Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 430 - The Imjin War: Part 5

Episode Date: September 6, 2026

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I'm Joe. With me is Tom and Nate, fellas, gentlemen. How you doing? I am so excited to talk about what I presume is the last episode in our series on the Imgeny. in war. Nope. Fuck's sake. Well, I blew my load anyway because out of respect for the Jinko Samurai, I wore jeans for the first

time in like four months. So, you know, I did as well. So we're wearing our denim war pants. I'm not because it's still hot as fuck here, unfortunately. It's humid as fuck. It's basically America outside, except no one's popping shots at me, I guess. That's rude. People have

guns here. They could shoot at me as possible. It just doesn't really happen. They just decided not to. There's nobody in a duly pickup truck. whipping shitties in the middle of the road. Nobody has rolled coal over your bicycle. I was over at the main train station and I saw a guy with a Ford F-150 for some reason though.

God damn. Euro-Trucks, man. Euro-American trucks. It's getting weird. I'm just saying. I saw a dude driving up my street in northwest London in a Ford Raptor

and I'm like, bro, you do not need this. Like, it's very clear you're not a builder. Like, if you're working construction, yeah, maybe you can make an argument, but no. But it rains all the fucking time in Europe.

Like, have a van. A van does the same thing that the pickup truck does. You're not going to be off-roading in that shit and it's covered as opposed to a pickup bed, like a bed where unless you put a camper top on the back of it, which basically makes it into a van in the first place, like you've got a great big open bed. It's going to get rained on and it can hold less than a van. They need to do

like Japanese, you know, expel the barbarian shit about pickup trucks. For pickup trucks? Yes. Vans only, okay? Respect the van emperor. I think I've told the story about the guy in my neighborhood with the Ford Raptor before. I am not a fan. He takes up two parking spots. I have seen that car. It has one of those, like, loud paint jobs, too.

It says Raptor down this. I don't know if that's all Ford Raptors that say that. But like that one does, and it's in lightning bolts and shit. It is obnoxious. Meanwhile, I would fucking have like a Redo Megon or something like that bumping soul survivor of Acon and Young Jeasy down the street. Give me some weird Eurovans and station wagons. and that's my thing, man.

You're fucking whipping around like Charles Taylor's son. Yeah, exactly. I got like a Renault, what is it, R5 or something like that and just playing fucking, what is it,

trap or die, something along those lines. Yeah, you're driving the fucking Renault R5, but much like every Renault car as soon as it rains, the electrics are just fucked and your windows are going

up and down all the time. You get to bump the windows. They're hooked up with the little sound sensor, like it's got the BPM going, you know what I mean? It's like a big EQ. Fuck, windows that are just, opening and closing on their own

or just European swangas. And speaking of none of that, that would be a difficult transition. I actually have a transition for those who are listening. Last night, I re-watched a subject of a previous episode of this series Ghost Dog Way of the Samurai

last night. Oh, that's mandatory viewing. When you come to our live show in Cork, I'm going to ask the door if you've watched Ghostog. And if you haven't, you will be eaten. I will be testing you on your knowledge of the tenants of Bushido. It's true. Yeah, you have to read the book. You have to honor your retainer and you also have to keep pigeons on the roof. And you also have to have a best friend who's a Haitian ice cream man who does not speak

English. Yes. And most importantly, since we have Nate in here, you also can't speak to him. Yeah. Because Nate could chop it up with the Haitian ice cream guy and it doesn't count. All right. Fine. I mean, to be honest with you, I cannot speak Creole and I can't understand a word of it. So, Well, he's speaking French in the film. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, when we left you last time on part four of our series, the Japanese invasion of Korea had turned into something of an Asian world war

as the Chinese Empire brought in soldiers from all across its vast territory. A combination of crushing Korean naval victories, starvation, and the Korean military in tandem with a growing number of guerrilla soldiers known as righteous armies, finally handing Japan its first life. land defeats, forced the Japanese the pulled forces back to, dare I say, a perimeter around Busan, abandoning

everything else it had taken and leaving tens of thousands of casualties behind. Then we entered the stalemate era of the war which would last years. Now, I know what you guys are probably thinking, oh dear God, how many episodes is Joe going to talk

about a fucking stalemate? Well, I'm going to do my best to keep all of that to this one single episode because there is a lot we actually have to talk about, and some of it is completely ridiculous. But we should probably jump back to Japan and revisit our good old, possibly syphilitic friend, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Publicly, he was still making claims about how great the war was going. However, there's a very, very good chance he wasn't paying attention at all to the realities in Korea. According to letters he was writing to his wife, while thousands of men were dying in Korea,

he was spending hours a day memorizing theater, practicing tea ceremony, and hosting costume parties in his garden. He's just like me for real. My favorite part of this was, I guess, one of the kinds of costume parties that he hosted was he invited all of the people in his court, and they all had to dress up like commoners, and Hideyoshi himself dressed up like a fishmonger and walked around loudly shouted. about how good his fish was, and he had just the best time.

See, if, you know, feudal Japan Twitter had have existed, then Ian Miles Chong would have been transvestigating Toyotomi Hideyoshi. I mean, there has been jokes back and forth about how do you compare Japan in his relationship with Asia to another country or another civilization.

And one that has been floated periodically is that they are basically the Brits of Asia. Now, I don't necessarily know if that's true, although they're obsessed with them. there's certain things that are comparable perhaps. But in this case, fancy dress party where you make fun of commoners, they are British, flat out.

And one of his concubines gets pregnant, so he finally has a true born child. Because before, you know, he takes his heir a parent and is going to move them to the Chinese capital to take over this empire he's building. He's adopted.

And it quickly becomes a parent to everyone that now that he has a true born son, He doesn't give a fuck about his adopted son anymore. He's getting his adopted son and going, yee! Actually, Tom, kind of. Hold that thought. He's like, I saved receipts.

There's no date on when the return period expires. He's going to shove that kid in the mailbox. He's applying the fucking Patagonia lifetime warranty to his adopted son. Hey, look, if some of our parents could do that, I know mine would have used it. And when his concubine gets pregnant, and gives birth, he leaves the wartime command center, goes back to the capital, and just never goes back to the headquarters.

And if you remember back to our last episode, Chinese commander Lee Roussong had set two random Chinese officers to pretend to be official imperial envoys to negotiate and to the war without ever consulting the real imperial government. They arrive in Japan. At no point does anybody decide that this lie has gone two point.

And it's only going to get weirder. So Hideyoshi welcomes them in, as he has been led to believe that they are coming to effectively apologize for China supporting Korea and offer concessions to Japan. When negotiations begin, nobody there present can translate verbal speech. So it's done like before through written characters, which Hideyoshi also had not read. So he only knows what's being written thanks to Gensori.

his monk translator. Genso does the same thing literally everyone else has done up until this point. And that is whenever he hears anything or I guess in this case reads anything that he knows would piss hideosia he softens it, he changes

the details or sometimes just doesn't tell him at all. So negotiations go exactly like we've already talked about. The Japanese claim they're never going to invade China in the first place and have been forced into the war because of the conduct of the Koreans. The Chinese already know this to be a lie, thanks to the Ryukyu kingdoms, but don't

bother to argue about it. They don't make this a sticking point. The Chinese simply asked for total Japanese withdrawal from Korea, and then afterwards, we'll be cool. And again, I should point out that these guys are not real imperial envoys. They're lying. They cannot make any deal at all. Yeah, these guys are doing the diplomatic version of committing way too hard to the bit of gay chicken and realizing some things. Once again, Tom hold that thought. I saw name pick up the mic and I was like, what the fuck is he about to say? These guys are not the only fake envoys that are going to be involved in negotiations. I just remember seeing the screenshot from Final Fantasy 7 that says,

Cloud, you need to dress up like a woman. It's the only way. And I just think to myself, maybe there's something in this story that's going to have a parallel here. You must dress up as an envoy. It's the only way. Maybe that's, maybe there's an allegory there. We'll find out. In an effort to impress these men, Hideyoshi orders them to be allowed. with gifts and ceremonies, including possibly not confirmed, starring in a play himself for the men to enjoy.

Oh, love this. This is like Stephen King, self-insert characters. He's like, finally a role for me that I have written and everyone has to enjoy it. I actually would say that this is, there's a different parallel that comes to mind for me.

It's somewhere either Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani loving to basically do Broadway diva stuff like going on Saturday Night Live and like really, really, really committing to the pit. And you know they believe that they're the funniest

motherfucker out there. Just like Hideyoshi absolutely believed he nailed this. He's also like leading tea ceremonies. He has a giant boat parade full of singing ormen paddle by for these guys' amusement. He,

like, why the sounds of this, syphilous fucking rocks? I mean, there's definitely a love of the spectacle going on here. We can just call it. that politely, professionally.

