Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 431 - The Imjin War: Part 6

Episode Date: September 13, 2026

PART 6/6 COME SEE US LIVE IN CORK, IRELAND SEPTEMBER 26TH https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-cork-26th-september-tickets-1993823733459 GET YOUR LIVESTREAM TICKETS HERE: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-cork-26th-september-2026-tickets-1993900928351 BUY JOE'S BOOK https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Fo%E2%80%A6ok/dp/B0GSG5CNXX/ The conclusion to our series on The Imjin War!

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I'm Joe with me. It's Tom and Nate Vellas. Gentlemen, how are we doing? I am happy that we were reaching the base of this very girthy series, but I had a very funny experience on the way to work because, you know, you know me, I have a neurological condition that makes me a creature of habit and every day on the way to work.

There's like a bicycle shed outside of my tube station and I stand in a specific spot and finish my can of monster and smoke a cigarette before I get on the train. And for a long time, there was a coffee shop that was like on the front of the station and like it was closed for ages. we thought it'd just completely gone out of business.

So all of them, the local kind of addicts and near-do-wells would hang outside and just chill out and cause no harm to anyone. But the coffee shop reopened. And I was like, okay, fair enough. But over the past couple of weeks, there has been a small gathering of people that I assumed were also morning commuters that would stand in pretty much the same spot when I was having my cigarette and my monster. And I started chatting away to them or whatever. And just like, they wave at me and say hello in the morning. we just kind of catch up or whatever.

And then this morning, there was only one of them there. And I was like, having to sing around, we were chatting away. And he just reaches into his leather satchel, which isn't like, it was a nice satchel. And he just pulls out a full bottle of wine and just takes a massive mouthful out of it. And I realized, oh, I have just befriended the local winos that can't drink outside of the coffee shop at 8 in the morning anymore. You weren't talking to commuters at all. You were just talking to the local outside drinking folks. I mean, he's commuting somewhere.

He's commuting to a different state of mind. But like, I've seen when in morning, I'm there on my own, because I pretty much, within the like variance of maybe one foot stand in the exact same spot because I can put my can of monster on the bike shed while

I light up a cigarette. And I've seen the people who work in the coffee shop look at me and I'm like, they definitely think I'm a local wine own. Yeah, they thought you were outside drinking this whole time. Yeah. relevant to our one of the things we talked about early on in this series, an interesting sort of shock surprise experience.

Harmless, but bizarre. I went to the gym on Wednesday after we recorded this last episode, and I typically, if I go, you know, I go get changed and I go use the bathroom. And then I, you know, go wash my hands, walk upstairs, and start my workout. Typically takes me like an hour and 15 minutes, hour and 20 minutes. So I was getting ready to go start the workout. I had to use a bathroom. I went into the stall.

And then I was like, I was coming out, I opened the door. As I opened the door, I am confronted with a naked guy who's probably 19 or 20 drinking out of the water tap in the bathroom sink with his like his mouth on the spigot. And he looks at me, he's like, oh, excuse me. And he just runs away. And I'm like, what the fuck are you? And I was thinking about it. I'm like, are you like, are you like a deer with a mineral deficiency? You try to like lick the lime scale off the tap. But what I, what I imagine is, is that prior to showering, he was thirsty and someone was using the sink in the actual locker room. Because the bathroom is an enclosure like within the locker room. And he was like, well, I'm not

waiting in line. Fuck. Just walk naked in the bathroom and drink straight out of the It's like, I guess that's the thing. You know, the Gen Xers are always like, oh, we drank straight from the hose. Well, they didn't realize you can drink from the water taps if you want. Now, if your immune system is good, I suppose. Maybe if he's a deer, someone had been previously placing huge piles of sugar there. Or salt for that matter.

Or salt, you know, like how they do to bait dears in the forest. And then on that day, they took it all away and they were getting ready to shoot him. But then you came up and scared him off. Well, I was just thinking about like the running away from combat and just losing your clothes in the process because when this kid was just like, oh, sorry, I just darted off. I was sort of like, oh, I guess like if you didn't wearing samurai armor, it decided that

he couldn't keep up the fight, that's what it would have looked like. And I was like, okay. On the other side, it was like, maybe he's telling his friends, it's like, yeah, you know, I was getting changed. I just went into the bathroom to get a drink of water from the top and some American came in and was like staring at me. I was like, what the fuck's going on? Well, the thing you have to realize is that I was in the stall

closest to the sink. So when I opened, I had no expectation whatsoever. There would be somebody there because I had my headphones and I couldn't hear. And I opened it up and suddenly just right in front of you. You're like, what the fuck are you doing? Don't expect to see a surprise naked guy.

Well, no, exactly. Well, normally if you do, you're in Tesco in South London and it's just everyone's acting like it's a normal thing. Like, oh yeah, there's a naked guy in Tesco. That is true.

That happened the last time I was there and everybody was acting like who's totally normal. That's the thing, man. Although like Tia booze in America think that it's going to be some combination of like Notting Hill and Doctor Who,

they don't understand that no, the real Brit vibes is naked man in Tesco. Or you're like me and Joe in Brixton in the Ardy pub out the back and a guy has a light up LED a fucking backpack and we're

sitting on discarded lawn furniture drinking a four pound pint of carling. And we negotiated down to four pounds because they only accepted cash and we'll be at eight pounds. Or you're in a pub on Whitechapel Road and a guy comes in with basically like cheap knock off sunglasses and just random

stolen meat from the Saintsborough's local. Or you're me and you fucking last Friday night ended up in an EDL Millwall pub. That is a story I will tell online is lit by robots on the next episode. I'm the only one here that's not living in the UK

or British National and I remember one of my first London experiences when traveling there to go to the trash feature studios to record. I think it was the Bay of Pigs episode if I'm to remember. I went to the Tesco

or whatever that is across the street, Sainsbury's. Sainsbury's. And I was walking across the street to the other side to the studio and just saw someone, it's like 11 a.m. fully taking a shit on the sidewalk.

I was just like, all right. I saw just such a variance of experiences outside that studio that the spectrum is one day I was having a cigarette and saw a guy on a penny fire than going down Mayor Street.

And at the other end, I saw a guy in the middle island in the middle of the road, just like bent over, calling up people like a crow? Maybe they're working together. Maybe. But fellas, I've gathered, and weirdly the water situation

date, that will come up. These things aren't connected. It's all part of the long seven minute intro to this episode. Yeah, this is actually planned. We dropped little hints in here, a little Easter egg so you guys can follow along. We never operate at random.

There's always a plan. And someone has definitely going to be shooting on the road. And when we left you last time, there was years and years of stalemate. Hidioshi got tricked into accidentally, temporarily becoming the vassal king of Japan for China for about 30 seconds. And Japan reinvated Korea while ordering what might be the first genocide committed by a Japanese state. Then, Yisun San, backed with a mighty armada of 13 whole ships, checked the entire Japanese Navy. On land, however, the Japanese forces were a short way away from Seoul. The Korean government was once again planning to run for somewhere else.

And everything seemed like it might be a rerun of 1592. And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Japanese forces stopped, turned around, and went right back to the Pusan perimeter, massacring tens of thousands of civilians along the way. They also captured tens of thousands of other Koreans and forced them into slavery, many of which were either A, sold to the Portuguese, or B, shipped to Japan. We don't exactly know how many Koreans went either way, but is thought that between 50 and 100,000 Koreans were eventually transported to Japan

and then put to work for whichever Lord had captured them on their lands. Interestingly, since Japanese lords had a deep, loving relationship with Koreans, ceramics? More than just about anything else, the artisans who created them were considered prized as slaves, and so many were captured that it plunged Korea into a ceramic shortage in the aftermath of the war. These Koreans completely change Japanese ceramics

to the point that pretty much anything you know as traditional Japanese pottery is actually Korean. Japanese historians at the time kind of jokingly referred to the Imgen war as the pottery war because that's what everybody got out of it. Yeah, because there's going to be something that happens after the Imgen war for a couple of hundred years. That means those ceramics artists are staying in Japan. Yes. And like a lot of them would eventually accrue wealth. They would be freed and, you know, assimilate into society. But yeah, around 100,000 people were taking.

slaves. That wouldn't go out for our pottery heads out there. I'm sure a lot of you are dying. I mean, that's Korean serabics are legit. Having spent some time there? No. I didn't know that though. I didn't realize that Japan just loves hoovering up things from other countries. Yeah. I mean, look at the canon of

Japanese mythology. The Swekoden. Don't ask where the Sviken came from. Japanese people will get very angry. Everybody knows it came from Konami, Tom. Yes. Now, anyway, why did the Japanese turned around. The Japanese army nor the Japanese Navy was actually truly defeated.

