Sunday, November 23, 2025

The Battle of Haengju – The Day 2,300 Men Stopped an Army of 30,000 Rethinking General Kwon Yul’s “real stats” on land

When Koreans talk about the Imjin War, the first name that usually comes up is Admiral Yi Sun-sin and the Battle of Hansan.

But if you’re looking for a “Hansan-level miracle” on land, you end up somewhere else: with General Kwon Yul (Kwon Yul, 1537–1599) and the Battle of Haengju.

And yet, Haengju is often reduced to a single anecdote –
“Women carried stones in their skirts and we somehow won.”

In this piece, instead of just retelling the legend, we’ll zoom in on two questions:

How good was Kwon Yul, really, as a commander?
And where does the Battle of Haengju sit in the actual flow of the war?

We’ll walk through the context, terrain, tactics, and legacy of the battle that turned a hill outside Seoul into one of the three iconic victories of the Imjin War.

1. Kwon Yul was not just “that Haengju guy”

If you only look at 12 February 1593, Kwon Yul can feel like a one-day miracle worker who appeared out of nowhere, won at Haengju, and then disappeared back into the mist.

In reality, by the time he climbed Haengju Fortress, he was already the most proven land commander Joseon had.

1) The Battle of Ichi – slamming the gate to Jeolla shut

On 8 July 1592, at Ichi Pass near Geumsan in Jeolla Province, Kwon Yul smashed a Japanese force in the Battle of Ichi.
That win blocked the Japanese advance into Jeolla – which meant he effectively saved Joseon’s last intact granary and logistics base in the southwest.

If Jeolla had fallen early, there would have been no rice, no tax base, and no real way to keep fighting. From the state’s perspective, Ichi was a lifeline.

2) The Siege of Doksan Fortress – proving he could sit and suffer

In December 1592, near Suwon, Kwon Yul held out in Doksan Fortress (Doksansanseong) against a numerically superior Japanese force.
It was a grinding siege. He didn’t win with flashy maneuvers; he won by refusing to crack, even under encirclement.

Put Ichi → Doksan → Haengju in a line and a pattern emerges:

Kwon Yul wasn’t a one-shot hero. He was a full-spectrum commander who could:

read terrain,
do the math on manpower and supplies,
play the psychology of both his own troops and the enemy.

Haengju is just the most famous of several data points.

2. Why Haengju Fortress, of all places?

Early 1593, the situation looked like this in one sentence:

Pyongyang had been retaken by joint Ming–Joseon forces,
but the main Japanese army still sat dug in around occupied Seoul.

To get Seoul back, Joseon needed a bridgehead near the capital – something close enough to threaten the enemy, but defensible enough to survive.

That role went to Haengju Fortress on Deokyang Mountain in today’s Goyang, a low but steep hill rising above the Han River just northwest of Seoul. (Dokumen)

1) Deokyang Mountain – the hill that sees everything

Height: about 124–125 meters above sea level.
To the east and south: the Han River.
To the north: the open plains of Goyang.
Along the ridgeline: an earthen rampart (a raised earthwork wall), backed by wooden palisades and layered fieldworks. (Dokumen)

Stand on top today and you can see why he chose it: from that ridge you command the river, watch the roads, and rain fire down on anything that moves.

Kwon Yul reportedly considered other positions, but ultimately accepted the advice of officials like Jo Gyeong and picked Deokyang Mountain as his hill to die on. Strategically, it was a textbook defensive fortress.

2) The numbers – depressing on paper, solid in composition

Contemporary estimates and later sources converge roughly here:

Joseon side: about 2,300 defenders
- regular government troops (gwangun),
- Buddhist monk-soldiers (led by monk-general Cheoyoung), roughly 700 by tradition,
- local volunteer fighters,
- and non-combatants – especially women – hauling stones and supplies.
Japanese side: about 30,000 troops in the assault force,
- under some of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s biggest names:
  - Ukita Hideie (overall field command),
  - Konishi Yukinaga, Ishida Mitsunari, Kuroda Nagamasa,
  - Kikkawa Hiroie, Mōri Motoyasu, Kobayakawa Takakage and others.