Could you imagine being like one, like a, an envoy or some sort of administrator and like going to one of his tea ceremonies, but like he's actually kind of shit at making the tea? Yeah, like he's not good at it at all. You know, he hasn't like double brewed it. You know, he hasn't strained it and then like rebrewed

it and like his tea pets are kind of all over the place. He doesn't pour from the right side. It's like, but if I say that his Oolong kind of sucks, he is going to cut my head off. That's where I kind of to land on this. Like, there's no way he's actually good at any of these things,

because his tutors are terrified of him. Yeah, so it's like an emperor's new clothes situation. The emperor has whack tea. His tea, whack. Cerebony, whack. His etiquette, whack. His orman, whack. Me, I'm tight as fuck. And like every

other time the Japanese, the Koreans, or the Chinese ever met with one another, Kiteyoshi only succeeds in an annoying and offending these guys. But this time for a different reason. Because remember, Hideyoshi is attempting to show himself as an equal to the Chinese emperor. You're never going to catch the Chinese emperor doing stage plays for you or serving you tea. So they're like, why is this man doing something that should be so below him? And then on top of that, when it came to the seating arrangement for the

singing orman parade, apparently the envoys were seated below Hideyoshi, which was a kind of of social faux pa for their standing as envoys, despite the fact that they knew they were not real envoys. They're like, no, we should be offended in the situation. We got to play the part. Oh, this is just burnt off a reading. This is burnt off for reading. Hideyoshi's going to shoot one of them in the head of the closet.

With the singing orman thing, if you're like the Japanese soldier equivalent of technical sergeant, Al-Fuck, and they're like, they're making listen to singing boats, can we just get money? If we just get paid, we can eat some food and drink alcohol, please, my God. I would have settled for concubines,

but I guess singing Orbit is cool too. It's like, all right, cool. We've got the fucking 16th century equivalent of Scissor Sisters on boats here, just paddling and singing away, whatever. Singing Scissor Sisters on Shami Sin, paddling gently through the river. Gonna take your army to Pusan.

Going to show them what it's all about. And while all of this is going on, it didn't mean that the Japanese in Korea were going to just sit in Pusan and do nothing. Jinju was a fortress city in the west of Busan that the Japanese considered a threat to their defensive line. They had attempted to attack it once before and failed, so it was something of a, it's a bruise on their pride, right? Because it's not really a threat to their position. It's a full 65 kilometers away. Rather, the more aggressive of the Japanese lords, namely, Kato Kiyomasa and Kibaya Kawataka Kajay demanded that they be allowed to attack specifically or to save face because they felt, you know, dishonored for having to not only withdraw to Busan,

but also because of the previous defeat at Jinju. Furthermore, everybody knew negotiations were starting back in Japan. And they argue that after everything that had happened, the Japanese would need a victory in the field so they could negotiate from a better position. That at least kind of makes sense. Not so much the first part. Japan has got teeth kicked in, down the peninsula, and they need some position of strength for negotiation.

Now, Konishi, to the surprise of nobody, is immediately against the idea. He points his whole thing out as being completely meaningless. It's a waste of men in supplies. But then, Kato writes to Hideyoshi pleading for his case to go on the attack, to which Hideoshi agrees and orders it to go forward. Konishi, in turn, tells the Chinese envoy with him in Busan, Shen Wai Zhang, about the plans. Making sure to warn him, look, these guys are going to go out and attack. We just need you to know that this isn't some kind of offensive.

It's a bunch of guys who want to salvage the reputation. Just know it's a one-off. Shen Wei-Jang, interned alerts to Korean commander-in-chief Kim Jong-wan, telling him that, look, the Japanese are going to attack. Konishi told us exactly what and where it's going to happen. You should just leave Jinju and let them burn it down, and they'll get it out of their system. Some Koreans agreed with Wei Zhang's opinion and stayed away.

But not all of them. The righteous army leader Kim Chong-il refused, leading his hundreds of men towards the city walls. Not wanting to lose face to a man leading what they called a rabble from the streets of Seoul, sued a regular army commander sent their men in as well. Word gets back to the Chinese commander, Li Rousong, about the attack, and he warns the Japanese that, hey, if you do this, it'll break our previous terms of ceasefire, but he's ignored.

And then also, Lee Rusang doesn't do anything to protect the city at all. Eventually, 4,000 Koreans, both righteous army guerrillas and regular soldiers, have gathered in Jinju. Against them, the Japanese massed the single largest army that they had fielded for any operation so far in the war. Somewhere around 100,000 men. The army was so terrifying that Redcoat General and Possible Period Blood Wizard, Kwok J.U, who had listened to Huai Zhang's warning to stay away, tried to talk his first. friend and fellow righteous army commander Huang Jin out of defending the city. But Huang Jin told him I have no choice but to stay, because my other friend Chong Il is there.

So Kwok Jayu's like, well, you guys have fun with that. I'm leaving. Even my period blood magic is it could protect me from 100,000 dudes. Kato leads the march of the Japanese forces in July of 1593, birding, looting, and killing his way through Korean villages the whole way. He drives tens of thousands of civilians towards Jinju. and the siege begins on the 20th of July. Valleys of gunfire pin the Koreans down while laborers filled the defensive moat with dirt.

Once that was done, waves of Japanese units attempted to attack the strong stone walls of the city. Once they got to the walls, they tried to dig and drag the stones from its base in order to try to collapse it, but were pushed back by a hailstorm of rocks and arrows. When the Japanese then built protective wooden coverings, which were then loaded onto wagons

and were known as turtle wagons, because everything has to be a turtle in this context. The Koreans then just dumped burning pitch on top of them, torching them all alive. Feels like that's the thing you probably want to protect against, but if not, you know, your mileage may vary. The Japanese did eventually, like, roll out a defensive measure against the burning pit,

which was like raw animal skin on top, which just slows the burning down. Basically becomes like a legit meat wagon in a way. You got meat on top, meat in the middle? Oh, fuck. It's the KFC double down. It got meat on top, meat in the middle, meat on bottom. It's meat all the way through.

In the case of real life turning into a game of Fortnite, the Japanese tried to build block towers on a nearby hill so they could then fire their muskets down and into the city, only for the Koreans to rush out and build their own taller block tower within the city so they could fire down with the cannons that they had hoisted up to the top. Though in the constant back and forth shooting Huangjin cut a musketball straight to the face

and killed him. Command of the defense fell to the civilian administrator so he won a job he was not at all prepared for. And instead of taking effective command, he instead had a mental breakdown. Relatable. Understandable. He just like me for real. I get it. I don't want to be in charge of a city under siege either, especially

if I'm just like a government bureaucrat. Like, I've been a government bureaucrat. I was never equipped to command of siege. I'm the guy that files your taxes. Very few people are equipped to command a siege. Let's be real. That's true. And it's probably not the guy that works the local ministries. He started crying and spent most of his time locked in a room with his horse. That's my emotional support horse.

Yeah, he's just petting it, stroking. And the horse meanwhile, it's like, let's get the fuck out of here. We've got to go. That's the horse being like, can we not die, please? Sick stumps means abandon the siege. he leaves effective command in the hands of Kim Chong Il. Then it began to rain. For the Japanese, obviously this is bad for their muskets, like we've talked about before.

But for the Koreans, it ended up being equally as bad because not only was it a fucking downpour, it never stopped. It washed away the dirt at the base of the walls, weakening where their stones were anchored in and making it easier for the Japanese to dig them out. And because they had to be outside manning the walls in the rain, it soaked. the bows and arrows that they use, and specifically the glue that held their strings together began to fray. So it rains so hard their bows are even useless. It also, I suppose, affect the tensile strength of the bow

when you draw it back because when the wood is wet, like, completely soaked through, it's more pliable. Yeah, maybe. I mean, either way, it's raining so much. You don't want to be standing out in it with any kind of weapon. There is at least one listener who is very into artery, who's going to send me a very angry email. after that statement.

The only thing that I know is according to the sources that I use, specifically their glue failed within their strings, which they discovered when they pulled the strings back and it all just kind of came apart.

