Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 429 - The Imjin War: Part 4

Episode Date: August 30, 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 of By Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. With me is Tom and Nate.

And we're on part four of our series on the Imgen War. Bellas, how you doing? I am so tired. My flight got delayed by two hours last night and I got home at 3 a.m. And I was staying at my friend's house. an hour away from London. Ooh, that low-coster experience. I got four hours of sleep

before I had to get up and come here to record this episode. And do you know what? Like, I am trying to be a bit more forgiving to British people, but after my experience in the airport last night, I think we just need to glass all of Southern England.

Like, Hussein from Trash Future was so insanely right where people like Robert Jenric or Nigel Farage have a successfully put politicize the act of being a con. It's always funny to me because my British airport experiences are, if I go to Stansted, I'm like, I realize I live in basically Big Essex or I used to live in Big Essex because that's the entirety of fucking the United Kingdom.

It's just that kind of, you know, legends out on holiday. Whereas if I go to Heathrow, which is where I typically fly in these days, I just wind up becoming a self-hating American because there's so many Americans in Heathrow. I'm like, God, we are really fucking annoying and loud, aren't we? We are pretty loud. Yeah, we are pretty loud. I was flying out of Alicante Airport, which is 40 minutes away from Benadorm. That feels like a personal mistake, quite frankly.

Well, you know, easy jet cheap. Low-cost airlines. I also forgot my iPad on the flight out on the plane. And because Spain being Spain and no one works after 2pm, I had to take a risk and hope that Menzies, which is the ground crew facilitators for lost property was still. open and I had to explain to a police officer who's reaching for his gun why I had to

walk into the baggage carousel to pick up my stuff. You went to Spain and had like an American police experience of nearly being shot for no reason. Yeah, honestly like so in Alicante airport there is two places

you can smoke past security. One, they have opened a weather spoons inside Alicante airport and the Other one is the Budweiser bar. I went to the Budweiser bar because I bought a bottle of like water. I went up to have a terrace up above, which closes at 10pm. My flight was supposed to be at 20 past 10, been delayed once, got on the plane.

The fucking door for the cockpit wouldn't close. So we were on the ground for like an hour and a half. But I like had two cigarettes. I was like, okay, I'm going to go to the gate now because you have to do like a second pass support check before you go to the gate and was walking down the stairs and the guy who was like working there on his own was

trying to tell he was like, it's closed now, you have to leave, you have to leave. And there was a family of what I can only describe as the biggest cunts on the planet in the hallway leaning up to the terrace all vaping because they refused to pay for something to go into the terrace.

And the guy was like, you can't smoke down there, you can't smoke in there. And then a 10 year old was just like It's a vapy dickhead. And I'm like, these people are awful. Wait, was the 10 year old also vaping?

His mother who was on crutches was. So, you know, this is very American coded, except the cops would pull guns on them. I'll just leave you with this one. Obviously, when I had to bring merch or equipment or stuff

for various things I was doing, it's much easier to get a business class ticket on British Airways because you get two checked bags included and you can have up to 32 kilos in each one. So that's a lot of fucking stuff. And one of the benefits, obviously, get food and stuff for free. Well, the British Airways lounge in the Geneva airport is BrewDog affiliated. It is BrewDog in Geneva. And it makes me, I'm like, you know what,

I'll just go outside and pay for the Cope sandwich in the regular airport because I just cannot stand to be around, be in BrewDog with British business travelers. It's just one of those things. Maybe I am that person now, though. Maybe so, you know what? I think what we should do instead is we should pretend air travel doesn't exist and we should go back to feudal Japan, where our problems could be solved by wearing elaborate lacquer armor and wielding multiple swords that have different kinds of limit break functions on them. They're designed for three different limit breaks. As we invented earlier, the denim samurai when we talked about my deep undying love for ghost dog. I want to pose the question since people will ask. I was like, yes, I did get duty-free cigarettes.

Yes, I did buy a thousand cigarettes and got them into the country. Was there duty-free between Japan? and Korea. Decidedly no, which somehow I do promise you will come up. It's because an Irish person

hadn't invented Judy Free yet. All I can say is as much as I desperately want to continually make references to other Jim Jarmerish movies in this,

I feel like the goal here is to stay on topic and to stay within, to keep the anachronisms to a minimum. So we've already had Forrest Whitaker's ghost dog,

the way of the samurai. We don't need to talk about Ghost Train or down by law. And as established, I've seen zero other of Jim Jarmush's films. You don't need to. You've seen the one good one. Yeah. And you know what? I might watch it again today when we're done

when we're done here. I've actually heard broken flowers is good, but I haven't watched that many because I wanted to like Dead Man. I wanted to like Ghost Train. I didn't unfortunately. Yeah, he was missing dog when he went back to Ghost. Or not Ghost Train's Mystery Train, I think. I'm going to get Dejarmed. I'm going to have my

charm adjudication removed. We're losing our badges of charm. We're no longer Jarm certified. We're not Jarm compliant. We're no longer from the domain of Jarm. You just see photo of Jim Jarmu, which is like fucked up hairicle with the caption they're doing this to me and work tomorrow.

Now, when we left you last time, the Japanese forces continued storming north through Korea. Chinese forces were slowly finally making their way to help the Koreans beat back the tide of invaders, while Koreans banded together to create the wonderfully named righteous armies to launch their own guerrilla war in the mountains and forests of the peninsula. At sea, Yisun Sin had, well, horribly outnumbered,

battered the Japanese fleet so badly Hideyoshi had all but given up hope of securing a supply route for his forces in Korea. And I do promise we will be talking about righteous armies, much more in this episode. And somehow it will have something related to a different series we talked about. And I don't want to go any further than that because I want you two to be as surprise as I was. But before we get back to the Naval War, we have to rejoin the Japanese on the ground campaign. And because this is a very long war, very large war, covers so many different moving pieces and a relatively short span of time here in the first few months of the conflict.

It requires us to actually go back in time a bit so we can get caught up with the present. The war had been going on for four months, and the Japanese were continuing their march north towards the Chinese border. And that brings us back to Kato Kiyomasa. It's becoming clear that, for at least most of the Japanese warlord stuck in Korea, that any invasion of China was solidly off the table at this point. And instead, they need to focus on, I don't know, actually taking over Korea because everything was grinding to a halt. One of the men who refused to acknowledge this was Cato, which is why he was incredibly pissed to find out that he was tasked with invading and taking over Ham Young in July of 1592. Now, I'm assuming nobody has a map present. And if you don't, I encourage you to, while driving your car and listening to this podcast, pull up your cell phone and find one.

I know where Ham Young is. You got some choreo heads in here. I'm Joson maxing. I know where Ham Young is. Get the Ham Yong heads in the crowd. It's the very northeastern province of Korea on the border with Manchuria, which at the time of this war

is not part of China. So he's no longer, like, it's taking him away from what he sees as the main show of storming over the Korean border and continuing the invasion into China. He's getting put over into the side show. I hate getting orders that, like, no, you have to stay in Korea

and invade someplace when you're in a very Chinese time in your life. I mean, look, I don't even know what that means, but I like it. There's a part of me that's always laugh. It's like, oh, we really need to focus on conquering Korea first before we invade China. And there's a part of me that wants to be like, I'd realize that cartography wasn't quite as advanced back then. But you do realize that if you're struggling with this small, granted, quite mountainous peninsula that's basically the size of Michigan, you may struggle with subsequently conquering with the third largest country on Earth. Like, at the time, it wasn't the same borders. I know that, but still, it's very funny.

Like, no, no, we got this. Actually, we may not have got this. We had banked on a huge falling domino, every domino getting larger until we take over on the entirety of China. And like, we're kind of struggling to push this little domino down. Yeah, it's like military success is built on, you know, iterative wins. You know, you win smaller scale things to build up to eventually invade China. But first, you have to invade China's grundle.

That's a very kind way of referring. I would say you could actually call Korea. Japan's favorite place to invade China. But calling it China's gruntle. Geographically, Manchuria is kind of China's grondal. Well, I think if you're going to compare it to a griddle, you have to geographically figure out

which part is the asshole and the penis, which we haven't figured out. That kind of implies that China is lying on its back and its head is Tibet. And, yeah, like, I suppose, Inner Mongolia are the tips of its feet. And thus, Manchuria and specifically the Korea,

Manchariot borders, it's gruntled. That's quite awkward. That also implies that, well, I think it kind of implies at Hong Kong as its asshole. I don't know. Do you really want to go that far? I'm not caught up the speed of my Chinese map-based physiognomy. We're anthropomorphizing

the Chinese map, but sexually. Sexualizing China geographically. See, that is perfectly fine to do. It's just lines on a map. We are inventing new ways to perform toxic masculinity here, right? We were finding new ways to be problematic. Which part of China is vainy?

