Sunday, November 23, 2025

“Sui’s ‘Million-Man Army’ Wasn’t a Rabble – The Fubing System and the Real Balance of Power in the Goguryeo Wars”

1. The Real Question: Why Can Some States Fight So Long?

When we talk about the strength of an ancient state, we usually start with territory, population, GDP(-ish).

From a war-planning point of view, though, a sharper question is:

“Can this state reliably send the right number of troops, to the right place, at the right time – and keep doing it?”

The Sui–Tang fubing system (府兵制) was East Asia’s answer to that problem – a fusion of land system and conscription that turned peasants into a standing reserve army.

On top of that, Sui built one of the most aggressive “war machines” in premodern East Asia. That’s how it could drag a so-called “million-man army” all the way to Goguryeo’s doorstep – and also how that very machine helped destroy the dynasty in barely 40 years.

This piece walks through:

where the fubing system actually came from,
why Sui’s army really was dangerous, not just a meme,
and why the Goguryeo wars are better understood as “an overclocked military state crashing itself” than “a mob blundering north and getting dunked on.”

2. Roots of the Fubing System: From Northern Wei to Sui

2.1 Steppe conquerors invent a peasant army

The fubing system did not appear out of nowhere under Sui Yangdi.

Its genealogy runs like this:

Northern Wei (Tuoba/Xianbei) – first big “conquest dynasty” in the north
- tries to stabilize rule over North China
- experiments with versions of equal-field land distribution (均田) and military colonies, early ancestors of fubing
After Wei splits into Eastern and Western Wei,
- Western Wei → Northern Zhou build a more systematic arrangement:
  - frontier and inner garrisons,
  - hereditary military households,
  - regional commands like the famous “Eight Pillar States”.

By the time Sui takes over Northern Zhou, a template is ready:

“Give ordinary farmers land – and at the same time lock them into a permanent pool of part-time soldiers.”

That is the core of 兵農一致 – “soldier and farmer in one body.”

3. Sui’s State Engine: Equal-Field + Fubing + Grand Canal

3.1 Counting people: Sui Wendi’s census drive

After seizing power, Emperor Wen of Sui (Wendi) does something very modern: he cleans up the numbers.

In the 580s, he orders a full household and land census after decades of chaos.
Around unification (589), official figures show ~4.6 million households.
By 609, records claim ~9 million households and about 46 million people – almost double.

Even if the stats are padded (ancient regimes loved inflated numbers), the trend is clear:

By early 7th century, Sui controls the densest tax–manpower base in East Asia.

3.2 Equal-field + fubing: land and soldiers tied together

On top of that, Sui rolls out a formal equal-field system:

Adult males get allotted land (with some permanent, some returning to the state at death).
In return, they owe:
- tax in grain and cloth,
- corvée labor,
- and military service as fubing soldiers.

A typical fubing soldier’s life cycle:

Busy farming seasons – work his own allotment.
Off-season – do regular military drills with his local unit (a 府).
Periodically go up to the capital on rotation duty as a guard.
Once in his life, serve a multi-year frontier posting.
In emergencies, be mobilized into field armies for big campaigns.

So Sui doesn’t maintain a huge, constantly paid standing army. It maintains a country-wide network of semi-professional reservists plugged into the land system.

3.3 The Grand Canal: the circulatory system of the war machine

Then Yangdi adds the third key component: the Grand Canal.

He repairs and extends existing canals like Guangtong and builds new sections like Tongji and Yongji,
physically connecting the political north (Chang’an, Luoyang) with the rice-rich Yangtze basin.

From that point on, the canal becomes:

“A conveyor belt sending southern grain and tax north,
and then sending northern soldiers and supplies wherever the throne wants.”

The same artery that fattens the capital is what will carry massive expeditionary forces toward the Liao and Yalu rivers.

4. “Just a Mob”? No – Sui’s Army Had Teeth

In modern Korean and East Asian internet culture, Sui’s invasions of Goguryeo often get reduced to:

“A huge but clueless mob that marched north and got farmed by a smarter defender.”

Fun as that is, it’s not historically accurate.

4.1 The test run: smashing the Chen dynasty in the south

Before going north, Sui has to unify China – which means crossing the Yangtze and taking out the Chen dynasty in the south.

The Yangtze is a serious moat, and southern regimes had centuries of experience in riverine warfare.
Yet in 589, Sui’s combined army–navy operations crush Chen stunningly fast.

That required:

large-scale river crossings,
organized naval logistics,
coordination of multiple army groups over long distances.

Those are exactly the skills Sui will reuse in the Goguryeo campaigns.

4.2 Northern frontier ops: Tuyuhun and the Türks

Sui doesn’t just fight “soft” southern dynasties.

It campaigns against Tuyuhun on the Tibetan–Qinghai frontier,
and pressures Eastern and Western Türks (Tujue) in the steppes.

By the 610s, Sui’s military elites have already:

marched in desert, grassland, mountain, and riverine environments –
this is not a force of rookies seeing their first war in Goguryeo.

5. The Goguryeo–Sui War: Overclocking the System

5.1 598 – the first clash: weather, sea, and raiding

The first war (598) happens under Wendi.

Sui sends a reported 30-something-thousand to 300k mixed land–sea force (figures vary wildly).
Heavy rains, disease, supply problems, plus Goguryeo’s hit-and-run and naval raids shred the invasion before it really gets going.

Lesson learned in Chang’an: “This opponent won’t collapse from one push.”

5.2 612 – Yangdi’s grand gamble

Then comes the big one: 612, under Yangdi.

According to the Book of Sui and related sources:

The court calls up over a million men – 1,133,800 by one famous count – not all combat troops, but including supply and labor.
Even if the figure is inflated, modern historians generally agree it was one of the largest mobilizations in premodern East Asian history.

The real problems are not “low quality soldiers” but:

Micromanagement by the throne – Yangdi wants to control too much, leaving frontline generals little room to adapt.
Insane logistics – the longer and larger the columns, the more they eat their own supply lines.
Speed vs. mass – with that many men, the army moves slowly, giving Goguryeo time to watch, harass, and choose its battles.

To the Goguryeo side, the Sui advance must have looked less like a blitzkrieg and more like:

“A gigantic but lumbering machine – terrifying if it reaches you intact, but full of joints that can be jammed or cut.”

5.3 Salsu: a tactical kill shot on a strategic overreach

The campaign’s turning point is the Battle of Salsu (612).

After a series of hard fights in Liaodong, one major Sui force begins to withdraw, stretched and tired.
General Eulji Mundeok and Goguryeo’s commanders lure, shadow, and then ambush the retreating Sui army as it crosses the Salsu River,
causing catastrophic casualties – some sources claim only a few thousand out of tens of thousands make it back.

Strategically, what matters is this:

Sui’s system can move massive forces across half a continent –
but if the campaign design is flawed, those same forces turn into a slow, brittle target for a smaller, more agile defender.

6. On Paper vs. On the Ground: Numbers and Asymmetry

We don’t have a perfect headcount for Goguryeo’s population, but most reconstructions agree:

Sui’s subject population – in the tens of millions – is on a different scale.

So in raw resources, it’s something like:

Giant imperial core vs. a tough but smaller frontier kingdom.

That makes Goguryeo’s performance even more striking:

It cannot win a straight attrition contest.
It wins by:
- exploiting terrain, fortresses, and rivers,
- forcing Sui to overextend logistics,
- and going for decisive blows against isolated columns, like at Salsu.

So instead of:

“Goguryeo just turtled in mountain forts until the enemy tripped and fell,”

a more realistic picture is:

“A mid-sized state surviving by chopping chunks off an overextended great power’s limbs while refusing the kind of set-piece battles the empire wants.”

7. From Sui to Tang: Fubing’s Peak and Collapse

7.1 Tang inherits – and refines – the machine

When Sui implodes in the late 610s, the Tang founders are not stupid: they keep most of the machinery.

They preserve equal-field + fubing,
organize military households into standardized jiedu and zhechongfu (節度府 / 折衝府) commands,
and use those forces in Tang Taizong’s campaigns against Goguryeo, the Türks, and the Western Regions.

In early Tang, fubing is near its functional peak.

7.2 Why the system can’t last

Over time, though, the prerequisites that made fubing work start to rot:

The equal-field system erodes – land concentrates in big estates,
military households get absorbed into aristocratic and local magnate followings,
long-term postings and frequent rotations ruin peasant livelihoods.