As the rain continued, the Japanese demanded the fortress surrender, threatening that they would behead 10,000 Korean civilians that they had captured if it didn't. Kim refuses the surrender, either not thinking the Japanese had 10,000 civilians

in their country, custody, or maybe they didn't believe that they would follow through. Or assuming, if he did surrender, he would doom the upwards of 60,000 people that had crowded inside of Jinju to the same fate. The Japanese went through with their threat. Afterwards, seven days into the siege and still pouring down rain, the Japanese continued their attack. Now with lighting the turtle wagons on fire no longer possible, it didn't take long for the Japanese to collapse a portion of the wall and pour into the city. After a week of fighting, the Koreans had no ammo left, their bows were ruined, and their starving soldiers and civilians inside were reduced to rushing forward to try to fight the Japanese with anything they had on hand. And since the Japanese had surround the city and people began to break and run, there was no escape.

Kim Chong Il, seeing all that was lost, climbed the wall of the city, joined by several of his fellow commanders and his son and jumped into the Narn River to die. What followed was an unspeakable, horrific, wild orgy of violence as samurai and Ashigaru killed everything that moved. When they ran out of people, they slaughtered livestock, cats, and dogs. They poisoned the wells with corpses and burned the buildings. By the time that the Japanese army left Jinju, the city ceased to exist and 60,000 people were dead. Oh, Jesus.

When you made the comment that you said that they didn't believe If the Japanese either had the prisoners or would do it, there's a part of me, it's like obviously this has been formed by a lot of more recent history where you think, oh, buddy, I wouldn't bet on the Japanese being unwilling to follow up on a threat of mass civilian violence,

of, you know, atrocity and so on. When faced with an army of samurai, generally, I tend to lean towards like, I believe they're going to do whatever violent act they just threatened me with. Yeah. I will say,

obviously we know a lot about modern-ish, Japanese imperial history. But in the phase of the Imgen war, we have covered so far, which has been incredibly brutal. Don't get me wrong. It is nothing compared to what has not happened yet. Gotcha. Like, what the Japanese

did in Jinju is going to be par for the course during the second invasion as it's often term, though I don't like using that term because the Japanese never left in the first place. The next day, Hideyoshi gives his terms of peace to Konishi, to in turn give to the Chinese

in Korea. There's seven terms in total, and we're not going to list them all in detail, but they're absolutely wild. For starters, the first term was that the emperor of China offered a daughter to the emperor of Japan for marriage, which was never going to happen. Another term of Japan retains control of four provinces of Korea. Another thing that was never going to happen. And it's still clear that Hideyoshi simply did not understand anything about China. It's ruling philosophy. It's emperor. Nothing. He was trying to deal

with the Wanli emperor. Like he was just another daimyo during the civil war as equals, but offering a deal from a superior military position. This is how he unified Japan as a whole, and he thought he could just do it here too. And when those things failed

during the warring states period, he'd use he would just threaten people. And he can't threaten China, obviously. Yeah. Ideologically for the Chinese, even if they wanted the war to end no matter what, and they did want the war to end, they could not accept these terms. They're a fucking empire. If they start giving up territory, it'll give people ideas.

And if your emperor is the divine being on earth bestowed on his power of ruling by God, you can hardly marry off his child to someone that is concerned a barbarian. this leads us to an interesting impasse in the peace talks. The envoys of both sides, for Japan I'm talking mostly about Konishi here, knew that these demands coming from Hideyoshi were never going to be accepted by the emperor. The two sides were nowhere close to coming to any kind of agreement that would permanently end the war. And the Chinese officials in Busan, when they read them, agreed with that sentiment. But none of them, Konishi, Li Rousong or Shen Wai Zhang,

wanted to be the guy to tell their government because they knew if they did, everybody would come to the conclusion that the only answer was more war. And all of these guys wanted the war to end. So they sat down and came to the conclusion that we should probably just start lying to all of our sovereigns

in order to make negotiations sound like they're going really well. At least we'll remain at the status quo rather than invading one another again. This seems like a completely foolproof plan. When in doubt, lie your ass off. Just keep lying. This is quite honestly the best historical case of fake it till you make it I have ever found. For example, Hideyoshi's demands had to be delivered to the emperor by his own hand-selected envoy.

And he picked a Christian lord named Naito Tadiyoshi to do this who happened to speak and write Chinese. But he and the rest of the Japanese lords and the Chinese envoys all knew there was absolutely no way. They could bring Hideyoshi's demands as they stood, unedited, because it would piss off the Chinese emperor and ruin everything. So Konishi and Naito simply sat down and forged a new letter. Ah. Now, the demands were one province of Korea, some money, and resumption of equal trade, with the idea that they knew they could drop the demand for a province during negotiations. I cannot foresee this going badly. at all.

Somehow this gets even stranger. Because Naito wouldn't even make it to China with this list. He was refused entry of crossing the border from Korea into China by Song Yin Chang, the imperial officer in charge of military affairs in Korea. Song took the letter, read it on his own, and refused them on behalf of the emperor. He instead said the only way to peace, true peace, was Japan becoming a vassal, a little brother just like Korea. And that was something Hideyoshi would never agree to.

So, Naito goes back to Konishi in Shen Wai Zhang. And they decide, well, fuck it. Let's forge another letter and agree to the terms. They're just like me forging my parents' signature in my school diary when I got notes sent home. Yep, I've done that. I got real good at it. I got caught once. I wasn't nearly as good as these guys.

The Koreans have been left out of this process entirely, but they eventually hear about Hidiosi apparently agreeing to become a vassal to China and we're like, that sounds fake as hell. Remember, Korea had been talking to Hidioshi for years at this point. They'd heard his whole spiel about, you know, he was going to conquer

the world, he was born after a heavenly sunbeam hit his mother's stomach and all that shit. There was no way he was suddenly out of the blue going to bend the knee. It's like, yeah, he had an epiphon. He's like, you know what? I am a bum. All right. People were like, that doesn't sound like him.

My ormins suck at singing. This doesn't work. But the Chinese took one look at this and said, This rules, thanks. Didn't even question it. However, word of this eventually gets back to Kato Kiyomasa. Who is fucking furious. He knows what Hideyoshi's real list of demands were.

So he launches his own unauthorized diplomatic mission, meeting with both Korean and Chinese officials, in order to tell them that Konishi was lying and gave them Hideoshi's actual letter of demands. that Chinese in turn believe Kato must be a political opponent of Konishi and must be lying which 50% of that is true

Meanwhile all of this is going on in Hideo She's just living the life of a soldier boy So he's like hop up out of my bed Turn my swag on He doesn't get my unix say what's up The Koreans in turn believe Kato Because they're like yeah that's the Hideyoshi that we know is what he gave us

This letter but they have no power to stop anything the Chinese are doing And that's when Konishi nearly gets Kato killed in order to shut him up. Allegedly, kind of. He writes to Hideyoshi claiming Kato's undermine Konishi's role as the head of the diplomatic effort in Korea. And, most importantly, he dared to speak for Hideyoshi without authorization and used a Toyotomi clan name without permission. Other sources I use say that this was not done by Konishi, or at least not entirely. Rather, it was partially driven by a lifelong political,

rival of Kato, Ishida Mitsunari. Either way, someone narks out Kato to Hideyoshi. In response to this, Hidioshi immediately recalls Kato to Japan and puts him under house arrest. Depending on which source you read, it said that he did this expecting Kato to kill himself. You know, he hasn't been sentenced to anything. He hasn't truly been permanently dishonored. So the idea is you place a samurai Lord under house arrest. And, you know, the implication is, now you kill yourself and save face. And we've already talked about how traditional Cato is.

So it kind of goes extra for him. This is a guy who believed that under his own ideas, Kadyoshi should kill himself for doing theater because it's unmanly. Everyone is just living in the reality of like 2018 Twitter of posting back and forth, kill yourself, kill yourself. I was going to go with a different comparison. and this is basically the equivalent of the guy who takes photos and be like, do you think people would think

you're gay or straight? And every time he shows it to someone, the guy's like, yeah, that dude's gay as fuck. And it's sort of like, oh, yeah, I've seen that. It's like, oh, this guy should kill himself. He's like, what do you think about him? Oh, he should kill himself. It's just endless cycle of that. The kiddo Kiamaasa challenge of telling a never-ending string

of people they should kill themselves for increasingly more creative reasons. This is why I should have put in the appeal. I think it was, what, like maybe three or three-ish years ago? One of my Twitter account got banned because I told someone they should put a gun and their mountain pull the trigger. I should have like,

I am actually abiding by 15th century Japanese principles. I feel like that would have worked. You don't understand? I'm simply Shinto. I was going to say, I'm Irish equivalent

of Forrest Whitaker and Ghost Dog and I'm living by Japanese rules, okay? I take it very seriously. I'm Yukio-Ponato Mashima. However, shut the fuck off. That isn't what happened.