Now, the Yag-see is a real big throbbing vein, actually, I would say. That's true. That's very true. That's a good one, Nate. On top of this, taking him away from the main show, Ham Yong is incredibly remote. And Nate, you kind of accidentally touched on one of the huge problems that Japan would have regarding this region, which was they knew absolutely nothing about it. They didn't even have maps. Joining him was his fellow lord Nabashime Naushige, who, on top of being Kato's longtime political

ally, was also his close personal friend. More on these two a little bit later, because we haven't really talked about Kato's personality. Let's just say he's a character. The invasion of Hamaang would be the hardest part of Japan's campaign so far. It doesn't really have any roads. It's considered rural, even for Korea. Like I said, they don't have maps. They have zero clue of what they're doing. Kato, Nabashime, and about 20,000 men, just kind of march off into the forest. And in order to find their way,

they kidnap some locals and force them to be their guides. They're not over the border yet when they kidnap these guys. So, like, one guy's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know shit about Ham Yong. And they kill him.

So the other two are quickly like, you know what? I can tell you exactly where to go, even though they have no clue themselves. Yeah, this very quickly becomes, like an Italow Calvino book like Invisible Cities where it's like let's invent a Ham Yong of the mind

just direct them there somehow if it gives us Hobgong vibes then we technically are there it's like that's not actually Ham Young I was gonna say they're experiencing what my friends experience when we're like walking from one pub to another and I'm doing the autistic thing of walking

20 feet in front of everyone else despite the fact I don't know where I'm going that is an experience I've had personally and I just assumed the whole time like well Tom knows where he's going Nope See I learned something at this episode I guess there were Irish people in feudal Japan

Or there were artistic people in feudal Japan Autistic Irish Pathfinder That's an interesting uniform badge It's a military skill badge And it's like yeah Got Irish stuff got you know, the torch, got the wings, and got trains on it for some reason? It's Tom's head, but instead of a wreath, it's just two trains on the other side.

The march to Ham Yong took two weeks, and they were generally allowed to advance unopposed. Now, the reason for this is because one of Ham Yong's commanders, Yehoun, had ordered his army just to retreat into Manchuria. But before he could get away, local civilians saw what he was doing, snatched him, and murdered him for cowardice. The governor tried to do the same thing, but his own soldiers kidnapped him, stripped him naked, and left him on the side of the road to be found by the Japanese. That is definitionally being naked and afraid. As a former enlisted guy, I support both of these things. Now, the larger reason as to why there's no immediate resistance to them is just the general disgust that the average everyday people had with the local government in Hamya. It was like anywhere else in Korea that we'd already talked about, suffering under the weight of incredibly corrupt local bureaucrats and administrators for generations at that point.

But after being told that their taxes were going to be raised to help with the fence, only to see the people who had collected those taxes, sworn to defend them, and then run away with their money, they had just about enough of this bullshit. So it's another example of the greater unifying theory of fuck that guy, but at this case, they would come to regret it. To the Koreans and Ham Yong, the Japanese were bastards, but the local government were also bastards, and they knew exactly what they were going to do. So they thought, why not just refuse to fight? Allow the Japanese to come in, and they'll probably kill all the people that we hate. Which, to be fair, they were right. Yeah, I was going to say, there's not many, like, good feudal landlords or lords in general,

although if they would argue that they were the good ones, I'm sure the Telegraph would give them an opinion column. The telegraph opinion column written by your local samurai landlord The peasants tithing me 10% of their rice harvest every year It's actually good for their moral fortitude It's actually emotional labor on my part

To collect my tiths I don't think you realize the stress that I'm under I'm really mad about the Japanese national health care system Because it won't treat my repetitive stress injury Even burglaring my peasants for not paying taxes Yeah, it's really hard for me to listen to the gripes of like the starving and plague-ridden peasants when I'm feeling like quite overstimulated

by the fact the Japanese are invading the country. You know, like after all, the idea came as like, how could they be worse than the ones that were already here? And obviously, we know what the Japanese army is going to do, but if you don't, we will get there.

And this worked for the Japanese until they're about halfway through the province. That's when the army commander Hanukhom very nearly checked them at Hey Jong-Tong-Jong. Chang. He caught the Japanese by surprise, forcing them back under a hail of arrows, and then the Japanese army retreated into the town's grain warehouse complex. And Han was very convinced of his victory, so he just orders his men to charge in and finish them off, but the Japanese had built a complex network of fighting positions out of sacks of grain to hide behind with their muskets.

From a military standpoint, you don't want to be the one charging a defensive position when they have guns and you don't. You've heard of corpse infrastructure. How about grain infrastructure? Insult injury. They've created a fortified defensive position and also they're flexing on how much food they have. Man, not only do I get to shoot you at the face. I am so not hungry right now. God, what am I do those rice I've got? Shit. Now, with the element of surprise gone, Han's men were charging directly into volleys of musket fire. They broke and ran, and this saves Cato's northern advance. into the mountains, deciding he would simply attack the next day, but Cato doesn't give him time to do it, and he attacks that night. He encircles the Koreans, leaving only a path of escape to funnel them into, the drumroll, please, a nearby swamp.

Oh. Yes, it's time to swamp Max Japanese style. Yeah, we got Korean Shrek tactics. Yeah, Shrek Song Sing Neme. That's your name. Yeah, the Japanese, uh, shatter the Koreans and the dead of the dead of the, the night, forcing them to run into the swamp where they get gunned down. Han survives temporarily because he's captured and goes out real, real bad. After this, Kado and Nabashima split their forces

and begin just a general occupation of Ham Yong. They lay down the foundations of an administration, garrisons are popped up, they create tax rolls, and through a combination of threats of violence and hatred towards the former government, he also enlists several. thousand Koreans into his service. But generally speaking, living under Cato is horrible. He rules through an iron fist. And like I said, we haven't really gone into his personality too much. And there's a lot here. So we kind of have to make the story short. Cato is considered to be very, very conservative and traditional, even by his fellow samurai. Just as one example, this is the era where tea ceremony, theater, poetry,

dancing, and forms of art are being explored by his fellow samurai. Not as much as they would be in the future, but it's becoming not weird to do it. Like, we already talked about, Hideyoshi is doing this as well, but Haydo learns about this and bans them within his domain

and says anybody who gets caught dancing should kill themselves. He's doing full, lose Pete Hegeseth's shit. All my samurai are too low tea. One of the ways I've heard Cato described by a historian

is his ethos boiled down to as a samurai, your job should be grab your sword and die. And he is kind of like the bullet point checklist of all of the things that we talk about and we think about samurai. Whenever I call them,

you know, landlord serial killers, he was pretty well known for killing peasants who so much has looked at him in the eyes, not getting off the road, all the things that we've talked about before and we talk about samurai, except he is incredibly important and therefore has even more power to do that to other people. And there's another element to him and Konishi's rivalries. Their domains are neighbors. They share a border. They fucking hate each other. See, he was born way too early. He would have loved having his own

YouTube channel with AI generated thumbnails that say samurai woke question mark with a big soy face. I mean, you could have accomplished this with woodblock prints, but it might not have the same effect. It would be difficult to do Uber drivers sucked me off

when all of those points of reference don't yet exist. Lower ranking Korean government officials were chucked into dungeons if they refused to work for him. Though he did manage to capture two of King Sanjo's sons, the princes of Korea,

and he kept them close at hand as hostages. Cato never really happy with the idea that the other lords were coming around to that the invasion of China was no longer possible, decided, well, I'll do it on my own. But the thing is, is remember we already talked about,

he's not on the border with China. He's on the border with Manchuria. Now, sometimes the people of Manchuria are known as Manchus, sometimes at the time they're known as Jurchins, but neither of them are Chinese. So he invades Manchuria by crossing the

Tumann River, all on his own, without talking to anybody about it. And he starts burning houses, he starts looting crops, which some people have said the whole point he did it was to be able to forge for more food. But he eventually comes to battle with the Jurchins. And of course, he forces the Koreans that he has conscripted to be effectively a human wave before he sends in his own Japanese soldiers. And he does win. He fights one battle against the Jurchens. But it is terribly costly. It is by far the bloodiest battle any Japanese general Lord Daimyo, whatever you want to call them, had fought during this campaign yet. And after that one battle, he decided, oh, pack it up, boys, goes back over the two men into Korea.