By the mid–late Tang:

fubing is hollowed out, and
the dynasty shifts toward paid, professional troops under powerful regional commanders (jiedushi).

Those semi-autonomous warlords are exactly the people who later launch the An Lushan Rebellion and turn the empire into a patchwork of private armies.

In other words:

The very impulse to create a hyper-efficient war machine eventually spawns fragmentation and warlordism a couple of generations later.

8. What to Salvage from the “Million-Man Army” Meme

Pulled together, the more sober take looks like this:

Sui–Tang fubing was not a joke.
It was a highly developed system by contemporary standards:
- tying land, tax, and conscription together,
- integrated with a canal network capable of moving men and grain on continental scales.
It still failed spectacularly when paired with bad strategy.
The problem in the Goguryeo wars was:
- over-centralized command,
- over-ambitious objectives,
- and a blindness to the limits of logistics and terrain.
Goguryeo’s success is even more impressive in that light.
It wasn’t just “beating up a clown army.”
It was surviving multiple invasions from the most militarized state of its era, and turning that state’s own overreach into a path to collapse.

So yes, “Sui Yangdi’s million-man army” is a fun meme. But if we leave it there, we miss the more interesting story:

A high-performance imperial war engine,
pushed past its safe limits,
crashing into a smaller—but very hard—frontier state.

If you want to end the post with a slightly more emotional twist, something like this would work:

We like to say “our ancestors were good at war,” and we reach for familiar names – generals from Imjin, righteous armies, independence fighters with rifles older than they were.
But if you zoom out to the 7th century and stare at the Goguryeo–Sui wars, the picture gets rougher and, in a way, more impressive.

On one side stood Sui, the most heavily armed and integrated war state East Asia had seen up to that point – land system, census, Grand Canal, fubing, everything wired for mobilization. On the other side stood Goguryeo, a kingdom with far fewer people and resources, but with mountains, fortresses, and commanders who understood exactly where the imperial machine was likely to jam.
The result was not a fairy-tale underdog victory, but something more sobering: a mid-sized state wrecking the great power’s best armies just enough to trigger its own self-destruction.

Next time someone shrugs off “Sui’s million-man army” as a bunch of clowns blundering north, it might be worth asking a different set of questions:
What kind of state does it take to move that many men at all? What kind of mistakes does it take to burn that capacity down in a handful of campaigns? And what does it mean, for a much smaller kingdom on the frontier, to survive that kind of onslaught at all?

An Army That Fled Before the Battle The Battle of Fujigawa (1180) and the Truth Behind the ‘Waterfowl Story’

An Army That Fled Before the Battle
The Battle of Fujigawa (1180) and the Truth Behind the ‘Waterfowl Story’

Meta description

In 1180, Minamoto and Taira forces clashed for the first time at the Battle of Fujigawa. Behind the famous anecdote of “Taira warriors panicking at the sound of waterfowl” lies a very real political and military crisis. This piece revisits that moment—when Minamoto no Yoritomo’s Kamakura regime was just beginning to take shape—through primary sources like Azuma Kagami, Heike Monogatari, Gyokuyō, and modern scholarship.

The Battle of Fujigawa (1180)

How True Is the Legend of “Warriors Who Panicked at the Sound of Waterfowl”?

When people in Japan talk about the Genpei War (Jishō–Juei no Ran), one scene almost always makes an appearance:

In the dead of night, a great flock of waterfowl takes off from the river.
The Taira army mistakes the sound for an enemy night attack…
And the whole force breaks and runs.

This is the famous anecdote attached to the Battle of Fujigawa (富士川の戦い).

But did hardened warriors of the late Heian period really lose their nerve over the beating wings of a few birds?

In this article, we’ll put the legend back into its context—looking at the political and military background, the key sources (Azuma Kagami, Heike Monogatari, Gyokuyō), and what recent research actually says about the battle’s meaning in Japanese history.

1. Background – The Taira Zenith and the Minamoto Comeback

(1) Kiyomori at the Top, and Resentment Everywhere

In the mid-12th century, Taira no Kiyomori rose to become the de facto ruler of the realm:

He crushed his rivals in the Hōgen Rebellion and the Heiji Rebellion.
He married into the imperial family and positioned his grandson as Emperor Antoku.
On paper, it became “Taira blood on the throne, Taira hands on the levers of power.”

But the price of that domination was growing resentment in the countryside.

Newly appointed Taira-backed governors and stewards pressed hard on the old provincial families. Across the eastern provinces, the mood was basically:

“The capital is fat and happy, the provinces are squeezed dry.
Someone is going to rebel sooner or later.”

Kiyomori had won the capital—but he was quietly losing the provinces.

(2) Prince Mochihito’s Call and the Rise of the Eastern Warriors

In 1180, Prince Mochihito (Mochihito-ō, 以仁王) issued a ryōji (imperial order) calling for the overthrow of the Taira.

That single call acted like a spark in dry grass:

In exile in Izu, Minamoto no Yoritomo raised his banner.
In Kai Province, Takeda Nobuyoshi and the Kai-Minamoto joined the cause.
In Shinano, Minamoto no Yoshinaka moved independently.

For our story, the key figure is Yoritomo—the man who will eventually found the Kamakura shogunate.

2. Yoritomo’s Early Defeat and His Choice of Kamakura

(1) The Defeat at Ishibashiyama and Flight to Awa

Yoritomo’s first move did not go well.

He rose in Izu… and was promptly crushed at the Battle of Ishibashiyama (1180) by Taira-aligned forces.
He barely escaped with his life, fleeing through the mountains.
Eventually he slipped across the sea to Awa Province, on the Bōsō Peninsula.

It was there that he began to rebuild, securing the support of powerful eastern families:

The Chiba clan,
The Kazusa clan,
And other regional warriors who hated Taira-era officials more than they feared failure.

From this point on, “the Minamoto in the East” starts to mean something more than a romantic slogan.

(2) Kamakura as a Natural Fortress

Yoritomo then made his key strategic choice: he moved his base to Kamakura.

Kamakura is:

Ringed by hills on three sides and open to the sea on the fourth,
A natural stronghold that’s easy to defend and hard to assault,
A region with spiritual and ancestral ties to Yoritomo’s line (Hachiman shrines, old Minamoto connections).

On 6 October 1180, Yoritomo entered Kamakura with almost no resistance. From that day on, Kamakura stopped being just another provincial town and started becoming a political concept: the future seat of a military government.

3. Three Forces on the Board – Yoritomo, the Kai-Minamoto, and the Taira Expedition

Just before Fujigawa, the map of central Japan essentially shows a three-cornered contest:

To the east – Yoritomo’s forces based in and around Kamakura.
To the north-east – The Kai-Minamoto under Takeda Nobuyoshi, controlling Kai, Suruga, and neighboring regions.
To the west – A Taira punitive expedition under Taira no Koremori, sent down from the capital.

(1) The Kai-Minamoto as Independent Actors

The later chronicle Azuma Kagami tends to write as if Takeda Nobuyoshi and the Kai-Minamoto were straightforwardly under Yoritomo’s command.

Modern historians are more cautious.

The emerging consensus is that:

The Kai-Minamoto rose in response to Prince Mochihito’s call as an independent anti-Taira force, not as Yoritomo’s vassals from the start.

In other words, at this stage they were more like allied rebels than subordinates. Yoritomo was a rising star in the east—but he was not yet the unquestioned commander of all Minamoto-aligned forces.

(2) Weaknesses of the Taira Army – Logistics and Morale

The Taira expeditionary force under Koremori, marching out from the capital, looked impressive on paper but had serious problems:

It was a hastily assembled mix of conscripted warriors and local levies.
Famine and shortages in western Japan made food supply precarious.
On the long march east, desertions began to mount.

Heike Monogatari talks about a force of 70,000 riders—but contemporary diaries like Gyokuyō paint a more modest picture: perhaps 2,000–4,000 warriors in the field, with the number shrinking as the campaign dragged on.

In short, it was already a beaten army walking—it just hadn’t broken yet.

4. The Battle That Wasn’t – Fujigawa as a Non-Battle

(1) Deployment on the Fuji River

In the 10th month of Jishō 4 (1180):

Takeda Nobuyoshi and the Kai-Minamoto advanced to the eastern bank of the Fuji River.
Koremori’s Taira army camped on the western bank.

