Hegemony, Hunting and Human Trophies in the East Asian War of 1592–1598

Abstract On the eve of his invasion of Korea that launched the Imjin War (1592–8), the Japanese military hegemon, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, held a spectacular hunt parade, the semiotics of which linked the hunting of human and animal trophies. During the war between Japan, Korea and China that followed, Hideyoshi’s troops severed tens of thousands of body parts from combatants and non-combatants, sending heads, ears and noses to Japan for ritual curation alongside hunted animal bodies. In contrast, Chinese and Korean forces took heads and ears from defeated enemies but rarely kept body parts once battlefield tallies were complete. Drawing upon research linking hunting cultures and the taking of human trophies, this difference may be explained by the ascendancy of the warrior class in sixteenth-century Japan, which valued hunting, in contrast to the ambivalent status of hunting within the Chinese and Korean Neo-Confucian elites. Human trophy-taking was an institutionalized practice that, together with the hunting of animals, was intended to assert publicly Hideyoshi’s civilized righteousness and fitness for hegemony. This article makes the case that the human and the more-than-human were entangled in the same regime of violence that characterized and legitimized late sixteenth-century warrior rule in Japan.