Sure, Yisan's wildly improbable victory did set them back, but they still had hundreds upon hundreds of ships. They still had about 100,000 plus dudes on land. Why did they stop? Well, if you're confused, so were the Japanese lords. As we explained before, they wanted to take over most of Southern Korea for themselves. But Hideyoshi wanted to brutalize Korea in order to make himself feel better, punish the Koreans, and show the Chinese that he and by extension Japan were a power to be feared after he failed the first time around. That being said, it's also clear that Hideyoshi didn't really have any clear plans and what to

do next, because it's not as though he packed it up and went home. If his goal is to brutalize Korea, he'd achieve those goals. Once back behind the walls of the Japanese Pusan perimeter, men just dug in more. They built in more forts. They built them even larger. Entire armies of Korean slaves and Japanese peasants, conscripted by their lords as laborers and shipped over, worked around the clock to build entire castles, some of which still survived to this day.

But once they hunkered down, they ran in the same problems as before. Food began running out. Men were put on rations. in order to try to make rations so men weren't, you know, getting sick. The slaves and laborers that they brought over, Korean and Japanese, were just cut loose into the mountains and forests to die. Meanwhile, Hideyoshi seemingly stopped caring about Korea. He rarely wrote to the lords that were ordering all of this ship built,

really only to write in and say, thank you for the literal mounds of noses that have been packed in salt, and ship back to Japan, which Hideyoshi that entombed in a shrine that was called literally the mound of noses and blessed by a priest. You would be so pissed off if you were like a Japanese soldier

stuck in Pusan for like years on end and Hideoshi just hit you with a new phone, who this? Yeah, like he's literally not paying attention to anything that's happening there. It's pretty clear he doesn't really plan on what to do after brutalizing Korea. He's like, no, step one, genocide.

Step two, don't know. Step three, we're respected by China. Like, how do you quiet quit when you are the head of your own country? Oh, don't worry, Tom. It gets worse. Now, he spent most of his time tutoring his young son, Hideyori, on how to rule Japan, which mostly came down to telling Hideyori that whenever he distrusted anybody or they displeased him, he should beat them to death.

Which is interesting because that's not what Hideyoshi did. Remember, he's the deals guy. Yeah, he's kind of the master manipulator and the master of figuring out how to suck up to people. Yeah, he's going to put out a book called The Art of the Deal, what every deal has fallen through. Or failing that, he would hang around and supervise work on his castle. While he was doing that, tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers were slowly marching into Korea. By December, 60,000 men under the command of civilian administrator turned to, inspector general Yang Hao had began to move into the south from Seoul against the Japanese.

Quick question. Was it Hideoshi going blind or was it dead? Kind of both. It seems like his eyesight was affecting him worse, which tells me that the work that he was supervising on that castle was really bad. Because I was thinking it would be so annoying to be like, I don't know, the foreman on like building a Japanese castle and you just have the leader of the entire country. standing there like a Japanese umerell, but he's fucking blind and can't see what's going on. Tapping this side of the castle with a stick, like, no, build it higher.

The umerell are like the retired Italian guys who stand around and construction sites and tell people what to do. Yeah, I was thinking of the exact same thing. It's like that, but, but he's, he's talking to like a completely, like a vacant lot completely turned away. He's just like,

yo, that shit's fucked up. That's not a right angle. He's wearing like perfect, a cargo kimono, just like the umerels with his hands behind. is back leaning forward. 16th century Japanese fishing vest. This could be the perfect hustle if you happen to be a Japanese construction worker, though.

If he's so blind, he can't tell if you're building the castle or not, you could just sit there and make banging noises all day and collect your paycheck and you don't have to build a fucking castle at all. Do like Mission Impossible type shit where Mission Impossible when they like put the picture in front of the security camera, you just have like a perspective warp drawing that like looks like you're building

a castle but have it like one feet away from his face. I don't know. I feel like just banging on the hammer all day but not building anything is like tapping your phone to get the last bit of steps for your step account. You're like at a certain point like fuck it. I'm just going to go fucking walk or something like that. Last, like, I think it's more annoying to just bang a hammer and pantomime all day along. Okay, option C,

I will print out a single piece of paper with the braille on it that simply reads Castle and have him touch it repeatedly. I'm stroking the braille that says castle. Imagine a castle. And if he catches on, if he catches on, I have a feeling I can outrun him. Lewis Braille actually went blind because he got

poked in the eye and like I think some kind of a workshop when he was a kid and it caused an infection. And I'm thinking Japanese Louis Braille of Aunt La Latro would have been injured in a much more spectacular way. He was injured by a decompressed a barrel full of noses. And it just exploded, got hit

with nose and salt. Freak nose temple accident. More on the nose temple later. You know I had to say that. With them were the soldiers from Magui's army and the under the command of Kuan Yol. Together they gunned the castle at Olsan, the eastern part of the Japanese fortified line,

and they would reach it at the end of January 1598. Yeah, you could just hear them coming because all you can hear is just the deafening sound of Scottish Post Rock coming over the hills. What? Are we talking about Maguire? Yes, yeah, okay. Okay, I get it now.

I've heard of Mogwai. God damn it. If you're going to go down the Maguire route, I think hunted by a freak, it's a great way to describe what's going to. on in the situation. Olson was under the command of Asano Yoshinaga, who had spent months building not a fort,

but a full castle. It was a multi-layered earth and stone monster reinforced with moats with spikes driven into them. However, as soon as word of the Allied army advancing got to Asano, he immediately sent for help from Kato Kiyomasa, who saw that the mighty castle actually had quite a weak spot.

Namely, he had not finished building it yet. and the gates were not installed, something that the Chinese and Green Army quickly figured out and assaulted, flooding right through one of the open gates. Cato and his men fell back into the inner citadel of the castle as the attackers dumped cannon fire onto them.

Cato's own bodyguard got ripped in half by a cannonball, which burst through his torso had nearly killed Cato. Oh, God. What a way to die. Sort of like you watching this half, you're like, things are going good, right? This is a good sign?

Is it bad when your bodyguard gets evaporated? Like if someone says blown to smithereens, this is what I expect. Yeah, he's literally blown two pieces. And this isn't an exploding cannonball either. He got straight, clapped, head on. The Chinese moved towards the inner wall, armed with a giant hook on a rope. At which point, they would, like, throw it around like a lasso and try to throw it over the wall to pull onto pieces so they could try to rip the wall. down bit by bit. Yeah, the Chinese

Yiha Shinobi. Yeah, and it works. Like, this is a siege weapon that does work, because you have to remember, like, it's a stone wall in the 1500s, right? Like, there's big seams in it. If you wrench down on them hard enough, the mortar will break loose, and pieces will come down. And it is better than just throwing meat at it. You think it's a grappling hook to climb, and instead it's, like, the world's most lopsided form of tug-of-war.

Yeah, kind of. Yanking bricks out. Yep. And big portions of the wall were eventually brought down like this. Soldiers poured in, but Chinese and Korean losses were climbing so high that they fell back to their cannons instead and just started shooting at it, hoping for a bigger breakthrough, which then just transformed into a siege. Within days, already short of food, the Japanese garrison was forced to eat their horses, which I know we've pointed out before that it's always a good side when you have to eat your mode of transportation. Yeah, horse can be friend or food. Say what you will about the modern military,

but I'm never going to get so hungry. I start, like, cutting succulent slices out of my mind-resistant ambush protected vehicle. The Humvee is in a front to God's greatest creation, the horse. Obviously, horse meat only lasts for so long. So soon they're just kind of rooting around in the dirt looking for roots and grass like truffle pigs. Also as well, like these are like horses that are used for tram.

or for work. So, like, that meat is going to be tough as fuck. And they're small horses. Like, these aren't very big horses at all. How many hands tall? How many missed their hands tall? I feel like when you're in a situation when you're about to eat horses, you're probably hungry enough. You're about to go grub mode. You're about to go, like, you know, rat rotisserie. You're going to make rat suvla. And so when you do actually get a chance to eat fresh meat that way, you're going to be like, I don't care, it's tough. Yeah, that horse can make eye contact with me as I stab it to death for steak. I don't give a shit at that point.

There's one guy who's really annoying. He's like, no, no, no, we have to slow cook this. We're going to braise it. It'll take six hours, but it'll be really tender. And everyone's like, shut the fuck up, Derek. Cut that horse to pieces now. Eat that guy next. We're eating Derek next.

It's at this point where the Japanese soldiers had to think, like, I really wish we had leather boots to eat. Instead, we only have wooden sandals. We have to immediately start with our horses. No, this, so there's a guy I'm following on TikTok because it's insane. He is slowly eating the headboard of his bed. I was thinking something along the lines of like, yeah, that lacquer armor, you know, I bet you get, you get a nice little barbecue smoke coming out of that.

