Did Toyotomi Hideyoshi really want to invade China or was it just a pretense to only invade Korea?

>>17766424 (OP)
I think it was a pipe dream rather than a directly planned and expected ambition. Smaller states like Korea were first on the list and if the empire building went well then maybe operation China would be taken seriously.

>>17766571
Even if China was defeated militarily, I don't see a way to effectively govern both China and Japan pre-19th century

>>17766424 (OP)
>east sea
Cringe naming

Why do they have the battle date as pearl harbor?

>>17766424 (OP)
>Japanese participants who wrote accounts of the invasion invariably invoked the myth of a primordial conquest of Korea by Japan's empress Jingu as historical precedent that justified their venture
>Hideyoshi himself claimed a sanction that was even more grand: In broadcasting his plans to extend his dominion overseas, he asserted that the will to conquer had been bestowed on him by Heaven.
>To the king of Korea, he wrote in 1590, that he was conceived when the wheel of the sun entered his mother's womb in a dream, a sure sign that the glory of his name should pervade the Four Seas, just as the sun illuminates the universe. Indeed, he had no purpose but to spread his fame throughout the Three Countries of Japan, China, and Korea. Now that he had pacified and prospered Japan and demonstrated his invincibility there, he would invade China to introduce Japanese customs and values to the country, and he wanted the Koreans to lead the way.
So to answer question #1, did Hideyoshi really want to invade China: as far his ambassadors, writings, and public declarations - yes. To answer questions #2, was it a pretense to only invade Korea: only if Korea resisted I guess.

>>17766424 (OP)
More do with disloyal samurai. If he wanted to conquer Korea, might hire European sailor to counter Yi fleet.

>>17766571
>I think it was a pipe dream rather than a directly planned and expected ambition.
It was originally Nobunaga's plan to conquer Ming China after he dealt with the Mori clan in 1582. Naturally as Nobunaga's successor, Hideyoshi in the aftermath of the Shikoku campaign(1585) had the same ambition. After the Kyushu campaign(1587), Hideyoshi expressed to his wife that he already set his sights on Korea/China. In 1591 Hideyoshi actually drafted a document to inform the Ming of his invasion though it proved unnecessary as he purposely declined to execute Ming informant Xu Yihou.

Hideyoshi changed his war goals multiple times.
1. June 1592 After Hanseong was captured, the exuberant Hideyoshi added India to list, planning to personally cross over and take command.
2. July-August 1592 In the aftermath of the Battle of Pyongyang, his generals petitioned him to abandon the conquest of Ming China. Soldiers ordered to pacify Korean territory and hunker down for Ming intervention.
3. June 1593, bottom 4 provinces of Korea and a marriage alliance between the Ming/Japanese Imperial family.
4. February-September 1597, secure Jeolla and Chungcheong provinces and Korean waterways.
5. May 1598, Half of Japanese soldiers return to Japan from Gyeongsang province.
6. September-October 1598, Hideyoshi's death, Council of Five elders not informed of Japanese defensive victories orders a full withdrawal.

>Smaller states like Korea were first on the list and if the empire building went well then maybe operation China would be taken seriously.
Due to the deception of the So clan Hideyoshi was actually under the impression they were vassals. He was extremely belligerent and expected Koreans to pay tribute by 1589, spurring a Korean dipomatic mission by 1590 which was misinterpreted as submission. He ordered his men not to plunder Korea but to only take action if they did not obey his orders.

>>17767476
>More do with disloyal samurai.
Blantantly untrue, more than half of the invading forces were nominally under the control of the Hashiba clan the rest is derived from geographical proximity not loyalty. If anything the conflict exacerbated tensions between Hideyoshi loyalists paving the ground for Sekigihara.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/p32oyg/which_were_the_primary_japanese_clans_that/

>might hire European sailor to counter Yi fleet.
Yi has no relevance to Japanese performance on land, adding European naval support wouldn't have changed the outcome.

>>17766424 (OP)
The Korean peninsula is like a sore toe that begs to be stomped. Its just geography

>>17768090
>Yi has no relevance to Japanese performance on land
True, had they succeeded taken Yi port base and not focus rivalry race take pyongyang

>>17768085
How would Nobunaga has done during imjin war
>>17768182

>>17766424 (OP)
>>17768085
Slightly off topic, but why is Nobunaga generally viewed poorly in Japan given that he just wanted to reunify the country and establish a Japanese Empire (which later happened anyway)?

