Chapter 165
The little ball Kim Daebung had sent flying—or rather, the small band of steel-clad wako—caused utter havoc in Ming.
After hearing reports of the wako's exploits, the Xuande Emperor unleashed his rage upon the assembled ministers, his blood seeming ready to boil over.
“What on earth are the Fujian Provincial Administration Commissioner (the local official who governs the province) and Regional Military Commander (the military commander of a single province) doing? Are those bastards truly officials of Ming or not!”
“Your Majesty, please calm yourself!”
“Calm? Did you just tell me to calm down? Minister of War, after hearing the contents of this horrific memorial, you still have the nerve to say that?”
From the wako's perspective, Ming was a far easier target to raid than Joseon.
It had more wealth to plunder and more people to kidnap and sell into slavery, so a single raid yielded far greater profits, but...
Joseon did participate in the sea ban, but it merely prohibited people from living on small islands; people still lived in coastal towns, and Joseon maintained a navy.
Ming, however, had not only reinstated the sea ban with renewed vigor after the Yongle Emperor's death and completely abolished the navy it had possessed...
It had also made it illegal for people to live in coastal cities, leaving not even the bare minimum of troops in those regions, so it had no military force capable of responding quickly when the wako invaded.
Minister of War Yang Shiqi, who knew these circumstances, cursed the Xuande Emperor inwardly.
‘Then revive the navy, damn it.’
However, since his opponent was the emperor, the Minister of War did not offer even the slightest rebuttal.
“I apologize, Your Majesty.”
“Will apologizing solve every problem!”
The Xuande Emperor flung the memorial he had been holding onto the floor.
It was not behavior befitting the emperor of Great Ming, but no one stepped forward to stop him.
At any other time, perhaps—but if someone tried to restrain the emperor in his current mood, they could easily become the target of his anger and turn into a headless ghost the very next day.
Besides, after Ming had suffered such a humiliating defeat at the hands of the wako, it would have been stranger if the Xuande Emperor had remained calm instead of getting angry.
“Fine, I admit that Fujian had no navy and therefore could not prevent the Japanese pirates from invading by sea. But didn't the Regional Military Commander and Provincial Administration Commissioner have more than a hundred thousand crack troops in Fujian? And yet they kept doing nothing but letting the wako slip away without even fighting them once!”
“I apologize, Your Majesty.”
“I hear that the wako moved extremely quickly, first plundering dozens of villages along the coast, then moving inland and sweeping through every small city they encountered. And the Ming army was unable to respond or punish them in any way... How can that make any sense!”
The wako of this era were weaker than the Japanese of the Sengoku period.
Even so, the wako were experts at plundering, waging guerrilla warfare, and fleeing whenever the opportunity arose.
Like true professionals, they calculated in advance how quickly the Ming army could move and from which direction it would appear.
As a result, the government troops of Fujian failed to capture even a single wako.
“Dozens of coastal villages were plundered, and no fewer than two county fortresses fell as well. The bastards even committed the outrageous act of murdering Ming county magistrates. That is not all—the number of commoners they killed or took prisoner is said to be too great to count. Your servant's heart is utterly devastated, and I do not know how to contain the surging anger; it feels as though my chest is burning away.”
“Your Majesty, your servant, the Minister of Rites Yi Sangchung, has something to say. Is this not all because of the wako? Therefore, sternly rebuke and censure the Japanese king (the shogun), and prohibit tally trade.”
Kim Daebung would have doubled over laughing if he had heard that.
Although the Muromachi shogunate nominally held all the power in Wa, that was true in name only.
In reality, it was already struggling to control even the great daimyo families based in Kyushu and Chugoku (western Honshu), such as the Ouchi and Shoni.
That was why, when Shoni would rebel against the shogunate several years from now, the shogunate would be too weak to suppress them itself and would instead lend legitimacy to the Ouchi family and have them carry out the campaign.
What power could such a shogunate possibly have to control wako who operated outside the shogunate's own sphere of influence?
However, the Minister of Rites did not know that.
It was just as Joseon had once mistakenly believed that the Lord of Tsushima possessed the power to control every wako.
"The Japanese king is a barbarian utterly ignorant of benevolence and righteousness, and consumed by greed. Therefore, he must be governed as one would tame a beast. Whenever they fail to control the wako and offend Ming, as they have now, revoke tally trade entirely. Then, once they demonstrate that they are making an effort to control the Japanese pirates, resume tally trade. That would be the proper course."
"As the Minister of Rites has said, the people of Wa are ignorant of benevolence and righteousness. They pretend to follow the order of the Central Kingdom while busily plundering Great Ming, and their conduct is thoroughly vicious. In that respect, they are beasts in human form. We must not merely hope to enlighten them by extending benevolence and righteousness as though they were human beings."
In actual history, Ming would maintain the sea ban all the way until the Longqing Emperor—in other words, until the mid-to-late 1560s.
As a result, from its founding until the mid-to-late 1560s, Ming would suffer constantly at the hands of the wako.
Part of the problem was that Ming had failed to properly build a navy, and part was that it had driven the Japanese into circumstances where they had no choice but to engage in piracy if they wanted to obtain Ming's valuable goods.
Yet Ming blindly deluded itself into believing that this was the best solution.
Just as the Xuande Emperor was doing now.