Instead, something even weirder than there's all also the off chance that, you know, Hidioshi would eventually order him to kill himself, which was a pretty common punishment in Japan for men of his standing. However, what happened next is even weirder than any of that. While Kato is under house arrest in Kyoto, at Pushimi Castle, a massive earthquake hits. This destroys a portion of the castle, which Hidioshi is also in at the time. Kato runs through the destroyed castle and checks on Hidioshi to make sure he's okay.

Hideyoshi is so impressed by his loyalty immediately pardons him and sends him back towards Korea. I feel like this is another case of Olman's portents, etc. Yeah, man's life was literally saved by an earthquake that killed thousands. Yeah, it's like it's one thing if a guy's got shooters, but if he's got geomancers on his side,

you're even more fucked. Yeah, you can't fuck with that man. He's unlocked the geomancer class for his retainers. It's done. Back in Korea, this big lie just kind of continues. Naito makes it all the way to the Chinese imperial court

to deliver the forged terms. The Chinese court, in turn, decides that they're still too generous. Grants Hideyoshi, the title of King of Japan, but does not agree to allow Japan within the tributary trade system, saying that it would require some time

for Japan to prove that it could be a good little brother before it be allowed in. And all of this was contingent on the Japanese completing their withdrawal from Korea. Naito says, yeah, sure, whatever,

dog, we agree. Let's shake on it. This is quite literally when my brother used to make me do a little dance before he'd let me play Gears of War II on his Xbox 360. The thing is independently from this agreement,

which Hideyoshi is completely unaware of, he does order about half of his men to leave Korea and return home. So for the Chinese, like, oh look, Japan's, they're making good on their agreement. So the Chinese government and the emperor go the whole nine yards to prepare to officially welcome Hideyoshi as the king of Japan.

They get official silk robes made. They make him a crown. They write an official proclamation. They box it all up and set an official, real imperial delegation towards Korea, from which they're meant to travel to Japan to oversee Hideyoshi's accession to the throne as king. You too cannot get all of this for $25 a month from loot crate.

Imperial loot crate. Imperial Chinese Luke Cray Bring it back. I feel like that would pop off now. It would make so much money. Imperial Chinese loot crate is just what you call the British government in like 1905. But, you know, they get to Pusan. They see, well, there's still Japanese soldiers here.

But, you know, some of them left. They take note of that. And then they travel all the way to Japan. More on that in a second, though. Because while we're still in Korea, let's talk about the Japanese soldiers in Korea because their lives are fucking awful. They still have no food.

The land around their base is barren, destroyed from the war, picked clean by hundreds of thousands of hungry mouths. Typhoid fever breaks out. They're forced to spend their time either dropping dead, being hungry or building and maintaining castles just to try to withstand the Korean winter

as time goes on. Soon people begin deserting in the thousands. And virtually none of these guys make it back to Japan. Most just stay in Korea and offer their military services to the Korean government. Now you might be wondering, how, why? Well, there's an interesting bit of academia written about this that kind of explains why the Japanese soldiers would be so comfortable volunteering for Korean service. And a lot of it has to do with the very disunified nature

of Japan, even when it was technically unified under Hideyoshi, split up amongst lords and very little to nothing to do with the concept of national identity. Your rank and file Ashigaru didn't see it as treason. They saw it as working for a different lord, which is something that people would do all the time in Japan. So they didn't really see it as a big problem. Meanwhile, the Koreans were like, yeah, sure, whatever, we could use literally anything right now, come on in.

And with the war on pause, the Korean government moved back into the ruins of Seoul. It just kind of sort of went back to work, trying to lead a nation which had effectively been completely destroyed. The country was ravaged by famine and disease. Conservatively speaking, hundreds of thousands were dead. And the state, as much as it still existed, was completely bankrupt. But little resources they had were dumped into reinforcing fortifications in the south of the country,

as Japan still had tens of thousands of men occupying Pusan in its surrounding areas. Everyone in Korea assumed it was only a matter of time before they were reinvated. and they wanted to be prepared for it. The Koreans had previously believed in stopping an invasion at the coast, virtually leaving nothing behind it if it failed, hence why what happened had happened. Japan's rapid advanced north had proved that this was a terrible strategy. This time, they began building a series of stone fortresses in Korea's rugged mountains as far south as they controlled and all the way into what today would be North Korea,

developing what could best be described as a nationwide strategy of defense and depth. Their plan was in the case of a second Japanese invasion, they would grind them down bit by bit as they advanced north. And what's interesting about this large-scale construction project is just how it was done. Because remember, they're broke. They can't pay anybody.

So they instead turned to Buddhist monks once again. Hell yes. You got the monk warriors. They get the monk construction corps. Monctruction. Monctruction. Korea had persecuted Buddhist practitioners so badly before the Japanese invasion that there is no legal recognition for the status of a monk, nor even their religion.

Like they persecuted Buddhists so badly, even Imperial China told them to slow down a bit. So now they offered a monks a deal. Work for free for two years and will give you an official certification of your monkhood and would legitimize their religion in the eyes of the court. Very similar to how Irish people getting visas in Australia works. Oh. So basically it's indentured servitude for monks. Yeah, pretty much.

Which I suppose is just kind of being a monk in general, right? Except now it's back breaking labor. This system works incredibly well for the government and not so well for the monks. I kind of didn't want to go into it here, but the government rapidly just moves the goalposts on giving out these monk certifications. A lot of them get nothing. and they don't really give them as a religion the kind of rights they promised them. But a lot of fortresses get built.

So who's to say if it was good or bad? Next came the military reforms, which had, in all honesty, probably been needed for about 100 years. For the first time, the Korean army was broke down into squads, platoons, and companies for ease of command. They adopt the musket as their standard infantry weapon,

which was easy because after all, they had captured thousands of them and could begin building their own. And kind of like the Japanese, these were still to be paired with swords and bows. They printed military training manuals and established a military training agency. And in order to ease the weight of managing all this, because remember, they're mostly a state of smoking ruins at this point. The new army would be organized more as a part-time militia. Units would be made up around villages that they lived and commanded by men who lived with them.

And they would split their time training and working the land, you know, to offset the whole famine thing that's going on. And back with the Navy, Yi Sunsen was promoted to the newly created rank of Supreme Commander of the three provinces of the South. He was once again left with no materials, no budget, or any supplies from the central government. But at least this time around, they didn't have any to give him, unlike the first time when they just didn't give a shit. Instead, the men of his Navy had to kind of get their own food, get their own building supplies, and their own salaries. So they fished and sold what they caught in the market. They set up a rotating roster of men so they could go back on land and farm. Independent of the army modernization,

Yi began the process of building his own gun factories to crank out copies of Japanese muskets and cannons. Despite all of this, it didn't mean that the Korean government didn't immediately get back to doing what they'd been doing best, stabbing each other in the back. We talked a bit before in our last episode about how Yusongyang was untouchable. So his political enemies began going after his political allies, meaning Y's son's sin. Well, in the meantime, Y's son's sin's number one

hater, Juan Kuhn, had made sure to pour an endless amount of reports over to them, dogging on Ye. His clothes, whack. His tactics, whack. This only got worse after Yi got promoted over him, because Juan had once outranked Y. Juan Kuhn made sure to act on his anger by getting constantly drunk and accusing Ye of just about any crime he could think of, hoping one of them would and he'd be taken down a notch. He also repeatedly tried to goad Yi into attacking the Japanese knowing he wouldn't, so he could then say he was an incompetent or ineffectual commander. There's also the added benefit that if Yi did attack the Japanese,

would piss off the Chinese, who then in turn would pressure the Korean government to punish Yi. He was fucked no matter what he did. Yi's son sin in turn was writing his own letters, accusing Juan of being a drunk who refused to obey commands, which was true. Eventually, Sol got sick of both of these guys, sending them never-ending streams of letters, and sent a guy to go and investigate their claims against one another, and found that they were both pretty much guilty of whatever the other was saying. Juan was a drunk who hated his boss and routinely refused orders,

but they came to the conclusion that since Juan had once outranked ye, it was only natural for him to kind of like have a chip on his shoulder. But to end the constant bickering, they transferred Juan to a different post. in the north, which brought with it a higher rank in court. And after he was transferred, he still continued shit-talking Yi and sending letters to anybody who would read them. He was dedicated to ruining him. Ye was found guilty of ignoring orders when he thought that they were unsuitable and was

not punished. He was kept in place because they didn't have anybody to replace him. But by 1596, he lost a lot of political clout. This is paired with the Korean government demanded that he attacked the Japanese fleet. But the thing is, outside of maybe two or three blowups in the last several years, there really wasn't a Japanese fleet to attack. They only left port to sail back and forth to Japan. They very rarely probed out anywhere close to what you can consider Korean-controlled territory. And China had repeatedly told Korea to leave the Japan-bound ships alone.