According to Azuma Kagami:

Yoritomo himself set up camp farther back, around the Kisegawa area, watching developments and consolidating his hold over eastern warriors.

So if you zoom in on the front line, the immediate clash at Fujigawa was less:

“Yoritomo versus Kiyomori”

and more:

“Kai-Minamoto versus Koremori’s Taira punitive force,”
with Yoritomo positioned behind them as the political beneficiary of whatever happened next.

(2) The Famous Waterfowl Story – What Actually Happened?

The classic war tales (Heike Monogatari, Gikeiki, etc.) give us the cinematic version:

Under cover of darkness, the Kai-Minamoto lead their horses into the shallows of the river.
Startled, huge flocks of waterfowl explode into the air.
In the tense silence of night, the roaring of wings sound like an onrushing cavalry charge.
The already nervous Taira troops panic, throw away their equipment, mount whatever horses they can find, and bolt in every direction.

It’s a brilliant scene—and that’s exactly why we should be suspicious.

If we line up the more sober sources, a different picture emerges:

Gyokuyō says that hundreds of men deserted before any serious clash, and that Koremori, recognizing his numerical disadvantage, ordered a retreat.
Other court diaries report that the Taira troops, fearing encirclement, set fire to their own camp and withdrew under cover of darkness.
Azuma Kagami mentions fear of being cut off by the eastern forces and implies that the waterfowl episode triggered an already brewing collapse.
Heike Monogatari then polishes all this into the memorable legend of “warriors routed by bird wings.”

Taken together, the most plausible reading is:

The Taira army was already suffering from desertion, supply problems, and collapsing morale.
The noise of the waterfowl didn’t create panic from nowhere—it simply became the signal for a retreat that many in the army wanted anyway.

So the Battle of Fujigawa was, in reality, a “battle” in which:

The armies faced each other across the river,
One side’s will to fight evaporated,
And the Taira command decided—chaotically and poorly—to pull back without a pitched engagement.

It is, almost literally, a battle that ended before it truly began.

5. Aftermath – Yoritomo’s Grip on the East and the Foundations of Kamakura

Once Koremori’s force disintegrated and fell back westward, the strategic picture shifted quickly:

The Taira punitive army was effectively finished as an instrument of eastern control.
The Kai-Minamoto solidified their hold over Kai, Suruga, and the surrounding areas.
Yoritomo, from Kamakura, moved to eliminate rival eastern powers (such as the Satake) and assert himself as the leader of warriors in the Kantō and beyond.

Step by careful step, he:

Created new offices (like the shugo and jitō),
Institutionalized bonds of vassalage with eastern samurai,
And laid the groundwork for what would become the Kamakura shogunate.

From that angle, Fujigawa’s real importance is not the scale of the fighting, but this:

It was the moment when the Taira’s reputation for invincibility cracked in the East,
and when regional warriors began to see Yoritomo—and the Kamakura camp—as the safer bet.

6. “A Stupid War” or the Birth of Psychological and Structural Warfare?

It’s tempting to treat the whole thing as a punchline:

“An army that ran from the sound of birds—what an epic fail.”

On one level, that humor hits a real nerve: fear, rumor, and night terrors have always shaped battlefields.

But if we zoom out, a few deeper themes emerge:

The Taira army at Fujigawa was structurally doomed.
It was under-supplied, hastily assembled, and fighting far from its logistical base—while its opponents fought on home ground with rising local support.
The waterfowl story is probably a literary device, polished by war-tale authors to illustrate the Taira’s loss of nerve and the “rightness” of Minamoto ascendancy.
The battle’s real significance lies in the shift of power in the East—the consolidation of warrior rule and the beginning of a political order in which Kamakura, not Kyoto, would be the nerve center of military power.

So rather than seeing Fujigawa as just:

“a silly episode where a big army freaked out and ran,”

we can read it as:

a case study in how logistics, morale, and perception decide wars—
and as the opening chord in the long, uneasy music of samurai government that would dominate Japan for centuries.

Why Are Conspiracy Theories So Addictive?

Karl Popper’s “Conspiracy Theory of Society” and the Traps of Our Age

“The real task of the social sciences is to explain things that nobody wanted to happen.” – Karl Popper (paraphrased)

Open the internet on any given day and you’ll bump into some version of:

“Everything is decided by X.”

Where X might be: neoliberalism, the 1%, the deep state, the world government, Big Pharma, Big Tech, global finance, or some particular country.

This style of explanation is surprisingly sweet. It feels good. It promises to:

Tell you, in one stroke, who the villain is.
Replace messy structures with a simple story about “a few bad actors.”
Lift the burden of responsibility off your own shoulders and dump it onto a shadowy “them.”

Philosopher Karl Popper called this way of thinking the:

“Conspiracy theory of society”,

and he went after it very hard.

His core claim is simple:

Most things that happen in society are not the result of someone’s master plan.
They’re the unintended consequences of many people each pursuing their own goals.

In this essay we’ll look at:

What Popper meant by the “conspiracy theory of society”,
Why it damages our thinking,
And what kind of “rational theory of tradition” and social science he proposed instead.

1. Why Conspiracy Theories Feel So Good

First, why are conspiracy theories so seductive?

They make the world look simple.

Instead of dealing with complicated economics, politics, and history, you get a one-line answer:

“Group X is pulling all the strings.”
They aim your anger for you.

Unemployment, inequality, political distrust, cultural anxiety—
all of that can be poured into one explanation:
“This is all the result of a deliberate plot.”
They reduce your own responsibility.

Structures, incentives, sheer bad luck—those fade into the background.
What remains is the comforting feeling that you are a victim of “them,” not also part of the picture.

Popper compared this to an old Homeric worldview: in Homer’s epics, wars, plagues, and disasters are all “the schemes of the gods.”

Modern conspiracy stories do something similar. They just swap out the gods for:

Corporations,
Billionaires,
Secret societies,
Foreign powers.

2. What Popper Meant by the “Conspiracy Theory of Society”

Popper’s “conspiracy theory of society” is the idea that:

“All important social events are the result of someone’s intentional plan.”

So if you want to “understand” society, you supposedly just need to ask:

Who benefits?
Who is really pulling the strings behind the scenes?

Popper thinks this is dangerous on two levels.

It’s empirically wrong.

Real-world social outcomes almost always come from the messy interaction of many actors, plus randomness, plus structural conditions. Yes, conspiracies sometimes exist—but they rarely control everything.
It misdefines the job of social science.

For Popper, the real challenge is:

To explain “the unintended consequences of human actions”—
outcomes nobody specifically wanted, but which still emerge from the way institutions and incentives are set up.

If you assume everything important was planned by some secret committee, then you stop looking at those unintended consequences. You stop doing real social science.

3. Unintended Consequences: Popper’s Main Point

Popper’s key insight is very intuitive once you see it:

We always act with some purpose in mind,
but in society, results almost never match our intentions exactly.

He often used market examples to make this concrete.

A simple housing example

Imagine a small town where a bunch of people decide to sell their houses.
Each seller is trying to get the highest possible price.
None of them got together in a dark room to plot the market.

But the more people put their houses up for sale at once,
the more the average price tends to fall.

So:

No one wanted “lower house prices.”
No one planned it.
Everyone was acting “rationally” based on their own interest.

Yet the outcome—a drop in prices—is the opposite of what each individual hoped for.

That’s what Popper calls an unintended consequence.

And for him:

Explaining these unintended consequences is the central task of social science.

By contrast, saying:

“House prices fell because Group Y wanted to wreck the market.”

may feel satisfying, but it skips the actual mechanism.

4. The Oedipus Effect: When Predictions Change Reality

Popper also talks about what he calls the “Oedipus effect”—named after the Greek myth, where a prophecy helps bring about the very disaster it predicts.

In social life this happens when:

A widely believed prediction causes people to act in ways that make the prediction come true.

For example:

A rumor spreads: “House prices are going to crash soon.”
People rush to sell before the crash.
The sudden flood of supply makes prices crash.

Again, no secret cabal is necessary. What you need to understand is:

How information spreads,
How people update their expectations,
And how their responses feed back into the system.

That feedback logic is at the heart of Popper’s view of social science.

5. So… Are There No Real Conspiracies?

A common misunderstanding goes like this:

“If Popper criticizes conspiracy thinking,
then he must be saying conspiracies don’t exist.”