"The Provincial Administration Commissioners and Regional Military Commanders of the Jiangnan region, including Fujian, must keep an even closer watch for the arrival of pirates, including the wako. Prepare yourselves to exterminate them the moment they set foot on Ming territory."
The wako who invaded Ming were exceedingly cunning, wicked people who never honored their word or kept faith.
Yet besides being highly skilled at piracy, they were also very good at recognizing their own limits.
That was why they avoided clashing with the 'Ming government troops' no matter what happened.
Therefore, it was effectively impossible for Ming, without a navy, to suppress the Japanese pirates.
"Moreover, the reason the Japanese pirates swarm there is that many commoners still live along the coast, while merchants also violate the law by trading in order to amass wealth. Every object in the world already exists within Ming, so how can there still be people who covet barbarian goods? From now on, exercise even stricter control over merchants and commoners so that they cannot give the wako an excuse."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
The Xuande Emperor intended to wrap up every problem this way, but then a good answer occurred to him.
"Come to think of it, although Great Ming has no navy at present... we still have the expeditionary fleet left behind by the Yongle Emperor."
The Xuande Emperor himself had closed the shipyards, but he had not opposed the Yongle Emperor's decision to organize an expeditionary fleet to spread the majesty of Great Ming throughout every country under heaven.
Thus, although he strictly enforced the sea ban, he had preserved the treasure ships used by the expeditionary fleet.
And the eunuch Zheng He, who had personally commanded those expeditions, was still alive as well.
"Summon Zheng He from Nanjing and have him prepare to suppress the bases of the wako, including Tsushima."
**
I hate Ming more than anything in this world.
That was why I had let the wako loose to give those Ming bastards hell.
Yet it seemed to have worked far better than I had expected.
"Chief State Councillor, I hear that Ming has suffered such severe damage because of the wako that the emperor is deeply distressed."
"Indeed. How badly must they have been tormented by the wako for His Majesty to send Joseon an imperial edict through the Liaodong Regional Military Commission, telling us to devote ourselves to suppressing the wako and to remain constantly on guard against them?"
The Ming bastards did not know.
They did not know that blockading the sea and completely banning trade had no effect whatsoever on suppressing the wako.
Rather, they should open the way for trade as Joseon had done, cultivate a navy, and turn the country into one the Japanese could not attack recklessly.
Then again, come to think of it, those Ming bastards had acted the same way when Westerners first arrived in Ming.
They had told the Westerners that Ming already possessed everything in the world and that they should leave at once.
At that time, those Westerners committed atrocities so terrible that even the Japanese would have been appalled.
After completely defeating Ming's utterly powerless navy, they unleashed pirates who kidnapped Ming children and women and sold them into slavery, thereby reaping enormous 'profits.'
The port Ming opened for the first time after being horrified by those atrocities was the 'Macau' that remains famous even in the twenty-first century.
"We should use this opportunity to expand the navy a little more. Have them patrol diligently, pretending to wipe out the wako. That will also give them a chance to train."
"You have no intention of wiping out the wako?"
"The wako?"
I gave a small chuckle when I heard that.
"They do not touch a single Joseon subject. They only plunder Ming. Therefore, the wako problem is Ming's problem alone and has nothing whatsoever to do with Joseon."
If this had been before Munjong suffered humiliation in Ming, Jo Mal-saeng would have scolded me a little for saying that.
However, after suffering tremendous humiliation at the hands of the Ming emperor, his view of Ming had changed.
Perhaps for that reason, Jo Mal-saeng did not rebuke me and instead changed the subject.
"They may be attacking only Ming for now, but how can we know what will happen later?"
"The Lord of Tsushima, once one of the wako's ringleaders, is studying the Joseon language on his own in order to curry favor with Joseon, even though no one told him to. And you know very well that not a single person has suffered harm from the wako since trade with Japan began in Jeju's Jeongui Prefecture, don't you?"
Of course, subsistence wako—Japanese pirates driven to desperation by how difficult it was to make a living in Wa, who sometimes showed up in fishing skiffs carrying battered katanas and farm tools—did appear from time to time...
But such feeble wako were often utterly helpless against the 'pyeongon' I had newly distributed to the fishing villages.
"And we have received word that, after using the silver-lead separation method I devised at Tsushima's silver mine, they managed to extract no less than fifty geun (30 kg) of silver in just one week."
At its peak, the Iwami Silver Mine produced as much as thirty-eight tons of silver a year, so this was still far short of Iwami...
But by Joseon's standards, where we had once struggled desperately because we lacked even three hundred nyang of silver, producing thirty kilograms a week meant obtaining roughly one and a half tons of silver a year.
This was something Joseon truly could never have imagined.
"If we sell the silver to Ming and use the proceeds to buy rice, we will have nothing to worry about even in the event of a bad harvest."
"If that silver is released throughout Joseon's eight provinces, it will greatly disrupt Joseon's commerce."
"I agree."
That was why I intended to sell every bit of silver produced in Tsushima to Ming from then on.
Those bastards were silver-devouring monsters, after all.
It would benefit Joseon to feed them silver until their bellies burst, then bring all kinds of luxury goods into Joseon in return and use them to develop commerce.
"Let's claim that it is silver brought over from Wa and have merchants dispose of it for us."