And this marks the most northern point of the Japanese invasion during the entirety of the Imgen war. He fights precisely one battle with the Jurchins and goes back. After this, he settles back into administration. But the calm of Ham Yong, a population of people who were initially, willing to work with them thanks to how bad the Korean government had been, would be broken thanks to just how shitty the Japanese were to them. The samurai and the Ashigaru were doing exactly what you thought that they would do, especially under the command of a man like Kato. Arbitrary violence was an everyday occurrence, and that came with just a constant,

roiling band of looters that the Japanese army turned into. If you had anything they wanted, they could and would just steal it from you. And this is not just something that was happening only in Hamyang. It was happening everywhere. Just remember how fast everything is happening in Korea. It's only been about four and a half, five months at this point since the invasion started, and they're already kind of sort of invading Manchuria. Add on top of that, that's the 1590s. It takes time for word to travel, for things to come together, even something as simple as anger at being invaded and exploited. The shock of being invaded, being displaced, and being conquered was wearing off, so to speak. And soon the people of

Pomeyang began forming their own righteous armies, along with virtually every other region of Korea. Only 90s children will remember, you know, drinking from the hose, joining a righteous army, being invaded by Japan, you know, only real ones recognize real. Yeah, I mean, when I was a kid, we would just occasionally invade Toledo. Japan had hardly conquered or even invaded every province of Korea. Like I said, they kind of just shot north at a straight line. That was never their plan. They assumed they would storm right up the middle, take Seoul, capture, kill King Sanjo, maybe get them to surrender, and then Korea would simply be theirs.

That meant despite their victories, they, in reality, controlled very little of the country they now claim to control. Yeah, and also is like not good because very easily you can be routed out of your straight line of retreat. Yeah, and my zero logistical supply system. Well, as you said, also maps that have are rudimentary at best if they even exist. And the ones that do exist probably do, in fact, look like the map on the back of the child and water world. It's just sort of go this direction and the thing is there. And they're just simply color-coded with no roads or anything on them. They look sick as fuck, though.

They probably make great tattoos if you have no idea what they say. Oh, fuck yeah. The rest of it became free territory for the Korean army and the righteous army to simply move around in. Most of these righteous armies formed around the, upper class, landlords, scholars, former government administrators, because they had the money to buy weapons and pay people, but not all of them. Enter Kwok J.U. He was an upper classman, or at least he would have been. He probably would have been a civil servant like thousands of other people, but when he took his essay portion of the civil service exam, he wrote a hypercritical paper on the king and

the Korean government, so he didn't get a job. I too remember being an ultra-woke 21 year old in college. Instead of getting that sweet government gig that everybody dreamed to get, he simply vanishes from history for a bit until the war starts. Then he reemerges, rallying civilians to fight alongside him in Kyeongsang, dishing out his wealth to pay people, pay for weapons, and of course, thanks to his classical education and intelligence, he had a lot of charisma. He could give a rousing speech or two.

But really what galvanized people to him was what else? but insane militant spiritualism Oh hell yes Please tell me about These esoteric shit He led his band of guerrillas

While wearing a red silk robe Why was it red How was it red Well It was Died in the menstrual blood Of young girls Because he claimed it gave him

Magical Energy Powers That could deflect Japanese bullets I presume this is not the case He said it was Uh Already in this series we've had Samurai

Cat Williams, the denim samurai and now you're getting run up upon by, you know, the Korean leader iceberg slim. This isn't even the first time we've had a period blood wizard general involved in this show. Literally the entirety of the Boxer Rebellion was about this. They believe they

could fly because of period. There's a joke in sort of an apocryphal thing in a diocese novel. He's a Chinese French novelist about how the Japanese basically were jealous of Chinese's technological superiority and sent spies, and someone stole the sort of white blanket proof at the consummation of a marriage that had blood, you know, on it from basically from someone's

hymen breaking and bleeding. And they're like, yep, this must be their flag. We're going to steal their flag and make it our own. And hence the Japanese flag. And it's just like a diss on the Japanese. And I was just like, this is an eternally recurring thing, man. Jeez. And this earned him the nickname the Redcoat General and my eternal disgust. That's gross. Yeah, it's really gross. It's really nasty. The period blood wizard general was incredibly successful, though. He never met the Japanese in open battle. He stuck to ambushes. He raided warehouses. Or as one story goes, and there are a fucking lot of them about Kwok Jay-U. Or as one story goes, and there are a fucking lot of them about Kwok Jayu. He built a kind of improvised explosive device or IED for those with brain injuries for the Japanese to step on. But they weren't bombs. They were boxes full of hornets. No, man.

I love having to fight on the Crash Bandicoot battlefield. Yeah, I was going to go in a different direction. It's like, yeah, we've got the period blood robe wearing Wizard General. And he's like, but the spirit of Kevin McAllister from the first home alone has possessed him. Actually, he's come back through time. He didn't know of Home Alone or the McAllenters or the wet bandits. But yet the spirit was the same. hot door knobs boxes full of bees.

Maybe Kevin McAllister was actually studying Korean history, and that's how he set up traps for the wet bandits. Maybe. Maybe that's why he went up in the attic. He's like, fine, you can punish me and make me sleep in the attic as punishment. I'm going to read all these treatises and how to do fucked up booby traps in the spirit of Kwok J.U. Kevin McAllister is a very, very young savant expert in Confucianism. Nobody asked Kevin McAllister how he dyed his clothes. some of these righteous armies joined forces temporarily.

Sometimes they joined forces alongside government troops and large battles. And most of the time, these volunteers showed themselves way more motivated than their government counterparts and oftentimes ignored orders to retreat, even when they were ordered to. This collection of volunteers, warrior monks, militant period cultists, and government soldiers eventually launched an attack on Chongju, armed mostly with farm tools. If you remember the Japanese had taken Chongju a couple episodes ago, this would cut the Japanese advance in half and sever an easy connection between their northern advances in Seoul.

The Japanese, not expecting any kind of attack at all, barely had the town garrisoned. So when a force of Japanese soldiers dressed only in loincloths was sent out to forage for food were butchered, the rest of the garrison simply bailed, abandoned the town, and let it fall to the Koreans. Though not all of these joint operations between the various factions of righteous and state armies went so smoothly.

A similar attack on the town of Qumsan broke down when a faction of civilian volunteers attacked without waiting for the warrior monks that were supposed to be supporting them. This is despite the fact that the first detachment of civilian volunteers only had 700 men and the town of Qumsan was garrisoned by several thousand Japanese soldiers. The Japanese didn't even wait for them to attack the town. They simply opened the gates, marched out and killed them. It's frustrating because when we, we know obviously warrior monks is going to be, you know,

Confucian Buddhist monks, you know, probably like whatever sort of training they've done. I don't know if they did martial arts or not. I don't know how they train with weapons, but clearly they are some kind of a fighting force. And yet that combination of words in our minds implies like, oh, you had to wait on the warrior monks because they're going to show up and do fucking Hadookins at them or something like that. We always think like, yeah, there's this mental image of like, no, they're absolutely going to know some kind of magic powers. I realize it's not the case.

That's actually kind of a cultural assumption that's just based on, you know, not knowing a ton about it. Well, we don't know that they're not magic. Well, yeah, we don't know. We don't know if they were doing, you know, sort of, yeah, like they were the, the inspiration for some of the moves that Ryu and Ken can do in Street Fighter. Like, maybe that's real. Maybe they can do Hadookin and Shuru Yucan and stuff like that. Magic aside, if you have the title Warrior Blank, you probably want to wait for him. you know, I don't know what

word you can put after Warrior to make them not sound intimidating and motivating. But in this case, it's the original thing. It's a genuine article because people would be like, oh yeah, Stanley McChrystal is a warrior market. It's like, no, he just has body dysmorphia runs 14 miles a day.

