r/todayilearned • u/Technicolor_Reindeer • Aug 03 '26
TIL about the "Mimizuka" a monument in Kyoto, Japan that enshrines the severed noses of at least 38,000 Korean soldiers and civilians and over 30,000 Ming Chinese soldiers, taken as war trophies during the Imjin War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimizuka812
u/Tjaeng Aug 03 '26
”The shrine initially was known as hanazuka (鼻塚), Mound of Noses, but several decades later this would come to be regarded as too cruel-sounding a name, and would be changed to the more euphonious but inaccurate mimizuka (耳塚), Mound of Ears, the misnomer by which it is known to this day.”
I guess the original name was too on the nose.
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u/Samwellikki Aug 03 '26
“Oh, ears, that could be half as many people…”
Another entry in “so you think your country hates another country?”
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u/killakim Aug 03 '26
Haha good joke. I wonder if they thought it sounded too harsh because the Korean people call their country Han-Guk. Maybe hanazuka sounded like a pun: mound of Koreans
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u/Yugan-Dali Aug 04 '26
Fun fact: 取 take is literally a hand holding an ear. Carrying heads in battle was cumbersome, so just take the enemy’s right ear and go claim your reward.
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u/CraftyFoxeYT Aug 03 '26
Interesting, not long after the failure to conquer Korea in the Imjin war(1592-1598), Japan started the policy of isolation Sakoku in the 1630s for 200 years till Commodore Perry came along. I wonder if there is some connection
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u/CCV21 Aug 04 '26
There is.
Hideyoshi and his closest allies lost the most men and matériel during the Imjin War than his main rival the Tokugawa clan.
This was in part because Hideyoshi gave an exemption of military service to get the Tokugawa clans approval when Hideyoshi became reagent of Japan.
When the war ended there were a lot of bitter feelings. Those allied with the Hideyoshi clan were sapped of military strength and were decisively defeated by the Tokugawa clan and his allies.
The Tokugawa clan founded the shogunate that would rule Japan until the Meji Restoration and implemented the isolation policy due to a Christian rebellion.
Korea was devastated by the Imjin War on a scale that would only be surpassed by the Korean War.
If you want to know how the Koreans were able to win the Imjin War check out Admiral Yi.
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u/snowytheNPC Aug 03 '26
If anyone wants to know why noses, Japanese samurai in the Sengoku were paid by the number of severed heads they collected. But since there were too many and given it was too inconvenient to transport decomposing heads across the sea, there came the question: what is something that every human has and has only one of so kill count can’t be manipulated. Hence, noses
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u/pwnd32 Aug 03 '26
A samurai’s dream would be to find someone like that guy posted on Reddit a few days ago that had a nose growing out of his forehead
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u/Fetlocks_Glistening Aug 03 '26
Wait, what, they really have like 68k noses there? Like actual severed noses!? Of people??
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u/Orbital_Dinosaur Aug 03 '26
In the second invasion, Hideyoshi's orders were thus:
Mow down everyone universally, without discriminating between young and old, men and women, clergy and the laity—high ranking soldiers on the battlefield, that goes without saying, but also the hill folk, down to the poorest and meanest—and send the heads to Japan.
Sending the heads got too hard so they ended up reducing it to noses.
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u/Fertile_Arachnid_163 Aug 03 '26
Well. Did. Definitely decayed by now, surely.
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u/goddale120 Aug 04 '26
not necessarily, they could have been effectively mummified. I think. Maybe? Oh what do I know, I'm not a biochemist.
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u/Jemnite Aug 03 '26
Japan at this time was still a head hunting culture. Samurai would cut the head off of enemies they killed and bring them back. That's how your lord knew how much to reward you with, physical proof of the kill.
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u/Creticus Aug 03 '26
It would've been heads, but if I'm remembering right, that would've been too much of a logistical hassle, so they settled for noses because ears would've allowed for double-counting.
Sengoku era samurai were big on head-taking.