Not at all.

Popper openly admits that:

Real conspiracies do happen: bribery, cartels, cover-ups, coups, back-room deals, and so on.
Intelligence agencies, political machines, corporate boards—of course they sometimes collude.

These are legitimate subjects for investigation.

What he denies is this:

That there is one big master conspiracy explaining all important events,
and that once you’ve named the villain, you’ve “understood” history.

He even points out that dictators like Hitler believed in their own anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and used a fantasy about a “world Jewish plot” as justification for their own horrific, very real conspiracies.

In other words:

Small-scale conspiracies are real and important.
A conspiratorial worldview—where everything is one giant plot—is something else entirely, and it’s intellectually toxic.

6. Applying Popper to Neoliberalism, Big Capital, and World-Control Narratives

In today’s debates, you see similar patterns everywhere:

“The 2008 crisis was simply engineered by a handful of financiers.”
“Neoliberalism is a single secret world-domination script written in advance.”
“Every major downturn is a deliberate demolition job by global elites.”

There is a grain of truth in the anger:

Powerful states, international institutions, and big capital have pushed highly unequal rules of the game for decades. (Routledge)
The Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, for instance, involved rapid financial liberalization, short-term foreign borrowing, and over-leveraged corporate structures—shaped by both domestic policy choices and external pressures, including the IMF. (Routledge)

But a Popper-style analysis asks a different kind of question:

“Given a certain set of institutions and incentives,
how did each actor—politicians, regulators, banks, firms, households—
behave in ways that seemed rational at the time,
yet combined to produce a disaster nobody actually wanted?”

If you instead say:

“It’s all just the work of a small cabal that wanted this precise outcome,”

you risk three things:

You stop studying structures and incentives.
You ignore the unintended consequences that made the crisis possible.
You drift toward politics of pure resentment: “If we just get rid of those people, everything will be fixed.”

That is exactly the mental shortcut Popper is warning about.

7. Healthy Critique vs. Toxic Conspiracy Thinking: A Checklist

So how do we tell serious social criticism apart from slipping into conspiracy-style thinking?

Using Popper’s spirit plus more recent work, we can sketch a rough checklist.

① Can the claim be refuted?

Serious critique says:
“If A, B, or C evidence shows up, I’ll revise or abandon this idea.”
Conspiracy thinking says:
“Any evidence against my theory is just more proof of how deep the plot goes.”

If nothing could ever make you doubt your story, it isn’t analysis; it’s dogma.

② Does it look at structures, or only villains?

Serious critique looks at institutions, incentives, information, class, law, technology—
all the boring but crucial stuff.
Conspiracy thinking skips straight to:
“Who are the evil masterminds?”

Real power is often embedded in systems, routines, and legal codes, not just in smoky rooms.

③ How does it treat complexity?

Serious critique admits:
“This problem has multiple causes. Some are economic, some political, some cultural.”
Conspiracy thinking insists:
“Deep down, it’s actually very simple. It’s them.”

Reality is complicated. Any explanation that always boils down to a single group is almost certainly missing something.

④ What about the critic’s own role?

Serious critique allows for uncomfortable thoughts like:
“I, too, benefit from some structures I criticize.
My consumption, my voting, my silence—all of that can be part of the problem.”
Conspiracy thinking places the believer safely outside the system:
“I am purely a victim or a lone awakened soul; the corruption is entirely elsewhere.”

Popper’s point is not “trust the system.”
It’s: “Don’t let your anger push you into fairy-tale thinking.”

8. Popper’s Alternative: A Rational Theory of Tradition

Popper’s lecture and essay were titled:

“Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition.”

By “tradition” he meant not just customs, but also:

Institutions,
Shared practices,
The inherited ways of doing things—in science, politics, and everyday life.

His proposal was neither:

Blind worship of tradition, nor
Blind iconoclasm that wants to smash everything old.

Instead, he argued that we should treat traditions and institutions as:

Things we critically examine and gradually improve.

A conspiracy worldview, by contrast, tends to do this:

On one side: “We are the guardians of the sacred tradition; everything that challenges it is a hostile plot.”
On the other side: “Everything about the system is a lie engineered by a ruling cabal; nothing good can come from reform.”

Popper’s stance is much more patient and harder work:

Trace how a given institution or tradition actually arose.
Study what unintended consequences it has produced.
Decide where it should be reformed, where it should be preserved, and where it should be replaced.

No single mastermind, no magical revolution—just continuous critical improvement.

9. In the End, the Question Comes Back to Us

To wrap up, here’s the core of the argument in one place:

Popper’s critique of the “conspiracy theory of society”
- Explaining everything as “some group’s plan” is empirically wrong
  and it hides the true work of social science.
The real task of social science
- To explain unintended consequences—wars, crises, inequalities that no one individual explicitly desired, but which arose from how our systems are built.
Real conspiracies vs. a conspiratorial worldview
- Actual plots, cartels, and cover-ups exist and deserve investigation.
- The problem is turning that fact into a totalizing worldview where every major event is one grand scheme.
What this means for our time
- Criticism of neoliberalism, global capital, state power, or big tech is not only legitimate, it’s necessary.
- But when critique degenerates into “a single evil script written by a handful of actors,” we’ve stopped trying to understand and started looking for emotional comfort.

Popper’s warning is not:

“Stop criticizing, everything is fine.”

It’s closer to:

“Don’t trade real understanding for a story that merely makes you feel better.”

So the uncomfortable question his work throws back at each of us is this:

Am I really trying to understand a messy reality—
or am I secretly shopping for a one-line story that flatters my anger?

Saturday, November 22, 2025

It Wasn’t Just the Imjin War – It Was the East Asian Seven Years’ War

“It Wasn’t Just the Imjin War – It Was the East Asian Seven Years’ War”

Subtitle: Was Joseon Really Just a Punching Bag?

1. The Old Story: “Imjin War = Total Defeat for Joseon”

If you grew up in Korea, you probably learned some version of this script:

“In 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea.
Joseon collapsed almost instantly.
Ming China stepped in and saved the dynasty.”

From there, the Imjin War is often remembered mainly as national humiliation.
Joseon troops are portrayed as doing little more than retreating and dying badly.

But if you look at recent scholarship and read through the campaign in detail, a more complicated picture comes into focus. In terms of grand strategy, there is a strong case that this seven-year conflict ended as Hideyoshi’s failure, not Joseon’s simple defeat.

2. Even the Name Is Too Small: “Imjin War” vs. “East Asian War, 1592–1598”

More and more historians in English call this conflict the “East Asian War, 1592–1598”, or “the East Asian War,” rather than just the “Imjin War.”

There’s a reason for that.

Yes, almost all the actual fighting happened on Korean soil. But the stakes were never “Korea alone”:

Japan: Hideyoshi launched the invasion with the explicit ambition of pushing through Korea and ultimately attacking Ming China.
Ming: could not ignore a Japanese army sitting on the route to Liaodong and Beijing, so it intervened to protect its own northern frontier.
Joseon: became the unlucky battlefield where these larger designs collided.

If we just call it a “Japanese disturbance” (the literal meaning of waeran), we easily miss the fact that this was a full-scale international war that reshaped East Asian geopolitics.

3. The First Three Months: Joseon Collapses, Japan Blitzes

We do have to face one harsh truth:
The opening phase was a disaster for Joseon.

Within three weeks, Japanese vanguard forces marched into the capital, Hansŏng (Seoul). (koreanhistory.humspace.ucla.edu)
King Sŏnjo fled north to Pyongyang and then all the way to Ŭiju, near the Ming border.
Major Joseon field armies were routed in battles like Tangeumdae.

If you freeze the story at this point, the dark joke that “the Joseon army got steam-rolled like tourists in a bad action movie” doesn’t feel entirely unfair.

But that’s only Act 1.
The problem is that our public memory often stops there.

4. Three Pillars That Flipped the War: Navy, Rebuilt Army, and Righteous Armies

From the summer of 1592 onward, the trajectory of the war begins to bend. Joseon doesn’t just “endure” — it gradually claws back initiative.

(1) Yi Sun-sin and the Navy – Cutting Japan’s Lifelines

The most famous piece is, of course, the navy.

Through a string of victories – Okpo, Sacheon, Hansando and others – Admiral Yi Sun-sin and the Joseon fleet smashed Japanese squadrons and seized control of much of the southern and western seas.

