Mimizuka

Mimizuka is a grassy, mound-shaped monument topped with a five-layered stone pagoda in Kyoto's Higashiyama district. Built in fifteen ninety-seven by the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, it commemorates his failed invasions of the Korean Peninsula. While the name translates to Ear Mound, the earth beneath the stone structure contains the severed noses of at least thirty-eight thousand Korean soldiers and civilians, as well as Ming Chinese troops, collected by Hideyoshi's armies as grisly war trophies.