>>17766424 (OP)
He was fantasizing about moving the imperial capital to Ningbo (which he never ultimately took)
I think further expansion comes naturally to successful warlords in general, they tend to keep going until they meet someone who can stop them.

>>17768353
He killed a lot of people, and among those people were the sorts who tend to write history books (i.e. Buddhist monks) and destroying an institution as old and historic as Enryaku-ji really didn't sit well with people.
I guess a western comparison would be sacking Rome or the Vatican, it was probably the single most important Buddhist monastery in Japan since the Heian period.
Also, his heirs didn't end up running the country, so he was safe to criticize.

>>17768374
Solzhenitsyn said there was more written about the 1937-38 purge in USSR than the Holodomor because most of the victims of the former were people who could read and write.

>>17768382
>>17767311
Go discuss your typical WW2 thread.

Bump

>>17768382
So(lzhe)nitsyn wrote all kind of shit that wasnt true so he's not a reliable source on anything
>several times more people died in the gulags that were ever imprisoned there

>>17766424 (OP)
>Did Toyotomi Hideyoshi really want to invade China
He was acting upon the info that Ming was in its death throes and it was ripe for taking.
Which was absolutely true. Ming was already dead by then.
Just to give you some perspective, Japanese withdrew from Korean peninsula in December 1598.
Manchus set up shop in northern China in 1616 and decisively conquered all of China outside of the Great Wall by 1642. Followed by conquering the capital in 1644 and doing a victory lap over the rest of defenseless China.
Oh, and they prodded Korean asses while doing all this, just to show who's in charge.

Hideyoshi had good intel, the problem was that while Japan had a much, much more potent force than anything Hong Taiji could ever dream of, its geographic position fucked them over.
Manchus didn't have to carry and supply their shit over the seas and fight a war in Korean landscape. So even if they were worse armed, supplied and less numerous than the Japanese by an order of magnitude, they got to poke the house of cards that was late Ming and got it to implode just like Hideyoshi's informants correctly assessed it would.

In light of looking at that sort of grander picture, it's extremely hard to even propose the plan as being some sort of 28 dimensional keikaku where he's out to butcher people making up his powerbase.

>>17768591
So happen between 1616 and 1644?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanggongchang_Explosion

>>17768228
>True, had they succeeded taken Yi port base
Taking him out of the picture doesn't change the fact that the main Nagoya-Tsushima-Busan waterway was never threatened during the entire war. Furthermore the Japanese never planned on establishing a supply line off the Western coast of Korea.

> not focus rivalry race take pyongyang
How was this a mistake? No matter who reached Pyongyang the Japanese were in the mindset of blitzing rather than consolidating their gains.

>>17768329
>How would Nobunaga has done during imjin war
If his mindset was the same as Hideyoshi the outcome would have been the same, the Japanese overextended in too short of a timeframe and miscalculated the behavior of the Korean populace based on Japanese standards(expected them to submit not run off into the mountains). A more realistic plan would follow Hideyoshi's slow and deliberate build up of Gyeongsang, Chungcheong and Jeolla during the 2nd invasion not just running off and trying to conquer the Ming from the get go.

>>17768591
>He was acting upon the info that Ming was in its death throes and it was ripe for taking.
Hideyoshi defintely did not have a good understanding of Ming court politics, internal corruption or any semblance of Ming military strength. His only intel on Ming soldiers was from Wako raiders, diplidated coastal garrisons was not representative of northern border garrisons. You can see this shift in attitude after the 1592 Battle of Pyongyang, Konishi Yukinaga no longer wished to directly advance to Ming territory but to adopt a defensive approach.

>Japan had a much, much more potent force than anything Hong Taiji could ever dream of
The Later Jin had tens of thousands of heavily armored infantry and cavalry, the Japanese were mostly infantry force and even less armored than the Ming expedition force. To beat a Late Ming war wagon/cavalry field army requires superior mobility something the Japanese never had means to replicate

>>17768591
Ming may have already been in decline compared to its former peak, but claiming that Ming was in its death throes in the 1590s is ridiculous when that is exactly when the Ming expelled the Japanese from Korea. A lot can change in just 10 years, let alone the 50 between then and the Fall of Ming.

