It is dedicated to the sliced noses of killed Korean soldiers and civilians,[4][5][6] as well as those of Ming Chinese troops,[7] taken as war trophies during the Japanese invasions of Korea from 1592 to 1598.

[12][13] However, because of the number of civilians killed along with soldiers, and crowded conditions on the ships that transported troops, it was far easier to just bring back noses instead of whole heads.

[14] Japanese chroniclers on the second invading campaign mention that the ears hacked off the faces of the massacred were also of ordinary civilians[15] mostly in the provinces Gyeongsang, Jeolla, and Chungcheong.[2]: pp.

475–476  In the second invasion, Hideyoshi's orders were thus: Mow down everyone universally, without discriminating between young and old, men and women, clergy and the laity—high ranking soldiers on the battlefield, that goes without saying, but also the hill folk, down to the poorest and meanest—and send the heads to Japan.

[10] Though the exact reasons as to its construction are not entirely known, scholars contend that during the second Japanese invasion of Korea in 1597, Toyotomi Hideyoshi demanded his commanders show receipts of their martial valor in the destruction, dispatching congratulatory letters to his high-ranking warriors in the field as evidence of their service.

The Education Ministry of Japan at that time opposed the description as "too vivid" and pressured the publisher to reduce the tone and also to praise Hideyoshi for religiously dedicating the Ear Mound to store the spirits of the killed people.

585–586 In 1990 a Korean Buddhist monk named Pak Sam-jung traveled to Kyoto and, with the support of a private local organization, concluded a ceremony in front of the tomb to comfort the spirits residing there and guide them home to Korea.

It is just west of Kyoto National Museum and Toyokuni Jinja, the Shinto shrine dedicated to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was deified as a kami after his death.

Funding from the government is insufficient to care for the site, so the work is done by local residents, who volunteer to cut the grass and tidy up the grounds.