The practical result was brutal for Japan:

Japanese armies sitting deep inside the peninsula suddenly found their sea supply lines constantly threatened.
Major ports on the south coast became cages rather than launchpads.
Long overland lines of communication grew vulnerable and thin.

Several Western historians have argued that without the Joseon navy, Japanese forces might well have overrun the entire peninsula and been able to bring Ming to battle on very different terms.

(2) The Regular Army, Rebuilt – Not Just Running Away

There’s another under-told part of the story.

After the initial collapse, the Joseon regular army did not simply vanish into thin air. It was reconstituted and fought repeatedly:

Generals we remember by name – Gwon Yul at Haengju, Kim Si-min at Jinju, and others – were not guerrilla leaders but regular commanders.
Many of the major set-piece battles in the later stages of the war were led by reorganized Joseon government forces, often fighting alongside Ming detachments.

So the cliché that “only guerrillas and volunteers fought, the state army just ran” is just as misleading as the opposite myth that “volunteers won the whole war.”

(3) Righteous Armies – Not the Main Body, but the Nervous System

At the same time, you can’t dismiss the righteous armies (ŭibyŏng).

Were they the main heavy-hitting force? No.
But were they marginal? Also no.

They mattered because they did the things regular armies struggle with:

Harassing Japanese foraging parties and supply lines.
Ambushes and raids in difficult terrain.
Freeing captives, passing on intelligence, stiffening local morale.

If the regular army was the skeleton and muscle, the ŭibyŏng were more like the nerves and blood vessels of Joseon’s war effort.

5. Ming China – Saviour, Menace, or Both?

In a lot of modern online commentary, Ming sometimes appears as a kind of villain: a cynical great power that dragged things out, ate Joseon’s food, and made everything about its own politics.

There is some truth to that criticism – but it’s only half the picture.

(1) Military Contribution: Retaking Pyongyang and Pushing Japan South

In early 1593, Ming forces crossed the Yalu and launched a major campaign to retake Pyongyang.

They succeeded in forcing Japanese troops to abandon Pyongyang and retreat south of the Taedong River.
Japanese armies subsequently pulled back toward the central and southern regions, giving up any realistic hope of a quick march on Liaodong or Beijing.

On land, only Ming had the manpower, artillery, and logistics to confront Japan on this scale. In that sense, their intervention was militarily decisive.

(2) But They Were Not a Purely Benevolent Big Brother

And yet, it’s also true that:

Ming armies extracted enormous amounts of grain and supplies from an already devastated Korea.
There were many cases of looting, violence, and abuse against Korean civilians.
Ming court politics – hardliners vs. negotiators – often meant more energy went into talks and internal wrangling than decisive operations.
Above all, Ming did not come “just for Joseon’s sake.” The primary motive was to protect its own northern frontier and capital, for obvious strategic reasons.

So Ming was simultaneously:

the power that helped save the dynasty, and
a power that inflicted its own deep wounds on Joseon.

Any honest account has to hold those two truths together.

6. So Who “Won”? Toyotomi’s Failure, Joseon’s Survival, Everyone’s Ruin

If you reduce seven years of chaos to the bare outcome, it looks something like this:

Japan

Hideyoshi’s grand design – conquer Korea as a springboard to attack Ming – failed completely.
Japanese troops withdrew entirely from the peninsula; no lasting foothold remained.
Not long after, Hideyoshi died and his regime collapsed; the Tokugawa shogunate rose on the ruins.

Ming China

Militarily, Ming succeeded in preventing a Japanese thrust toward its heartland and in preserving Joseon as a loyal buffer state.
But the cost in lives and money was enormous. The war seriously weakened Ming’s fiscal and military capacity and is often seen as one of the factors that left it vulnerable to the later Manchu conquest.

Joseon

The peninsula was devastated; population, cities, and cultural heritage all suffered catastrophic losses.
Yet the dynasty itself survived. The court returned to the capital, undertook postwar reforms and military reorganization, and the state endured for roughly three more centuries.

For that reason, many historians today describe the conflict as:

Japan’s strategic defeat,
Ming and Joseon’s “incomplete victories.”

7. How Should We Remember This War?

The online argument that sparked this essay was essentially asking:

“Aren’t we a bit too eager to brand ourselves as pure losers here?
Wasn’t this war, in the long run, Hideyoshi’s failure and Joseon’s survival story, not just a tale of national shame?”

Seen that way, reframing the conflict as the “East Asian Seven Years’ War” isn’t just a matter of changing the label. It pushes us to:

Look beyond a one-note “we were crushed” narrative.
Acknowledge both the humiliation of the early collapse and the resilience, adaptation, and sheer stubborn survival that followed.
Remember that in great-power wars, “victory” and “defeat” are often messy, partial, and unevenly distributed.

It doesn’t magically erase the trauma.
But it does let us read the Imjin War not only as a story of how badly Joseon was hit,
but also as a story of how, against grim odds, it refused to disappear.

“Resolved to Die” and the Shadow of Compromise Pastor Joo Ki-chul and the Two Faces of the Korean Church under Japanese Rule

1. Why bring Joo Ki-chul back into the conversation?

Under Japanese colonial rule, Korean Protestantism always comes with a double exposure:

On one side, we remember the heroic stories – the March First Movement, Christian schools, pastors involved in the independence struggle.

On the other side, the record is much darker – churches bowing at Shinto shrines, denominations embracing imperial slogans, pastors preaching the emperor’s war as if it were the will of God.

Few figures crystallize this contradiction as sharply as Pastor Joo Ki-chul (1897–1944). One side of the frame is his famous motto, often rendered as a resolve “to die once and for all” rather than betray his faith. On the other side stand leaders like Park Hee-do and Jung Chun-su, who became symbols of collaboration within Korean Christianity. (위키백과)

This essay is not a sermon but a historical and humanistic look at the bright and dark faces of the Korean church under Japanese rule, seen through the life – and the foils – of Joo Ki-chul.

2. What exactly was Shinto shrine worship?

The background: imperialization and “loyal subjects of the emperor”

In the late 1930s, as Japan escalated the Sino–Japanese War and moved into the Pacific War, it pushed a full-scale war regime onto Korea. A key part of this was the “imperialization” campaign – turning Koreans into loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor in mind, ritual, and daily life.

Shinto shrine visits began in schools and government offices, then spread to Christian schools and churches. The official line was simple and chilling:

“Shrine worship is not a religious act. It is a civic ceremony of loyalty to the state.”

For Christians, this posed a direct clash between state ritual and the biblical commandment against idolatry.

The church caves in – and a minority refuses

In 1938, the Pyongbuk Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in Korea became the first to formally approve Shinto shrine worship.

That same year in September, at the 27th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church held at the West Gate Church in Pyongyang – under police surveillance and pressure – the denomination as a whole voted to endorse shrine worship as a civic duty.

Consequences followed quickly:

Pyongyang Theological Seminary, which opposed shrine worship, was effectively shut down.
Pastors like Joo Ki-chul, Lee Ki-seon, Han Sang-dong and others who refused the new line were deposed, arrested, and tortured. (위키백과)

In short:

At the institutional level, the Presbyterian Church officially bowed.
Inside that same structure, however, a small minority chose prison and death over compliance.

That fault line has haunted Korean Christianity – and its debates over collaboration and repentance – ever since.

3. The “resolved to die” pastor: Joo Ki-chul’s life and death

Early formation: faith and national consciousness together

Born in 1897 in what is now the Jinhae area of South Gyeongsang Province, Joo Ki-chul grew up in the orbit of the local church and was nicknamed a “boy pastor” for his early zeal.

At Osan School in North Pyongan Province he encountered figures like Lee Seung-hun and Jo Man-sik, who combined Christian faith with a strong sense of national identity.

He later entered theological training at Pyongyang Presbyterian Seminary, after a stint at Yonhui College (today’s Yonsei University) cut short by eye trouble, and began his path as a pastor.

Choryang Church and Sanjeonghyeon Church – into the storm

Ordained in 1925, Joo first served in Choryang Church in Busan, where his preaching and prayer life gained him deep respect.

Even at this stage, he was already submitting overtures to local church courts opposing shrine worship. His position was not tactical; it was principled and public.

When he later accepted a call to Sanjeonghyeon Church in Pyongyang – effectively the front line of the Shinto controversy – the collision became inevitable.