So while he had nothing to attack, his political enemies and some of the men who once backed him began to think he had lost his nerves. Eventually, King Sanjo was convinced that it might be a good idea to fire him and replace him with Juan Cune. The final nail in the coffin came when a Japanese spy named Yojiro, who occasionally worked with the Koreans, alerted the Korean court that a renewed invasion fleet under the command of Cato's on its way to Korea, with Cato now being sent back from Japan and free from house arrest. Yiziro told him when and where this fleet could be intercepted. The Korean government immediately believes the story and tells Y's Sun Sin to charge out,

destroy the fleet, and kill Kato. Ye, however, thought that this made no sense. The story is too good to be true, and this must be some kind of crap. So he refuses to go. He's finally forced to sail out by his boss several days late. He misses Kato's ship, who arrived safely in Pusan. Now, I should point out, he didn't have any massive invasion fleet with him, but still, killing Kato would have been a huge win for Korea.

It also would have been a huge win for Konishi, who had been the one to tell Yojiro his travel plans hoping the Koreans would kill him. Ye was charged once again with ignoring orders, and the Korean court began to debate what to do with him. At this point, even Yusong did not speak in his defense because it is no longer politically tenable. But his only defense gone, King Sanjo ordered Yi Sun Sin to be arrested and thrown in prison. He was almost certain to face the death penalty if it was not for one of the king's ministers speaking up in his defense saying that, look, he should be fired

but due to his heroic service in the war, we need to spare his life. The king agrees and demoted him all the way down to the rank of a common soldier and sent to serve in the army like anybody else. However, his new commander, Kwan Yol, knew who he was, of course, and respected him deeply.

he did not force him to live like a common soldier. He gave him a house, allowed him to live outside of his army's camp. He was allowed to have like a staff, keep servants, and on paper, Ye Sun Sin was his bodyguard. But really, he just let him do whatever he wanted.

Kind of like a Peter Ortiz situation when he joined the Marines. He's like, yeah, okay, we know you're really good at killing people and you're a psycho. You're better than this. And eventually, just like Peter Ortiz, His time to shine would come once again in the future.

In 1596, with the meeting postponed due to the earthquake, the Chinese envoys carrying all of Hideyoshi's ceremonial drip, finally reached Osaka. There, a full ceremony takes place, making Hideyoshi legally king of Japan in the eyes of the Chinese emperor. However, he is completely unaware of anything going on around him in regards to the agreement. Still, he thinks he's being crowned,

Taiko in the eyes of the Chinese and therefore equal the position of the Chinese emperor, which is, you know, he is Taiko of Japan. He puts on the robe. He puts on the crown. He's smiling. He doesn't speak or read Chinese, so he has no idea what the proclamation says, nor what they're saying to one another. And finally, Genzo, the monk translator, translates exactly what the document says in which Hideyoshi is holding. Oh, Japan had agreed to become a vassal of China.

Oh, and by the way, the emperor of China demands you immediately withdraw from Korea and there's no trade deal. I am shocked this does not end with Hideyoshi murdering the envoys. This is the equivalent of like this proclamation does the unfold and it just says these notes? It has to be the greatest moment of what the fucking diplomatic history. This man has no idea what ceremony he's taking part in. It's beautiful. He has been lied by no fewer than like a hundred people to get to this point. People have traveled across the ocean due to a lie and only lied further.

All you agree to this. I thought only Unix scheme. Meanwhile, Gensow, the monk is probably like, what the fuck did these guys in Korea do? Like, what did they agree to? what does this shit say? I have to be the guy to tell Hideyoshi this. All the fake nostalgia people about like, oh, it was better before Google

translate. It's like, no man, this is what it was like. You could end up a vassal state of China. At some point, there was obviously a conversation that happened somewhere in Korea that was like, you do realize he's going to be really mad when he finds out about this. I was like, no, he'll be fine.

It'll be fine. I think they were just hoping that he would see it and agree to it. because it would be an out. I don't know. I legitimately have no idea what their end goal was or that they would at least keep the negotiations open by continuing to talk.

But instead, they used Gensow translate and everything came crumbling down. Yeah, it's sort of like, this guy's God's representative on Earth. He's born under the mandate of heaven to rule the entire world. And it's like he basically signed, you forged his signature on a document that says,

my clothes are dusty, I'm a bum. Actually, China's way better than me. No trade deal. Got no motion, my whole child. I'm abandoning my entire fucking governing philosophy and religion to adopt yours. My tea pets are poorly arranged.

My money's not long at all. In fact, you could go so far as say it's short. My bitch is not bad at all. My weed isn't loud. In fact, it's quiet. China's better than me. I have no rights. My plays are dog shit off Broadway garbage.

But at this point, Hideyoshi flies into a rage. He rips off the ceremonial silk robes, he throws the crown and storms out of the room and thus ends negotiations. There's a story that Hideyoshi then dramatically tears up the Chinese proclamation, but we know that's not true because it actually still survives to this day. So he probably does a dramatic spiking of it to the earth at best. So now it's 1597.

Japanese soldiers have been short up hating life and dying in Korea since 1592. Negotiations have collage. entirely after the whole fake ceremony incident, and Hideyoshi may have lost his mind. After being holed up for five years, you would imagine a soldier would run out of ways

in which they're crazy enough to beat it. Like, you cannot beat it crazy style. Everything is just normal because you've done everything. And when the time you just produce particulates similar to that of like breaking a light bulb. For my personal experience, it takes significantly less than six months.

These guys are really hungry. so quite frankly, the only thing that they could beat a crazy style too is the fantasy of a hamburger. Like, it really does affect your ability to expand energy. No, that's just what American troops too. The spiritual equivalent of a hamburger, whatever that was for late 16th century, Japanese foot soldier, so on and so forth,

whatever that was, that's what they'd be fantasizing about. A nice onigiri. It's like, you guys got any porn and you're just like folding out a menu from a local diner? But like, you know when those shitty diners that has the big, bad quality pictures. It's like the phone book. It's like the menu has like 800 things on it.

Yeah, yeah, I don't you mean. Just beating it crazy style to that. I mean, when I was in Ranger's school, we used to basically tell stories when we were really hungry about like great meals we'd eaten. They were practically erotic stories. So like, yeah, it's 100%. I mean, I've certainly fantasized about a meal

while in a shitty outposts on a mountain. All the time. Like, damn, dude, I would fucking cut my own hand off for biscuits of gravy or something at this point. This is just proof that Paul Verhoeven is too subtle for the truth and reality of American society. He's too weird for the Netherlands, too weird for the U.S. One time we were snuggling in a big snuggle pile in radio school before, like, change out in really, really cold weather.

And someone was just like basically, in a way of sort of like paint me like your French girls, is it someone tell me about Christmas cookies. Hell yeah. Now, as Hideyoshi got older and arguably sicker, he also grew more erratic. He would fly off the handle at any and everything. He was quick to murder or order the murder of people. He saw as his enemies, where before he would tend to work with them. His son, Kediyori, was now four years old.

And ever since his birth, his adopted son, Kedetsugu, the man once tabbed to rule the greater Japanese empire from Japan, had a falling out. We don't really know how much of this is true, or how much of it is due to Hideyoshi's brink. growing paranoia. But Hidetsugu had a tendency of just killing people

who displeased him. See, I was about to ask for a point of clarification is Hidesugu beefing with Hideochi or the four-year-old? Both. How do you feud with a four-year-old?

It's like, are the finer points of... It's the Nicoletti video. I was like, come get your boy. What's he looking at? And he's like, the camera cuts. It's like a two-year-old. Yeah. Yeah.

It's exactly what I was thinking of. I've seen it in the meme, like, would you fight a baby if he gained 10 pounds of muscle and it cuts to that. It's like being held back from the infant. But like He-Atsuga was allegedly quite brutal and earned the nickname the Life Killing Region. And knowing that Hideyoshi was certainly going to select

his true born son to be heir, rather than him, began to plot a coup. Again, we have no idea how real this is or if it really only existed to Hideyoshi's mind. But Hideyoshi ordered him to, kill himself. So he did. Going further, just to be safe, Hideyoshi

then ordered Hide Tzu's entire family to be wiped out and anybody even a little connected to them. Eventually ordering the deaths of 39 people. And these are very connected people. Like, in one case, there's, and this

is going to have ripple effects going into the Battle of Sekigahara, whereas a lot of this old beef is going to come up since Hideyoshi is then dead. But like, there's a guy whose daughter had just agreed to become concubine to Hidetsugu. They hadn't even met,

but because she was given to Hidatizu as concubine, she was ordered killed. She hadn't even met him yet. And this pisses off a lot of people. And this is considered outrageous even at the time

in a society ruled by samurai serial killers. This is definitionally like slight on the ops blow up their whole quadrant. And but also you're not far enough away to not catch shrapnel. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm in the red zone for blowing up my ops whole quadrant. It's actually 10% reds here. And this has some really serious political repercussions as well.

