After settling the status issue of the Kuroda family, Gao Pragmatic finally no longer needs to stay in Sichuan. He can go to the Gimhae front line to command the Ming army nearby and launch the final battle against the Japanese army in Korea at any time.
According to the military orders issued by Gao Pangshi, Jinglue and Ma Gui's army should arrive at Jinhai almost on the same day, and Liu Wei should clear the area around Jinhai before that to create conditions for Jinglue to be stationed.
But in fact, Ma Gui, who was further away from Jinhai, arrived first. Obviously, Ma Gui's move complied with the rules of the Ming Dynasty's officialdom - it was impossible for him to let Gao Gebu and Gao Nanning go to Jinhai first to wait for him. For this reason, Ma Gui's troops marched quickly and slowly, running faster than when the Japanese army made a surprise attack on Sichuan, just for fear of missing the time and breaking the rules.
Gao Pragmatic walked at a leisurely pace. During the march, he even had time to reply to letters sent from various places, and he seriously held an armed parade.
Speaking of letters from various places, Gao pragmatically responded to a letter sent from Japan, and the letter was written by Narita Kai.
Kafihime often traveled back and forth between tomorrow and tomorrow in the past few years. Before Gao pragmatically went to war in Korea, she spent about half of the year in the capital and half of the time in Japan.
During his stay in Japan, he was mainly responsible for the defense of the two cities in Kanto, and was occasionally involved in some less confidential espionage matters. The two cities of Misaki and Yusheng have been built very solidly in the past few years, but the defense systems of the two cities are completely different.
Misaki Castle was built in a very "Kyoka style", that is, it adopts a bastion-style structure. In fact, two fortresses were built - the Castle Island Fortress and the Misaki Castle Fortress.
Misaki Castle Island was basically a tourist attraction in later generations of Japan. The main attraction was the Horseback Cliff. There was not a large population on the island.
However, at this time, Castle Island was built into a fortress due to high pragmatic strategic needs. Its main function was to serve as a strategic fulcrum "just in case" to ensure that there was always a place in Beijing that could not be occupied by the Japanese. The captured bridgehead.
This task requires two prerequisites. First, the fortress itself is strong enough and has sufficient supply storage. Second, Jinghua's maritime strength always stabilizes Japan.
Regarding the latter, Kaiji has no power to interfere, so her focus is to supervise the construction of the fortress, especially to put forward construction requirements for common Japanese siege methods.
Kafihime was responsible for defending the city during the Battle of Ninja Castle when she became famous. It can be said that she is a famous city defender herself, so with her assistance, the castle island can be called an iron wall after it is built.
In order to demonstrate the impregnability of the city defense system and to deter the Tokugawa clan, Kaibi, Gao Yunping, and Luo Yuan quietly invited Tokugawa Hidetada to visit Misaki Castle.
Tokugawa Hidetada was shocked by the solidity of Misaki Castle, and thought it was not inferior to Osaka Castle. In particular, the defensive firepower network formed by more than 300 artillery pieces and more than 1,200 musket shooting ports shocked Tokugawa Hidetada.
With the current weapons and equipment of the Japanese army, even if the corpses of 100,000 troops are thrown outside the city, they may not be able to capture the city. To capture the city, they must spend several years to besiege it for a long time.
Then he saw the Castle of Castle Island. At this time, Tokugawa Hidetada completely despaired of attacking Misaki Castle with force.
As a long island with rocky surroundings, Castle Island was originally difficult to land on. Nowadays, a towering city wall has been built, and the city wall has formed at least dozens of angles, and there is crossfire everywhere.
Looking at its firepower equipment again, dozens of Jinghua No. 1 Fortress guns are set up in all directions. The huge black muzzles are like the cold eyes of death. Any ship that dares to peek at the island of the city will probably be able to do so. His eyes were downcast and he was running away.
The ships didn't dare to approach the island at all, so why did they land on the island? Swim over and be beaten into a hornet's nest?
However, the island of Piancheng is far or close to Misaki Castle on land. The giant cannon on the north side of the island can penetrate Misaki Castle, but there is only a No. 2 cannon in Misaki Castle and cannot hit Castle Island. [Note: However, in fact, the accuracy of hitting Misaki Castle from Castle Island is very poor, and it can only be used as a covering strike. ]
what does that mean? This means that even if Misaki Castle can be captured, it cannot be truly occupied because the city is completely within the range of artillery fire from Castle Island. Even if the Tokugawa Army or any other Japanese army did capture Misaki Castle and move in, justice would soon be brought down from heaven, and such an attack would be meaningless.
The islands and continents are linked together, and the islands dominate the land. This is the Misaki Fortress completed under the supervision of Kaihime.
The construction of Tamana Castle by the Narita family was more inclined to the traditional Japanese city defense system, especially the Western Japanese castle style. But because she is a highly pragmatic concubine, Yusheng City unexpectedly possesses another "Beijing style" besides its architectural appearance.