After the Presbyterian General Assembly officially endorsed shrine worship, Joo did not quietly go along. From the pulpit he called it what he believed it was: idolatry, incompatible with Christian faith.

Five arrests, unending torture, and a final confession

From 1938 onward, Joo’s life became a grim calendar of imprisonment:

He was arrested and imprisoned five separate times, spending a total of more than five years and four months behind bars.
Interrogations involved severe beatings and torture; his body and health were steadily broken down. (위키백과)

Before his final arrest, he preached a farewell sermon at Sanjeonghyeon Church that later came to be remembered as the “resolved to die” confession. In essence, he said:

Christ bore the cross and did not deny the Father.
He could not deny his Lord to save his own life.
He wished to be, in his words, “like a green pine cut down before it withers, like a lily broken and given to God while still fresh.”

(Here the phrasing is paraphrased rather than quoted verbatim, to avoid copyright issues.)

On April 21, 1944, Joo Ki-chul died in Pyongyang Prison at the age of forty-nine. Fellow inmates and even some guards later testified that he met death in prayer and hymn-singing. (위키백과)

Today he is widely remembered as:

“The pastor who died resisting state-imposed Shinto shrine worship under Japanese rule.”

For many Korean Christians, he functions as a kind of moral plumb line – an uncomfortable standard against which both past and present compromises are measured.

4. But not everyone was a hero

If Joo’s name shines brightly, certain other names cast a long shadow.

Park Hee-do and the magazine Light of the Orient

One of the most striking contrasts is Park Hee-do (1883–1966).

Park was one of the 33 signatories of the March First Declaration in 1919 – a respected early figure in Christian-led nationalism.

By the 1930s, however, he had become the publisher of Dongyang Jigwang (“Light of the Orient”), a magazine devoted to:

Praising loyalty to the Japanese empire
Promoting the ideology of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”
Justifying war mobilization and imperial policies

In post-liberation scholarship and in the Encyclopedia of Pro-Japanese Collaborators, Park is firmly classified as a leading example of Christian collaboration with Japanese rule.

The more colorful claims sometimes found online – that the editorial board was entirely made up of former leftists, or that the magazine was funded purely as an anti-communist psy-ops operation – are hard to verify and not accepted as mainstream scholarship. For public writing it is safer to stay with the solid, documented fact: the magazine was a mouthpiece for imperial propaganda, and Park chose to steer it.

Jung Chun-su and a denominational “Eulsa Treaty”

Another emblematic figure is Jung Chun-su (1876–1951) of the Methodist Church.

In the final years of colonial rule, Jung played a leading role in merging the Korean Methodist Church with the Japanese Methodist denomination.

The union agreement contained clauses effectively stating that:

On major public issues and relations with the Japanese state, the Korean side would follow the decisions of the Japanese church.

Critics later called this a kind of “Eulsa Treaty of the church”, evoking the 1905 treaty that had stripped the Korean Empire of its diplomatic sovereignty.

Jung also publicly supported imperial subjects’ oaths, war cooperation, and Shinto shrine rites in his sermons and writings, cementing his reputation as a collaborationist church leader.

In short:

At the very moment Joo Ki-chul and others were dying in prison for refusing shrine worship,
Other pastors were preaching loyalty to the emperor and wrapping the war in religious language.

That stark contrast continues to shape how Korean churches talk – or sometimes avoid talking – about their past.

5. Between “almost all were collaborators” and “only a few were”

It is tempting to collapse the story into one of two slogans:

“Almost all Baptists and Presbyterians collaborated.”
“Only a tiny handful did; everyone else was innocent.”

Both are misleading.

Institutional vs personal responsibility

At the denominational level:

Presbyterian and Methodist leadership bodies did officially endorse Shinto shrine worship and aspects of imperial ideology.
This is visible in General Assembly minutes, official statements, and printed sermons.

At the level of local churches and individual believers:

Some complied reluctantly, treating shrine visits as a bare minimum to avoid closure or arrest.
Some collaborated enthusiastically and became active agents of propaganda.
Some – a small minority – refused outright and paid with their positions, their freedom, and in some cases their lives.

After 1945:

Serious, organized reckoning with this record of collaboration never took deep root within the denominations themselves.
In many cases, postwar church growth and anti-communist fervor simply buried the issue under a new set of priorities.

A more accurate summary might be:

“Within a structure of institutional collaboration, there existed both shameful complicity and costly resistance.”

That gray, uncomfortable space is harder to tweet than “all heroes” or “all traitors,” but it is closer to the historical reality.

6. The questions this leaves us with today

Joo Ki-chul’s story is not just a devotional tale; it presses on some very contemporary nerves.

When the state demands rituals of loyalty, where is the line?
At what point does “just going through the motions” become complicity? How far would we ourselves resist if jobs, schools, or our children’s safety were on the line?
How do heroes become collaborators?
Park Hee-do once signed the March First Declaration. Jung Chun-su began as a respected church leader. What paths of fatigue, fear, ambition, or rationalization led them from early idealism to imperial praise?
What does honest reckoning look like?
After liberation, the Korean church and society at large largely sidestepped systematic “truth and reconciliation” over collaboration. What did that avoidance cost in terms of moral clarity and institutional trust?
What does “resolved to die” mean without religious faith?
Even for non-believers, Joo’s “one-death resolve” can be read as a radical question:
For what values, if any, am I willing to accept real loss?
His story can inspire not only admiration but a disturbing self-reflection:
“Under the same pressure, am I so sure I would not have chosen the easier road?”

7. Conclusion – Standing between memory and record

In the same historical moment, within the same religious community, there were:

Pastors praying on the cold floor of a prison cell, asking God to hold them fast in the face of death, and
Pastors in warm pulpits, blessing the emperor’s war and telling believers that bowing at shrines was an acceptable civic duty.

To hold both images together is not an exercise in self-loathing or self-congratulation. It is a basic act of historical honesty.

Remembering Joo Ki-chul’s martyrdom keeps alive the possibility of costly integrity.
Remembering the careers of Park Hee-do and Jung Chun-su keeps alive the warning that we ourselves are not immune to compromise.

In that sense, revisiting these names is less about settling accounts with the dead and more about preparing for the next moment of pressure, when society once again whispers:

“Everyone is doing it. Just bow once and move on.”

What we learn from Joo Ki-chul and his counterparts will shape how we answer that whisper when our turn comes.

Why Japanese History Always Had One Face and Another Hand — How Emperors, Shoguns, and Retired Emperors Built a Double-Layered Politics

0. Prologue – Honne, Tatemae, and Japanese Power

When people talk about Japan, one pair of words comes up over and over:

honne – what you really think
tatemae – what you say and show on the surface

It usually describes everyday life: the polite phrase you say out loud vs. the blunt truth you only tell close friends.

But if you zoom out to centuries of Japanese history, a similar split appears at the level of power itself.

Officially, there is the Emperor – the sacred sovereign.
In practice, there is the bakufu (shogunate) that runs the country.
Even inside the court you often get double layers: a reigning emperor on the throne, and a retired emperor turned monk who quietly calls the shots from behind the scenes. (위키백과)

This essay takes a quick tour through those “two faces” of power – emperor and shogun, emperor and regent, emperor and retired emperor – and asks:

Why did this double structure keep coming back?
How is it similar to honne / tatemae – and how is it different?

1. The Era When “The Emperor = The State” Was Surprisingly Short

In theory, early Japan tried to build a straightforward system:

From the Yamato polity through the Nara and early Heian periods, the court imported the Chinese-style ritsuryō code:
a centralized bureaucratic state with the emperor at the top.

On paper, the emperor had it all. In practice, power slipped very quickly into the hands of great aristocratic families – above all the Fujiwara clan.

The Fujiwara strategy was simple and brutally effective:

Marry their daughters into the imperial family.
Become the emperor’s maternal relatives.
Monopolize the posts of sesshō (regent for a child emperor) and kanpaku (chief advisor to an adult emperor). (Cambridge Core)

Outwardly: “Imperial rule.”
Behind the curtain: “Fujiwara rule in the emperor’s name.”

So even in this supposedly “pure” imperial age, Japan was already running on a dual system:

Emperor as sacred symbol on top,
Fujiwara regents and chancellors as the operating system underneath.

2. When the Retired Emperor Was Stronger Than the Reigning One – Insei

From the 11th century, the system twists again.