Yeah. Yeah, you put it with a little tin of water over some coals. There's some leather in there. Fry it up. Yeah, but like the dude that I'm watching on TikTok posts daily updates on him literally like chewing the wooden headboard. and he's making pretty good progress with a...

I don't think he is. He's going to die. I feel like there are other ways in which you can transform yourself into a beaver that might at least do something interesting like redirect water. Yeah, no dams.

Don't eat stuff. Like, I don't know. Or do what I do and don't go on TikTok. I would say that's probably a good choice. Now, they're already eating their horses. So you know it's going to run out next, right? They're water.

enter the best hustler, quite possibly of the entire series. A random unnamed Korean man. He emerges, not necessarily from Kwan Yul's army, just from the surroundings in general. Nobody's sure where he comes from, but he has water. And he's carrying it in a jug on his back. He goes through both lines.

Nobody is bothering him. He goes to the Japanese wall. And he says, I'll give you one cup of water for like a dozen. silver coins. Now this is some pretty serious water based inflation. Normally it was even one whole coin. And that is a lot of money

for your average Japanese soldier. This means that only a small number of them could afford a single cup of water and they quickly get all of it or run out of money. The Koreans let him do this, the Koreans and the Chinese because they realize that it's

really demoralizing for the Japanese. So they kind of allow this Korean hustler to do a bit of sciops just for his own game. Absolute king shit, honestly. The men in the castle, they buy all the water up, they drink it. Everyone else, mostly the Ashi-Garu, but most importantly, not the musket-wielding Ashi-Gar because they are treated very well because they are the most important soldiers out there, just the samurai can never admit it, are forced to drink the piss of the men who could abhorred water because it was

slightly more hydrated. I was literally going to make this joke. I'm like, are we going to have fucking water world economy take over? But I was like, that's too coarse. That's too low-hanging fruit as a joke. And then you just say it. Yep. Sometimes history is worse than we are. Sometimes. That always.

One time I went to a gig and it was like dance music and almost all of the crowd were on ecstasy and it came out and there was just like these kids that had bought like packs of water from Aldi and we're selling them for a fiver bottle. And they sold every single one. That's a hustle. Good for them. Yeah, I never get hustled for water because I don't lock myself in a metal containers full of people doing ecstasy.

However, I do get hustled for water at festivals at outdoor concerts because I still get got. So at the end of the day, we're all getting hustled by the water man. So everyone settles for drinking piss, right? But obviously, there's a piss deficit at play here. there's only so much piss to go around there's only so many dudes who can afford water so soon people are fighting over the piss you get piss fights and since it's

February this is all really cold and they've burnt through their small supply of firewood so now everybody has soaked in piss and freezing today probably felt really good for like a second because the pace is warm and then you realize you're covered in pace

definitely I have been there before in an unfortunate circumstance right, did not drink piss. But obviously, being deployed, there's piss bottles everywhere. Oh, God. And I was in a guard tower

because it was my squad's turn to do, you know, night shift because everybody else is out on patrol. And it's January, February, it's cold as shit. I'm in northeast Afghanistan. And I'm bumbling around looking for my energy drink.

And I knocked over a water bottle that was on the top of the guard shack that somebody left. And it dumped on my pant leg. And it was piss. And it was so fresh that the dude literally just pissed in that bottle before I relieved him, like five minutes before. So for a split second, because obviously there's no heaters there.

You can't have a fire in a guard tower. Some freezing cold. And I dumped this piping hot bottle of piss down my leg. And for a split second, like, it's kind of nice. I remember seeing guard towers where people had chucked piss bottles out. And there was just like a like basically looked like a minefield surrounding them of nothing about piss bottles. is just like average Belgian apartment. Like it's just so fucked up looking, man.

We're all disgusting. Now, this also leads to problems because people are starting to get frostbite, which is a huge problem all around. Obviously, frostbite can get infected. It can kill you. But most importantly, for the sake of the defense of this castle,

the things that mostly get frostbite are your face, your nose, most of all, and your fingers. Mm-hmm. Which is a huge problem when you have a bunch of dudes who need to use muskets. And also, contrary to popular belief, piss is not sterile and may be warm so you can't piss on your own hands to warm them up and sterilize them if you do get gangrene.

Yeah, you get to boil you'll piss first. They don't have any firewood, Joe. How are they got to boil the piss? Get enough guys together, body heat, maybe do some vigorous exercise and just put a pot of piss at the middle and see if you get to boil. I have a North Face puffer jacket that's just like a plastic bag continuously on the inside full of warm piss. You never know when you're going to need it. It's like the reverse of that Chinese dude that has the inflatable puffer jacket that he drinks beer out of. It's like it's thermal wear, basically. You definitely don't want to use the straw, though.

You know, side note, my dad actually got frostbite in Korea in the 70s because basically, like, they were out doing patrols and the gear they had with shit and wasn't waterproof. But, like, technically speaking, if you got frostbite, then that was like a thing you'd be punished for under the military justice system because it was like dereliction for not having taken care of yourself. So no one reported to the medics that they had gotten frostbite. And so basically everybody came out of it with like fucking chupacabra hands basically. Before your dad ended up being in the same unit as Jeffrey Dahmer. And now we're finding out

that he was actually retainer for Toyotomi Hideyoshi. My dad was actually there for Operation Paul Bunyan in 1976. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, he, but he also got frostbite and basically, yeah, had Baba Yagi for the rest of his life.

This fucking, yeah, because the skin, once you damage, it's all of like the whatever that produces the oil and your skin cells and stuff in your hands like it doesn't really heal so you basically have

you gotta have fucking carmex on your hands nonstop effectively you gotta be like the guy in uh in what is it of mice and men who's like no he keeps one hand in the glove with fucking Vaseline so it's soft for his wife

so this is where Jeffrey Dahmer got the idea of keeping the bodies in the freezer. Yeah maybe yeah I don't know what I know about Jeffrey Dahmer as a medic was apparently you didn't want to be his roommate And I don't want to be flipping about that because it's really fucked up.

But yeah, like he had access to all the medic drugs. Hold that thought for a question from the Legion. Okay. So obviously now we have several men who lose fingers. They can't use muskets. And that's even when the musketeers, the musket wielding Ashigaru, were given the most warm clothing, the most food and the most water they had available to try to keep them healthy.

Hundreds of Japanese were killed because they're trying to sneak out of the castle at night to find food and water. And the Korean Chinese outside just butchered them as they came out. That being said, the Chinese and the Greens outside were faring just as badly. They were dropping dead from disease and cold. And in the first week of the siege, they had eaten all their pack animals too. Having to cut open Japanese scrap scavengers and jump inside them like taun tons. There's also a very real fear that the Japanese are mustering forces together to come to Olsa's assistance.

Yang Hao decided that he needed to bring the siege to an end. And on February 19th, he ordered an all-out attack against the citadel. He assumed that if his men were suffering, the Japanese must be on their deathbeds. And to be fair, he was kind of right. According to Japanese chroniclers, there were maybe a thousand men inside the castle that were in any kind of fighting shape. Everyone else was dead, dying, or, you know, too weak to really even support themselves to do anything to facilitate fighting. Thousands of men attacked the citadel wall and were agreed with a volley of musket fire, fired by men so weak, they required help to reload their muskets

and help to remain standing while they fired them. I have to make this dumb joke. There was a long time ago, but there was an NES game that was basically Fist of the North Star. I don't think it was released outside of Japan, but I've played it on an emulator. And when you played as Ken Shiro, if you hit someone in the head,

their head exploded, and if you picked them, they went flying into outer space. And in my mind, I'm thinking that like when the guy pulls the trigger on the musket, the recoil causes him to lose gravity on Earth and just go flying backwards. So you basically have like a human catapult, but unintentionally. Yeah.

It's one way to exfil all your people out of a siege, I guess. I might not be able to break out of the siege, but if I point my gun this way and fire, I'm in a GTA cheat mode my ass out of this place. Fucking rocket jumping off the Korean Peninsula. You hit a shot so hard you end up in Hokkaido. Hundreds of Chinese and Koreans are killed over the next. three hours, and finally Yang Hao decides it wasn't going to work, and he orders the siege to be lifted and is meant to begin to withdraw. Then as the withdrawal was ordered, a rumor began to spread

within the ranks that a massive Japanese relief force had just landed by sea to the south and was marching right for them. There was no relief force, but panic spreads, and soon Chinese soldiers are running from nothing. The Korean part of his army hadn't even been told there was a withdrawal going on at all. So they see the Chinese go from fighting to just running for their lives and they're forced to keep up. Yang Hao looks out in confusion is his army virtually disintegrated for no reason. Eventually he returned to Seoul and then in letters back to his government, he blames the Koreans for all of his failings. I was just thinking as a really dumb aside that maybe that's the origin of Issaqai as a concept is that someone got launched into outer space by the musket because they were

so wasted away from fatigue and starvation. And they wound, like you said, Tom, wound up in Hokkaido with like a village with a nice, you know, thermal spring. And they're like, okay, this is my life now. And now it's entered into Japanese culture this way. Well, for it to be a Sakai, he'd have to rotate around the earth enough times where like a certain amount of time would have to pass or he'd somehow be fired so hard. So quickly.