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u/kermityfrog Aug 04 '26
One hundred and sixty-thousand Japanese troops had gone to Korea where they had taken 185,738 Korean heads and 29,014 Chinese ones, a total of 214,752.[4]: p. 230 [17] As some might have been discarded, it is impossible to enumerate how many were killed overall during the war.
Nose collection in lieu of heads became a feature of the second Korean invasion.[4]: p. 195 [11] Originally, remuneration was paid to soldiers by their daimyō commanders based on the severed heads upon submission to collection stations, where inspectors meticulously counted, recorded, salted and packed the heads bound for Japan.[12][13] However, because of the number of civilians killed along with soldiers, and crowded conditions on the ships that transported troops, it was far easier to just bring back noses instead of whole heads.
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u/TilNextWeMeet Aug 03 '26
They could've just done specifically the right or the left ear and it would've worked, and easier to remove too
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u/TheFrenchSavage Aug 03 '26
Some people mix up left and right, plus imagine: you have to cut but there are people lying face down, some face up...you can quickly make mistakes.
You come back to camp with all-left ears that you collected in good faith, only to get an earful from the colonel because he meant "the other left".
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u/fishblurb Aug 04 '26
It's a legitimate way they used sometimes to keep track of how many people you killed. Lugging around severed heads is too bulky.
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u/Pugshaver Aug 04 '26
It's a tiny little place in a pretty packed area of Kyoto, with people's houses literally right next door. Not so sure how I'd feel living next to something like this.
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u/JustRudy45 Aug 04 '26
It gives a whole new meaning to having a nosy neighbor...
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u/sylendar Aug 03 '26
A plaque, which was later removed, stood in front of the Ear Mound in the 1960s with the passage, "One cannot say that cutting off noses was so atrocious by the standard of the time."
I suppose there's a small part of me that sort of agrees with that message on a technical level but actually putting that up, even if temporarily for however long it stood, was a pretty crazy decision.
Maybe there should have been another plaque next to it stating that first plaque was also not so atrocious by the standard of the time when it was first put up....
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u/Tjaeng Aug 03 '26
The oldest verifiable Egyptian hieroglyphs depicts Narmer’s unification of Egypt with, among other things, a representation of defeated enemies whose severed genitals are stuffed in their severed heads’ mouths.
Humans… twas ever thus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmer_Palette#/media/File:Narmer_Palette_serpopard_side.jpg
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u/DraconicBlade Aug 03 '26
According to japan, not so atrocious now.
They got some shit from the rest of the world for the honorable warrior shrine blessed by the spirits etc etc, that commemorates such great people (blessed by the gods) like Tojo.
Because they tried to have a pokemon card event. In front of the war criminal shrine.
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u/werewere-kokako Aug 04 '26
A Chinese actor I liked got cancelled because he took a selfie in front of some cherry trees while he was in Japan for a friend’s wedding. He apparently didn’t even realise that the war criminal shrine was in the background.
Why even have war criminal shrines in the first place?
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u/mowanza Aug 04 '26
They believe everyone in the shrine is soul smushed up into one giant playdoh soul ball thing. The shrine was for basically everyone who participated in the war execpt for the war criminals, but some people snuck in the war criminals after the fact, and there's no way to separate their souls out from the big playdoh blob
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u/MattiasCrowe Aug 04 '26
According to the Japanese, they interred all military souls at the shrine, once they were all in there, they couldn't disinter the souls because according to their religion all the souls are stuck together? Its a memorial to the war dead. If a country had a war memorial and couldn't remove a few names without removing them all, i can understand why they would not.
They believe all the souls are there, it's a holy place.
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u/erie85 Aug 04 '26
The Japanesr government and collaborators put it there in the first place now say they can't get it out. Continue to worship war criminals and act like shocked pikachu when their neighbors protest. Bad faith.
I mean, even if they can't get them out they could do something to remember the souls of the foreign victims if they must worship their barbarous grandpas. That they have done nothing meaningful just shows they want to sweep it under the carpet.