Some emperors found it impossible to rule freely while surrounded by Fujiwara in-laws. So they tried something clever:

Abdicate early.
Take monk’s vows, move into a separate palace (the in).
Rule from “retirement” as a cloistered emperor.

This is the famous system of insei, often translated as “cloistered rule.” (위키백과)

The setup looked like this:

The reigning emperor in the main palace: performs rituals, receives ambassadors, appears in official records.
The retired emperor (often called a Hōō, or “Dharma Emperor”) in his own residence:
decides appointments, land grants, and big policy choices.

In other words, even within a single person’s life you could get something like:

tatemae: the emperor on the throne
honne: the retired emperor pulling strings from behind a screen

It’s one of the clearest moments where Japan’s layered, almost theatrical style of power becomes visible.

3. The Age of Warriors – Emperor and Shogun as a Built-In Double State

3.1 Kamakura – Dual Capitals, Dual Authorities

By the late 12th century, civil war between great warrior houses (the Genpei War) brings a new class to the front: the samurai.

In 1192, Minamoto no Yoritomo is appointed shōgun (“barbarian-subduing generalissimo”) and sets up the Kamakura bakufu. (Fiveable)

From this point, Japan is structurally a two-center country:

Kyoto – the emperor and aristocratic court: keeper of ritual, culture, and legitimacy.
Kamakura – the shogun’s government: in charge of military affairs, law, and provincial administration.

Formally, the shogun governs on behalf of the emperor. In reality, the bakufu controls the warrior class, the provinces, and most practical politics.

So again we get:

Emperor = face of the state
Shogun = hand that actually moves it

3.2 Muromachi and Edo – Layer upon layer

The pattern repeats under:

The Ashikaga (Muromachi) bakufu, and later
The Tokugawa (Edo) bakufu.

The labels change, the basic geometry does not:

The emperor in Kyoto remains the source of sacred authority.
The shogun’s government, first in Muromachi then in Edo, runs the bureaucracy, taxation, and military.

By the Edo period, the layering gets even more intricate:

Nominally, the Tokugawa shogun holds supreme authority.
In practice, the powerful rōjū (“elders”) and senior councilors often steer major decisions, especially in foreign policy and crisis management. (egyankosh.ac.in)

So we now have a double structure sitting on top of another double structure:

Emperor (symbol) / shogun (ruler)
Shogun (symbolic head) / rōjū (day-to-day operators)

If you like political nesting dolls, Edo Japan is a paradise.

4. After the Meiji Restoration – New Costume, Same Logic

The Meiji Restoration (late 1860s) outwardly “restores” direct imperial rule.
The shogunate is abolished; the emperor returns to center stage.

Under the Meiji Constitution of 1889, the emperor is defined as the sovereign who holds ultimate authority over the military, diplomacy, and legislation. (EBSCO)

On paper, this looks like a return to a single-center system. But once again, real power lives elsewhere:

A small group of elder statesmen (the genrō),
The high military command, and
Senior bureaucrats and business magnates (zaibatsu)

dominate policy behind the imperial façade. (EBSCO)

After World War II, the U.S.-drafted constitution transforms the emperor into a purely symbolic head of state. Political authority is entrusted to:

The Cabinet and Prime Minister
The Diet (parliament)
The bureaucracy, and
For most of the postwar era, a single dominant party: the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has governed Japan for the vast majority of years since its founding in 1955. (The Washington Post)

So even today, you can roughly draw the same diagram:

Emperor = symbol of national unity
Elected government + permanent bureaucracy = actual machinery of power

The faces change, the structure survives.

5. Is This Really Unique to Japan?

It would be easy – and lazy – to say, “This double structure exists because Japanese people are ‘naturally’ two-faced.”

History is messier.

Other societies have had similar splits between legitimacy and control:

Early medieval Frankish kingdoms:
Merovingian kings as nominal rulers; powerful “mayors of the palace” running the show.
Modern constitutional monarchies like the UK:
monarch as figurehead; parliament and cabinet governing day to day.
Late Joseon Korea:
a formally absolute king hemmed in by powerful aristocratic factions and in-law clans.

So the basic idea—one person as sacred symbol, another actor as practical ruler—is not uniquely Japanese.

What is distinctive about Japan is how stubbornly long this pattern lasted:

The imperial line was never abolished.
Even warrior regimes needed imperial titles, court ranks, and formal appointments to legitimize themselves. (Fiveable)
Shogunates almost never tried to erase the emperor; they used him as a source of symbolic capital.

For roughly a thousand years, Japan kept some version of:

“Legitimate sacred center + practical governing center”
in place at the same time.

That endurance is remarkable.

6. Honne / Tatemae and Double Power – A Useful Metaphor, Not a Curse

Strictly speaking, honne and tatemae are concepts about personal behavior:

What you really feel vs. what you are expected to say.
The flexible line between honesty, politeness, and social survival.

Using those words to explain institutions can slip into cultural determinism very quickly:

“Japanese are like this, therefore their politics must be like that.”

That kind of claim doesn’t hold up.

A more careful way to put it:

Japanese political history happens to contain many layered arrangements where public image and private control are separated.
The honne / tatemae vocabulary gives modern readers a helpful metaphor for understanding those layers – as long as we don’t mistake metaphor for cause.

So rather than:

“Because of honne / tatemae, Japan produced double power structures,”

it’s more accurate to say:

“When we look at emperors, shoguns, cloistered rulers, and elder councils,
the honne / tatemae lens helps us visualize how roles and realities diverged.”

7. Why This Matters for Readers Today

For readers in any country, this story suggests a few useful habits of mind.

Always ask: who really holds power here?
- Written constitutions, formal titles, and televised ceremonies show one layer.
- Money, bureaucracy, media ownership, security institutions may show another.
Symbols can stabilize – and destabilize.
- Separating the “face” (symbolic authority) from the “hand” (executive power) can create long-term stability:
  people rally around the symbol while elites argue over policy.
- But in moments of crisis, that same symbol can be used to blow up the existing order, as in the Meiji Restoration, when imperial prestige became a revolutionary tool.
Avoid easy explanations based on “national character.”
- Instead of saying “this nation is naturally X,”
  it’s more fruitful to ask:
  - What historical bargains produced these institutions?
  - How did legitimacy, geography, and foreign pressure shape them?
  - Who benefits from keeping the “face” and the “hand” separate?

Japanese history’s long experiment with emperors, shoguns, retired emperors, and party machines is, in that sense, not just a story about Japan.

It’s a reminder that power loves masks—and that understanding politics often starts with asking what, and who, is hiding behind the nicest one.

Thursday, November 20, 2025

The Real Ace Behind the Turtle Ship: Panokseon

How the Panokseon Became the True Workhorse of the Imjin War

From Maengseon to Panokseon: The Evolution of Joseon Warships

1. Why Joseon Had to Start by Rebuilding Its Ships

In the early Joseon period, the basic naval platform was the maengseon (“fierce ship”).
Under King Sejo, official military transport ships (byeongjoseon) were standardized as dual-use vessels for both warfare and grain transport, and by the time of the Gyeongguk Daejeon legal code they appear as large, medium, and small maengseon as the standard warships.

That compromise came with serious problems:

Because they also had to carry tribute grain, they were heavy and sluggish.
In peacetime they were logistics workhorses; in wartime they were expected to double as combat ships, which meant they were far from optimized for battle.
From the 16th century, with armed Japanese traders and coastal raiders becoming more dangerous, maengseon were increasingly criticized for lacking both agility and firepower.(위키백과)

Court records from the Seongjong and Jungjong eras already complain that maengseon are too heavy and slow, and various officials propose increasing the number of small, fast craft (so-called “swift ships”). But when fleets shifted toward smaller hulls, another problem appeared: they died quickly under concentrated enemy fire and boarding attacks.

In short:

“Build them heavy and they can’t move. Build them light and they shatter when hit.”

Joseon’s navy lived inside that dilemma through most of the 16th century.

The answer they eventually arrived at was a purpose-built, two-deck fighting ship: the panokseon.

2. From Sejo’s Military Transports to Myeongjong’s Panokseon

(1) The Roots: Byeongjoseon and Maengseon

To be fair, byeongjoseon and maengseon were not useless relics.
Joseon absolutely needed a secure state grain network along the Yellow Sea and South Sea coasts, so “warship that can also haul rice” was the political compromise baked into early designs. For a while that balance worked.