Like, different thing entirely. If you're not from this region, everything else is just sparkling asshole. And despite the factional setbacks like that one, the righteous armies were taking towns from the Japanese all over Korea. Bigger still, I'd argue, they were fighting off the Japanese in other places, like at the siege of Chinju, west of their stronghold in

Busan, where 3,800 Koreans, a mix of government soldiers and civilians, all under the command of Kim Simun, fought off a Japanese assault. Bigger still was that this was the first deployment of Korean manufactured copies of Japanese muskets. The Japanese walked up thinking the Koreans would collapse as they had elsewhere at the first volley of gunfire. Instead, him to the sick beats of a flute player, fought off the Japanese siege towers and samurai and Ashigaro as they tried to scramble up ladders. And the Japanese were also surprised who find themselves getting shot at with guns. Sort of like, is this allowed? You're cheating. They're not supposed to have. They're supposed to have arrows and not guns. A lot of peacocks, perhaps, but not riflemen. You're not supposed to steal

our shit. That's unfair. Yeah, like, look, man, when you invade a country with a hundred thousand dudes. You're just a giant walking loot drop waiting to happen. But it also kind of implies they're like, oh, the creates could never conceive of pointing a thing at a thing and pulling a trigger. It's like, it's not that difficult of a concept to figure out unless you said, this is multiple months since the invasion has begun. So it's like, there's been some finding out and learning, discovering, you know, opening your imagination to the possibilities of what guns can do. Opening my third eye to get shot with a musket. Yeah, you basically have unintentionally created like firearm reading rainbow for the.

the Koreans. The Koreans fired captured muskets and bows. They dropped rocks, large sharpened spears of iron, buckets of boiling water, and burning bundles of straw down on the Japanese. More and more groups of volunteers arrived to support the town as the siege wore on. Civilians attack the Japanese. They beat drums and lit torches at night to try to convince them that thousands more men were gathering.

And then they eventually did. On the last day of the siege, five days into the battle, Kim was shot in the head and died, but the Japanese pulled back a short time later. As a result of losing their hold on the bits of Korea that they controlled, as well with an upswell of popular resistance, the Japanese soldiers and their warlords tossed out Hideyoshi's order to treat the Koreans fairly, as much as they ever had. And they simply began butchering almost anyone that could get their hands on as a form of revenge.

Of course, this only drove more and more Koreans into the waiting hands of the righteous armies to support their structures. Because like in virtually every war, the vast majority of the population is going to try to keep their heads down and just keep living until you force them to the point that they just can't do that anymore. That brings us back to the war at sea. Yi Sunsen had been building his navy. We talked about this before.

He had ordered a lot of ships to be restored and build new ones. And finally those ships were getting finished. But I don't mean it to sound like he suddenly had 500, 600 ships or anything. He still only had 166 warships under his command, making him outnumbered by about a thousand or so. Before this, Juan Cune, his political rival, said that they needed to attack Pusan. Obviously, the main beachhead and artery of the Japanese war effort. And Yisan said told him that the idea was completely ridiculous. They didn't have the ships, the men, anything to do it.

But in the four months since, they had one lopsided victory after another, and his fleet had only grown in strength. So in September, Yi decided to pull the trigger on attacking Pusan. Yishun Sen, Wan Kuhn and Yi Oki amassed their forces and pulled into a spot on the Naktong River, short way away from Pusan on October 4th. Against them were 500 ships. The Japanese were anchored into the harbor and three clusters close to shore. The Koreans began their attack, charging through the rough seas and obliterating 20 smaller Japanese ships that were left as a guard at the opening of the harbor.

As the Koreans pulled into the Pusan Harbor, they watched the Japanese sailors do what they've done a million times before at this point, abandon their fleet and run inland to man fortifications. Normally the Koreans wanted to avoid these things, but they attacked anyway. The Japanese ships were torn to pieces as the Japanese in their defense at the Harbor Heights made it rain with muskets and captured cannons. The Korean ships had nowhere to escape the incoming grounds, but they really didn't need to. Their armor withstood the onslaught and did nothing to slow them down as they destroyed the Japanese fleet that was still still at anchor. By the time the Koreans pulled back as the sun began to set, a quarter of the Japanese

ships were destroyed, and the Koreans had only lost six men. After the Battle of Pusan, any hope that the Japanese head of securing the Yellow Sea for their campaign was dead. But that did little to change the immediate problems facing Korea on land. China, despite promising help in sending a few thousand men so far, could still in reality do very little. The Ordos rebellion was still burning through northern China. The wanly emperor knew this, but also knew he couldn't wait for everything to shake out before sending help to Korea. The Jurchans in Manchuria were offering Korea help as well, because they had long wanted to conquer parts of Korea and clearly saw this as an opening. So the emperor knew that he had to act before they swept in. He was getting desperate.

So he offered tons of silver and a peerage to any man who could respond to Korea's plea for help and bring peace. Enter the first of what will be a rogue's gallery of bullshitters moving forward in this series. I feel like this is an occupation, a vocation, if you will, that we can all identify with. Oh, for sure. We can all see ourselves in the masters of the arts of bullshitting, the flim flam men, the soothsayers, perhaps. I will say from this part to the end of the series, we have more flim flam men in a series than we ever have before. I don't want to give up too much, but going forward, every bit of diplomacy between China and Japan is going to be based on a collection of two people both lying to each other,

and hoping it all just works out in the end. Enter Shen Waijing. Nobody is entirely sure where Shen came from or who he was. He was sometimes called an adventurer, sometimes a merchant, sometimes a former pirate who had spent time with the Waco Pirates of Japan. Yeah, there's very few people that have ever been described as an adventurer who turn out good. Yeah, adventure also most of the time does just mean pirate. But when he shows up to present himself to the imperial court, he's decked out like a noble, he speaks like one, he tells of his ability to lead men, and of course, he's charismatic. Using this imperial speech check, he explains the court that he knows Japan, he speaks Japanese, and he could easily negotiate with the invaders. The court, having no other real options, immediately promote him to the rank of commander and dispatch him to Korea.

And guys, I probably don't have to tell you, he does not speak Japanese at all. Ah, yeah. What happens next is, let's call it, an appereteep of bullshitting, because there's going to be a lot more coming. Shen meets with King Sanjo. He delivers a ton of silver and promises nearly one million Chinese soldiers that will march over the border shortly.

Now, this is something that A, does not exist at all, and B, no way believes, not even the Koreans who are facing their own personal version of the apocalypse. Whenever he's asked directly, when the Chinese army will actually come to Korea, he just figures out ways around it.

At one point, he says, you don't understand. The generals must wait for the portents of heaven to be favorable. Yeah, but how'd you argue with that? That is so incredibly eloquent, but completely meaningless in a way that only confusionism can monster. It's kind of like a deus low volt, but sort of in reverse, like deus low vault as an excuse to not do anything.

But God doesn't really will it right now, man. We don't really have the will of heaven at the moment. We may be tomorrow, you know. Yeah. In the meantime, I mean, y'all got anything alcoholic I can drink? it might clarify my contacts with the other spirit realms, you know? Heavenly procrastination. After the meeting, Shen goes south, and he meets the Japanese under a flag of truce,

where he was welcomed into Pyongyang for talks with Konishi. And like with the Chinese court, he impresses the collection of Japanese lords. Though, like I said, he doesn't speak Japanese. He has to communicate like they have multiple times by now, which is just writing Chinese characters on paper and handing them back and forth. I know people who've done this in real life in the modern day. Japanese and Korean people who can communicate this way. It's wild, but yeah, fair enough.

In the meeting, Konishi simply explained that they didn't want war, but rather good relations with the Chinese and Koreans, but the Koreans had turned on them and insulted them, which led to the war. You see, Hideyoshi just wants to trade and open embassies with China, something that totally would have happened if the Koreans hadn't gotten in the way. This is how the war would be explained by the Japanese. Japanese moving forward, despite the fact, going back to our very first episode, the Chinese are fully aware Japan has always wanted to invade China.

Thanks to the Ryukyu kingdom. They told them everything. Yeah, you versus the Kashi tells you not to worry about. Now, Shen knows that he only needs some kind of agreement to get the bounty offered by the emperor. So he shrugs and says, yeah, sure, sounds legit to me. and he comes up with the idea of like, what about a ceasefire?

And then during that ceasefire, we can hash out a permanent peace. Because a ceasefire is peace, Shan assumes that after they shake hands of the ceasefire, he's going to go back to China, he's going to be made a noble, get a sack full of coins or whatever, and that's it.

So that's exactly what he does. And the Koreans are not involved in these talks at all, but because Shen is an official officer of the Chinese court with the rank of commander, they have no choice but to follow his orders. then Shen goes all the way back to China he's expecting to be made a wealthy noble upon arrival but by the time he gets there

China no longer gives a shit about his negotiations at all I'm just to roll it back a second rode out to meet the Japanese under a flag of truce that is just like a fucking Warren Zeevan lyric it's been rolling around in my head for the past three minutes the reason why China has abandoned this is because the Ordo's campaign was all but over and 40,000 men under the commander Lee Roussong

had been freed from the fighting and had been ordered to go to Korea as fast as possible. I will say really quickly, Tom, if you change the lyrics slightly, you could send courtier's guns and money and that song does in fact describe the entirety of this conflict. Cortes guns and money! I mean, in this situation,

he saw a werewolf would have menu in his hand. God damn. At this point, Shen is ordered to turn right back around, go back to Pyongyang and tell the Japanese the negotiations were over until they pulled back to Pusan. By January 1593, the Chinese army had officially reached the Korean border, though this Chinese army was, let's just say, a perfect example of all the things wrong with the Chinese army at this point in time. Lee would command in the field, but he didn't have the freedom of command.