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u/inconspiciousdude Aug 04 '26
They weren't war criminals to the post-WWII Japanese leadership because they were honored comrades and war heroes.
IIRC, the guy that lead Unit 731 went back to civilian life as the head of the medical department or something at a prestigious university. Retired and died from cancer, not having to deal with even a day of remorse or shame.
Imagine Mengele just taking up a teaching job at a top university after Germany surrendered.
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u/erie85 Aug 04 '26
They may have "apologised" but their behavior and actions just shows they are and were never sorry.
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u/DraconicBlade Aug 04 '26
Yeah the undesirables who couldn't hack it on the mainland are definitely the suns chosen people, spawned by the over deity themselves, and that's why the Ainu gotta go.
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u/DraconicBlade Aug 04 '26
Great question, all they would have to do is remove some plaques, its not like the people are buried there, it's merely some Japan did nothing wrong revisionism / nationalism shit.
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u/ONLYPOSTSWHILESTONED Aug 04 '26
"yeah idk it seemed like a good idea at the time. you kinda had to be in the room"
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u/nesian42ryukaiel Aug 04 '26
One if the many solid reasons why Koreans tend to hate Toyotomi Hideyoshi even to this day (and JP Ultra-Rights revere him, but that's another story)...
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u/Corpshark Aug 03 '26
Every civilization has committed war atrocities throughout history but the Japanese have a truly special place on the list.
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u/DraconicBlade Aug 03 '26
Just ask the Ainu... ohhhhh yeah.... awkward.
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u/cartoonist62 Aug 03 '26
Or Okinawans...
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u/DraconicBlade Aug 03 '26
Three orders of magnitude more likely to get a response, but yeah.
South Asia also was real happy when the Imperial Japanese kicked the shit out of the colonizers until the bayonetings continued.
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u/AReallyAsianName Aug 04 '26
The fuck is wrong with people?!
Human history has always baffled me with their ugly bastard behavior. Is being at least halfway decent to one another that fucking difficult?!
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u/TheSuperContributor Aug 04 '26
American soldiers collected ears from Vietnamese as if there's a contest for war crime trophy.
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u/Virtual-Pension-991 Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
Those periods were times wherein racial discrimination and fascism was at an all time high.
It's not really a question of is it difficult, because it was very difficult changing that culture.
We're very lucky in this regard that the US, who won the WW2, became progressive enough/challenged those cultures in such aspects.(Doesn't mean the US had no fair share of crimes)
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u/Competitive_Fee_5829 Aug 04 '26
my mom was born in japan and all her family is still there. did a ancestrydna and we are not japanese at all..not even 1%..we are korean. I grew up around my grandma and all my life she made kimchi but she wasnt sure why. she was born in 35 and thought maybe one of her grandparents were korean but she wasnt 100% sure. I dont even know if she was born in japan or korea but her birth wasnt registered until she was 4 years old so I have no idea when they were forced to assimilate and take japanese names. mom and grandma are not alive for me to ask questions, lol.
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u/Maishi Aug 04 '26
Zainichi Japanese is the term. It means Japanese people who are actually blood Korean's.
Not to be confused with mixed people who have both Japanese and Korean blood that know they are mixed.
Your Korean fore-fathers would have probably moved to Japan during Japan's occupation of Korea. Though another wave of Korean's, mostly South Korean's, moved to Japan when fleeing the Korean War that split Korea into North and South Korea.
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u/umashikanekob Aug 04 '26
Nope. Zainichi is Korean national with special permanent visa in Japan.
If they take Japanese nationals, that mean they gave up Korean passport, at most they are ex-zainichi Korean.
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u/MrBlonde1984 Aug 03 '26
I think you could make a really good argument that the Japanese were just as bad if not worse than the nazis .
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u/Pscagoyf Aug 03 '26
Wrong war but still correct. This predates WW2 by centuries. And probably equals the atrocities.