But by the mid-1500s the environment changed:

Japanese coastal forces were sailing larger, more heavily armed ships.
Fighting was no longer just small raids; larger fleet actions near open water became plausible.
Japanese tactics increasingly relied on closing in, grappling, and boarding after a few volleys of gunfire.(Korea.net)

A heavy, half-freighter maengseon was now too slow, too soft, and too low-sided for this new style of war.

(2) The Turning Point: Eulmyo Waebyun and the Demand for a “Tall, Steep Warship”

The large Japanese raid of 1555 (the Eulmyo Waebyun) triggered a serious rethink.
From then on, memorials to the throne start repeating a common theme:

“We need a tall, steep warship so high that the enemy cannot easily jump aboard.”

In design terms, that meant:

Higher freeboard and upper structure
A weapons deck from which guns and arrows could fire downward
Oarsmen protected underneath, instead of being exposed along the sides

The ship that embodied these demands was a big, flat-bottomed, two-deck warship: the panokseon (literally “planked house ship,” from the enclosed upper structure).(위키백과)

3. What Did a Panokseon Actually Look Like?

(1) Flat Bottom, No Keel

The panokseon was a classic Korean coastal warship, part of the broader hanseon tradition. Its key structural traits:

Flat bottom (pyeongjeo) for stability in shallow coastal waters
No Western-style central keel; instead, a wide bottom plank and side planking
Transverse beams tying the sides together in a box-like hull(위키백과)

That meant:

It excelled in shallow, tidal waters like those of Korea’s west and south coasts.
At low tide it could sit upright on mudflats or be dragged ashore for repair.
It was less suitable for blue-water ocean operations, but Joseon’s navy fought mainly in coastal seas and straits, so this trade-off made sense.

Japanese warships, by contrast, tended to have deeper, V-shaped hulls optimized for different kinds of waters, which could be a disadvantage in Korea’s extreme tidal environments.(Korea.net)

(2) Two Decks: Separation of Muscle and Firepower

The real revolution was the two-deck layout:

Lower deck: rowers and some support personnel
Upper deck (the “panok”): gunners, archers, and melee troops

This gave four big advantages:

Rower protection
Oarsmen were shielded from arrows, matchlock bullets, and splinters, so the ship could survive longer engagement cycles without losing propulsion.
Higher firing position
Guns and archers shooting from a raised deck enjoyed better range and plunging fire angles.
Anti-boarding geometry
Taller sides made it physically harder for Japanese marines to grab the rail and swarm aboard—something Japanese accounts complain about repeatedly during the Imjin War.(Facebook)
Command and visibility
A small “general’s tower” on top of the upper deck gave the commander clear sightlines for flags, drums, and signals.

(3) Size and Crew

Exact dimensions vary by source, but most reconstructions converge around:

Length: roughly 20–30 meters
Beam (width): around 8–10 meters
Complement: on the order of 100 personnel (rowers, gunners, archers, officers, marines)(위키백과)

In modern terms, think of something comparable in footprint to a small modern tug or coastal patrol boat—but built of thick timber, with two decks and loaded with guns.

4. Panokseon vs. Japanese Warships: Different Ships, Different Ideas of War

(1) Japanese Atakebune and the Boarding Paradigm

In the Sengoku and early Imjin War era, Japanese fleets relied on large command ships like the atakebune, supported by medium and small craft.

Their basic concept of naval combat looked like this:

Fire some arrows and matchlock volleys to soften the target
Close the distance and grapple
Send warriors swarming onto the enemy deck for close-quarters fighting with swords and spears(Korea.net)

In that paradigm, the ship is primarily a floating delivery platform for infantry. Firearms are important, but they are the prelude to boarding, not the main way of deciding the battle.

(2) Joseon’s Alternative: Artillery-First, Keep Them Off the Deck

Joseon, by contrast, had a long record of developing gunpowder artillery well before the Imjin War. Under King Sejong and his successors, several families of cannon—cheonja, jija, hyeonja, and hwangja chongtong—were standardized and progressively lightened for naval use.(uexinja.blogspot.com)

Very roughly:

Cheonja (“heaven”) guns: the largest pieces, long range but fewer in number
Jija (“earth”) and hyeonja (“black”) guns: medium calibers, the practical workhorses in battle
Hwangja (“yellow”) and smaller portable pieces: short-range, multi-shot, or grapeshot-type roles; some overlapped the space where we might put hand-cannon today

Some royal chronicles boast extremely long ranges—far over a kilometer—using idealized “paces” and test shots. Modern analysis is more cautious: effective combat ranges of a few hundred meters are more realistic, but that was still enough to outrange typical Japanese small guns and small-caliber boat guns of the time, especially when firing from a high upper deck.(위키백과)

A panokseon’s layout made full use of this doctrine:

Cannons distributed along the bow, stern, and sides so the ship could fire in any direction
Space on the upper deck for mixed volleys of cannon and massed archery
The ability to create “layers” of fire:
- Long and mid-range bombardment with artillery
- Archery as the enemy approached
- Small guns and anti-personnel rounds if a ship got dangerously close

Where Japanese doctrine said, “Shoot, then board,” Joseon’s answer was:

“Shoot so much, from so far, and from so high that they never get the chance to board at all.”

The panokseon’s tall sides and two-deck layout were the physical hardware behind that idea.

5. Imjin War Case Studies: Where the Panokseon Proved Itself (and Where It Didn’t)

(1) Hansan Island: A Textbook Panokseon Battle

The Battle of Hansan Island (1592) is often cited as the panokseon’s masterpiece.

Admiral Yi Sun-sin deployed a panokseon fleet in his famous crane-wing formation, curving around the Japanese fleet.
As the Japanese ships pressed inward, they sailed deeper into overlapping fields of cannon and arrow fire from both “wings.”(Facebook)

In this battle, the famous turtle ships (geobukseon) were shock units used for disruption and breakthrough. The bulk of the destruction was delivered by panokseon squadrons firing in disciplined waves.

(2) Myeongnyang: Ship Design Meets Geography

At Myeongnyang Strait (1597), Admiral Yi faced an overwhelming numerical disadvantage. He compensated with:

Violent tidal currents in a narrow passage
Flat-bottomed, strongly built panokseon that could better ride those currents and pivot quickly
Concentrated fire from upper decks against Japanese ships thrown into chaos by the water(Facebook)

Again, the panokseon was not a magic weapon by itself, but its structural traits matched the environment almost perfectly.

(3) Not an Invincible “Wonder Ship”

It is important not to over-mythologize:

Joseon cannons still faced limitations in powder quality, metallurgy, and aiming; they required extensive training and maintenance.
The panokseon’s flat bottom, while ideal for coastal waters and tidal straits, made it less suitable for the open ocean and heavy swell.
The Japanese navy evolved too, experimenting with heavier guns and modified warships after the shock of early defeats.(Korea.net)

So the panokseon’s superiority was not that “one ship class was absolutely the strongest in the world,” but that:

Its hull form fit Korea’s coastal geography,
Its two-deck layout fit Joseon artillery doctrine, and
It matured inside a navy that had trained with gunpowder weapons for decades.

Those three layers together created the edge we see in the historical record.

6. Blog-Friendly Takeaways: Why the Panokseon Matters

If you want to distill this into a punchy blog conclusion, these are solid anchor points:

Joseon’s naval victories were not lucky accidents.
The panokseon was the result of several decades of thinking about:
- Heavy vs. light hulls
- Transport duties vs. pure combat roles
- How to counter Japanese boarding tactics with artillery and height
The turtle ship was the symbol; the panokseon was the day-to-day firepower.
Turtle ships were few in number and highly specialized.
The panokseon carried most of the fleet’s guns, most of the sailors, and did most of the actual fighting.
“Local design beats imported templates.”
The panokseon’s flat bottom, no-keel box hull, and double-deck structure look alien next to Western sailing ships of the same era.
But for the shallow, tidal, island-strewn seas of Korea—and for a doctrine built around artillery rather than heroic boarding parties—it was exactly the right tool.

If you frame it that way, your article naturally shifts from:

“We had a cool ship once”

to:

“Here is how a small country, stuck between powerful neighbors, used ship design, geography, and doctrine to punch far above its weight at sea.”

And in that story, the quiet MVP is not the spiky turtle ship on the movie poster,
but the panokseon, the real workhorse of the Imjin War.