Probably the only thing North and South Korea agree on is their mania for their neighbor Japan. Anyone who is a little aware of the geopolitical movement in Northeast Asia will know that harmony does not exactly reign between the three countries. But the bad blood comes from afar, from much older than the bickering that took into account the Second World War. At the end of the 16th century, Japan tried to conquer Korea not once, but twice… And it came within a hair's breadth of succeeding. The monumental logistical problems, the intervention in extremis by China, which saw that a horde of samurai with very bad drool was one step away from standing on the border, and the weakness of the Japanese navy, resoundingly defeated by the Korean fleet, ended up put an end to both expeditions. If the Japanese generals had spent less time hunting tigers and more coordinating their movements, instead of competing with each other to see who could advance faster and first take such a castle or conquer such a city, perhaps the history of Asia would be today. different. But they weren't up to the task, and the adventure ended in a disaster of epic proportions for everyone involved.
To this day, it is still not known for sure what fly stung them to get into such a mess. Worse yet, it is assumed that the idea was to conquer China, and passing through Korea was just a mere formality. The year was 1592 and Japan knew peace for the first time in almost a hundred years after an endless period of civil wars. Toyotomi Hideyoshi , the second of the great unifiers of the country, had just completed the work begun by his predecessor, Oda Nobunaga , and that a few years later Tokugawa Ieyasu would finally finish off . The island empire was united and at peace, and Hideyoshi, despite lacking the lineage to claim the title of Shogun , he was the absolute master of the roost. The de facto king of Japan. But it is seen that he did not seem enough. Hideyoshi was hell-bent on conquering China . Some say it was as good a way as any to keep his bellicose vassals busy. With the country recently pacified and a couple of million samurai about to join the ranks of the unemployed, it would be better to give them something to distract themselves with, they wouldn't think of taking up arms against the new government. Or maybe it was just a simple case of megalomania. In his last years, the once brilliant Hideyoshi began to show clear signs of dementia, and the disastrous Korean campaign could well have been the result of one of his strokes.
In any case, Hideyoshi's colonial project ended in tremendous disaster. And, although the Japanese had to return home with their tails between their legs, the trail of horror and desolation they left in Korean lands would take centuries to forget. It is true that in all wars there are outrages to give and take, and even more so in those days, but the samurai in Korea went over a few towns. By comparison, the massacres of the Japanese Imperial Army 300 years later seem like child's play. Among the many barbarities perpetrated, the unedifying custom of mutilating corpses to get trophies of war stands out. . In those days, it was common in Japan to cut off the heads of fallen opponents and present them at the end of the battle to show the world how much and how well each one killed. The more heads cut, the more chances of promotion. The custom came from old and, although little by little it was falling into disuse, that of counting the heads at the end of the butchery on duty was still in style. The Japanese have always been lovers of keeping traditions alive. But there was a small problem... the commander in chief of the campaign, who decided the rewards of the hardworking samurai, was Hideyoshi . And this one was in Osaka , hundreds of kilometers away from where the heads were cut off and with a sea in the middle. The logistics of shipping such trophies were rather complicated. Hideyoshi, always witty, found the solution:it was not necessary to send the whole head, it was enough to cut off the nose, or in his case an ear, and send it by ship. Previously pickled and preserved in brine, of course, like a canned pickle .
Thus, during the war with Japan, the main Korean export item was freshly severed human noses. They were sent by the thousands, each one duly labeled with the name and data of its seasoned collector. Obviously, if with the severed heads there was already a lot of picaresque and, in order to take credit for the piece, they ended up slicing the necks of fallen warriors on the battlefield indiscriminately, with the ears and noses he spent three quarters of what same. Only this time, the deception took a much more macabre turn. Not infrequently the Japanese ended up slicing off the nasal appendages of civilians and peasants, women and children included, to pass them off as those of defeated enemy soldiers. After all, in distant Osaka no one was going to know who they really belonged to.
Genuine or fake, Hideyoshi ended up amassing so many of these sinister trophies at his headquarters that he soon didn't know what to do with them. There was nowhere to put so much canned appendix. So he had no other idea than to have them buried next to a temple in Kyoto , hoping to appease the spirits of its unfortunate owners along the way... and the pile was of such dimensions that it ended up forming a hill several meters high. The remainder, since there was still human pickle to give and take, was sent to other cities in Japan, where he was buried in similar mounds. He called them “ Mimizuka ”, which comes to mean “hill of the ears ”, although what is buried there are mostly noses.
Today, more than 400 years later, the Mimizuka The original still stands, covered in grass, stuffed with dirt and human flesh. Anyone who takes a stroll through the quiet suburbs to the east of Kyoto can visit it, although it is not exactly the star attraction of the old capital. Few tourist guides mention it. Neither do the textbooks of Japanese schoolchildren. Only a modest commemorative plaque, at the entrance to the small park where it stands, recalls the barbarity of that war and prays for the eternal rest of the poor souls of the mutilated. Nobody in Japan seems to want to remember all that. Practically the only ones who visit the Mimizuka Today, in addition to the neighborhood residents who take care of her selflessly, they are Korean tourists. Four centuries have passed, but the two Koreas will not easily forget that horror.
Collaboration of R. Ibarzabal