On paper this is absurd: 2,300 vs. 30,000, a mid-tier club trying to hold off a Champions League squad.

Kwon Yul’s job was to turn those numbers from “suicide” into “calculable risk.”

3. 12 February 1593 – Ten hours of hanging on by your fingernails

Most sources agree on the broad outline:

The Battle of Haengju was a one-day siege – about ten hours of assault and counter-assault, until the Japanese finally gave up and pulled back at dusk.

1) Wave after wave

Japanese forces launched 7 to 9 separate assaults during the day, depending on the account.

Dawn: massive bombardment and skirmishing to probe the defenses.
Then a pattern:
1. musket volleys to cover the advance,
2. rush the palisades and ramparts,
3. attempt to rip down or burn the defenses and climb in,
4. take heavy losses and fall back,
5. rotate fresh units to the front.

For Kwon Yul, this wasn’t a one-and-done fight. It was:

“How do I keep these people alive long enough to survive the next wave…
and the next… and the next?”

2) Layered defense – artillery, arrows, stones, then steel

Haengju was defended in vertical layers:

Approach zone outside the walls
- Heavy and medium artillery (hwacha, various chongtong cannon) opened up first,
- creating a crude “bullet curtain” to keep attackers from reaching the walls in good order.
At the ramparts and palisades
- As the Japanese closed, defenders switched to arrows, stones, and improvised projectiles,
- including stone-throwing devices like seokpo, and simple gravity — rocks rolled or hurled down from above.
- The monk-soldiers are remembered for showering the slopes with stones and missiles “like a torrential downpour.”
When the enemy got inside
- At several points small Japanese parties actually breached inner defenses.
- When that happened, Kwon Yul threw in counter-attacks at close quarters,
- leading from near the front alongside monk-general Cheoyoung and other officers.

There’s also a famous story about the “ash pouch” or “powder pouch” trick:

Monk-soldiers are said to have hurled pouches filled with ash or flour,
bursting them in the attackers’ faces to blind and disorient them before counter-attacks.

Even if the details are embellished, they capture something real:
Haengju wasn’t just brute stubbornness; it was also psychological warfare and battlefield improvisation.

3) Logistics, morale, and terrain – three plates spinning at once

Haengju only looks like a “miracle” if you ignore the management side.

For roughly ten hours Kwon Yul had to:

juggle ammunition, arrows, stones, and gunpowder so nothing critical ran out at the wrong time,
rotate exhausted soldiers, monk-soldiers, and volunteers along the walls,
keep non-combatants (especially women) moving stones and water under fire,
hold together a coalition force made up of regulars, monks, local militias, and civilians.

And he did all that while:

exploiting the slope and geometry of Deokyang Mountain,
reading the rhythm of Japanese attacks,
and choosing exactly when to stand firm behind the walls and when to launch local counter-charges.

That’s not “pure luck.” That’s cold calculation + on-site leadership + disciplined execution.

4. What changed after Haengju?

Haengju is often filed under “one big land victory,” but its strategic impact reached much further.

A bridgehead northwest of Seoul
- By holding Haengju, Joseon–Ming forces kept a secure staging point just outside the capital.
- From there, they could threaten Japanese positions on the north bank of the Han and pressure Seoul from multiple directions.
Cracks in the Japanese defensive ring
- The defeat at Haengju cost the Japanese heavy casualties and badly shaken morale.
- After that, they were far less willing to make deep thrusts beyond their main strongholds and started to shift into a more defensive posture around Seoul and the southern provinces.
A psychological reset for Joseon
- Stringed together with Ichi, Jinju, and the naval victories at Hansan and elsewhere, Haengju helped cement the idea that Joseon was battered but not broken.
- Because Haengju was a land battle and a siege, its impact on popular morale was huge:
  it proved that Joseon’s armies could win on hills and walls, not just at sea.

That’s why modern Korean historiography usually lists Haengju alongside Hansan and the First Battle of Jinju as the “three great victories” of the Imjin War.