He had pissed off almost every powerful lord in Japan in the wake of the slaughter. It also meant that the entire ruling Toyotomi clan had now been reduced to just him and his four-year-old son. Whoops! Because remember, Hideyoshi is adopted into the family. It is not his. He killed his entire adopted family. Pair that with just having his heavenly destined invasion of Korea, China, hypothetically India,

all that shit thrown in the trash, along with thousands of soldiers, and the Chinese daring to tell him to fuck off. Also, he's 60 years old and very clearly physically unwell. He's looking weak in a time where he cannot look weak. Through the syphilis that was possibly, allegedly eating his brain, he knew that he needed to shore up his position before he died so his son would have a chance to take over. So he once again turns towards Korea.

At this point, there's probably around 20,000 Japanese soldiers camping out in and around Busan, so Hideyoshi orders another 141,000 men to be sent over. Virtually all of the commanders and most the men getting on these boats had already fought in Korea the last time around, at least for a little while. And then this is oftentimes called the second invasion of Korea, which I already said I don't really like that term because they had never elapsed. But the renewal of the war this time around is much different. Whereas before Hideyoshi saw Korea as a place to conquer a stepping stone for the eventual invasion of China, this time around, Hideyoshi only ordered his. armies to invade Korea to lay waste to the southern portion of the country. He was not going there to conquer. He was going there to slaughter and destroy as a political tool in Japan. The goal was to show

the Chinese and the Koreans that he, and therefore Japan, was still powerful and to show that his own dimeos, who might be thinking that he had been weakened, that any that stood in his way would be put in the fucking ground. However, it's also pretty clear that he never bothered to communicate this with the lords that were already in Korea, or leading the large reinforcing army. Kato Kiyamasa, Konishi Yuki Naga, Karoda Nagamasa, they all came to the conclusion that made sense to them.

They would be taking over the provinces of Kianzeng, Chola, and Chongchang, turning them into domains of Japan, and then split the lands amongst themselves as rewards for their long, horrible service in Korea. The same thing they were going to do the first time around, just on a smaller scale. Overall command of the Japanese invasion

didn't fall to any of those men. However, instead it went to Kobayakawa Hideki, Hideoshi's wife's 15-year-old nephew, an adopted son of Kobayakawa Takakaj. Yes. Yes. Yes. With him was a weird party of other teenage samurai lords of high status and zero experience. Though, I should point out here that these guys exert no control. They're a symbol of Hideoshi's status. Instead, this kind of central control as much as it really ever existed,

in the Japanese army would fall to Kobayakawa's chief of staff, Karota Yoshitaka, Koroa Nagamasa's father. Though, like I said, use the term centralized command here. Very loosely, this army's pretty much the same as the first one. It did change somewhat this time around. They had learned. Nobody involved underestimated the Koreans or the Chinese anymore. Nobody thought they were just going to walk in and take over.

Bases were built and reinforced and supplies were stockpiled. even the lords in command with plenty of personal beef to go around, were much more open to working together than they were the last time. There was no quick lightning samurai offensive either. Instead, starting in March, troops began to trickle and decree at various points, generally around the Pusan area or Chukdo, a small island on the mouth of the Naktong River. It's clear from the beginning that Kido is taking a leading position amongst the lords,

while Konishi was stashed away to oversee the Japanese Navy, because Hideyoshi saw how badly had failed the first time around and put one of his most accomplished lords in charge to get into shape. That's because this time around, the Navy would not be limited to just faring supplies and men. Hideyoshi was worried that if they put all that strain on Japan, it would be worrying to his control. The Navy instead would be made specifically to combat the Korean Navy for the first time.

The ships had evolved at least somewhat. They were still mostly unarmored in the military. light transports, but they had been modified to carry cannons and muskets with the goal of shooting it out in naval combat. This time around was different for Korea, too. They heard about the Japanese troop buildup and immediately requested aid from China. China, this time around, are not dragging their feet. They're fucking pissed at Hideyoshi for spiking those sweet silk robes that they'd offered him. Insulted, offended, and still flat broke. After the whole last time they'd fought the Japanese, they had gone even broker. China still couldn't afford to stand up an army to respond to Korea's needs,

and worse still, a large band of Jurchin had centralized under a warlord named Nerhachi, who is now threatening China from Manchuria. Some China heads out there might know what happens in a few years regarding Nerhachi. Yeah. Instead, the Chinese could only send a few thousand men at first, with others being mustered and sent over from thousands of miles away. and would take months to get there. The first of these groups, 3,000 men under General Yang Yuan, marched into Korea and joined the mustering Korean forces in June,

and then immediately ignored any input the Koreans had once again. Like we pointed out, the Koreans wanted to take the fight into their mountain fortresses, specifically so they could pull the fighting away from population centers. So, of course, the first thing the Chinese did was march into the city of Nam Juan and decided this is a great place to fight. Another Chinese army did the same thing in the city of Chongju. Enter Yojiro the spy once again.

Very hard to be a spy when you're eight foot tall, have red hair and like a 64 pack. That's a joke from me and Joe. I know what you're talking about, though. Listen to lines led by robots. He appears in the camp of the Qiong Song army and tells its general Kim Ong-so that the Japanese are planning an offensive into Chola province starting in September. He even tells them exactly what roads they're planning on. taking and urge the Koreans to block the path. Furthermore, he said tens of thousands of more Japanese soldiers were on their way to Busan from Tsushima, and the Korean Navy could catch them on the way

and kill them before they landed and maybe even end the war. This information is passed to Kwan Yol, the commander-in-chief, who decide the benefits of believing this by far outweighed the risk, because he had been right last time. He orders the naval commander, Juan Kuhn, to dispatch his navy and intercept them off Busan as they try to land. He might be wondering what Juan Cune had been doing since he had couped Yi Sun Sen and became naval commander. Mostly just drinking and fucking piles of concubines. I was going to say probably not shit based on everything that we've heard so far.

Yeah, he was completely neglecting the Navy that had been left to him. Men were deserting, the ships had fallen to disrepair, everything was fucked. But now Juan was placed in the same situation that Ye had been, following the exact same spy and knowing that if he didn't attack, the exact same thing that nearly got ye executed could happen to him. So of course he delayed. He suggested his fleet and said,

go do something else. And finally, after a lot of back and forth, Kwan Yule got sick of arguing and instead sent him to patrol around Kodak Do, a small island that was occupied by the Japanese. But the damage was done. Within the halls of the Korean government, Juan Kuhn was a coward who refused to fight the Japanese fleet directly.

Soon people like Kuan Yol and others were traveling to meet with Yisun Sin while demanding Juan finally go on the attack. Finally in August, Juan caves to the pressure. He leads his plate towards Busan, stopping at Chol Young Doe, where they spotted anywhere from 500 to a thousand Japanese ships arrayed in a battle line and waiting for them. So perhaps, Yojiro did, set a trap. The Korean sailors were tired because they had rode the whole way. It was now nightfall.

They normally didn't attack at night. The waves were rough, making rowing even worse. And most importantly, they didn't have any water with them. So they're all incredibly thirsty from rowing across the sea in rough water in August. Literally everything was working against the Koreans to attack that day, and any commander would have waited until the next morning. So, of course, Juan charged right in. Aha.

The Japanese withdraw, forcing the Koreans to chase them. Then the Japanese would counterattack, forcing the Koreans back. And then once the Koreans got their shit together and attacked, the Japanese would then fall back more. They did this purposely trying to exhaust the Korean sailors for having to row back and forth, who had already rode all the way there. And then finally, the Japanese turned around and really attack them.