Tamana Castle is located in East Japan, but it was built in the style of a West Japan castle, which is obviously very special. Let me first talk about the difference between the castle style in East Japan and that in West Japan.
Among the castles in East Japan, there are Ninja Castle built on the water, which is known as the "Floating Castle", and Ogaki Castle, which is built on the main transportation road to guard one side and has both transportation and military value. There are even extremely complex structures that took 56 years to build. Xinfatian City.
The appearance of the eastern Japanese castle is not as majestic and beautiful as Kinki, and its structure is not as solid as the western castle. However, most of the Dongguo Castles are unique in style and do not stick to their inherent forms. Their practicality and diversity may be extremely rare in Japanese history. It is precisely this kind of thinking that emphasizes the practicality and functionality of the castles that Dongguo Castle presents. A hundred flowers blooming.
For most people, the impression of Japanese castles is basically composed of towering stone walls, water-filled moats and majestic castles. These are actually concepts derived from the modern castles of Western Japan.
Comparing the modern castles in East Japan with those in Western Japan, in fact, the castles in East Japan were mostly built with earth ramparts, empty walls, and water banks arranged in a complex and exquisite way, and very few were fortified castles with stone walls and castles. Although this is not the case in all cases, the way castles are constructed in East Japan is indeed unique to all of Japan.
There are very few castles in East Japan with stone walls, especially in the Kanto area. The only ones with stone walls are Edo Castle and Odawara Castle.
In the original history, even Edo Castle, the residence of the Tokugawa shoguns and known as "the largest in Japan", only had stone walls underneath the "Fushimi Tower" on the right side of the famous "Nieju Bridge" and in the middle. Almost all of it is covered with earthen ramparts. Even Edo Castle Nishinomaru, where the shogun Shiji lived, has mostly this kind of earthen ramparts.
Therefore, it is natural that there are no stone walls in the Kanto castle walls outside of Edo Castle. The reason is actually very simple, because the stones needed to build the stone wall are not produced in large quantities in Kanto.
If we had a current geological map of the Japanese archipelago, we would find that only Kanto is unique. It is a concentrated area of alluvium, so it would be difficult to obtain stones for the city walls. The stones used for the stone walls of Edo Castle were transported by ship from Izu country under the orders of the Tokugawa Shogun family. As a result, even Mito Castle, which was the residence of the "Three Tokugawa Houses", could not use stone walls but earthen fortresses.
Although the Tohoku region is further away from the Kinki region, the core of Japan, than the Kanto Plain, Iwate Prefecture and Fukushima Prefecture later had certain capabilities in producing stone. Even so, there are still only a handful of cities with towering stone walls. Only Morioka Castle, Aizuwakamatsu Castle, and Shirakawa Komine Castle can be regarded as several large castles built with stone walls in the northeast. This shows the low popularity rate of Ishigaki.
Even these three famous cities are nothing compared to the majestic stone walls left behind by modern castles in Western Japan, but they are generally still regarded as stone walls.
Similar to the Satake clan's Kubota Castle and the Uesugi clan's Yonezawa Castle, there were almost no stone walls in the castles, while the Date clan's Sendai Castle and the Mogami clan's Yamagata Castle only built stone walls in important places. In addition, only a few places such as Hirosaki Castle and Nihonmatsujo Honmaru have obvious traces of stone walls.
The lack of good stone is a problem of land endowment, and there is no way to solve it unless it costs a lot to transport it from other places. But just because the Japanese can't solve it doesn't mean that Jinghua can't solve it either. Jinghua can either buy the stone or find another way.
It costs money to buy stone, and the people who make money are other Japanese famous people who sell stone, so Kaiji chose the latter without any hesitation - the "other method" is the iron bar concrete method that Jinghua Infrastructure is good at (steel bars are very popular in this era) It’s too luxurious).
The Narita family was not originally wealthy, and they could not afford the cost of building a city with iron bars and concrete. However, the largest shareholder of the Ming Fed was Jinghua, so Gao Pragmatic was naturally very interested in lending money to others.
As a result, the Narita family frightenedly received a huge loan of up to 200,000 guan of Yongle Tongbao - Japan used copper coins from the Ming Dynasty. This is mentioned earlier in this book. They especially liked Yongle Tongbao, which was on the military flag of the Oda Nobunaga family. Yongle Tongbao was painted on it, so there was a gray business in the Jiangnan area of the Ming Dynasty that secretly manufactured Yongle Tongbao and sold it to Japan.
Of course, this deal has now been snatched away by Jinghua, because Jinghua's technology is more advanced, the Yongle Tongbao produced by Jinghua is of better quality, and can more conveniently cooperate with the high-pragmatic economic control of Japan's grand strategy.
