arquebusier ashigaru 1,500 archer ashigaru 300 spearmen ashigaru 6,400 laborers and boatmen The majority of the Japanese fighting troops sent into Korea were ashigaru (light infantry), who were usually conscripted peasants armed with spears, tanegashima (Japanese arquebuses), or yumi (Japanese bows). Unlike the samurai with their expensive suits of armor, the ashigaru wore cheap suits of iron armour around their chests. The ashigaru armed with arquebuses were trained to fight in the European style, with the men trained to fire their guns in formation to create a volley of fire, then to go down on their knees to reload, while the men behind them fired, and the cycle repeated over and over again. The commander of the Japanese First Division and overall commander of the invasion force was Konishi Yukinaga, a daimyō of Uto from Higo Province in Kyushu, chosen as commander of the invasion force more because of his diplomatic skills than military skills, as Toyotomi Hideyoshi did not expect the Koreans to resist. Konishi had converted to Catholicism in 1583, and was known to the Spanish and Portuguese as Dom Agostinho. Katō Kiyomasa who led the Second Division into Korea was known in Japan as Toranosuke ("the young tiger") and to the Koreans as the "devil general" on the account of his ferocity. Katō was one of the "Seven Spears of Shizugatake", a group of seven samurai who distinguished themselves in combat at the Battle of Shizugatake in 1583, where samurai had fought one another mano a mano, and where Katō demonstrated his skills with a cross-bladed spear with great effect by cutting so many men, whose severed and salted heads were thereafter tied to a stalk of green bamboo and carried by one of Katō's attendants into battle. Katō was a devoted follower of Nichiren Buddhism, a type of Buddhism closely associated with militarism and ultra-nationalism in Japan, and his relations with the Catholic Konishi were extremely unfriendly, to the extent that the two men almost never met during the campaign in Korea. Katō's battle standard was a white pennant which carried a message alleged to have been written by Nichiren himself reading Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō ("Hail to the Lotus of the Divine Law"). The naval commander was Wakisaka Yasuharu, another of the "Seven Spears of Shizugatake", who had been named daimyō of the island of Awaji in the Seto Inland Sea in 1585, where he