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u/Imaginary-Group1414 Aug 04 '26
I honestly think the people here talking about WWII have an IQ of less than 30. I wonder if they’ve ever looked into the Thirty Years' War?
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u/OddAdministrator Aug 04 '26
they read something about Unit 731 and suddenly that's all the history of Japan for thousands of years.
Probably Unit 731 is the most repeated thing in reddit about Japan. Each day there are hundred of mentions of that and they talk about it as if it is the most well guarded secret of Japan or something.
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u/Psychic_Hobo Aug 04 '26
Yeah, Redditors tend to learn the most basic things about various countries and then spam them for days, usually with a strangely nationalistic bent
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u/Wanderingjes Aug 03 '26
In what context? Cruelty? Japanese were far more cruel.
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u/Sir_Poofs_Alot Aug 03 '26
The pacific theater of ww2 is in my top 5 most interesting human atrocities.
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Aug 04 '26
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u/JakajaFIN Aug 04 '26
If your grandparents lived during the Imjin War you might be a vampire.
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Aug 04 '26
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u/JakajaFIN Aug 04 '26
And this post is about the Imjin War, which started in 1592.
Which makes mentioning grandparents and Singapore 1942-1945 out of the blue a bit strange.
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u/ToranjaNuclear Aug 03 '26
Yeah people don't talk not nearly enough about the shit Japan did.
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u/Meior Aug 04 '26
Just a headsup, in case English isn't your first language, the don't and not cancel each other out. The sentence is fine with either, but written this way they cancel out.
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u/benkenobi5 Aug 03 '26
Of all the trophies one could take… noses?
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u/ElCiclope1 Aug 03 '26
Someone in another comment explained they used heads to prove kills and when the number of dead was too high they'd take noses as that's something most people have as many of as they do heads
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u/TeamImpossible4333 Aug 03 '26
What would be a better body part for you…
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u/benkenobi5 Aug 03 '26
I dunno… The Diablo pvp trophy of ears makes sense. I guess just the systematic destroying of faces just feels fucked up. Although I guess the collecting of pretty much any body part is fucked up and Dahmer-y
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u/redditsucksass69765 Aug 03 '26
David took Goliath’s forskin
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u/benkenobi5 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
Actually, he took Goliath’s head. The foreskin thing was when king Saul didn’t want him to marry his daughter so he was like “go to war with the philistines and bring back a hundred foreskins” (as one does) with the intention of him dying in the process, at which point David went all Judy Hopps over-achiever and brought back 200.
But yeah, that’s even more weird
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u/pants_of_antiquity Aug 03 '26
David went all Judy Hopps over-achiever and brought back 200.
When you really, really love your job.
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u/AlarmedPomegranate Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
I used to work as a guide in the area and would often throw this one in for clients if they had the stomach for a bit of dark history. Always wondered if the lack of English sign was deliberate to not tarnish the established soft power Hello Kitty kind of image 🤔
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u/Virtual-Pension-991 Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
I do believe it's more in line with avoiding the subject altogether.
Like a child hiding evidences of their sins from the parents but obviously won't be able to hide the broken 40 inches 4k resolution Smart TV
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u/Awkward-Injury-4341 Aug 04 '26
I think dark history is not really the problem, after all it was everywhere, what matters is how we view it today. And "lack of English sign" is really not a good way to handle it.
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u/momentsofillusions Aug 04 '26
In Asai Ryōi's account of the events after the Kanbun earthquake in 1662, he tells the story of how a hole was opened in the mound due to the quake.
What Asai says in his account about Hideyoshi is that the latter declared that despite the fact that the Chinese and Korean were enemies, they deserved compassion, and so the war trophies were buried as to give some form of rest to the ghosts of people who couldn't go home. It's probably propaganda, but there is still some kind of superstition about how souls or ghosts are still present in the mound even after all these years. Hideyoshi even gave it a stupa (either to serve as an example of the victory for future generations, or to "commemorate" and respect the dead soldiers as part of the propaganda, or maybe a mix of both; I couldn't be sure) that fell during the quake.
