Warrior • 125
811–1639
Stephen Turnbull • Illustrated by Richard Hook
INTRODUCTION: THE WORLD OF THE PIRATE
Raiders and gentlemen • Samurai versus pirates • The first wako Half merchant – half pirate • Band of brothers • From sea dogs to sea lords
CHRONOLOGY
PORTRAIT OF A PIRATE
Appearance and costume • Equipment, arms and armour • The pirate ship
THE DAILY LIFE OF THE PIRATES
Famine and raiding • The organization of a pirate band Pirate bases • Trading, smuggling and extortion
CAMPAIGN LIFE (1):
THE MECHANICS OF A PIRATE RAID
CAMPAIGN LIFE (2):
DEFENSIVE MEASURES AGAINST PIRATE RAIDS
Fortification • Armed resistance • Negotiation
THE WAKO’S EXPERIENCE OF BATTLE
A domestic piracy campaign: the revolt of Fujiwara Sumitomo, 936–41 International action: Hu Dongxian and Xu Hai, 1556 Wako on the micro-level: the Tiger incident, 1605
MUSEUMS AND COLLECTIONS
FURTHER READING
Over a period of ten centuries the coastal areas of China, Korea and Japan were ravaged by bands of fierce pirates. The name given to them appears in Chinese as wokou, and in Korean it is pronounced waegu. In each case the first character in the two-ideograph word is the ancient name given by the inhabitants of China and Korea to Japan, which shows clearly where they believed that their tormentors had come from. In many cases the identification was correct, and the name entered the Japanese language as wako. But piracy in the Far East was by no means confined to one country of origin, and by the mid-16th century individual pirate bands had acquired a decidedly multinational character. Chinese, Korean and even Portuguese freebooters were involved in massive raids on coastal communities. Some of the most influential pirate leaders were renegade Chinese who based themselves on Japanese islands and sailed from there to terrorize their fellow countrymen under the convenient anonymity of ‘wako’ – with a strong emphasis on the character ‘Wa’. That is why the present work is called ‘Pirate of the Far East’ and not simply ‘Pirate of Japan’.
The first use of the expression wokou to refer to raiders from ‘the country of Wa’ appears on a stone tablet erected in AD 414 in southern Manchuria to the memory of the hero King Gwanggaeto of the Goguryeo state of Korea. This was a time when there was considerable military involvement between Japan and Korea’s three kingdoms of Baekje, Silla and Goguryeo. Troops frequently came from Japan to fight on the Korean peninsula, and the use of wokou on the monument probably refers to Baekje’s willing use of Japanese troops in its wars against Goguryeo rather than pirate raids in the later meaning of the term. Several centuries had to pass before the word wako was to become associated with ongoing raids arising from uncontrolled aggression that was usually and casually attributed to Japan.
Indeed at that time the prevailing image held by the inhabitants of continental East Asia of the Japanese was a positive one. Japanese armies frequently fought in Korea as the allies of the Baekje kingdom, on whose behalf they suffered a heavy defeat at the battle of the Baekcheon river in 663. Otherwise the only Japanese visitors to China and Korea were cultivated diplomats, earnest students, or disciplined Buddhist monks in search of truth. In 719 the arrival of a group of envoys from Japan to China occasioned the comment that Japan was a ‘country of gentlemen, where the people are prosperous and happy and etiquette is carefully observed’.
During the ninth century, in fact, the Japanese tended to be the victims of piracy, not its perpetrators. In 811, 813, 893 and 894 Korean pirates took advantage of the turmoil caused by the break-up of the Unified Silla Kingdom to raid Japan, but eventually suffered heavy casualties and withdrew. Japanese pirates did exist, but their activities were confined to domestic targets. These were the days when the emperors of Japan were beginning to hire local landowners with military skills – the first samurai – to guard the palace in the capital city of Nara and to protect them against rebels and evildoers. The early samurai were frequently called upon to quell pirate raids, either from Korea or from their fellow countrymen. The perpetrators of these domestic outrages were not called wako; there was no confusion over their native origin. Instead they are referred to as kaizoku, which literally means ‘sea robbers’ and became the generic term for Japanese pirates operating within Japan.
In 862 an imperial court history noted that pirates in the west of Japan were boldly seizing property, attacking the boats carrying tax rice and committing murder, so orders were sent for their ‘pursuit and apprehension’ in the provinces along the Inland Sea. This stretch of water lies between Japan’s three main islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu and was well suited to illegal seafaring. Hundreds of islands and secluded coves provided shelter for any local fisherman who sought to augment his honest income by preying on the seaborne trade that passed through the narrow straits of Shimonoseki at the Inland Sea’s western extremity on its way to China and Korea. Rich pickings could also be had at its eastern end, where lay the imperial heartlands around Nara and Kyoto, the city that was to become the new capital in 894. In 867 we read of pirates gathering in the strategically located Iyo province on the northern coast of Shikoku to go plundering along the Inland Sea, while other bands operated along the coasts of the Sea of Japan and round the Kii peninsula. In 1114 the Chief Priest of Kumano was commissioned to use his ‘warrior monks’ to pursue and capture the pirates who infested the coastline of Kii province.
The early pirates tended to operate in small groups, and some had links to Korea. They could be bold in their exploits, and in 931 the Court issued orders to guard the roads and rivers that led from Kyoto to the Inland Sea; but little seems to have been achieved because similar orders had to be issued in 932 and 933. The 932 order included the grand-sounding appointment of a tsuibu kaizoku shi (envoy for the pursuit and capture of pirates), but he must have been ineffective because in 934 an official granary in Iyo province was attacked and burned. Two years later Iyo was to provide Japan with its first ‘pirate king’: Fujiwara Sumitomo, whose insurrection is described later.