Yeah. He goes back in time several hundred years. So effectively, we're doing Joe Haldeman's the Forever War. Yeah. But it's just a one Japanese. guy with the musket. He just fucking, he got unstuck in time that way. Yeah. In the aftermath

of the siege, something groundbreaking happened for the Japanese. Asano wrote his father in Japan, demanding any men from the domain, any men at all, samurai or Ashi Garu, it didn't matter. When they're sent to Korea, they better be armed with guns.

This is the first order from any lord of unified Japan for samurai to carry guns. Asano recognized that wasn't the katana or the lance or the bow, any of the traditional weapons of the samurai that had saved him during the siege. It was the almighty gun. Ghost dog. Ghost dog. But after this, there was about time for more Chinese reinforcements coming over the border. Some of these were under the command of Leo Ting, nicknamed Big Sword Ting. Yeah. Wall fucking name. Fucking God, Joe, you got to realize. Because he carried

a sword the size of a man. Also, big sword ting sounds a guy with a huge sword in South London would say. And that's definitely a line from like some dude from bricks is like big sword ting. So basically you're saying that guts and or cloud strife did exist. Yeah. He has a legitimate buster sword.

From all accounts, it's a massive sword. Much like heaven, I didn't expect them to be Chinese. Oh my God. I always thought that stuff just. was, you know, flights of fancy, but now you're telling me that a guy had a sword the size of a man, you know, he trained with an even heavier sword. It's not even like, uh, the only large sword at play here. It's something I didn't bring up before, but Yisun Sen has ceremonial swords that are about two meters long. Okay. There's strictly for ceremony. He doesn't carry them with him,

but they are his. And over the years, there's been very much unconfirmed accounts of him using these two meter long swords as signaling devices while he was commanding ships, which makes zero fucking sense. You would not use a sword that way. No naval commander would use a sword that way, especially not one of the greatest ones of all time. But to make Yisan Sun Sun sound even cooler, he did have two swords, which were about two meters long. They still exist today. You can go see him in a museum. But Leo Ting carried his fucking sword with him and used it in combat. The only way the Japanese are going to combat, they say, if they deploy a soldier who uses a giant key as a sword. Yeah, they're just North Korean Sora.

The people's kingdom hearts. There's going to be a kingdom hearts spin out here. Does that mean the DPRKH? Yeah, they're going to go to like Pyongyang Disney as a kingdom hearts world. And they're going to have to recognize that, uh, yeah, Kim Jong-un-Z. sister is technically a Disney princess now. I mean, Kim Jong-un absolutely would post a picture of him

captioned me with my best friends and it's Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. No, that was just his brother that he had assassinated. He did that shit all the time. I was thinking more like goofy with an Ashugaru Musk is saying, unafraid to let it yuck. Now, with big

sword ting coming into town, uh, I'm sorry, this is fucking killing me. I'm saying the whole thing every time. Meanwhile, I'm going down the road on this with Goofy and thinking of Mob Deep lyrics, you yuckin me, I'm yucking right back at you.

Now, with Big Soorting, coming into town, he brought with him his also very colorful personality. And by that, I mean, he was cartoonishly corrupt even for Imperial China. No, Joe, I thought a guy named Big Sort Ting would be retiring and demure,

he'd be really polite. I thought a guy who walked around basically carrying novelty oversized cleaver would be like he would be completely by the book. I believe in giant sword meritocracy. I'm shocked that he's corrupt. Yeah, it's weird. Exactly.

Me too. I figured the guy that had the novelty oversized sword would basically have the personality of a Norwegian. He's in the pocket of Big Bud K. So he had been denied promotion twice for taking bribes. And one of the first things he did when he got to Korea was demand that one of the king's sons, one of the princes of Korea,

join his army as a way to force the Korean government to make sure he'd always be supplied with food which is honestly a brilliant strategy like you're not going to leave me out to dry unless you want your son to die too King Sanjo refuses and after a whole lot of debate

Big Sword Ting decides that he will accept the third most powerful man in the country Guido Kwan to be his logistics based hostage and this is how he runs his army I have not heard a single phrase on this podcast in three years. That makes me smile as much as every time you're saying Big Sword Ting.

I'm going to say it every time I have to. The Brixton Samurai, Big Sword Ting. If there were plurals of them, if there were multiples and they'd have people go out, look out. Big Sword Ting's. Like, yeah, you're right. That is what it is. And there's even elements of the Chinese Navy showing up to the war for the first time under the command of Admiral Chen Lin. Lin makes Big Sword Ting seem not so corrupt in comparison. He had previously treated his sailors so brutally.

He was charged criminally for it in Imperial China. He resigned in protest of the charges, was reinstated, and then fired for corruption, reinstated again in time for the war. This man has been fired more times than I've been demoted. Then, Lin thought his own ships that the government gave him were such. pieces of shit that when he showed up to Korea, he just had all of his Chinese soldiers move on to the Korean ships instead because they thought that they were better. And to be fair, they were. The Korean government was worried that Lin was known for being a total cartoonishly corrupt prick would force Yi Sun send to be subservient to him because it was his right as a Chinese

naval officer to make him subservient to him. And the government sends Yi warning to treat him with a quote, soft hand. So Yi does something he knows would win anybody over. He gets shit-faced with him. And this works. They become best friends. Afterwards, when Lin's own men don't do well in a battle, and the Korean Navy does, you know, take out a couple Japanese ships and take some heads, he offers these heads to Lynn to send back to his own government so he could save face. He gets him on some head-based debt. Of course, Guy then writes to King Sop. telling him exactly what he did, so nobody in the Korean court thought that the Chinese admiral had outperformed him. The Japanese in their fortified perimeter definitely saw the writing

on the wall, though. They needed to consolidate their defenses in order to prepare for the coming weight of the Chinese army. Kiteyoshi refused, coming to the conclusion that doing that would make him look weak in the eyes of the Chinese. Then, four months later in June, he suddenly orders half the soldiers to come back to Japan out of nowhere. This ended up not biting him in the ass through sheer happenstance. So June happened to be slated for a massive new offensive to take place against the Japanese in the south of Korea. But a huge rebellion breaks out in Liaodong, forcing the Chinese to start pulling soldiers

back to put it down. So instead another stalemate develops. And there's a really good chance that the Chinese and the Koreans are able to actually force the Japanese off the peninsula if this rebellion doesn't kick off. Maybe not, but we'll never know. Then, Yang Hao gets fired. He fell victim to political, factual infighting back in China

as a pro and anti-war factions began to solidify and fight each other over the conduct of the war. An investigation by one leading anti-war faction member, Ding Ying Tai, accused Howe of covering up losses, lying to the emperor, and fleeing the battlefield,

which, to be fair, is actually all true. Supplies again become a massive problem. and Hideyoshi wanted to relieve the stress being put on Japan feeding this army because it's actually taxing Japan's acrogulchral base quite a lot to keep all these dudes going. But he legitimately has no idea how to end the war. Like I said, his goals as unspeakably terrible as they were had been met. But when your entire political ideology boils down to how can I make this look good for me personally, it kind of makes ending a war you started for no reason really fucking hard.

And thankfully, nobody does this anymore. Hideyoshi was also busy doing something even more important at that time. Dying. I was going to guess concerts and tea ceremonies, but dying also up there on the list. By July, according to his own letters, he hadn't eaten in 15 days and couldn't get out of bed. He grew so weak that a rumor came out of Japan, made its way to Korean spies, and then all the way to the Korean court that he had already died. In Japan, everybody was so certain that he was absolutely done for that the emperor put out a personal official order

for all temples and all people in Japan to pray for Hideyoshi to recover. Hitting the pray for Mojo, Bolton. Surprise. This does not work, no matter what the 2026 FDA tells you. The only thing Hideyoshi was thinking about on his deathbed, though, was securing his son Hidiore's rule. He demanded his daimyo swear endless pledges of loyalties to this five-year-old kid.

Over and over and over again. He orders several children of the most powerful lords in Japan to Osaka Castle to be kept and raised as hostages. Then he created the Council of Five Elders. Now, for anybody who has watched the wonderful miniseries Shogun, these are those scheming men simultaneously holding Japan together while also stabbing each other in the back and setting everything up for the next Civil War. The council is made up of the most powerful and loyal lords, Kiyoshi thought he had.