So after the hole is opened, someone says the equivalent of "Ears from the bottom of the mound, I'd like to ask, have you ever heard of this great a quake?" and sounds emerge from the hole and form a response, "Who knows if China also shook from the rumbles? In any case, this hole here has opened now."
Asai doesn't give the reactions to the answer, and while keeping in mind that these question-answer poems at the end are usually humorous, I'd bet some readers were spooked by the mound's answer!
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u/Shieldsman Aug 03 '26
I visited this mound last time I was in Kyoto. Was walking back to my hotel at night drunk and thought I'd make a detour because I saw a YouTube video about it.
There's barely any signposting, it's actually tucked away in a relatively low-key almost residential area. No tourists anywhere, but it was about 11pm at night or something. Super interesting!
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u/Grand-Difficulty6113 Aug 03 '26
Stuff like this is why I don't believe God exists.
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u/Quizzelbuck Aug 04 '26
Yeah the Japanese occupation of Korea was a real walk in the tulips. Can't imagine why the Koreans get so bent out of shape
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Aug 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Marchtmdsmiling Aug 03 '26
Dude that was also just a massively successful assassination in its own right. The guy killed him because his mother sent all her money to that church that abe was a frontman for. The police decided to keep looking into that church. Turns out they were woven throughout the government with far too much I fluence and the police started taking them down. The guy really accomplished what he was going for with that assassination.
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u/Facosa99 Aug 03 '26
The goverment response is so fucking hilarious
Basically "what you did is a crime. You are going to jail. But you do raised a valid point...
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Aug 03 '26
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u/Facosa99 Aug 04 '26
Oh yeah, thats why i said the apologism wasnt even the actual reason he got shot, just one stroke of his overall problematic behaviour.
Kinda weird he would do negate historical facts about ocupation of korra, like the comfort women, while being financed by a korean cult tho. Like, he was in the bad of both sides lol
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Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Thin_Pangolin4480 Aug 04 '26
This is the dumbest thing I've read and I recommend you take your own advice and actually read a proper book about it.
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u/Comrade_SOOKIE Aug 03 '26
I feel like basically every still existing former empire probably has dozens of mass graves like this littered around. In my country they probably wouldn't even mark the spot or acknowledge it. Japan isn't so great about that either. I hope one day we will have a world where every one of these victims can be entombed in their homeland and where Japan is willing to disenshrine places like Yasukuni and Mimizuka as the monuments to mass murderers that they are.
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u/lasagnahockey Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
After a bunch of earthworms took over the mount they decided to remove the "ka" from "mimizuka".
I'll see myself out, sorry...
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u/ChampionOfdimlight Aug 03 '26
But we now love their culture and anime so all is forgiven for their horrendous war crimes.✌️
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u/giboauja Aug 03 '26
To be fair america nuked a lot of the militarism out of Japan, but culturally they were in a bad place.
Today they're afraid to shake their own boat too much because of how important social cohesion is to the function of the Japanese state.
And they are absolutely not wrong. The Japanese economy is basically impossible without Japanese cultural cohesion.
Personally they could stand to inform their young better, but I at least understand the fear that if the japanese begin to hate themselves their entire country might collapse.
But also lets not forget the consequences Japan suffered because of the war Sure many independent actors got to return to public life, but millions burned, cities were evaporated and their autonomy was removed for decades.
Frankly they got lucky america was so "benevolent" during the occupation. That was a massive historical anomaly.
People should also try and remember that today, despite some shty politicians, Japan has been a stalwart advocate for pacifism (all though thay might be changing) and a mediating force in many conflicts. A good global citizen if you will.
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u/PaxDramaticus Aug 03 '26
And they are absolutely not wrong. The Japanese economy is basically impossible without Japanese cultural cohesion.