Later Jin/Qing was able to win not only from geography but also from their ability to flip former Ming officers to their side. Japan would never be able to do something like that.

>>17769312
>when that is exactly when the Ming expelled the Japanese from Korea.
To put it in perspective the Ming lost more men in the Battle of Sarhu than the entirety of the Imjin War. If we go by expenditure the Later Jin-Ming wars cost more than 7 times than the Imjin War.

>>17768591
>Manchus set up shop in northern China in 1616

They did not dumbass, Nurhaci established Later Jin in his own Jurchen homeland in Jilin, he didn't even control Liaodong at the time

>and decisively conquered all of China outside of the Great Wall by 1642

Look at this retard trying to use obfuscation. This was just Inner Mongolia (not Ming controlled but conquered from Ligdan Khan) and Liaodong

The Qing also gave Manchu princesses to Ming officers who defected like Li Yongfang and the Three feudatories generals, Wu, Shang, Geng and Kong families

>Followed by conquering the capital in 1644

Full of shit. The Ming dynasty in northern China and Sichuan in 1644 fell to the internal Han rebels Li Zicheng (Shun dynasty) and Zhang Xianzhong (Da Xi dynasty)

Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong's rebellions started in the 1630s and resulted in tens of millions dead, with a deadly plague and famine striking all of China at the same time

Fighting between the Ming and Li Zicheng killed over 300,000 people in Kaifeng in 1642. Not a single Manchu was present at the battle.

This resulted in Wu Sangui defecting to the Qing in exchange for a Manchu princess,.

Wu Sangui opened Shanhai pass to the Qing and they attacked Li Zicheng together.
>and doing a victory lap over the rest of defenseless China.

The Qing fought for decades against multiple disunited warlords backing Ming princes from northwest China (Gansu where Muslim warlords Mi Layin and Ding Guodong backed Zhu Shichuan) to general Jiang's mutiny in Shanxi and bandit gangs all over Shaanxi as well as Southern Ming warlords like Li Dingguo, Zheng family in Southern China

The Qing had to fight the Southern Ming on the mainland until 1662, and then the Three Feudatories in the 1670s and Southern Ming in Taiwan in 1683.

The Ming also had a massive rebellion in Guizhou and Sichuan, the She-An rebellion in the 1620s at the same time they were fighting the Later Jin, that resulted in millions dead.

>>17768591
>>17769577
The Ming also had the massive Bozhou rebellion in Guizhou in the 1590s at the same time they were fighting the Imjin war in Korea, which drained the Ming treasury

Hideyoshi failed to defeat the Ming while the Ming had a massive internal rebellion just like the She-An rebellion decades later in the 1620s.

The Qing also only gained heavy artillery to breach Ming forts and walls when the Han generals Shang Kexi and Kong Youde defected to the Qing in the 1630s by sailing from Shandong to Liaodong and brought Han heavy artillery experts who manufactured and used Hongyi pao cannon (Red Barbarian cannon) who then become Han bannermen

The Qing gave the Han generals Manchu princesses and then the Qing called Han bannermen as ujen coohai (heavy troops) because they wielded heavy cannon

The Hongyi pao was introduced to China in the 1620s after some people in the Ming court advocated copying western heavy cannons and brought Portuguese experts to show how to make heavy cannon.

Some Han people already saw the Inner workings at Spanish cannon foundries in Manila.

The Qing Han bannermen used heavy cannon to blast Ming walls and lighter versions for mountain warfare.

By contrast, the Mongol attack against the Jurchen Jin in the same place, took decades longer, from 1211-1234 because they had no heavy artillery, and then tge Mongols had to fight the Song for decades more from 1234-1279, again, with no heavy cannon.

Japan completely lacked heavy cannon.

The Qing had Han banner cannons combined WITH massive internal Han rebellions across China (Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong killed tens of millions) AND a disunited Southern Ming.

It still took the Qing decades until 1683, if the Ming never introduced the Hongyipao, the war would last until 1783.

