastern tip of the country to the pretty decently far northwest, let's be real. And they're going to end up pushing further north. at one point, a faction of the Japanese military straight up invades Manchuria. It does not go well, but you can like see how far they're going to continue pushing with all of the problems that they already have. There are MacArthur's everywhere for those with eyes to see. Yeah, yep.

Though this one doesn't get fired, unfortunately. But that is part three of our ongoing series on the Imgen War. Fellas, how you feeling? Three weeks in. I'm stretched like the supply lines between Pusan and Pyongyang. It's good for your spine. I feel like so much is going on. It's like a next time on Dragon Ball Z.

Man, that's exactly how I feel in the research of this. This is a huge conflict. We've certainly covered like bigger stuff. But there is just so many moving pieces because of just like how disjointed both sides of the war effort are. That nobody is moving together. nobody's really communicating other than like roasting each other. There's a ton going on and we still have a lot to cover. You can see how this becomes the fodder for both historical battle epics and also lots and lots of soap operas.

Yeah, I've seen some on Netflix. I haven't watched them because I'm going to be honest with you, it just really doesn't appeal to me. Like palace romance in the background of the Imgen War just is not my genre of TV. I would have thought that would really been up your street, Joe. I'm not a big fan of romance. I'm not going to comment. But fellas, you host other podcasts. Plug those podcasts.

Josh Uchurcher podcast about tech industry and British politics. Kiljames Bond, a feminist film podcast that's extremely funny. And I'm in a band called Second Homes. That's got a debut album out. It's available on streaming everywhere and band camp if you want to actually support us. So it's all out there if you're interested. I have been sitting in this chair for so long.

I just looked at my legs and the, the length of my shorts has suddenly gotten Rhodesian, but I produce a show called Bloodwork about the economy of violence to show Colbonite Skin about the history of tattoos. You can follow like my other work.

Follow me on Instagram at Scam Golden. S-C-A-M-G-O-L-D-I-N. I'd like to see that old hack sue me. But yeah, that's about it. This is the only show that I host. Thank you for listening to it. It's also the only show that makes Tom short shorter. Consider supporting us

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