He answered directly to his boss, a civilian administrator, minister of war, Song Yin Chang. However, Song Yin Chang would never cross the Chinese border, so they'd have to play like a game of telephone. The soldiers under him wore chain mail, carried swords, spears, and bows. There were some cavalry. But as far as artillery went, there's only some light artillery units. Probably the most widely used piece was that highly dangerous and very ever. of date faux-lang-chi cannon that we've already talked about. They did have some larger cannons, but these were old.

They weighed several hundred kilos and would not be very useful in the Korean terrain. This army was also not made up of conscripts. They were a little busy. Also, they couldn't really get enough of them to show up to work. Instead, since it was put together quickly to put down the Ordos rebellion, it meant the ranks were almost entirely mercenaries, gangs of bandits. and the desperate, or failing that, someone who needed food. And the reason why these kind of people join the military is obviously to loot,

but it was standing policy in the Chinese army to pay a commission per head, a soldier collected in battle. So you can make a fat sack by collecting heads. This will certainly not go badly for anyone around this army. I love it when human remains, butcher human remains become a kind of ad hoc current. It always goes well. It always leads to positive outcomes. People never look back and say,

damn, that was a pretty fucked up situation. I've never heard of anyone looking at that and say, I think it was a bad idea. This is not a form of currency that I can forge by collecting heads that aren't Japanese. God damn, these skulls are so fungible. Man, sharpening these swords basically is 16th century Bitcoin mining. By this point, the defeats at sea, the boiling rage of the righteous armies and the national army

that was finally getting its shit together, the total collapse of what existed as a logistical system, and just the realities of war had been catastrophic for the Japanese. They had, for all intents and purposes, lost control of Korea, as the people made themselves ungovernable and unwilling to wait their turn

to get butchered by some dickhead samurai. The growing pressure forced the Japanese to abandon some places and give up trying to take others to try and hold the lone artery that they had that went straight north, from Busan to keep places like Pyongyang and Seoul. Things were so dire that Kato-Kiyomaso was ordered to abandon his holdings in the north and travel back south, and he didn't even bother to argue too much about it. At this point, at least 150,000 Japanese

soldiers had been deployed to Korea, and through a combination of combat losses, which were never very large in a single battle, but were rapidly picking up, sickness, exposure during the very, very, very, very bad Korean winter and hunger, up to one third of them were dead. Konishi's army still huddled in Pyongyang had lost 65% of its men. Of course, the Koreans had suffered incalculably worse, and we will cover that later, but I'm just trying to lay things out for how Pyongyang looks because that's going to be important in a little bit. We should probably touch on that growing problem of hunger as well.

It's now the winter of 1593, and up to that point, thanks to the victories of Yisun Sin, Japan had been depending on Korean food stores to supply their army or forging, which you really can't do in the winter anyway. That would have been the previous year's harvest. And thanks to their invasion, it meant that nobody was going to the fields and planting and there would be nothing to harvest. Yeah, sometimes reaping what you sow is good when what you're sewing is like grains, berries, etc. Me reaping. Oh, my back kind of hurts. Me sewing.

This rules. I think you got it backwards, Joe. Fuck. Me sewing. Ah, it's work. Me reaping. Oh, I see why people do this. Eating is good.

And in a lot of places, you know, the land had just been destroyed. Thanks to looting, war-adjacent destruction, people being displaced away from the land that they might be able to plant on. They'd eaten through those supplies had nothing to replace them.

Forging parties were being torn apart by bands of guerrillas. And virtually nothing was making it over from Japan. I realize it's guerrillas as in guerrilla warfare as an insurgents, but foraging bands are being torn apart by parties of guerrillas sounds like an entirely different problem. It's the gorilla that knows sign language saying death to the Japanese. Coco, the talking egg has become a Korean supremacist. Coco says topple the shogunate. Coco want burk and bag.

Coco want Japanese out of Korea. Coco has two things that used to say. Number one, jealousy professor. number two, docto is Korean. I was just about to say that. Yeah, Coco could hang out with the peacock in the King's Chambers. Like, this is my collection of weird animals that somehow could talk to me. This meant that Japan didn't have the manpower to complete their campaign.

Couldn't ask for reinforcements because even if they got there, they couldn't feed them, and lacked any ability to sea lift the amount of food they would need to support them and that were already there. to hold on to what they still had. All of this, despite not losing a single major land battle. As the brutal winner continued to make everybody's lives worse, the Chinese crossed the border and began marching

towards Pyongyang, picking up more soldiers from the Korean army, as well as various righteous armies along the way, including warrior monks, led personally by their 80-year-old master, Hugh Zhang. Hugh Zhang. I am thinking now that guerrillas

are actually the perfect Confucian animal because they embody both the strength of the will and the body but the peace and stillness of the mind. So like, yes, we should release guerrillas into the wilds of Korea to defend it from the encroaching push

of, I suppose, at present, North Korea, but also like in 1590s of the Japanese. So what you're saying is like this in the time frame we're talking about. You have a, you have a gorilla sit down,

to take the civil service exam and it just starts doing that that gorilla dance in a circle move and it's just like ah well done it's funny how you've happened upon a comparison that basically makes sense with the cut with the jokes we've made so far it also sounds like the most racist thing a Japanese person has ever said about Koreans oh they're all a bunch of fucking primates

cocoa wants Birkenbag not because of what Birkenbag represents in culture but for the physical value of a receptacle to hold things that's deep cocoa it's more statement on the sort of the ineffable oneness of the human experience that even if an object has does have no value to a gorilla, the fact

that one's willing to part with said object to gorilla shows that one is actually present in the world because they understand you know that the equality, the way you could call it the sort of the equal worth of the primate and also because the primate might smash the fucking shit out of you and break your back because it wants your bag.

So yeah, Coco does not resent jealousy professor for the fact that jealousy professor is jealous. instead Coco appreciates that Coco has what jealousy professor wants. So we've established Coco fusionism. Correct. I would say also that quite frankly, if you're talking about, you know, someone who has the ability to crush you and will crush you,

but also like has a kind of spiritual dimension in terms of how they perceive things, what you have also just described as not too far off ghost dog the way of the samurai. Yeah. That all comes back to ghost dog. Man, sometimes I think about when someone hits play on one of these episodes, like, what the fuck do they expect is going to happen over the course of 90 minutes? We're the only military podcasts out there, unfortunately. Other people have tried, but they never succeed. But someday, maybe someone will have one that's a completely straight-laced history podcast and the people who want that will get this instead.

For the time being, until humanity can advance, this is all you've got. And if you do try to create a military history podcast, it's not this one. I will plant an IED made of Hornets for you. Me and Coco will fuck your shit up. We have a lot of primates who find spiritual calm by listening to the show. They will not appreciate your efforts. You won't like it if you ruin their time. The army eventually grows to be about 58,000 men.

The 15,000 or so Japanese held up in Pyongyang have no idea this is coming for them. To reinforce that, Lee sends forward a fake emissary to tell Konishi that another delegation led by Shen was on its way for further negotiations. Konishi was so happy to hear about this as a way out of this absolute cluster fuck. He sends out an official welcoming party to greet Shen, who he thinks is coming. Only three of these guys survive and make it back to Pyongyang to tell Konishi that there was actually tens of thousands of soldiers marching for them, and they just slaughtered all of our friends. The army reaches the outskirts of Pyongyang in the beginning of February.