Most important amongst them, of course, being Tokugawa Iyasu, who had only used this time during the war in Korea to become even more powerful. Here comes my boy, Tokugawa Yasu. Personally, I'm just, I know that there's this sort of symbolism and that it's, it's representative, but like the idea of swearing your undying fealty to a five-year-old is just very, very funny to me somehow. I sort of like, okay, like, I am at your command, my liege. And it's like, what do you do? Like, become a greo for the entirety of the plot of Paw Patrol.

You will know every single plot by heart and be able to recite it orally. It will never be written down because it's sacred. Getting on your hands and knees to like bow in front of your five-year-old lord, he just hits you in the top of the head with a fire truck toy. It's like, all right, uh, I appreciate that, my liege. I'll bear this scar from you hitting me with the baby Einstein piano for the rest of my life. So where every other lord in Japan, prosecutes this war in Korea

and an attempt to become more powerful and court more favor with the ruler of Japan. Tokugawa had done the opposite. He had an agreement with Hideyoshi that he would supply exactly zero men and zero fucking coins to this war. So he didn't. While all of his fellow lords had dumped men and coin

into the Korean meat grinder, Tokugawa was sitting pretty. He had even been named a regent to Hideori. so now he is far more powerful than everybody else and has Hideyoshi's kid in the palm of his hand which isn't that difficult because he's only five so you probably lift him with one hand and this guy's probably pretty shit. Also literally we don't know what they're doing maybe he's just holding

them like a platter threatening people with him. Just like yeah I'll get this kid in my hand you know the fuck I can do with it. Gestering threateningly at someone with a five year old. It's a five year old scowling while you do it to making mean faces. Tokugawa Yasu hit him with the DMX lyrics like you're broke. stupid you kid ain't yours? The council was charged with running the country and protecting Hidiore's

position until they came of age. But Hidioshi spent the last days sending letter after letter to the men of the council and the retainers, begging them to protect Hidiorei and repeatedly over and over again demanding oaths of loyalty be renewed

from one day after another. Toyotomi Hidioshi penned a final death poem. I am the do which falls, the do which disappears. years. Even Osaka Castle is only a dream. And then the bitch died in September 18th, 1598 at the age of 62. Rest and piss. This is immediately met with secrecy by the council of elders. Nobody was to know about Hideosi's death for fear that word would get to Korea and then the hundred thousand or so dudes camped out there and all their lords suddenly have to start freaking out about who's in charge.

If Armando Ionucci hadn't been a coward, he would have made a movie about this instead of the death of Stalin. I mean, this is kind of what the book Shogun is about. It's really good. Also, he should also make that movie. I would watch it. I will play Hideyoshi. Don't ask me if that's okay. With the one unifying force amongst all of these

lords who hate each other, now dead, the council was rightfully worried that the men might lose their shit and start settling old beefs and use the resulting bloodshed for political jockeying and whatever new regime was birthed out of the old. All while being in Korea,

Like the council of elders realize like, fuck, we need to get all these guys home because there's all sorts of other players involved in Japan who could very easily turn on the government and their whole army is in Korea. All those dudes hate each other. And most importantly, those dudes all swore to follow Hideyoshi,

not this fucking council, which is why they're keeping it secret. It's starting to sound like ghost face killer lyrics, get him out of Korea before the beef gets exponential. And there's also something else that may or may not have happened. According to the council, and really only the council, the final order given by Hideyoshi was to end the war in Korea. However, there is no written record of this, which is interesting because there's a written

record of just about everything else he did. And the council kept Hideyoshi's death a secret, passing orders back and forth from Japan to Korea, forging his name. as if he was still alive for a week. Surely you're not telling us, Joe, that they just hid that, disposed of it, to not let people know

that the war was supposed to end. Well, I actually argued the different thing. Hideyoshi didn't want the war to end, and they did, because there was no order. Ah. And literally when the first things they did is pass orders to Korea

to end the war, no matter the reason. Meanwhile, fucking Tokugawa Yasu is just like breakdancing in front of a fry. Everyone says, you're going to fucking lose this war. Up in here. Up in here.

Let me teach you about a little something called Sekigahara, you little shit. Me in about 200 years worth of my family to make you all look like fucking idiots. Now it's in my opinion from all the resources that I read that the council understood that there was zero fucking chance they could continue the war without Hideyoshi at the helm. And knew that if the Lord's fighting in Korea also knew that the orders to end the war, came from the council and not Hideyoshi, they could very well just ignore them and continue fighting the war on their own for their own gain and there was nothing they could do to control them.

But just because Japan wanted out of this whole thing didn't mean the Chinese and the Koreans were in the same boat. In fact, shit was about to get really weird. Enter the anti-war faction member Ding Yangtai once again. He returns to Korea and this time he's not investigating Chinese military officers. He's investigating the Korean nation as it exists under King Sanjo. And when you guess it, he came to the conclusion that this whole six-year-long war

was all the fault of Korea and King Sanjo. China bared zero responsibility for any of this. The evidence for this was the previous negotiations that Korea dared to have before Japan's initial invasion while addressing Hideyoshi as king before he had been granted such a title by the, emperor of China. And they had dated their letters going to Japan using Japanese year titles, not Chinese, which is a huge foe pa apparently. And when the war started, it was clearly another failure of Korea to defeat the Japanese and protect the celestial kingdom. He writes, quote,

The current king of Korea is a tyrant to his subjects and wallows in debauchery. He imprudently lured the Japanese to invade our empire and scoff at Heaven's court and has formed a gang with Yang Hao to deceive the son of heaven bars. Facing a charge of treason, King Sanjo simply abdicated his throne, locked himself in his personal apartment, and got really depressed. Now, this throws the government of Korea into complete and total disarray because unlike, say, Japan or China, the Korean government actually needs their sovereign to approve literally everything that goes on there. So members of his inner circle, start begging

the king to rescind his abdication so they might be able to continue working. Adding that if you don't come back to work, that asshole Yang Tai could actually have him charged with treason because he had abdicated without the approval of the Chinese emperor. Yeah, like

normally when one of your friends kind of withdraws from their social circle and you're concerned about their mental health, it's like, you know, oh, are you showering, are you eating? Have you started a rewatch of the Sopranos again? These guys in charge of the entire country. Yeah, you don't get to be a

small bean with imposter syndrome if you're king. I'm starting to get really worried here because the sovereign of our kingdom offered to give me his PlayStation and didn't want any money for it. Someone check the king's Google history. He's looking up small

vans and charcoal grills. He's looking up how to kill yourself while not making your mother sad. He's looking up. listening to a lot of the spill canvas, we should really get in there. They're just like knocking on the door to check if he's okay and all you hears, take me out tonight.

I was going to go a different direction. I was going to say, you're like, damn, I didn't even know that Elliot Smith was that active in the 1500s. This goes on for a week until all the Chinese military leadership in Korea turns on the investigator, regardless of the status with the court back home. and they demand that the Korean king return to his throne so his country might work. Yangtai is eventually recalled. King Sanjo receives a letter from the emperor of China,

recognize him as a good and true boy, and thus Sanjo becomes king once again. Meanwhile, the Chinese and Korean armies are still on the march. Tens of thousands of soldiers split amongst three groups, all meant to hit the three main Chinese fortifications at the same time. This is supposed to be the battle that ends all of this. Magui brings 30,000 soldiers back to Olsan. This time they find the castle in much better shape.

Construction had been completed. The moat is filled with both spikes and water now from a nearby diverted river. And soldiers inside were much healthier than the last time around, which is a low bar. But there's clear evidence to him that the Japanese were packing it up. They weren't advancing out of the walls under the forge for food. they weren't going on patrols. They saw a lot of boats nearby, seemingly like taking on things to bring home. So he thought, well, if they're planning on withdrawing, I don't need to fucking attack him.

So he just camps out, which is a good choice. This is the first I'm ever giving a round of applause for a military officer for not throwing his men into a needless bloodbath. His fellow commander, Dong Yanwan, didn't have the same thoughts. He was leading an army through Central Korea, and he came across the Japanese fort, at Sa Chian, commanded by Shimazu Yoshihiro. Now, Shimaziv is an interesting guy in the fact that he's commanding a castle during a time of war,

because he's actually a year older than Hideyoshi was when he died. So he's 63. A little old to be still at the front line samurai game, but he has 8,000 men with him. He's badly outnumbered by the Chinese army of nearly 30,000. However, Shimazoo had fought the Chinese the year before.