5. “Haengju skirts” and what’s left on the hill today

1) Women with stone-filled skirts – the origin of “Haengju chima”

When the fighting grew desperate, local women from the Goyang area are said to have gathered stones in their skirts and carried them up to the walls, feeding the defenders’ endless demand for ammunition.

From this legend comes the term “Haengju chima” – literally “Haengju skirt” – which later became a generic word for a kind of work skirt. The details are debated, but as symbolism it stuck:

ordinary civilians, especially women,
turning their everyday clothes into part of the fortress armory.

2) What you can still see at Haengju Fortress

If you visit Haengjusanseong today, the landscape still tells the story. (Dokumen)

The earthen ramparts and palisade lines tracing the ridge of Deokyang Mountain.
Early stone monuments commemorating the victory, including a 1602 stele and a later 1845 replacement;
plus a towering modern Haengju Victory Monument, erected in 1963 with local donations.
Chungjangsa Shrine, which houses Kwon Yul’s portrait, and a small museum displaying weapons and artifacts associated with the battle.

Stand on the summit, look out over the Han toward Seoul, and it’s not hard to imagine:

ten hours of cannon fire, musket smoke, arrows, stones,
and men and women clinging to a low hilltop as if the whole country were balanced on it.

6. So what were Kwon Yul’s “stats,” really?

Back to the original question:
If you had to give Kwon Yul a character sheet, how strong is he?

Based on the record we’ve walked through, you could sum him up like this:

Strategic sense (situational awareness)
- From Ichi to Doksan to Haengju, Kwon Yul showed a sharp instinct for where to fight to make winning even possible.
- Choosing Haengju meant factoring in terrain, the Han River, logistics routes, and the movements of Joseon–Ming forces all at once.
Tactical and command ability
- Holding off ~30,000 attackers with ~2,300 defenders over multiple waves in a single day requires a rock-solid command system.
- He integrated artillery, bows, firearms, close-combat units, monk-soldiers, and civilian support into one coherent defensive machine.
Psychology and morale management
- A country that has lost its capital and been routed in early campaigns doesn’t just decide to stop running.
- The fact that Kwon Yul’s mixed force didn’t disintegrate under those odds suggests deep trust in their commander and a powerful shared sense of purpose.
- “Powder pouch” tricks, public acts of courage, and visible civilian participation all helped lock in that mindset.
Consistency over time
- He wasn’t a meteor that burned bright for one battle.
- He consistently delivered at crucial moments throughout the war, especially on land – the front where Joseon was at its weakest.

If Admiral Yi Sun-sin is the SSS-tier naval boss of the Imjin War,
then Kwon Yul is the top-tier defensive strategist on land – not as famous abroad, but absolutely central to how Joseon survived.

Bonus: “Character sheet” comparison – Kwon Yul vs. Japanese commanders

Think of this as the game-version appendix to the article.

Scale:
- 50 = average commander,
- 70s = solid,
- 80s = outstanding,
- 90+ = legendary.
Scope:
- Based on performance during the Imjin War,
- Joseon commanders are rated from a Joseon perspective (what they meant to their own side).

1. Quick comparison table

Commander	Side	Signature role / battle	Strategy	Tactics & Command	Courage & Nerve	Organization & Admin	Symbolic / morale impact
Yi Sun-sin	Joseon	Hansan, Myeongnyang, Noryang (naval)	97	99	98	99	100
Kwon Yul	Joseon	Doksan Fortress, Battle of Haengju	90	88	92	85	88
Kim Si-min	Joseon	First Battle of Jinju	88	93	96	84	90
Hwang Jin	Joseon	Second Battle of Jinju	80	85	95	78	82
Jeong Mun-bu	Joseon	Bukgwan Victory, northern guerrilla war	87	86	90	82	83
Gwak Jae-u	Joseon	Uiryeong, Nakdong River guerrilla actions	84	88	94	80	91
Konishi Yukinaga	Japan	Busan landing, march on Seoul & Pyongyang	86	83	82	80	70
Ukita Hideie	Japan	Commander at Haengju, later Sekigahara	78	76	80	77	72
Ishida Mitsunari	Japan	Toyotomi strategist / bureaucrat	82	72	75	88	75
Kuroda Nagamasa	Japan	Operations in Gyeongsang / Jeolla regions	80	84	83	82	68

⚠️ Important disclaimer
These are creative, blog-style stats built from historical records and modern scholarship – not rigorous academic ratings.
Think “flavor for readers and gamers,” not a peer-reviewed table.