On the 8th, the Koreans and the Chinese moved in on all of the gates, minus the east one, because it's on the river's edge. Their cannons start shooting at the gates. Archers launch fire arrows into the city to set it a blaze. They attack the walls throwing up ladders and trying to scale them, but their pushes are all thrown back. Lee is worried that his army is losing its nerve. So he picks a random retreating man,

cuts off his head and rides around the battlefield on a horseback, holding it up for everybody to see, while also offering a cash bounty for the first man over the walls. Benefits packages are important. Yeah, they had a different approach to family readiness groups back then. You've heard of the Montgomery GI Bill. This is the version of that that if you don't go to college,

the VA comes and cuts your head off. Slowly, this army fought their way up the walls while cannons blew open one of the city gates. The perimeter broken, the Japanese fall back to their final position, which is very well prepared. It's logs reinforced with earthworks on the other side of a series of barricades

within the walls of Pyongyang. So as they funnel in through the gate, they have to make it through this maze of barricades they build, all while getting shot at, and then have to assault a fortified position in this corner of Pyongyang's walls. And Lee throws his men in there. They get shot to hell, and he pulls them back. Now, Lee runs into a problem here. He knows he has the manpower to kick the Japanese out. He has tens of thousands of men. But their position inside the city is so good, he would lose thousands of his men in the process, and it just kind of wasn't worth it. So he sends a

letter to Konishi saying, look, I can kill you. But what if I just let you leave the city instead? Temporary ceasefire pack your shit and get out. Now, the Koreans are once again, not consulted about any of this. I really should have to point this out at this point, but the Chinese are not talking to the Koreans at any point when it comes to making deals with the Japanese. They simply make whatever deal and then tell the Koreans how it is and then tell them to shut the fuck up when they get mad about it. So, for anyone listening a little bit about me, one of my favorite things to watch on YouTube is speculative battle reenactments. So, like, one of them that I watched recently was the Battle of Helms Deep. Oh, hell yeah.

Fought between the forces of Saro Man and, I think it was like several regiments of like Australian special forces. I mean, it's kind of a difficult question, which side is going to conduct more war crimes? I mean, Australians do have their war crime, Uriqui, who is going to go to prison very soon. Fingers crossed. But I'm thinking of like, okay, we have all the battlements of Pyongyang being held by the Japanese. They're retreating back. The fortifications are

quite strong. How many crackheads do I need to tell that the center of the fortress is, or the center of the city is completely made of copper? You've heard of the shining beacon on the hill. That's the shine. It's the copper.

I should point out that there are some conflicting stories about how this exactly unfolds. The Korean version of it is Konishi sends him a letter, promising a huge payment to Li if he lets his army go. This version became very popular within Korean history, thanks to just how corrupt their officials and Chinese officials were that, and other things we'll talk about in the future, where everybody was just like, oh, Lee Rusong got paid off to let the Japanese go. There's really no evidence for that, but whatever the cases, Konishi knew his back was against the wall, and he could only fight to the death

but not win. And, you know, there's no point of doing that. He had already lost thousands of men in the previous days fighting. He had the gunpowder to hold out a few days, but the situation was impossible. So he accepts Lee's offer, he abandons his wounded, and leads his army across the frozen Tejong River back towards Seoul. What followed is not exactly what you could consider a victory for the Koreans. For one, Lee Roussong takes all of the credit, which I'm sure we also coming. But that's hardly notable considering what happens next. As was custom, the Chinese counted the enemy killed via how many heads they took. And this isn't just the Chinese in this conflict. This is literally every side of this conflict. But like I already pointed out, the soldiers

also got paid per head. This inevitably leads to horrible crimes against humanity. Chinese soldiers begin butchering Japanese wounded right alongside the Korean civilians that are still in the city, eventually claiming they killed 20,000 Japanese soldiers and letters back to the Minister of war so they could collect the bounty. But that would have been more soldiers than Konishi had altogether. Furthermore, Konishi in his own writings, said he lost about 1,500 men defending Pyongyang, and you can do the war crime math in your head that fills in that gap to make up 20,000. Konishi led his men into the winter and Lee just let him, refusing demands from the Koreans to run him down in the open. This led to Koreans to believe again that Lee had taken a bribe from

his Japanese counterpart. But in reality, it's because Lee's own situation was quite bad. It's fucking February in Korea, for starters. It's colder than any kind of cold that any of these guys have experienced before. I was only in South Korea in that post-climate change era. This is pre-industrial revolution. I can tell you, it's fucking freezing. And we had, yeah, polypro winter weather gear. They did not. Yeah, they're literally wearing chain mail that's freezing to them. It is miserable. They have eaten through their food supply. But after a few days, the Chinese marched out and into K-Song, which had been abandoned by the Japanese. By mid-February, they're less than 50 kilometers away from Seoul.

And while the Japanese were not putting up a fight between Pyongyang and Seoul, that was not the choice of all the Japanese warlords, as I'm sure you imagine. Kobayakawa Takakajai had been in charge of Kaysong and refused to withdraw until Otani Yututsutsugu, one of the counselors Hideyoshi had sent to Korea to try to get a handle on things, personally visited him and told him, Yo, the Tyco wants you to fucking leave. But then, he stopped 15 kilometers outside of Seoul before once again refusing, saying they needed to stop retreating and kill the enemy.

Otani once again had to go out and meet him, promising that he'd be put in command of the defense of Seoul if he just stopped being an asshole and came into the city. It was now the end of February, and Lee Roussong thought that the Japanese must be demoralized. They're defeated, they're on their last legs. So he moves his army towards Piochje, a final rest stop between his army and Seoul. His forward scouts came across a small detachment of Japanese soldiers and ran them over, but they claimed that they must be a smaller part of a larger hole.

So Lee urges them forward. He rides with them, only a thousand cavalrymen, and Lee catches sight of some Japanese fleeing into the distance, and they follow them, eventually, of course, being led into a narrow valley. Lee Roussang had fallen for a trap. We've talked about about a thousand times on this show, and this is how the beginning of the legendary battle of Biaq Jeguan begins. Takehage stood at the head of an army of 41,000 men and was waiting for him.

This caught Lee in the open and outnumbered under a hail of musket balls. He tried to pull back, but Takakaj, seeing he had them caught in his trap, immediately ordered a charge. Lee Rusang is very nearly killed at the opening stage of this charge, but is only saved because one of his officers does those classic secret service diving in slow motion things in front of him and takes a spear that was meant for him.

Lee's sub-commander, Yang Wan, sees what's happening and orders his men into the battle at a dead sprint to catch up with his idiot boss. Soon 60,000 men are packed into this narrow valley. And since the Japanese charge was already ordered, it took their muskets out of the equation. Instead, we're getting a clash of swords, spears, and whatever the hell else someone managed to drag with them into the battle.

The reserve Chinese cavalry is ordered in, all while the valley floor is rapidly being churned into this mess of mud by tens of thousands of feet, something made worse by recent rains. The press of bodies, the shitty terrain, eventually forces all of the cavalry from both sides that get off their horses. So now you got horses running around in the middle of all of this as well. The thing is, at a distance, the Japanese forces were the superior army. thanks to their muskets in training.

But up close, they were also the superior army. After all, this is one of the reasons why you have a sword-wielding warrior cast running everything. This is what they were made for. Their swords are better. They're better made. Their armor is better. Their training is better. They have a standing army.

Adding to that, like we said, Lee's army is mostly just enlisted bandits and people who were hungry. They're not the hard, dead-eyed fuckers you need to stand toe to toe with the samurai-led army for too long. Mm-hmm. And after two hours of slaughter, the Chinese army begins to fall back. This is a problem, because now there's distance, opening up for their muskets to enter the fight again. They begin dumping fire into the Chinese army, leading to a withdrawal that lasts throughout

the night. In his dispatches to the Koreans, Lee does everything he can to make his defeat sound more like a minor setback. He says, well, you know, I haven't lost many men, but the best count I could find was at least 6,000. He claims only a few hundred. Fuck, hell. The train was also no good for continued campaigning, he wrote, and they should wait until spring, which is certainly true. You probably shouldn't be campaigning in Korea in

fucking February. Afterwards, his army pulls all the way back to Pyongyang. However, in his dispatches to China, he is much more open, saying that under no circumstances is he going to attack Seoul. He claims there's 200,000 Japanese in the city, which there wasn't. That's more than there are in the entire country of Korea at this point. He says it's impossible for him to continue. And he does point out some very real problems.

For example, he'd been driving his army hard in the middle of winter. Men were getting sick. Frostbitten. Supplies were running low. And he was also injured after being thrown off of his horse. Instead of offering a way forward, asking for reinforcements, things that we'd expect an army commander to do. He simply asked to be replaced. Job's too hard. Sorry. I need to take some time off. I'm experiencing burnout.

Yeah, we've all been. I'm requesting imperial Chinese mental health leave. You know, it's pretty clear he got a taste of war with the Japanese, both in the confines of Pyongyang and in open battle and decided, you know what? This shit sucks. No thank you. But he would not be replaced. Meanwhile, Seoul had been transformed into a nightmare. After word began to spread about the approaching army, Koreans within the city began setting buildings on fire, hoping to aid whatever liberation force was coming for them. But as we know, they didn't come. As a response, the Japanese murdered every single man within the city they could find. Anyone who survived, dressed as a woman to try to get out of the walls, just hid. They burned huge swaths of the city in revenge.