He had decades of experience under his belt in Japan's civil wars, and this wasn't even his first time being penned into a fort by an enemy that outnumbered him several to one. He had, as historians say, that dog in him. The Koreans began to attack with cannons and a new weapon, simply called the gunpowder jar. Now, this seemed to be carried mostly by the Chinese part of the army, but this is just a big-ass bomb in a ceramic jar. It seemed like it could be rolled downhill or loaded into a catar,

of some kind. But it was so powerful that when the fuse was lit and this bomb went off, it could seemingly take down huge chunks of wall all at once. The gunpowder jar is basically Sylvia Plath in the dungeon crawler Carl universe. Fuck me. However, I think it's safe to assume that workplace safety was not exactly something that had been invented yet within the ranks of the Chinese or Korean armies in the 1500s. because when they moved forward under musket fire, they carried these lit gunpowder jars with them. It was only a matter of time before one of the volleys clapped a guy

that was carrying one side of the jar too many, and they drop it, causing a massive explosion that seemingly atomized several hundred men in an instant. Yeah, it's like when you die five times and call a duty and get last stand. Or martyrdom. Martyrdom was what the fucking thing, laws. Yeah, but they used martydom on themselves. So this is basically the first instance of the big red glowing orb on the enemy that one has

to point at and fire. Yeah, pretty much. Or they accidentally reenacted being the orc from the Battle of Helms Deep just a little too soon. And this explosion is so big that obviously, like I said, it kills a lot of people, but it sends the rest of the attacking force fleeing. Shimizu orders his forces to counterattack immediately through this churned gun powder crater bloody mess, sending the Chinese Korean Allied force into full retreat. Shimizu, of course, inflates the number of people he killed. He says 30,000 Chinese soldiers died that day, which is definitely not true. Chinese forces say they lost 7,000, though, which is still a lot. It's a huge victory for someone that was as badly outnumbered as he was. On the western side

of the Chinese advance, commanded by Big Sword Liu Ting and his 25,000 mid split roughly in half, between the Chinese and Koreans. They marched towards Sun Tian Castle under the command of, who else? Konishi, because it's been a whole episode since we've talked about him. I'm so happy that big sorting has shown back up. Now, he has some interesting tricks up his sleeve,

which I also assume are quite large. Sun Tian Castle had been built on the very edge of Kwongyang Bay. I mean, they had dug a moat so deep where it's been built that he effectively created an island. And then they built one single bridge crossing over it. I've seen this castle also just called Japanese bridge castle and turned it

into a fortified island. You don't want to fucking attack this place. And for that reason, Big Sword Leo Ting had linked up with Yi Sun Sin and Chen Lin to coordinate a supporting sea attack to help his ground assault. But as always, Konishi didn't really want any of this smoke. This is not a man that saw any worth in fighting this battle that was, for all intents and purposes, already lost. He the war is coming to an end and he sends a letter to Liu Ting, sorry, Big Sword, Leo Ting, asking to meet in no man's land in between the two armies for negotiations. Big Sword Ting agrees, but not in good faith, mind you. He is not making a deal. Instead, he wants to lure him into a trap. He disguises one of his officers as himself and sends him forward to meet Konishi on the agreed upon

date. Conishi emerges from the castle, assuming everything is going according to plan, and it probably would have. This would probably be how Konishi gets killed. If only one of Big Sword Ting's random artillerymen didn't just fire on their own as Konishi was riding towards the middle. This sends

Konishi fleeing back behind the walls and the siege begins. Now there should have been an assault from both sides from land on one side. See on the other. They got the cannons and manpower for it but it never really worked out that way. Obviously communication in the 15

90s is dog shit at best and coordinating a sea and land board combined arms assault is virtually impossible. But she should have had that big ass sword to do signaling with because that's totally realistic, right? Exactly. Not like a flag or whatever. Or a messenger or perhaps a ground commander who didn't call off every attack before it took place, which is exactly what big sword ting did.

Now, he held his army back to build siege engines, which is fine, but he didn't bother to tell the naval commanders. So each time Ye and Lin attack the castle from the sea, they'd end up doing it alone, getting hammered by incoming fire and having to pull back and wondering why the ground of forces

were not joining them. Big Sort Ting is just like forging an even bigger sword so he can run up like fucking guts and he's going to let that thing clang. Yeah, he's building a city killer sword. I was a little bit surprised the fact that a person could cut an entire castle

in half, but I guess it's possible. he's working on it. A week later, Big Sword Ting finished construction and moved his siege engines in, but immediately got pinned down by musket fire. In an effort to get closer to the castle and hit it with cannon fire and support the ground forces, Yi led the Navy into shallow waters that night,

only to get grounded on some rocks. Lynn, not understanding what had happened, quickly followed him into this mess. The Japanese thinking this was some kind of large-scale landing, just zeroed in on these ships with every bit of fire they had. This forced even more ships to get in close and rescue the men who were stuck on the rocks. And before everything was said and done, 30 ships had to be abandoned. And just the siege ended the next day as a complete and total embarrassment

and easily the biggest defeat that Yisunsen was ever involved in. When word of the rapid defeat of the three-pronged Chinese assaults against the Japanese made it back to the Wanli emperor. He insulted his own commanders. He didn't even blame the Koreans like every other Chinese commander leader did in this situation. He said his commanders failed because they were, quote, cowardly and effeminate.

God damn it. I just feel like there's so many things here where it could all come together and it doesn't. It's like you have something as cool as the gunpowder jar, but then no one tells people, oh, if you drop it, you basically do the chick-sulub crater on yourself. Then you have these, guys building like the world's biggest most comically oversized siege engines, but they're like,

you should probably let the Navy know so that they don't get a shot to pieces or be washed up on the rocks. And it's like in the end, they have this basically able to do a sort of late 16th century Normandy landing. And it's it just, it's like, it's like the glue froze and then everything just fell apart. Like, it's insane. It's an interesting part of history because like if you could just include one or two more things into every. attempt that they had it would work, but they're just missing that, you know, it's a, we always say like the evolutionary dead end of military technology. And if they just had better signaling, some rudimentary form of communication didn't involve dude on horseback, why wouldn't have worked,

right? But instead, they get stuck. Because you think about us using signal flare, so much, at least all societies that fucking love fireworks. And yet, and yet. In November, Japanese envoys had reached Busan, and they're telling their Chinese counterparts, they want to negotiate an armistice, so they could finally withdraw their men. Hideyoshi's death was no longer a secret, but really nobody other than Cato wanted to stay in Korea and make a thing about it. But even he gave up after he saw everyone else

was like, no, it's time to go home. After their defeats attempting to drive the Japanese into the sea, the Chinese general saw little reason to do anything other than to sit back and let them leave. The Koreans, of course, were not consulted about any deal and were not okay with just sitting back. They still wanted revenge. for everything.

Yi Sun Sin and Lin got word that Konishi was packing his men in supplies up onto ships and preparing to get out in December. As Konishi observed his men loading onto the boats, 200 ships of the combined Korean Chinese Navy appeared off the coast of Kuangyang Bay. He assumed their armistice

covered everything. After all, they weren't fighting on land, and he assumed that the Chinese spoke for the Korean, so there should be no problem. Which, like, legally that was correct. But he forgot the part where the Koreans did not fucking care. So he was a little confused when he saw a few of his ships get smashed when they went out

to have a chat with this Allied Navy that had shown up. Konishi then does what he always did. Tries to make nice. He knows about Chen Lin and his attitude for corruption. So he sends multiple ships loaded down with gifts in the form of wine and hogs to get him to leave. And Yi himself refuses to meet with Konishi's delegation and attempt. to be bribed.

But then, in the middle of all of this, he gets worth at 300 ships, carrying reinforcements on the command of Shimizu, were sailing to Konishi and try to break him out of the situation that he was now in so they could both get home to Japan. But feeling guilty for taking a bribe, he was soon rejoined by Chen Lin, who was now wine and hog rich.

Don't look a gift hog in the mouth, you know? That's right. It was a beautiful hog, you know. know. The two fleets smashed into one another on the 15th of December, beginning the final battle of the Imgen War. Ships fired at one another, cannons, muskets, and bows, and people were ramming into one another and boarding actions began. There's nothing special about this battle. Yi Sunsen, as always, led his men from the front. Lin's ship was surrounded and his allies were sent to help him, and in the total confusion of hundreds of ships crashing into one another

and shooting all at once. Some of the ships on the Korean and Chinese side accidentally shot at one another, and Lin is almost killed. But at the end of the day, this goes like virtually every other naval battle we talked about. The Japanese are driven back. Your ships are set on fire.

People jump overboard. They're dragged out of the water and beheaded. Ye's ships are blasting away with their cannons at point blank range. So close that it's said that sailors could reach down into the water, pick up burning pieces of their ship, and just throw them at the Japanese. Yes. During one of these passes, as the story goes, Yi himself stood at the top of his multi-tiered flagship and fired an arrow that killed a Japanese commander.

