Konishi Yukinaga (小西 行長, baptized under the Portuguese personal name Agostinho; 1558 – November 6, 1600) was a Japanese daimyō who served under Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

Hideyoshi valued this help greatly since he considered this period to be the greatest crisis in his life.

Araki Murashige would later get back at the Konishi father and son by accusing them of false crime.

Even Yukinaga's mother, Magdalena Wakusa, served Hideyoshi's wife as a senior lady in waiting.

Feeling conquering China was impossible, Yukinaga ran a blitzkrieg in Korea to capture the king of Joseon and end the war through diplomacy before the Ming military came.

He sent his brother, Yoshichiro, to persuade Hideyoshi to abandon the Ming conquest and settled with 5 provinces of Joseon through diplomacy.

[5] However, Yukinaga got scammed by his negotiation partner, Shen Weijing (沈惟敬), who demanded 50 days truce.

To make it worse, the Chinese caught a Korean defector, who was a part of Yukinaga's intelligent network, and tortured him until he confessed.

As the result, Yukinaga only knew the Ming military had entered Joseon a few days before the Siege of Pyongyang.

[7] After the ceremony, Hideyoshi was in a good mood and sent some messengers to the Chinese envoys, telling them to ask anything they wanted.

Hideyoshi used the fact that the Korean side did not send a prince as a hostage as an excuse to break truce.

To win the trust of his opponents, he leaked military secrets to the Korean side through general Kim Ung-seo.

Kim Ung-seo partially believed this, but missed the most important part which was to harvest the field as to leave the Japanese army with no food and relocate civilians to remote areas.

During the 7 years war, he had developed a deep friendship with Ishida Mitsunari, who also wanted to stop Hideyoshi's foreign invasion.

Tokugawa Ieyasu was impressed by the devotion he showed to Mitsunari and openly praised him, "He risked his life and all his property to help his friend".

[citation needed] In Japanese pop culture, he is often portrayed as a weak bureaucrat similar to Ishida Mitsunari.

The Japanese had no clue at the time as to how to defend a walled city like Pyongyang, as such an urban layout did not exist in Japan.

Later on in the war in Korea, the Japanese forces built their own fortresses instead of relying on captured Korean fortifications.

[13] When the Ming army attacked Kato Kiyomasa in Ulsan, arrangements were made to ensure that Yukinaga would not reinforce Kiyomasa's positions (though given the grudge between the two commanders this was unlikely) even though his forces were not as close to Ulsan as those of other Japanese commanders, suggesting that the Ming considered him to be a substantial threat.

[citation needed] The Korean novel 7 nyeon jeonjaeng, by Kim Seong-han, portrayed him as a tragic anti-hero who tried to stop Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea to no avail.

Award-winning Japanese novelist Shūsaku Endō portrayed him as being jealous of Takayama Ukon, who was able to gracefully abandon everything and devote his entire life to God.

[16] [17] [18] Yukinaga was described as a "weak man" who suffered an inferiority complex from being unable to abandon the muddy world and live a clean life as a Christian.

[16] [17] [18] Endo's Yukinaga was, in fact, a person who endured a heavy cross without abandoning it even if he had to crawl on the dirt and he did it without expecting anything in return.