Like, for example, some of the damage that they did to Seoul would not be undone for 270 years. Fuck. As a result, almost anybody who could, mostly women and children, fled the city, almost completely depopulating it other than the Japanese garrison. The Japanese lords inside began to argue if it was even worth staying in the city, fully knowing the Chinese were coming back. The usual suspects like Kato and Takakaji insisted that they stay in the city, they do their duty, and they fight to the fucking death. Konishi doesn't think that's worth it at all. But Konishi also accepted that pulling all the way back to Busan

meant marching through the mountains that they really didn't control, exposing them to hundreds of kilometers of ambushes. But by staying, it also meant that they had to continue operational pressure. They had to go out of the city and keep fighting, whether it might be righteous armies or attacking government positions to stabilize their position in Seoul. As the spring thaw

began, the biggest threat to the Japanese in Seoul was the fortress of Hengju. About 10 kilometers away and fortress was probably a bit of a strong word for it. Civilian administrator turned army commander Kwan Yol, who will become a main character moving forward at this point, had moved into the area when Li Rousong

had, but Kuan Yol had never left. He's joined by bands of warrior monks, more civilian volunteers, a couple bands of government soldiers who fall in with them. Kwan leads is made into a mostly collapsed wooden fort near Hengju and begins repairing it. It's an incredibly defensible position. It has a steep drop-off onto the Han River, and the only way to attack it was from the north from the low ground. It's as good as it's going to get. On March 14th, the Japanese marked out of Seoul to the sick beats of drummers heading right for Heng Jew. This, it turned out, was Kwan's entire strategy. He had been conducting hit-run attacks up to this

point and was operating under the idea that under no circumstances, should they ever fight the Japanese in an open battle. He thought if we're ever going to fight a large Japanese army, it has to be at a position of our choice and a fortified place that they would have to attack us in. And he was right. The Japanese, possibly up to 30,000 soldiers closed in the fortress, manned only by about 3,000 Koreans, a mix of all of armed Korean society at this point. The Japanese come under a hail of arrow fire from Korean bows, gunpowder arrows from fire wagons, the occasional cannonball. The Koreans also built something I'll simply call the device.

It was a water wheel powered catapult. Fuck yes, we're going back to the panjandrum. So effectively, the way I had to, it described to me. It is a perpetually firing catapult powered by this water wheel. So all the cranes had to do was drop another load

of rocks or whatever into it. It was an automatic catapult and fire every minute or so. They had to keep reloading it. I'm going to have to look something because I'm trying to conceptualize this in my mind and I'm like, is it like it fires, then the water wheel helps

reload the tension and then it fires again? Yeah. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, I get it now. It fucking rules. The Japanese try to counter this by loading musketeers into big siege towers that could fire over the walls. But then the Koreans just unloaded firewagons into them, which we haven't talked about firewagons in a couple episodes, but it's firing like a hundred gunpowder powered arrows all at once out of a box. Hell yeah. It's like, sorry, we've got, we've basically got the entire power plant behind the kebler.

elves at General Mills and they're loading up this gigantic cataple. But the Japanese, like, don't worry, we'll put dudes on stilts with guns that'll definitely solve it. This is starting to get closer and closer to like, I don't know, like drawing upon the spirit of Mad Max Fury Road. A little bit. It's going to get more like that as we go on. After four charges, the Japanese finally broke through the initial barricades up on the hill and made it to the fort's walls, where they agreed with even more fire coming down on their heads. Other Koreans, monks, soldiers, civilians, volunteers, rushed out in a countercharge. As they fought in hand-to-hand combat, the Koreans deployed, according to the book of

corrections, reflections on the national crisis during the Japanese invasion of Korea, what amounted to be tactical pocket sand. So, bear with me here. Okay. They would rush forward, one hand on a sword, the other hand in a pocket. Then they would grab a handful of ashes and chuck them directly into the Japanese eyes, before cutting them down. Pocket sand.

Christ. I want to sit in into the combat meeting where they're like, guys, I have an idea. Half our city's already burned down. Let's put some of those ashes in a pouch.

It's like we got a lot of ashes. Acquiring ashes is not really a concern of ours at this point. So, yeah, I think we've got that part of the logistics train set up. We just need to deploy them. That's the one part of the logistical system that has not failed is the never,

supply of ash. The ash is typically available in great quantities. We are green on ash. The Japanese were pushed back thanks to tactical pocket sand, only to charge again and again for hours. Eventually the Koreans began to run out of arrows. They ran out of pocket sand. They ran out of blocks.

They ran out of boiling water. They ran out of ammo for their fire wagons. But then, and it moved straight out of like a shlocky Netflix war drama, the Korean Navy just pulls up down the Han River full with supplies and just unloads thousands of arrows and everything else, allowing the defense to continue until sundown when the Japanese finally gave up after nine attempts. The Japanese suffered their largest defeat on land to the Koreans of the war thus far, losing maybe up to 10,000 dead and wounded. And a lot of those wounded are going to die. But by

spring, a full-on famine had gripped Korea. The men of the Japanese army, having survived by far the coldest winter any of them had ever experienced, got zero reprieved by its end. The Japanese had maybe three months worth of food, squirled away in Seoul for its 53,000 men garrison there. And it is worse in other places in the smaller garrisons. But that's three months if they remained on a strict, just above starvation level ration, right? And most importantly for this to continue, they couldn't, you know, say, lose their entire food stock to a group of Korean guerrillas when they infiltrated the city and burned it to the ground in Yang Song, which is exactly what happened. I'm kind of envisioning a sort of like a junior NCO training thing

for the Koreans where in the U.S. Army, we had lace reports like liquid ammunition casualties and equipment, but they have liquid ammunition ashes, casualty and equipment. You got to make sure that the ash supplies check, but at a certain point, like, it's always green for some reason. It's an inspectable item walking down the ranks. Let me see your pocket sand soldier. Yeah, exactly. Pocketful of ash is an inspectable item. If that wasn't bad enough,

Seoul was turning into little more than a plague-infested hellhole. There were possibly thousands of dead bodies, both humans and livestock, laying all over. And the Japanese never bothered to bury them, burn them, or even throw them out of the city. We don't know exactly what disease was sweeping through the ranks because chroniclers of the day simply call it a pestilence. with a Japanese monk describing it as, quote,

men were attacked with fever and died. Thank you Japan's RFK Jr. I mean, like, when you think about it, Japan has really done a generation run post-World War II with the help of the US of like accumulating soft power, because pre, you know, anime, Japan was an evil in the East. I mean, you made the comment, not even making a joke here, you made the comment that some of the damage wouldn't be repaired for 270 years. and the thought crossed my mind that we're talking about the very tail end of the 16th century,

so right up near to the year of 1600. So we're saying in the 1870s or so is when this was repaired, which is only about 40 years before the Japanese fucking annex Korea and basically do it again. Korea was just like, we back up and Japan's went, not so fast. Yeah, it's grim. It's really, really grim what they did. And, like, you know, there's a whole length of thing that you can go into. But yeah, the thought crossed my mind.

And also bringing it back to the sort of joking tone, part of me is like, So what you're saying is the only way you can really describe the pestilential state of soul at this moment is sort of like ambient storytelling in a Cantaro Murrah manga, like basically sort of like... Pretty much. Skull-shaped clouds with stink lines and weird animal insect hybrids and things along those lines. With the war grinding to at best a halt and more than likely leaning towards defeat, Word finally got back to Hediosia just about how grim things were getting. Though his Lord commanders made sure to never really tell him the full truth. He blamed all of the problems on lack of enthusiasm from his commanders. While he planned for his spring trip to Korea to take command,

remember we talked about he was supposed to go, got talked out of it. He's like, oh, go next year. And with him, he was going to bring 200,000 men. And he purposefully sent word to this to his men in Korea in order to raise their spirits. But it does the exact opposite. The daimyo's in Korea, write to Hideyoshi begging him, please stay the fuck home. We're all starving, and there's no way we can feed another 200,000 men.

Just big letters on a piece of parchment. Shit's fucked. Hungry. Even the most war hungry of the lords like Cato knew they were fucked, and they came to the conclusion that they need to abandon soul and move everything back towards Pusan. So Konishi reaches out again to Li Rusong and asks to negotiate an end to the war. Lee quickly agrees and sends his boy Shen, who previous to this, we kind of skipped over.

But on his way back to Korea, he had been locked in prison for trying to travel over the border without authorization. But because Lee likes him, he is released and sent back to Korea. And he comes back over because they have a working relationship. The daimios, however, knew they would have to. sell this a different way to Hideyoshi, who still believed this whole thing could still be won. So in letters to him, they made it seem like the Chinese had come to them on their knees begging for negotiations. But at first, they would have to have a show of good faith to the Chinese. So they pitched to Hideyoshi, we'll pull back to Busan as a show of good faith to the Chinese.