I don't know which commander it's referring to, because no Japanese lord is known to have died in what became known as the Battle of Noryang. Maybe he just killed someone who was suspiciously, well-dressed. Shimizu's own flagship crashed into the rocks and nearly took him down with it, but he was saved the last second and pulled away. One Korean ship captain got shot in the head by a musket, knocked unconscious, woke up discovering his ship had been boarded and just drew his sword and started fighting. After fighting desperately for hours, the Japanese finally began pulling away, giving up the goose, recognizing they were not going to break through. And that's when Yisun Sen ordered

they be chased down. He was smashing a war drum the whole way. Then, while standing on the deck of his ship, next to his oldest son and his nephew, both officers in his navy, a stray musketball flew through the air and smacked directly into Yee Son Sin's chest, morally wounding him.

Oh, what a way to go, though. His last words were simply, Don't let the men know. So his body was quickly hidden inside of his flagship. His son took up the mantle at the war drums so nobody noticed the baseline had wavered. And the battle was complete.

The battle of Noriang became yet another Korean naval victory. When the word was allowed about his fate, every single man in his fleet began crying, including Chen Lin. When the news of his death reached King Sanjo, he went into shock and just kind of stared into the middle distance for a while.

He's body was sent back to his hometown of Asan and Barry next to his father. Thousands of people came out to line the roads and even the government who hated ye, fired him, and nearly executed him, or finally forced to promote him to the rank of minister, and give him the title the Lord of Loyal Valor, with a shrine built at his former naval base at Yosu. Though many more shrines would be built to the man all over Korea, and the modern era he has ships, coins, a Taekwondo form named after him. He's had a ton of films and

TV shows made about his life, including one where he's played by my favorite Korean actor, Choiman Sick. You might recognize as playing Odai Su, an old boy. Solid choice there. Ironically today, Yis Sunsen has a massive statue in Seoul. Only about 250 meters away from a statue of King Sanjo. Yee's statue is much larger. I'm pretty sure the street is on as Sanjo Dero, too.

So the street seemed after Sanjo. His statue, much bigger than Sanjo's. After the victory at the Battle of Noryang, the Japanese were slowly allowed to leave. After almost seven years of war, Japan had lost roughly 80,000 men, mostly to disease and cold and starvation, and they had nothing to show for it. Toyotomi Hideyoshi had set out to conquer the world and failed at the first step. Of course, the ripple effects would continue with the Toyotomi clan being badly weakened. Tokugawa Iiyaso became the most powerful lord in the country and set the stage for the council of elders to eventually break down into civil war once again

with Tokugawa Ie Yaiso coming out on top at the Battle of Sekigahara unifying Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate and his clan ruled for hundreds of years. Stay tuned in the future, we are definitely going to do a series on Sekigahara. For the Chinese, the war was disastrous. They lost tens of thousands of men, tons of supplies. Their economy already in shambles was now when the shambles. of shambles. All of the problems they already had had been made a hundred times worse. Weakened, broken teetering. The Manchus, or as they called them, their Jurchens, would topple the Ming

dynasty 46 years later. So I guess in a way, Hideyoshi did eventually help China die. For Korea, the war was an apocalypse. By the time the Japanese finally left, at least two million people were dead, with an unknown number taken as slaves, but probably hundreds of thousands. In total, 20% of the Korean population was lost in one way or another, making it statistically the most destructive event in Korean history. That is even accounting for the unknowable deaths that we know occurred in the aftermath once the Japanese left, because it's not like starvation and disease just went away with them. You can easily tack on tens or hundreds of thousands of secondary and tertiary deaths along with this in the years afterward. Virtually all of the farmland in Korea, which is, like we pointed out before,

in the southern portion, which was also the part that the Japanese had the most damage to, was destroyed thanks to the scorch earth tactics of the Japanese. This wasn't helped much by the actions of the Korean or Chinese armies either, whose soldiers preyed upon the population. Because as always, at the end of the day, the greatest victim in any war of any time throughout history are always innocent civilians. Along the way, the entire economy was destroyed as it previously existed. Even a century after the war ended, the total amount of cultivated land within the Green Peninsula would not approach pre-war numbers. And the Korean government wouldn't economically recover for centuries. The war did have some interesting social after effects. For example, before

the war, about one third of the entire Korean population was in a kind of serfdom. There are some arguments that it might be more closely related to chattel slavery, then served them. I agree, it's kind of a mix of the two. But after the war, but the land ruined, a lot of landlords and slave owners dead. And most importantly, the paperwork that acted in their enslavement all burn, a lot of people just suddenly became free, allowed to strike out on their own in an age of desperation. Though this no-be system would continue for hundreds more years after the war, for a small window in time, it was virtually unenforceable. The government desperate for revenue just began selling status to anybody who had enough money to pay them.

This went for titles as well, throwing the already chaotic Korean government into an even worse spiral of factionalism and infighting. This didn't even escape the throne because after Sanjo died, his family just started cooing one another. In Japan to this day, the mound of noses shrine still exists in Kyoto. Though it has been renamed to the confusing mound of ears because someone decided that Mimiizuka was better. I don't know why. There's no ears there. It's noses. Makes no sense.

It isn't a popular shrine. Virtually gets zero visitors. The only people who do go are normally Korean tour groups because they know what that shrine actually is. Speaking of shrines, upon his death, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the first Japanese leader to overtly order a genocide was made a kami or a spirit within the Shintofei. The shrine commemorating him was built a year after his death and then destroyed by Tokugawa before being rebuilt after the Meiji Restoration, where it still stands today, a short way away from the Mimi Zuka. I hate it when my haters start destroying my sepulchre. I can't speak for its popularity,

but I can say it currently has 3.7 stars on TripAdvisor where a shrine Tokugawa Iyasu has 4.4 and that would probably really piss off Hideyoshi. Yeah, because Tokugawa I Yasu fucking rocks. With that, ladies, gentlemen,

and non-binary friends, I bring it in to Turtle Ship Summer. We've been on such a journey and I did not expect that I would hear about such a delightful character as Big Sword Ting this late in the series. Well, Joe, you really pulled it out of the bag.

It was an adventure. The Imgen Moore has been a series that's been on our to-do list for probably five years. I'm glad we finally did it. It's over. It's done. Can't wait for the 12 fucking pirate series on the Battle of

Seca Gara. Oh, it's going to be a lot. I actually a little peek behind our production curtain here. I originally I originally planned to do a Seki Gahara series last year. And then I realized, I was like, oh, you know, we can do this in re-parts. Nope. No, sure fucking can't.

So it kind of got pushed on. And I'm glad we're going to be doing it after Imgen. I think it's going to be more interesting now. But fellas, how are we doing? Six weeks on into the Imgen War, one episode for every year of the war. Didn't do that on purpose, but here we are. Good. You know, I mean, there's a lot of horror.

a lot of apocalyptic detail, but there's also a lot of really funny bits. So I feel like it's a, it's suited our format quite well. It's got plenty of donkeys. Horses, horses got eaten. Which is good because we hate horses, so we're happy when they get eaten,

so on and so forth. We respect the, uh, the sacrifice to the Church of Eastern Horsodoxy. I mean, you definitely filled out the extended lines led by donkeys bingo card is like, period blood wizard,

eating horses. Awesome dude with a big sword. shows up. Incredibly drunk guy pulls it out of the bag of the last minute. But then also is prone to mood attacks where he becomes depressed and, you know, gets into his feelings and starts writing really depressing poetry.

So in a way, one side loses the war because their leader just dies. Completely unrelated. It's not stated in any of the sources that I read. But I would like to believe while King Sanjo is locked in his apartment, he's cuddling that peacock. He was gifted back in episode two.

I like to believe the peacock is still there. Or he's like, he's starting to lose his mind because he's been in the room so much and he's doing like, caraday, like fucking Martin Sheen in Apocalypse now against the peacock.

Really sweaty. But fellas, we do this thing on the show called Questions from the Legion, which, or maybe new listeners out there, we normally do every episode unless it's a series,

then we do it our final episode. So it's been six weeks. If you want to ask us question on the show, support us on Patreon. Becoming a Patreon supporter makes everything we do on the show possible. You get all sorts of bonus content, including every regular episode one week early to include series, ebooks, audiobooks, stickers at a high enough tier, Discord access where you can ask us more questions or you can ask us via Patreon.

And today's question is, worst roommate or worst roommate story that you have. Or I'm going to have to fucking abdicate from this one because I cannot tell someone. with these. Okay, I got one. Maybe think of a censored version. So, no surprise here. Worst roommate ever had. Definitely happened in the Army. I was reassigned. I was sent to Fort Hood in Texas because the Army wanted me to commit suicide. And I was put in a barracks room with a cook. I was not a cook, but you don't really get to pick where you end up most of the time. It was an available room. He was the same rank as me. I walked into this room. There's two bad. in every room. My bed obviously has nothing on it because I'm not moved in there yet.