2. “Character card” notes – why those numbers?

Yi Sun-sin – SSS-tier naval boss

Practically undefeated at sea, with Hansan, Myeongnyang, and Noryang shattering the Japanese navy and its supply routes.
Planned operations, managed logistics, and ran intelligence – hence near-max Strategy 97 / Organization 99.
His symbolic value for Joseon’s morale is off the charts, so 100 in the final column almost feels conservative.

Kwon Yul – “Architect of stand-and-fight victories”

From Ichi and Doksan to Haengju, he consistently chose ground that made winning possible and wrung the maximum out of inferior numbers.
That’s why Strategy 90 and Tactics 88 feel fair.
Stories of him personally helping soldiers, hauling water, and fighting near the front help justify Courage & Nerve 92 and a strong morale impact score.

Kim Si-min – “The master of small-force fortress defense”

At the First Battle of Jinju, he reportedly held off about 30,000 Japanese troops with roughly 3,800 defenders, using walls, firearms, and terrain brilliantly.
He gets Tactics & Command 93 and Courage 96 as the archetypal “outnumbered fortress commander.”

Hwang Jin – “The last sword of the Second Jinju”

In the doomed Second Battle of Jinju, Hwang Jin fought to the very end.
Strategically his room for maneuver was small, but personally he embodied “fight to the last”, hence Courage & Nerve 95.

Jeong Mun-bu – “Northern theater manager”

In Hamgyeong Province he blended regulars and irregulars to create the Bukgwan Victory, reclaiming Japanese-held strongpoints and stabilizing the northern front.
That puts him in the high-80s as a theater-level commander rather than a single-battle hero.

Gwak Jae-u – “Guerrilla war specialist”

As one of the earliest and most famous righteous army leaders, he specialized in small-unit raids, ambushes, and attacks on supply lines.
High Tactics 88 and Courage 94, and a very strong morale impact 91 as a symbol of local resistance.

Konishi Yukinaga – “Blitzkrieg specialist, weak in long wars”

Led the first invasion waves: from Busan up to Seoul and then Pyongyang in an astonishingly fast campaign.
Early-war Strategy 86 and Tactics 83 reflect his success in rapid operations –
but his management of supply lines and adaptation once Ming–Joseon resistance stiffened lag behind, hence more modest Organization and Symbolic scores.

Ukita Hideie – “Big title, underwhelming results”

Favored by Hideyoshi, technically the top field commander of Japanese forces in Korea.
But at Haengju, even with around 30,000 troops, he failed to crack a small fortress defended by Kwon Yul and eventually had to retreat.
Later, as commander of the Western Army at Sekigahara, he lost again.
That pattern of “high rank, limited outcomes” is why his stats sit in the high-70s/low-80s.

Ishida Mitsunari – “Brains in the office, not on the field”

Known more as a bureaucrat and strategist of the Toyotomi regime than as a front-line general.
Strong Organization & Admin 88, but modest Tactics 72 / Courage 75, reflecting weak popularity and limited battlefield authority.

Kuroda Nagamasa – “Balanced attacker”

Played significant roles in operations in Gyeongsang and Jeolla, and later bet on Tokugawa Ieyasu at Sekigahara, winning big rewards.
Solid numbers across the board – the classic balanced aggressive commander rather than a legend in any one category.

Taken together, this “stat sheet” view highlights one last point:

At Haengju, Kwon Yul and a patchwork force of 2,300
weren’t facing clowns.
They were staring down some of Hideyoshi’s most trusted lieutenants –
and still sent them home.

Which is why Haengju deserves to be remembered not just as a feel-good legend about “skirts full of stones,” but as one of the most technically impressive defensive battles in early modern East Asian warfare.

“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.