Not that we're all dying of frostbite, pestilence, and hunger. We should really, really, get the fuck out of here. And by framing it this way, Hideyoshi agrees to do it. But Konishi also knew that the Chinese couldn't know that they already planned to withdraw from Seoul. He needed to make it look like it was a concession. Again, the Koreans are not consulted about any of this and they have no idea. Li Rousong and the Chinese government won out of the war as soon as possible. They kept demanding that they go on the attack. And rather than telling the Koreans about the negotiations, he simply said, I really wish I could attack right now, but I need to gather men in supplies and wait for the right omens. You know how those omens can be.

In reality, Shen was already on his way to Seoul. The Koreans only learned about these negotiations due to a wooden sign that had been nailed into the ground outside of Lee's camp that simply stated that Korean forces were forbidden from attacking the Japanese due to ongoing negotiations. When the Korean chief of the state council, Yusang Yan, who was Yisun Sun Sin's childhood friend and the man who got him promoted, objected to the negotiations. Lee had him taken out by his guards and beaten. Like the second most powerful man in Korea is just getting his shit rocked by the dude's bodyguards. My bodyguards are jumping him.

In another run-in between you and Lee, they just beat the shit have used horses with sticks to get him to go away. Gorilla horse fair. We're touching on all sorts of stuff. We've got the spirit of berserk. We've got the spirit of blazing saddles, apparently. Yeah. People's horses are getting jumped.

We have Confucian gorillas. Like, got my horseshoes snatched up. Finally, the Chinese delegation arrives in Seoul to meet with Konishi. And the Japanese were shocked to discover that the Chinese had actually learned about how bad things have gotten within Seoul, thanks to Koreans who had survived their, you know, massacres. Shen begins talks by threatening the Japanese with a Chinese army of half of a million. If it didn't release the princes held by Cato as well as other officials they had captured and withdraw to Pusan immediately. Now, Konishi obviously already planned on doing this, but he knew that the Chinese had gotten their ass kicked and were desperate.

So he said he'd be willing to agree to these terms, but would require someone from the actual court of the Wanli emperor to come and make the deal so they knew they were legit. For Shannon Lee, this is a problem. There's obviously nobody in Korea like this. and it would take months for them to get there, possibly a year to two years. But then Lee realized, well, Kodishi wouldn't know that and would have no idea who anybody within the Imperial Court actually was. So, Lee simply chooses two of his officers, dresses them in robes of Imperial Office, and sends them over to fake it. Konishi falls for it and agrees to the terms to move to Busan and release the princes. Now, this pisses off Kato, because the princes are actually being held.

by him and Konishi can't tell Kato what to do necessarily Shen and the fake imperial agents would then travel with them to Busan and from there the fake agents would travel to Japan to meet with Hideyoshi

himself to sign a final deal. All right. All right we're doing postdoctoral research and flim flams. I promise you this somehow gets weirder. All right. Ten days later, Konishi and the rest of Japanese forces in Seoul begin their withdrawal towards Pusan. As they leave, the Japanese force

Korean civilians to dress in colorful traditional clothing, dance, and play music. It's an incredibly weird atmosphere that's equal parts, plague and celebration. Lee held up his end of the bargain. He doesn't try to attack them. The more Chinese troops are moving into Korea from all over Imperial China at this point. Not only from China, but also like Thailand, Java, there is a very strange collection of people all trying to kill each other in Korea at this point in time. The day after the Japanese have left Seoul, the Allied Chinese army marches into the city and finds the entire place little more than a burned down and looted open-air mask grave. Yusong said, quote, I saw that scarcely one in a hundred citizens remained. Those few people

were seen were all starving. They were gaunt, sick, and exhausted. The color of their faces like that of a ghost. The weather at this time is extremely hot and humid, so the dead bodies and horse carcasses that lay exposed and unattended throughout the city had begun to rot, admitting such a stench that passers-by had to plug their nostrils. Those few that survived, he noted, seemingly must have survived by resorting to cannibalism. And what must be one of the most disgusting passages I have ever read in my life. He tells a story of a Chinese soldier going out and getting drunk, celebrating, capturing the city, gets too drunk and vomits on the road

and starving civilians fight one another over who gets to eat his vomit. Oh my God. That's one that, like, if Japan had never invaded Korea in the modern era, they would still rightfully be remembered for what they did in the

1590s. Yisong Yang and other Koreans went to Lee and demand revenge. Lee shrugs and says the only thing stopping him from attacking the Japanese or he simply had no boats to cross the Han River. You said he would get them if Lee promised he would attack, or at least allow the Koreans to attack. Lee, not thinking you could actually get this many boats, agreed. He said he would send 10,000 men under the command of his little brother if he got

the required boats. You does this. He gets all the boats that are demanded of him. Lee's younger brother begins leading these soldiers across the Han, he stops and complains that his feet hurt, and he calls the operation off. When the cranes say, Fuck you, we'll do it on her own. Lee then takes all the boats and puts them under armed guard so nobody can cross the river.

By the time the Japanese fully withdrew to Busan, they were totally out of supplies and living on foraging alone. This also meant they couldn't garrison their soldiers together in one mass, and said 17 forts are built, and what let's maybe consider something of a perimeter around Pusan. It's an interesting thing that would never happen again.

And these forts aren't half-assed either. They're on hills. They're made out of stone and logs and earthworks. Their backs are to the sea. They're fronted with huge moats. The Chinese assume that the Japanese are only pausing, waiting to get on their boats and go home. But it's soon reported by scouts that they weren't trying to run.

Instead, soldiers were planting crops and building houses. by the time they have this all figured out the string of forts were already completed and that little glimmer of hope that the Chinese might have to push them out of the country altogether was now out of the question. What followed was four years of stalemate and that is real pickup next time

on part five. I can't wait to eventually get to part the Imgen War part 67. We're gonna get real deep into grain row You have no idea how much I had to cut out of this to get out of things talking about wagons and how things were... I did my best, Tom. I've done my best. But fellas, that's the Imgen Moore Part 4. How are you feeling? How are we all doing?

I'm just thinking surely this can't get any stupider. It gets much stupider. The lying with diplomacy legitimately becomes some of the funniest shit we'll ever talk about. And it does get very horrific. Mm-hmm. Because for people who don't know, the Japanese will reinvade Korea at the end of this stalemate. And in case you're wondering at home, how many parts this is going to be, it's going to be six. Yeah, it's a lot. Buckle up.

It's going to be a long fucking time. Like I said, some of this is comical. Some of this is horrific. So it's on brand for us. But yeah, there's a lot of things, a lot of twists and turns are just genuinely. even within the scope of the stuff I'm used to from being on the show was just not expecting. I think from the research perspective and the writing perspective, it's certainly one of the more complicated series we've done. I think it's certainly the oldest in the scale of time,

which made research a little bit more difficult. It's a lot. Sorry. I don't know what else to say. But fellas, thank you so much for joining me here today. Everybody, thank you for listening. If you like this show enough, you can support us on Patreon. You can get every regular episode early, almost 10 years of bonus content, Discord access, ebooks, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merch. Speaking of live shows, if you skip the intro, we're going to be in Cork, Ireland, September 26th. Tickets, available now, live stream, and in person, check the show notes. Leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

It helps us immensely. But fellas, you also host podcast. Podcasts. Plug those podcasts. I am the co-host and producer of Trash Shooter, a podcast about the British government being bad and the tech industry being bad. I'm also the producer of Kill James Bond, a podcast about a film criticism podcast. It's very funny. And I'm in a band called Second Homes.

And our debut album is available on bandcamp and also on streaming everywhere. So you can check that out. The album is called Find a Way to Hate It. We are recording this, sadly, the time for plugs will have long gone. Today is actually a band camp Friday. But there will be more later in the year where Bandcamp doesn't. take any fees, so I will announce that. Yeah, you can check all that out.

Blood work, show about the economy of violence. By the time you're hearing this episode, we will have put out an episode on the Toyota War from a different perspective, as we have covered on this show. And if you want to go to podcast madness in court, get your muffins ready, link in description.

You know, because you're doing an episode on the Toyota War, there is a Hornet IED waiting for you out inside your studio. Hey, listen, there was a feces IED out there this morning. Hell yeah. The crackheads love convening

in the wasteland area behind the building and shitting by the stairs. It's true. Fellas, again, thank you so much for joining me. Until next time, everybody, arm your guerrillas. And if your haters

kind of come up on you, put a box of bees in their path.