>>17768591
>>17769577
>>17769608
>>17768591
The Manchus were also already under Ming rule for 200 years

The Ming ruled Manchuria as the Nurgan region military commission in the Yongle emperor's reign, and had their Jurchen eunuch slave Yishiha led expeditions against his fellow Jurchens and set up the Yongning temple stele.

The Ming Chenghua emperor led brutal genocidal expeditions against the Jurchens that slaughtered and raped them.

The Ming executed Jurchen chief Wang Gao in 1575 afte he tried rebelling and taking Fushun city.

Nurhaci grew up in the household of Ming general Li Chengliang and he Nurhaci was bilingual in Manchu and Mandarin Chinese and read Ming novels like Water Margin. Which he credited for teaching military tactics.

Nurhaci went on multiple tribute missions to Beijing and knew what the Ming looked like onthe inside.

The Ming slaughtered Nurhaci's father and grandfather which is when he started planning to revolt.

Nurhaci didn't even achieve his first capture of a Ming city in Liaodong by military force.

Nurhaci offered Ming officer Li Yongfang in Fushun in 1618 to give his own granddaughter to Li, in exchange for defecting and surrendering the city.

That was the same city Wang Gao failed to take decades earlier.

Nurhaci's son Hongtaiji gave more Manchu princesses to Han generals like Shang Kexi in exchange for bringing his entire army over along with hongyipao heavy cannon experts.

The Ming also defeated the Dutch in coastal Fujian and Penghu (Pescadores) in 1622-1624, then defeated the Dutch in Liaoluo bay in 1633, the Southern Ming remnants defeated the Dutch in Taiwan in 1661-1662, forced Spain to pay tribute and abandon the Moluccas (Maluku) in Indonesia forever and abandon Zamboanga in Mindnao for decades.

This was WHILE the Ming was fighting both the Manchus AND internal rebels (She-An rebellion and Li Zicheng) in 1620s and 1630s

And the Southern Ming in 1662 which stomped the Dutch and scared Spain, only controlled islands

>>17768591
>>17769632
>>17768591
Lastly even if you belive your own lies.

If Later Jin and Qing is stronger than the Ming (ignoring all what I described above about Li Zicheng, whorring out Manchu princesses, the 1630 and 1640s disesse plagues decimating the Ming population)

And Hideyoshi failed to destroy the Ming armies in Korea.

Then Nurhaci would have curbstomped Hideyoshi when he tried marching through Jilin on his way to attack the Ming, by your logic

The Manchus invaded Korea twice in 1627 and 1636 and defeated the Koreans in a few weeks each time. and forced their surrender, with far less men Hideyoshi used to invade Korea for years.

By your logic, Japan was weaker than Manchus.

>>17768591
>>17769642
The plague that killed millions across China in the 1630s, hit Beijing and Tianjin hard in 1642-1644, immediately before the Ming capital fell to Han rebel Li Zicheng's Shun dynasty.

The plague and famine (Little ice age) and Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong's rebellions reduced the Ming population by half in 1630-1644, 100 million were reduced to under 50 million.

Millions dropped dead of starvation and plague from Hangzhou in Zhejiang to Gansu.

When the Qing were let through Shanhai pass by Wu Sangui in 1644, they found huge parts of China already depopulated.

Yet another thread shitted up by Chinkspammer’s autism

>>17769632
>The Manchus were also already under Ming rule for 200 years
Somewhat ironically this worked in their favor down the line because they could plausibly use this to portray their campaign as a natural succession of dynasties and not a foreign conquest in order to encourage defections.

>>17769688
This, he completely ruins any discussion on Chinese history.

>>17768085
Fucking So clan again.

>>17769713
They were first on the chopping block if Hideyoshi did not die when he did, the Ming court were genuinely prepping for a naval invasion of Japan.

>>17769909
Didn't they lead to misunderstandings during the Edo jidai proper as well? I don't think they've ever done their job properly, without causing issues.