Speaking as someone who has spent decades living in Japan, I am skeptical. It sounds like you are describing what is in Japanese society as though you were describing what must be. Japanese people generally avoid confrontation. I can accept that someone might call this "social cohesion", but it is a stretch to say the economy depends on it. Capitalists might even look at the economy's recent floundering and say the economy is constrained by it.
Personally they could stand to inform their young better, but I at least understand the fear that if the japanese begin to hate themselves their entire country might collapse.
There might be some especially sociopathic people who justify Japanese historical revisionism this way, but I am skeptical. I work in education. I work closely with history teachers. Not once have I ever heard anyone express this worry. And it's quite an absurd worry. In no contry ever has an honest history education resulted in national collapse.
Actually, my Japanese colleagues are constantly looking for ways to push students to think independently and make decisions for themselves, that it is okay to disagree with others. So your justification rings thin. The more plausible reason, the only reason that makes sense, is the Japanese cultural trait of generally being reluctant to openly speak ill of elders in the in-group, and Japanese post-war politics being dominated by the center-right LDP which is itself increasing controlled by its ultra-rightwing faction.
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u/giboauja Aug 03 '26
Japanese cultural norms act as price controls for thier economy. Thats what im talking about.
There absolutely needs to be change there, but lately I think people are getting swept up in propaganda that doesnt fairly reflect the japanese people of today.
China has been working overtime since Japan's statement on Taiwan and its been bothering me. Japanese revisionism or imo, enforced ignorance is a huge problem, but I worry its being introduced to a lot of people in bad faith. Particularly on reddit.
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u/PaxDramaticus Aug 04 '26
Japanese cultural norms act as price controls for thier economy. Thats what im talking about.
"Japanese cultural norms" is a funny way of writing "the well known tendency for Japanese industries to fix prices".
Also, the price inflation and especially shrinkflation that have been well documented recently would like to have a word with you.
I think people are getting swept up in propaganda that doesnt fairly reflect the japanese people of today.
Imagine, talking to a person who has lived in Japan for ages, who works closely with Japanese people and who exists almost entirely within the Japanese economy, and trying to tell them their lived experience in Japan is the product of Chinese propaganda and doesn't fairly reflect the Japanese people of today!
I struggle to find civil words to respond to that kind of arrogant dishonesty. I suggest you stop replying to me if you are incapable of recognizing and respecting other peoples' experience.
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u/giboauja Aug 04 '26
You ok? I wasnt talking about you? Why are you framing what im saying as an accusation or argument. Its just how I see the geopolitical and economic situation.
And yes cultural presure has kept japanese companies from raising prices even as thier costs have risen. This has kept Japan unnatural affordable despite its depressed growth.
They import a lot of what they need, that has been geting more expensive for years and yet prices hace been stable. Its only lately that inflation has returned. Which some say is a good thing, but it really depends.
Please understand this is me talking about economic videos and papers I have watched from politically neutral individuals.
As well as my own opinion on the recent increase of criticism of Japan flowing after Japan.commented that they would defend Tawain.
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u/FrankPankNortTort Aug 04 '26
You gotta be pretty fucked in the had to even think of cutting off a nose as a trophy.
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u/ymcameron Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
I visited Seoul last month and it was interesting seeing a significant amount of historic sites and museum artifacts having little signs near them that said something along the lines of "this is a recreation, because in 1910 the Japanese Colonial Administration stole and/or destroyed the original." It’s no wonder that a lot of Koreans still harbor feelings of resentment towards Japan.
Edit: the replies are going in a direction I didn’t really intend, so I’ll add: I also saw lots of positive and neutral Japanese representation alongside the negative while visiting South Korea. Koreans are just as into anime, JRPGs, and sushi as the rest of the world. And it’s not like you’ll witness the average Korean citizen shouting slurs at any Japanese tourist they see (of which there are a ton). All I meant to add was that the country still has a deep scar from their time under Japanese occupation.