The next pirates that the Japanese had to contend with were Jurchens from Manchuria, who were used to raiding Korea. In 1019 Jurchen pirates attacked the Japanese islands of Tsushima and Iki and various areas on the mainland, carrying off hundreds of captives. Their returning fleet was intercepted by Korean ships, and eight Jurchen vessels were captured. The sympathetic Koreans returned 259 Japanese captives to their homes.
Such cooperation between Japan and Korea ensured that for the next two centuries any anti-pirate activities by samurai were directed solely against domestic kaizoku raiders, and as the years went by one family in particular – the Taira – grew rich and famous through this form of service to successive emperors. Although their rivals the Fujiwara bred some great warriors, the Taira exerted more influence through their close familial attachments to the imperial line, while the Minamoto family rose to prominence in the north and east of Japan. The Taira made a name for themselves around the Inland Sea from the early 12th century onwards. In 1119 a certain Taira Masamori selected 100 of his most reliable warriors for an expedition, from which he returned at the end of the year with a large number of pirate heads.
Masamori’s son Taira Tadamori (1096–1153) continued his father’s work. His first expedition began in 1129 when ‘the governors feared the strength and bravery [of the pirates] and had no heart for capturing them’. In 1134 a court official noted with relief that one of Tadamori’s men had been rewarded for disarming pirates, but this was a year of poor harvests, and poor harvests encouraged piracy. Grain ships going to the capital were being intercepted, so another expedition had to follow in 1135, again led by Taira Tadamori, who returned to Kyoto with 70 captives. However, only 30 of the felons turned out to be real pirates; the others were petty criminals who had been arrested in an attempt to increase Tadamori’s reward. He was something of a crafty character, and Heike Monogatari (the great literary epic about the Taira clan) begins with a story of his thwarting an assassination attempt by producing a dagger in the imperial court where weapons were strictly forbidden, and then being excused when he demonstrated that it was in fact a dummy weapon. His cunning extended to statecraft, to the extent of forging a decree from the ex-emperor to further his interests in trade with China. As smuggling was part of that trade and the Taira controlled the Inland Sea it is likely that there was considerable understanding between the smugglers and Tadamori’s ‘coastguards’.
Strangely, Taira Tadamori’s greatest personal advance occurred not through defeating pirates but because of a bizarre incident when the ex-emperor was alarmed by a ghostly intruder in the palace grounds. Tadamori bravely investigated the alleged goblin, who turned out to be an elderly lamplighter, but the ex-emperor was so grateful that he bestowed upon Tadamori his concubine. She may already have been pregnant when she was handed over, and in 1118 gave birth to Taira Kiyomori, the greatest of all the Taira line. In 1146 Kiyomori became governor of Aki province on the Inland Sea. Seeking profit from trade with China, he organized the dredging of channels around the area of modern Hiroshima. His religious legacy in that part of Japan still stands today as the shrine of Itsukushima on the holy island of Miyajima, where the great torii (shrine gateway) appears to float upon the water when the tide comes in.
Taira Kiyomori also used marriage as a means of advancement, and when he died in 1181 he had become an emperor’s grandfather. His last words are supposed to have been, ‘Place upon my tomb the head of Yoritomo’: meaning Minamoto Yoritomo, the leader of the family with whom the Taira were now engaged in the bitter struggle known as the Gempei War. Initially the Tairas’ naval expertise stood them in good stead. Twice in 1184, at the battles of Ichinotani and Yashima, they avoided defeat by escaping to their ships, but in 1185 they risked all on a naval battle at Dannoura at the western end of the Inland Sea. Betrayed by their allies and thwarted by the tide, the Taira suffered a cataclysmic defeat, and the destroyers of pirates were themselves destroyed. Minamoto Yoritomo became Japan’s first Shogun (military dictator). The government of Japan thus passed from the imperial system to the newly created Shogunate. Japan was to be dominated by the rule of the samurai for 800 years.
Japanese warriors began exporting their wares overseas in the form of pirate raids at the beginning of the 13th century, when Korea became the first country to feel the brunt of the wako. Several factors led to this development. First, Korea was in a sorry state, because the advancing Mongols had been ravaging the north of the country from 1218 onwards. The Mongol invasions denuded the southern coastal area of soldiers, so Korea lay wide open to pillage from the seas. Second, a period of drought and disastrous harvests in western Japan provided the domestic conditions that encouraged raiding, which were exacerbated by the large number of unemployed samurai who had learned to challenge civil authority in a series of wars. Finally, Japan’s new central government by the Shogun was now located even farther east in the city of Kamakura, so was less able to control the inhabitants of the little islands and coves in the far west. All these elements combined to produce the first wako raids.
In 1223 gangs of Japanese pirates launched attacks on Korea’s southern coast from locations on the northern coast of Kyushu and the islands of Iki and Tsushima. Further raids followed in 1225, 1226 and 1227, and are well documented in both Japanese and Korean sources. One Korean account tells us that in 1225 ‘two Japanese ships raided the coastal prefectures and subprefectures of Gyeongsang province. Troops were dispatched and captured all [the Japanese].’ A Japanese description of the 1226 raid identifies the culprits as members of the Matsuura-to (the Matsuura gang), located in the Matsuura area of Hizen province. Their 1226 raid was a much larger affair than that of 1225, because ‘several tens of ships’ were involved. Pirates from Tsushima acted as their guides and there was much participation by unemployed samurai from elsewhere in Japan. Nevertheless, so fierce was the Korean resistance that the Korean chronicler could write that after ‘destroying people and houses and looting valuables... It is said that almost half of them were killed or wounded, and the remainder looted and returned with silver articles and other things’. The Korean navy also intercepted the raiders at sea and two pirates were beheaded, but the others escaped under cover of darkness.