The Korean fleet is so tired at this point, they hardly put up a fight. They scatter mostly back to Kodak Doe as fast as they could, and they lose 30 ships in the process. This is the most combat losses that the Korean Navy has taken so far. But wait, it gets worse. Kodak Doe, like I said, was controlled by the Japanese. It had a garrison of several thousand soldiers, and the Koreans knew that they were there. So why did they mostly scatter back to this island? They assume they could land there, get off real quick, go grab some water, get back on their ships,

and haul ass before the Japanese garrison on the island caught on to them. That did not happen. Instead, they climb off their ships, get ashore, and they find that an army of 3,000 Japanese soldiers is waiting in battle lines for them. This is a fucking massacre. At least 400 Korean sailors are killed. several more boats are burned on the shore, and the fleet retreats all the way the Chil Chong Yang straight,

a place so narrow that Korean ships were unable to maneuver in it if they were attacked. The way it's framed is like, they could hardly even turn sideways to bring their guns to bear. It's a motor pool for boats. They really can't move in this straight. But Juan pulls them back there because there's a dock

and they believe that they'll be hidden and the Japanese wouldn't possibly continue to attack them. You know, because I said that that's exactly what's going to happen. I think wrong is probably the thing we're going to say next. Yeah, and then everything Juan Kuhn did went perfectly to plan. Welcome to the Lions leading Lottians podcast. So Juan Kuhn steps off his flagship when he gets to the dock

and his boss, Kualul Yol is waiting for him. He's so pissed that instead of like discussing anything with Juan Kuhn, he punches him directly in the mouth. right in front of all of his sailors. Which, to be fair, I don't disagree with this, but sometimes he's going to punch your commander in the mouth. Juan gets really upset, he turns around, goes back into his ship, and locks himself at his quarters, refusing to speak with anybody, and just gets constantly drunk for about the next week. He does nothing else.

He never leaves his quarters. He never tries to reorganize anything to do with his ship there. He never tries to make sure repairs. are made that even men are staying on duty. He never sets out scouts or gather intel. He does nothing but crawl into a bottle. And the Japanese are still coming. On

August 28th, about 30 minutes after midnight, the Japanese fleet hit the Koreans while they're still anchored in the strait. This is a bloodbath. Virtually, the entire Korean Navy is destroyed. Some crews try to beach themselves and nearby islands to run ashore. Other men just

jump into the water. But by the time that the sun comes up, Wan's fleet. The Korean Navy that Yi Sun Sun had built is completely annihilated. One ship is one of the ones that try to beach themselves and the sailors try to hoof it.

Surviving crewmen say they ran for their lives across a small island, but Wan Kuhn, old, fat and very drunk, runs a little while, quits and just sits down under a tree to wait for the Japanese soldiers who are chasing him to catch up. They then

fill his worthless ass full of swords. This is why Cardio is important. And also, you know, not being a piece of shit get all of your men killed. Ye O'Kee, you might remember him as Yee Sun Sin's friend and former co-commander, commanded his ship until the bitter end, trapped in the strait while his ship burned around him, fighting until he had no hope, finally jumping into the water to die with his men. The only senior officer in the Grey Navy to escape the massacre was Kyeongsang commander Bay Seoul, who fled back the naval headquarters at Han Sando, and began burning everything down so it didn't fall into the hands of the Japanese. With him was all that was left of the

Korean Navy, 12 ships. Korea left without a Navy commander, and honestly not much of a Navy anymore, was left to choose some poor bastard to pick up the pieces. The Korean court fell into silence. Nobody wanted to be the guy to admit that they had seriously fucked up. And finally, the wonderfully titled Minister of Punishment, Kim Jong-Wan was the one to say what everybody was thinking. We need to reinstate Y-San-Sin immediately. There were no arguments. There was no factionalism. Everybody agreed.

The Minister of Punishments. Fuck, yeah. I don't want to know how that guy got that job. Then, in September, the Japanese ground defense had begun. begins exactly as Yojiro told them it would. And what's interesting here, or interesting, maybe not be the word,

horrifying, perhaps, is that it begins with an explicit order of extermination from Toyotomi Hideyoshi. And if you're wondering, Joe, do you have that? You know I do. Quote, mo down everyone universally, without discriminating between young and old men and women, the clergy and the laity,

high-ranking soldiers on the battlefield, that goes without saying, but also the hill folk down to the poorest and the meanest and send their heads to Japan. This is an order of genocide. Like before, sending heads to Japan was kind of impossible. Instead, the Japanese would take noses, with each lord designated a nose collection officer to streamline the salting and packaging, which would then send tens of thousands of Korean noses to Japan for inspection.

Fuck. More on this later. This time the offensive was in two thrusts. One to the right, the other to the left of Pusan, meeting in Chola. To the right, 63,000 men run of the clan of Hori Hidimoto, a retainer of the Toyotomi clan, and under him was everybody's most infamous piece of shit, Cato. The left was 49,000 men under Uquita Hidier, who you might remember best as being the guy who burnt down the palace because he thought it was haunted, and under him was Konishi and

so Yoshitoshi. Though like always, pretty much all these guys are operating on their own within their own political factions. The left's first target would be Nam Juan in its garrison of about 3,700 men. Namwan had been heavily fortified with a four meter tall stone wall, a moat full of wooden spikes and reinforced gates. However, the Japanese didn't give a single shit about any of this. Under constant cannon, musket, arrow, and firewagon attacks, the Japanese sent men forward to fill them out with dirt. And once that was, done, the attacks on the walls began. The Japanese didn't scale the wall, but

kept them engaged, forcing the Koreans to fire and keep them at bay for three days until they surged towards the south gate. Rather than building ladders, they just piled up strong bamboo stalk until it created a ramp. The Koreans should have set on fire, but thanks

to recent heavy rains, the bamboo wouldn't catch. And the Japanese quickly made it over the top. The Japanese made good on their promise to kill everything that moved, but the Japanese priest writing a collective death poem about the resulting slaughter. Quote, whoever sees this out of all of his days, today has become the rest of his life.

The Chinese commander, Yang Yuan, and 300 of his men managed to escape, but not before Yang had been shot twice. He gets away, he gets back into the hands of his fellow comrades from China. He survives his wounds. He's carried back into China. And then he's executed for his failure. probably wishes he would have died from the gunshots. Yeah, pretty standard, you know.

Meanwhile, the right army marched towards the fortresses Hua Wang San Song, which was under the command of everybody's favorite period blood wizard, Kwok J.U. Kato decided, I don't want to fight Kwok Jayu and just march right past it. They saw him on the battlemen's like drinking like a Capri son full of period blood. Let's just see him in his big red robes doing wizard shit. They're just like, yeah, whatever. Yeah, it's like the classic, you know, don't punch a crazy person in the face.

Therefore, if you're being confronted by someone just that crazy. You know, he got military commander peacock. It's like the military equivalent of the castle becomes the subway car in the New York City subway that there's only one person in it because everyone else stays the fuck away from it. There's like, I don't want to go in there. It's going to smell crazy. Or from my Eldon Ring heads,

it's like when you get transported to Mogwans Palace and you're like, oh, this shit is fucked. And then you get to fight the Lord of Blood, Moog. Yeah, he is the Lord of Blood, brackets, different blood. Then he finds the mountain fortress of Huangsak San Song, guarding the only pass

between Kyeongsang and Chola under the band of government administrator Kwak Jun and local governor Baik Saarim. Baik was the only one with military experience under him, and thousands of civilians had fled to the fortress for protection, with

maybe a few hundred militiamen along with them. But, just because he had experienced me and he was sticking around for this bullshit. Because when nobody was looking, he escaped with his family. Hit the bricks. You could just leave. You could just leave. I'm going to go well. I don't really give a fuck about symbolism. Just get out of here. Yeah, there's not going to be many fucking

Koreans left once Japan is done. So who's going to tell on you? Yeah, you all can die for this cause, but I'm not. I saw an auspicious sign over there. Had to go investigate. Poor tense and omens. You all know how it is. Got to go. Yeah. When the Japanese showed up, the Korean defense did not stand a chance

and thousands were butchered. By the end of October, the Japanese had effectively completed all of the goals of taking the southern half of Korea, stopping just south of Seoul. This time, however, the Japanese would stop and turn inward, secure what they had conquered. Unleashing a reign of terror, that would be one of the most horrific things to visit Korea until, well, the next time Japan visited Korea. The rules were as follows. Farmers returned to your land or be killed.

All government officials and their families were to be killed. Anybody who narked on a government official or a person who refused a farm were to be rewarded. The murder of civilians was immediate and constant. Each lord kept track of how many people their men killed per how many noses taken. People were killed for any reason, hundreds per day per lord, with these tables of murder surviving to this day, tallying up to the tens of thousands. And those records are incomplete because some have been destroyed. In Seoul, discussions about fleeing the capital once again started with the Chinese commander Ma Gui,

saying that they should abandon Korea altogether. The only thing that stopped him from fleeing was his boss, Yang Hao, who quickly traveled to Seoul from Pyongyang, gathered about 8,000 men together that China still had in the country, and had Ma Gwi march them to Kyeongji, taking up a position in the narrow mountain pass in Chiksan, in an attempt to ambush the Japanese as they advanced towards Slang. And on October 16th, that's exactly what happens. A 5,000 man vanguard of Corota Nagamasa's larger army marches up the road and the Chinese ambushed them. The vanguard is almost nearly wiped out until Corota's main force catch up. And then they just kind of fight till a standstill.