There's no fitted sheet. There's nothing. There's no belongings. His mattress is still bare. It has a pillow on it. And it has stained a dark yellow. There is hair everywhere. Screaming infidelities. His hair truly was everywhere. One of my friends framed it and a joke that has not aged well, not in an offensive way. But that it looked like Ron Jeremy had gone into the room been simply exploded. And I hadn't met this guy because cooks actually have, people don't know this, one of the worst schedules in the entire military. So he was always gone.

And I didn't know. He gets back on night shift. He gets back from night shift. I'm already asleep. I assume he's doing laundry or something, which is why there's no sheets on his bed. No, crawls onto the bare mattress, pulls, like, field a blanket. We nicknamed them whoobbies in the U.S. Army over him to be his blanket. and goes asleep.

This is not the worst part. The worst part comes while he's asleep. He is itching so furiously. While he sleeps, I can hear him. And I am a heavy fucking sleeper. And randomly screaming. So he is having night terrors and clawing at his skin. Like he has fleas.

And then the next day he gets a DUI and punches a cop. So thankfully he wasn't my roommate for very long. Yeah, problem solved. But yeah, it was a dire couple days there. and then I ended up making an agreement with a friend of mine that lived off post that I would just illegally move into his house because for people who don't know if you're in the army and single, you can't just move away without approval.

You have to live in the barracks. Unless you get married, which doesn't cause any problems. Yeah, which is why so many people, so many single dudes go and get married. I swear Diamond loves me. Yeah, so they don't have to live with itchy mick scream. So I did my barracks room up to look like I live there. and simply moved off post to get away from him.

Because he was only in jail for 48 hours. I knew he was coming back. And I called up my boy. I was like, you gotta get me the fuck out of here. We're doing human trafficking to get me off post. So that's the worst roommate I've ever fucking had, bar none.

My head roommate, this one isn't funny. He just was a psycho, he was a drunk. Prior enlisted guy who had been Signal Corps, he'd been deployed, he became an employee. He found out a little bit of my private life

from overhearing a phone conversation. I had with a friend, and then I came into my bedroom and started interrogating me about it, about 3 a.m. and then jumped in bed and started punching the shit out of me. I pulled a gun on me, but then moved out. That was pretty bad. Of course, I couldn't go to the cops because we were on post,

and you can infer that my private life. It was, don't ask, don't tell was in effect. So if I'd said that would have been a declaration, and I would have gotten kicked out of the army, I didn't want to get killed out of the army at that point. So I'd be like, oh, is this guy going to kill me? Is this guy going to kill me? Well, maybe.

But if he does, I have literally no say in the matter. but thankfully he didn't. He did actually write me an email like a year later and apologize profusely. I'm just like, I'm very, very sorry. And I was like, cool, man, I actually accept that. I appreciate it. And I never want to talk to you ever again. So that's not very funny.

But that's real life. In case anybody's wondering, the cook who did not shower or use sheets, he's still in the Army. He's his first sergeant now. I just saw him on Instagram. How did he survive the DUI? They were kicking people out like nobody's business.

It was 2007. Nate. Okay. In 2008, they were kicking people out for it. Like, he got bumped. Well, we were also getting ready to deploy. So he got demoted from E4 to E1 and allowed to stay in. And, uh, yeah, that was, you know, however many years ago. That's just crazy because- Right back on the surface, baby.

I'm not going to say who you are, but if you happen to be a soldier of the United States Army, that man is in charge of your food. But I will say the funny, the funny, the funny, gross roommate story, horrible roommate stories. I had a roommate in college who was a stoner. And one night, he, I mean, lived in a house with, it was five of us. And one night he was blazed off of his mind and decided to make spaghetti because he bought, like, you know, a jar of like ragu or something. He was going to boil spaghetti noodles to make it. And he forgot to put the colander in the sink when he drained spaghetti.

So he dumped spaghetti noodles down the drain. And I just ate something else because he was like, fuck it. The problem was is our garbage disposal was broken. So we couldn't actually clear it. And no one of my roommates wanted to do anything about it. And I didn't notice, like, I didn't remember what was going on. I just hadn't noticed the thing with the sink until like it is starting to like ferment. And so I basically had to do what one can only do.

describe as a, you know, when they, when they clean out a boil and what is it? It's not irrigating. And what do they call it? Do you know what I'm talking about, Joe? Like, you have to Lanson irrigated. Yeah. So I, my rubber, rubber kitchen gloves and just grabbing handfuls of rotting spaghetti and pulling it out of this disgusting. That motherfucker. Also, like, he smirk so much weed, he would wake up the morning and he would just, every morning, but hawk two huge loogies in the sink. And that sound is like, that's like my scratching metal on chalkboard to me. The people doing that is so gross to me. And so like, you got a hawk, too, on that thing, but it's just a rotten pile of spaghetti. So anyway, you can see why at the first opportunity, I got an apartment on my own to get

away from this shit, because it wasn't that much more expensive than what I was paying, living with four other dudes, and it was disgusting. So, yeah, so I have my, I have my distressing roommate experience, and then I have a, I have that one as well. What about you, Tom? I know some members of my former chain of command do listen to our show. And that is how I, illegally lived off post for three years and none of you noticed. You're not on the hook anymore. You know, once we were all out of the army,

come get me, motherfuckers. Once we were all out of the army and fucking people, you know, nothing was subject to anything. I learned about how many of my soldiers were on cocaine. They all told me after the fact. They're like, shit, sir,

gets out of your system so fast. It's so much easier to be doing weed. And I'm like, that is true. All right, guys. I, out of the interest of former roommate's privacy or whatever,

I will tell a story about and a neighbor instead. People actually might remember me posting about this where the flat that I live in now, my upstairs neighbors used to be a couple. I think there were a couple, but they were both furries. And one of them was a music teacher

who would play the trumpet all the time. But there, I guarantee, there are episodes probably of this podcast where you can listen back maybe two years ago and you can hear the faint sound of a trumpet up above. And then similarly when I moved to the UK, I lived in a HMO because I had no money and I didn't know anyone. So I was like, this is like you rent a room in a house that has like every single room

was converted into a bedroom. So I lived with two Turkish couples, a lady from the Ivory Coast. And then there was like a rotating cast that would like take the front room. One of them was a couple that I, they were nice, but it was almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. because every time at 3 a.m. I would hear them come home from the club and start screaming at each other.

Oh, that classic couple who, uh, once they get drunk day to scream at one another. Yeah. Yeah. I lived with them once. Yeah. Tom lived with John Leguizamo and Mirosurvino in the film Summer of Sam. Yeah,

kind of. Um, but yeah, it's like, I've had like so many fucking strange neighbors. But luckily nothing too bad. Well, fellas, I believe that only is that a podcast, that's a whole ass series. Everybody, you've already heard my Patreon pitch, check it out, join the Legion of the Old Crew. And once you do that, listen to these fellas other shows. Fellows, plug your shows. I am the producer and co-host of Trash Future, a podcast about the UK being bad and technology being worse. I'm also the producer of Kill James Bond, a feminist

film podcast. And I am in a band called Second Homes and our debut album is available all over streaming, band camp, etc. So please check those. out if you're interested. Listen to Beneathskin Show about the history of everything told you. The history of tattooing and listen to Blood Worker show about the economy of violence. We are going to be live

in September 26th in Cork, Ireland. We still have tickets available. If you can't make it, we're live streaming it with video on demand so you can watch it whenever you want. Come and see us live. The shows are always really fun. We'll have some drinks afterwards. And maybe watch a football match the next day.

Also, I noticed someone added us to the Old Crow Wikipedia article of the pop culture section. That is very funny to me. Because in closing, I will tell another story of once upon a time when Nick and I were looking for actual sponsorships

to pay our bills. We reached out to Old Crow, the very detailed market pitch to them. They answered back a single word email that simply said, no. Considering how much I know about how much you know about marketing, I would love to see that pitch

because that response is exactly as I would expect. Oh, we didn't write it. We reached out to a friend of ours who went to business school. And so, yeah, so we just still use the name and they don't pay us for it. Anyway, everybody, come see us live or will kidnap your children and hold them ransom, just like Hideyoshi did until you come to our next live show to show your loyalty. That's a joke. I think that might be a crime.

Tell all your weeb kids we're going to hold them up in a castle and you. Japan, they'll be really happy about it. That's true. That just sounds like a weird cult that we've just created. Anyway, come to a live show, join our cult. We'll see you next week.