In short, the Narita family, who had received a large loan, completely fell into the trap of pragmatism, but they also built Tamana Castle into the second Odawara Castle.
After the completion of the new Tamana Castle, not only did it have stone walls and castles, it was also extremely tall and majestic. While most cities in eastern Japan only had ten oars, Yusou Castle actually had thirty-two oars, which was a huge departure.
And because it is backed by Kyoka, Tamana Castle also has twenty-four forts. Although it is much inferior to Kyoka's own Misaki Castle, if Misaki Castle is not included, it is the only one in East Japan.
The garrison issue of Misaki Castle was not within Kahihime's purview, so during the construction of the city, she focused on improving the combat effectiveness of the Narita Army. [Note: Yusheng City also has some garrison from Beijing, which was briefly mentioned in the previous article. ]
Kai-hime's two former generals, Shibazaki Izumi and Sakemaki Hamaki, were sent to lead the army. The money earned by the Narita family from specializing in some Kyoka products was quickly invested in army expansion and training.
Compared with the Battle of Ninja Castle, the Narita Army at this time was much stronger. The entire army had been organized into an infantry association according to Jinghua's organization, which was 4,038 people.
Although the number of four thousand troops has not improved much compared to the past, the improvement of the Narita Army mainly lies in weapons and equipment.
Because of Kaiji's relationship, the Narita Army obtained some of the equipment of the Shoryu Garrison and the Golden Port Garrison that were eliminated from Annan, and established the first professional artillery battalion in Japan. Similarly, they also obtained a batch of Mongolian war horses selected by Jinghua and established two battalions of cavalry.
One artillery battalion and two cavalry battalions, this is a standard establishment. It goes without saying that the artillery battalion was the first of its kind in Japan. The two cavalry battalions based on Mongolian horses were probably even more intimidating in the Eastern Kingdom than the artillery, because even the Takeda Chibi cavalry that was so powerful in the Eastern Kingdom did not have such excellent horses to ride on.
Kafihime's own cavalry fighting skills are regarded as the best in the Eastern Kingdom, so she devoted a lot of effort to this cavalry. This cavalry used the same Wanli II lances and new sabers as the elite of the six major garrison armies and the Ming army, but they did not get half of the equipment of the Ming army cavalry.
For this reason, Kafei changed the cavalry's armor into a cheap and light belly roll suitable for cavalry according to her own preference.
The abdominal roll can be described in one sentence: a tight skirt with suspenders - of course it is made of fine scale-like iron or copper sheets.
Just like the abdominal roll that Kaihime wore when fighting, the Narita cavalry's abdominal roll completely replicates the preference of Kaihime. The "Sakura Wei" associated with the scale armor is pink but not conspicuous. The body of the abdominal roll It is black, and the outer haori is dark red.
Black and red are the colors of iron and blood. However, because the Jinhaori is worn outside, it looks like a red cavalry from a distance, which makes it "Akabei". Therefore, when this cavalry of about a thousand people was trained, it was called Narita Chibei.
Narita Akabi is regarded as a direct descendant of Narita Kai, and is usually led by her confidant General Sakamaki Basa. It is said that Naomasa Ii of the Tokugawa Army is very concerned about this Akabi and has always regarded it as a competitor.
Of course, Gao Qingshi felt that with Tokugawa Ieyasu's current attitude, the two of them might not have a chance to fight.
After Kaiji finished these tasks, she originally planned to stay in Japan and take charge of Kanto because Gao Pangshi was not in the capital. However, due to an incident not long ago, she planned to come to North Korea to meet Gao Pangshi in person.
What's so important?
Date Masamune secretly contacted Kaihime, hoping to use her to purchase iron cannons from Kyoka that were more advanced than Japan's, as well as large tubes (artillery) that Japan was extremely short of.
The purchase of weapons itself does not matter. What matters is that in Japan, due to the general peace order issued by Toyotomi Hideyoshi earlier, unless the daimyo from various places were to be recruited to fight in Korea, they at least did not dare to significantly strengthen their armaments blatantly.
Now Masamune Date has quietly contacted her to buy Jinghua's firearms, which is obviously a big problem.
What did Date Masamune want to do, whether these weapons could be sold, whether the Kanto Fleet and the Marine Division should remain vigilant and alert about this... and other issues were all piled up together. Kaiji thought it was necessary to visit North Korea in person.
At this time, Gao Jingshi's letter proposing conditions to Tokugawa Ieyasu had been sent, but neither Kahiki nor Ieyasu had received it yet, so Gao Jingshi replied to Kahihi, allowing her to come to North Korea.
All in all, by the time she received this letter from him, she must have already known about the adoptive act... I wonder if Kaiji would be dissatisfied with this? Gao pragmatic thought it would be a good idea for her to come over, so that if she was dissatisfied, he would be able to persuade and comfort her.
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