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Hideyoshi denounced Ming China as a “long sleeved country” that should be replaced with “a country of vigorous martial arts” — a country that saw itself as “the country of the gods,” or shinkoku.
Against a backdrop of such ideological perceptions entwined with the myth of Empress Jingu’s subjugation of “Korean kingdoms,” Hideyoshi invaded Korea and ruined its land and people. Japanese soldiers, who sought divine protection within the cocoon of mythological worldview
that featured faith in Hichiman the Great Bodhisattva (the divine manifestation of Empress Jingu’s son Ojin), inflicted unspeakable agony upon the Korean people. The war atrocities which the Japanese troops committed in Korea were even likened to being a “matsuri of blood” dedicated to the glory of their Hachiman and other military gods.
Nevertheless, the Japanese manㆍhunters were not immune from the fear of the Korean “vengeful spirits” which they caused to proliferate, and this fear, at a collective level, eventually led to the performance of pacificatory rituals (Segakie) designed to alleviate the “tatari” of unfortunate Korean souls and to the building of the “Mound of Ears” for them. The “Mound of Ears” in Kyoto (a misnomer of a “mound of noses”) was a product of the effort to get rid of the trauma arising from the senseless killings of hundreds of thousands of innocent Koreans. Religion was an element inseparable from Hideyoshi’s war of atrocity in Korea.