>>17769922
>Didn't they lead to misunderstandings during the Edo jidai proper as well?
Rumours did influence So Yoshitoshi to the point that he fled to Osaka, but this is irrelevant to how the early Edo period viewed the mainland. The Edo regime was actually very afraid of potential Qing invasion, their original plan was to sent 20,000+ men to aid the Southern Ming and try to snatch territory of their own but this was abandoned after the Qing quickly defeated the Longwu Emperor.

>I don't think they've ever done their job properly, without causing issues.
So Yoshitoshi was in a difficult position as all he wanted to do was benefit from trade with Korea rather than outright conquest but he couldn't outright refuse Hideyoshi's request.

>>17770017
The proposed Ming counterinvasion would be classified as 搗巢, unlike Hideyoshi's objective in Korea, their goal was not to annex territory but a puntive expedition to cause as much terror and devastation as possible.

>>17770017
>>17770037
>was to sent 20,000+ men to aid the Southern Ming

Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga)'s mother was Japanese and he sent delegations to Japan requesting intervention.

The Satsuma clan were the ones who supported intervening while the Tokugawa shogun rejected it.

>and try to snatch territory of their own
They did not. The Satsuma and Tokugawa weren't that retarded, Japan's navy was inferior to China's and the Zheng fleet would have destroyed them if they tried to backstab.

Tokugawa Shogunate begged the Dutch East India company for ships in a potential plan to invade the Spanish Philippines. The Dutch would provide both warships and transport ships for Japanese troops.

Japan's navy got wrecked by Tang China at Baekgang, Ming China at Noryang and by Portuguese at Fukuda bay.

Hideyoshi managed to get so many Japanese troops into Korea in two first place by rapidly rushing Japanese ships across the small narrow strait and avoiding combat with the Korean navy.

Southern China is far apart from Japan and the Southern Ming navy under the Zheng would be the ones ferrying Japanese over.

That's the whole reason why Hideyoshi tried to attack China via land through Korea, instead of sending transport ships directly to China, that would have risked the superior Ming navy massacring the entire Japanese convoy.

If Japan tried to backstab and seize land, Japan would be defeated by the Zheng navy.

>>17770118
Stop spamming shit when you clearly can't read modern Chinese sources. Admiral Cui Zhi of the Southern Ming sent Assistant General Lin Gaoxian to request aid from Tokugawa Iemitsu in 1646. The details of the Shogunate's plans are contained in Itakura Shigenori's letters to his nephew, though this plan fizzled out when the Japanese caught wind that the Qing conquered Fuzhou. See《西学东渐与中国事情》

>>17770306
>Admiral Cui Zhi
Also known as Zhou Hezhi

>Assistant General Lin Gaoxian
Typo, meant to state Lin Gao. The letter itself was written in late 1645 requesting 3,000 Japanese soldiers and armaments though it was politely rejected, however Itakura Shigenori's(senior member of the Shogunate) private correspondences meant the Shogunate privately wanted to exploit this opportunity while at the same time denying the Shimazu an opportunity.

>>17770306
>>17770332
Zheng Chenggong's father Zheng Zhilong told the Longwu emperor to send the request to Japan, retard

>>17770332
>>17770424
The two men sent to Japan with letters for the shogun and emperor and Nagasaki bugyo were Zheng's men, Huang Zhengming and Kang Yongning.

>>17766598
Going to guess he would have installed a relative of his as the new emperor and a new ethnically Japanese, Chinese-speaking dynasty would have begun

Remember these are all from the Chinese “sources”. You can consider them all made up bullshits unless you see them also in the English sources. That’s how Chinks operate.

T. Knows both Mandarin and Japanese.

>>17770424
>>17770427
You are retarded, Cui Zhi/Zhou Hezi's letter was delivered by Lin Gao in Longwu 1(1645), Zheng Zhilong's letter was delivered by Huang Zhengming and Kang Yongning in Longwu 2(1646). Itakura Shigenori's record of the Shogunate's plan was made after the first letter.

>>17770467
t. retard. English is one of the worst mediums to learn about the Imjin War considering the three major authors lack mastery of primary sources of the opposite side or even worse rely entirely on secondary sources(Hawley).
https://ijkh.khistory.org/upload/pdf/18-2-03%20Nam-lin_Hur.pdf

>>17768353
Because he was batshit and actually unnecessarily bloodthirsty. Went out of his way to kill and kill people who had nothing to even do with his overall mission. Also what other anons said about him basically having no regard for Buddhism and destroying temples.