They possibly lose up to hundreds of people per side. And then the battle begins the next morning because, you know, they had to take a nap. Here they trade musket volleys, cannon fire, arrows. there's hand-to-hand combat, and then the Japanese break, and the Chinese run them down with light cavalry. Anywhere between 5 and 600 Japanese are killed, judging from how many heads the Chinese had taken from the battlefield.

Now, the Battle of Chiksan is hardly a crushing Chinese victory, but it is a victory nonetheless. It would mark the northernmost point of the Japanese advance during this second invasion. And Yi Sunsen reinstated was quickly rushing to Southern Chola, where he was greeted with two things. Terrified civilians treated him like a savior and utter fucking chaos.

Inspecting the three provinces he was now effectively the dictator of. He discovered the Navy and was non-existent, and the army had run away so quickly they left warehouses full of weapons open and unguarded. People were looting, ripping each other off, robbing one another. Everything was just going completely nuts. So, he established an iron-fisted military dictator

with really the only punishment for anything being whipping or death, which is exactly how he ran the Navy. I know Yisun Sen is a military hero, but let's not make it seem like he's a nice guy. He is a savage tyrant. He just happens to be on the right side of history. He then got to meet Bay Soul, the last surviving senior officer of the Korean Navy.

And he wants to murder this man for burning his headquarters and also for losing the battle, which obviously he can't execute Juan Cune anymore. The Japanese took care of that anymore. So he wants to kill him, but he can't because he's second in command. So instead, he lines up all of the officers loyal to Basel and just starts beating the dog shit out of them.

This is somewhat familiar. I'm not going to say that things are like this nowadays to the same degree, but this level of like, well, I'm just going to whip everyone's ass. Like, that is kind of how the Korean military is run now. South Korean military. Yeah, corporal punishment is very popular.

It's the reason why the South Korean military is such a high suicide rate in a country with an incredibly high suicide rate. But in general, when you said that, I'm like, well, politically, operationally, can't really kill him. So I'm just going to beat everyone's ass that tracks. I'm going to whip your homies backs to shreds until you kill yourself. Right? Because there's no other way to get him. He can't fire him. But Basel figures this out quite quickly that his days are numbered in one way or another. So he tells Yisunsen, you know what? I'm

actually not feeling so well. I would like to go home and recover. Ysonson approves of his requests. And then Basel completely fucking deserts the Navy never to return. Ysun San is now in total unquestioning command of the Navy once more. And it's grand total of 13 ships now, because he brought another one, and about 120 very demoralized survivors. He orders these 13 ships to be armored like turtle ships, but without the time or resources to do it. This effectively ends with him nailing anything that they have

onto the side of these ships and building roofs on top of them. He arms them with any cannons that they have, and he gathers all of his men together and makes them swear an oath that they'll either destroy the Japanese Navy or die trying, declaring victory or death. He moves them to Oranpo where they run into a small Japanese scouting force

and they fight them off and retreat. The Japanese Navy chases them and this would happen time and time again. Yi would lead a small force out, chase off the scouts and displace, moving further and further west. Until finally he gets to a place where he knows he has no choice

but the fight, a decisive final battle no matter the outcome. And he chooses Myeong-Yang-Yang straight to be the place for this. The strait is important because Japan would need to cross it to enter the Yellow Sea and therefore finish the logistical pipeline they have been trying to do since 1592. It did not mean to rhyme. The strait is incredibly narrow. It's only about 300 meters wide at its widest point, meaning the Japanese wouldn't really be able to use the weight of their numbers and their

fullest extent. The current of the straight is also incredibly fast, meaning once you entered it, it would be really hard to maneuver and pull back. So by the end of October, when Intel got the ye that 300 Japanese ships were coming for him, he pulled all the way back out of the straight into open water and hid, so that when the Japanese emerged on the other side, he could surprise them. He also took several dozen fishing boats, loaded them with refugees, and used them as human shields. Oh. Yeah.

He wanted to make the Japanese think he had a lot of. lot more ships than he really had. Not great. Uh, not great at all. Nah. Pretty bad, actually. Then on October 26th, it happened. The Japanese began passing through the straight in four groups. As the first group of run 130 ships reached the end, Yi launched his attack, charging towards them firing cannons and muskets and fire arrows, their hastily built turtle ships smashing into them and fighting them in hand-to-hand combat. And at first, Yi charges alone with his flagship and the other ships

in the Korean Navy kind of don't follow him. It's only when he threatens to shoot at them that they catch up. And to be clear here, there's no withdrawal plan. There's no retreat. This is a fight to the death and it shows. Japanese sailors were shocked to find

they would hit a Korean ship point blank with cannon fire, blow it the fuck apart and nobody cared. A ship would be sinking and Korean sailors would still be throwing themselves through the air trying to board Japanese. ships. The Japanese flagship is part of this first group commanded by Kuroshima and Michifusa, and the Koreans immediately hammer it with cannon fire blowing it to pieces. This kills

Kurishima and throws his corpse into the water. Somewhat hilariously, Kurashima's brother, Michi Yuki, had been killed a few years before, also fighting Yisun Sun Sun at sea. Mofuckers erasing his whole bloodline. What naval battle at a time. When a Japanese man in service to the Koreans pointed out who it was, Yi ordered his body to be fished out of the water, butchered into pieces, and hung from the mass to scare the Japanese.

The Japanese keep pushing more and more ships forward, the water thick with debris and corpses, and each time they're hammered with fire, they're rammed, and they're bordered by Koreans with no thought of their own lives. And this goes on for hours, which is exactly what

Yisun Sen was hoping for. Because the straight had tides, and after a few hours, they would literally reverse. The water of the strait began flowing in the other direction, meaning the Japanese were now being pushed away from the Koreans, no matter how hard they rode. And then Yi orders a counterattack against the disorganized and out of control Japanese ships, fighting them all the way back out of the other side of the two kilometer long straight, destroying more and more ships and killing more men the whole way. By the time they emerged from the other side, the Japanese fleet of 300 ships was in full retreat,

having lost at least 30, but possibly more ships, and hundreds of men. The Koreans, by comparison, lost zero ships and 10 men. The Japanese Navy would keep retreating all the way back to Busan and never gain access to the Yellow Sea. Yisun Sin had stopped the Japanese Navy outnumbered 10 to 1 with a fleet of 13 ships and one of the most legendary lopsided naval victories of all time. And that is we will pick up next time

on part 6, the conclusion of our series on the Imgen War. I'd just like think about what Blade said. Some motherfuckers I was trying to ice skate uphill. Ye sun blade They've got insane tides in Korea They learned this the hard way And the Korean War in the 1950s

But yeah it's That thought crossed my mind Of like hey a narrow A narrow body of water like that I bet you the tide's gonna do some weird shit And I was not wrong The entire battle plan Was centered on the idea

That his 13 ships Could hold at least 150 For several hours So the tide would ship And it worked. Literally, tides changed and hundreds of people died. Also, I love the detail

of the Japanese guy on the Korean ship who's like, hey, that's my old boss. Fuck that guy. Fuck that guy. Fish him out. Time to cut that guy to pieces. Hey, we all have a boss. We'd like to do that too. Certainly not me. Um, fellas, that is the Imgen War

part five and what is rapidly turning into the longest series we've ever done, at least in the amount of time each episode is taking. Thank you so much for joining me. Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this so far. If you're enjoying this, perhaps you'll enjoy

supporting us on Patreon. You get years and years of bonus content, every regular episode early, like Part 6, for example. If you're enjoying this, if you give us one whole dollar on Patreon, you'll have the conclusion a week early. You get e-books, audiobooks, Discord access, all sorts of other stuff.

But, fellas, you also host shows of your own. Plug those shows. Trash Future, a podcast about the tech industry being bad and also British politics being bad. Kills James Bond, a podcast I produced is a feminist film podcast. And I'm in a band called Second Homes. Our debut album is available on band camp, but also on streaming everywhere.

So check that out, please. Blood work show about the economy of violence and posting pictures of guns. If you like the concept of gunpowder warfare and possibly magicians and wizards, buy my book. The Highlands Burn. It's available now. everyone, we still have tickets available

for our live show in Cork, Ireland on September 26th. Grab those if you can't make it. We're live streaming it. You could watch it from afar, whatever you want. Until next time, rule your naval dictatorship with an iron fist and beat your enemies with a whip.

Or lie until you make it.