It's funny in general how japanese founding fathers are seen in a more negative light than say American founding fathers. Hideyoshi and Tokugawa don't escape scrutiny either albeit Tokugawa, unsurprisingly, getting the least of it

>>17770467

Virgin Hawley : Balding manlet with no hair who makes up alt history and fanfiction in his head about how Korea could have been a great military power and how Spain could have, would have should have conquered China.

Chad reality: Korean girls got mass raped by Japanese in the Imjin war and Spanish governor general got their heads chopped off like animals and hoisted on pikes by Chinese and Spain permanently lost Maluku because of Chinese.


Also chad reality : Spanish invasion force in Cambodia got slaughtered to a handful of men by Malays and Chams.

Spain failed to conquer several Moro Muslim sultanates for hundreds of years. Spain failed to annex Brunei.

Samuel Hawley tried to make Korea look good in his book and whitewash the pathetic state of the Korean military during Joseon since he worked as a professor in South Korea.

It's mostly Koreans spamming the posts about Dasmarinas' plan for 200 Spanish to invade China (while in reality Chinese slaughtered and chopped the Spanish heads off both Dasmarinas father and son).

And Korea was raped by foreign conquerors for centuries

>>17771461
What if Phillip II actually authorize an invasion of China? I was reading a bit about these proposals in a book detailing the Japanese excursions in Korea and against the Ming Dynasty during the late 16th Century.

Chinese merchants slaughtered Spanish governor generals Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas in 1593 and slaughtered Luis Pérez Dasmariñas and beheaded Luis and all his soldiers and Luis bragged he could conquer China with 25 men in 1603. Spanish ruled in the Philippines was only saved by Japanese exile Catholics and local Filipino tribesmen after the slaughter of Luis and his guard.

In 1662, Koxinga's southern Ming remnant, the kingdom of Tungning on Taiwan sent one letter to the Spanish governor general of the Philippines, threatening him and leading the Spanish to withdraw its soldiers from the entire Maluku Islands (Maluku) in Indonesia in 1663 and lose it forever and withdraw and abandon Zamboanga on Mindanao for decades.

>>17771466
It gets even funnier:

The guy who planned on conquering China for Spain was Luis Perez Dasmarinas, Governor of the Philippines in the late 1500s and a wannabe conquistador who wanted to be like his early 16th century idols like Cortez or Pizarro.

In reality, he was fucking pathetic as Philippine Governor:
>Tried fighting Southern Moro Muslims & got booted off.
>Forced to end his Muslim Campaigns when Toyotomi Hideyoshi threatened to invade the Philippines if Spain didn't stop sending missionaries.
>Dasmarinas panicked, and took every Spanish soldier to Manila to defend the capital.
>Hideyoshi invaded Korea instead, but all soldiers were in Manila, Muslim Moros raided & enslaved Spanish subjects who were left defenseless.

>In 1593 Dasmarinas announced his plans invade China for Spain.
>He thought Cambodia was a nice place to start since Khmers were weak..
>Ridiculously fucking lost to the Cambodians who were undergoing the worst period in history: the Khmer Dark ages.

His term as governor ended in 1596 but he remained in the Philippines to pursue his conquistador dream so his retardation continued.
>1596.
>He attempted another expedition to Conquer Cambodia.
>His fleet got blown off-course by a typhoon and landed near an Island near Macau.
>Portuguese got pissed off and attacked the expedition, driving it back to the Philippines.

Dasmarinas met his end in 1603 when the Chinese merchants & immigrants in Manila rebelled against racist Spanish decrees. After 20,000 Chinese rebels- just mere peasants & rebels- surrounded Manila, Dasmarinas demanded that the Spanish should counterattack, but the new Governor told him to wait for reinforcements instead. Dasmarinas got pissed off, yelled "TWENTY-FIVE SPANIARDS ARE ENOUGH TO CONQUER ALL OF CHINA" and sallied out with like a hundred men.

The Chinese peasants merely lured him into a swamp and slaughtered his conquistadors piecemeal. His head was propped up in the siege lines the next day.

Filipino Filipinos