Chapter 204
“Kim Eung-gyo.”
“Yes, Taigam.”
Zheng He sighed in disbelief as he gazed at Tsushima, which had already been reduced to ashes.
“It is strange. Normally, Tsushima should have a lord of Tsushima, its daimyo. But how is it that... even though our expeditionary force burned every inhabited village and killed or captured every resident of this island... why has the Tsushima lord not appeared? Do you perhaps have any idea, Kim Eung-gyo?”
The Tsushima lord, the Tsushima samurai, and the people of Tsushima were currently hard at work clearing fields on Ulleungdo.
In exchange, Joseon was providing them nothing but meals.
According to Yi Cheon, who had been dispatched as the inspector of Ulleungdo, they were living quite happily, saying that Joseon gave them more food than they had received when they lived in Tsushima.
The people of Tsushima, who had not a shred of loyalty, were clamoring that if only they were allowed to put down roots and live here, they wanted to become Joseon citizens immediately.
This was a truth the Ming bastards of today could never know.
But if Ming learned that Joseon had hidden the Tsushima lord and his people on Ulleungdo, the enraged nation would declare war on Joseon.
I decided to keep this fact hidden.
“How could I know that, Taigam?”
“Isn’t the Tsushima lord a Joseon subject?”
The Tsushima lord was indeed a Joseon subject.
The office Joseon had bestowed upon the Tsushima lord was an honorary post as Vice Minister of Rites (with no actual authority, of course), and he even possessed the appointment document and official robes that proved it.
But that was merely a means of indicating a relationship through which Joseon could exert influence over Tsushima, nothing more.
In reality, the Tsushima lord was a senior retainer of the great daimyo, the Shoni clan.
It was not for nothing that the Tsushima lord had said he would serve under the Shoni family when I told him that Zheng He’s expeditionary force was coming.
Yet if I told Zheng He all these circumstances exactly as they were, he would naturally grow suspicious of Joseon.
‘How do you know so much about Wa?’
If he started thinking that, it would deal a fatal blow to relations between Joseon and Ming...
“The Jurchen chiefs belonging to the Jianzhou and Haixi Guards in Liaodong also swear allegiance to His Majesty, then constantly stab Ming in the back and behave like barbarians, do they not? Likewise, although the Tsushima lord claims to be loyal to Joseon, it is nothing more than empty words.”
That had actually been true until I came to Tsushima myself.
But after I came to Tsushima and explained it to him in the sweetest, most reasonable terms—‘Hey, you’ll starve to death the moment you can’t trade with Joseon.’ ‘You know Joseon could replace the Tsushima lord without breaking a sweat if it put its mind to it, right? So behave, okay?’...
Ever since then, he had obeyed us so well that he seemed to have become Joseon’s vassal.
On top of that, claiming it was a custom of their country, they even dutifully bowed their heads on their own by presenting Sejong with the finest katanas made in Japan every New Year.
But Zheng He could neither know nor should know any of this.
I would have to take advantage of his ignorance and tell him a benevolent lie, allowing him to run his happy little fantasy.
“I asked an unnecessary question. Kim Eung-gyo, you are right. But... this is more than a little strange—it is extremely strange. I had heard that more than ten thousand Wokou lived on this small island of Tsushima, but when I add up everyone we killed or captured, there are not even 2,000 of them. Even if we count all the women and children to be made into slaves, there are only about 200.”
“That is indeed strange. Rather than speculate, how about interrogating the daimyo of Iki and asking him what happened?”
The daimyo of Iki would not know where the people of Tsushima had gone or who had taken them.
Even if that bastard said, ‘Joseon did it!’, the suspicious Zheng He would never believe the Iki daimyo’s accusation.
The Ming bastards are such extreme paranoiacs that they even suspect Joseon, which has spent decades pretending it would die at Ming’s command; would they believe the Iki daimyo?
“Bring him here at once.”
Before long, Iki’s daimyo, Tachibana Nobuaki, was dragged before us.
When Iki had just been conquered, he had spat at us, hurled every curse imaginable, insulted us, and made a huge commotion, claiming that the various gods of Wa would curse us...
Now, however, he was docile beyond belief, as though he had turned into a well-behaved lamb.
It seemed possible only because Ming had diligently cast its magic (torture) to make the Wokou docile.
Zheng He glared at the daimyo and asked,
“Do you know why there are so few people on Tsushima?”
“I do not know either.”
At Zheng He’s gesture, sailors from the Ming expeditionary force approached Iki’s daimyo, Nobuaki, carrying various instruments of torture.
Seeing the instruments that would force him to spit out the truth, Nobuaki trembled and began making excuses.
“It’s true, Great Taigam! Tsushima and we in Iki have indeed engaged in Wokou raids for a long time, but we are bitter enemies... so we do not know much about them.”
“This Wokou bastard, lower than a dog or pig, still hasn’t come to his senses. What are you waiting for? Prepare the knee-press torture at once.”
In Ming, it was common wisdom that Wokou were beasts in human form.
Thus, Nobuaki, who was not considered entitled to human rights, was forcibly made to kneel and subjected to knee-press torture, despite already being crippled by the aftereffects of torture.
Even torturing that bastard would hardly produce the information Zheng He wanted, making this torture meaningless.
Yet I did not feel sorry for him.
‘He must have been one of the Wokou who had plundered Joseon in the past, too.’
“...... It is true. Until just a few months ago, the Tsushima lord and his people were living on Tsushima. But one day, we discovered that all the many people on Tsushima had vanished, leaving it a land where no one lived at all.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, exactly. So we guessed that the Hirado Wokou must have held a grudge against the Tsushima lord and plundered Tsushima from end to end.”
“That too has some merit. They say Wokou and Jurchen barbarians try to kill each other the moment they meet face-to-face. Indeed, since they are uncivilized barbarians who have not properly accepted the civilization of the Middle Kingdom and thus have not been civilized, they do not know the duties one must observe as a human being... so it could have happened.”
The duties one must observe as a human being are, in truth, things one can learn only from someone else.
If no one teaches people that murder is wrong and punishes them for it...
people will easily kill another person to obtain the single piece of bread they need, as easily as taking a coin from someone’s pocket.
That is not so much because human nature is evil as because that is the law of the wild.
So I agreed with Zheng He that one must be taught in order to observe proper conduct. But the Ming bastards were scoundrels who pulled every vile stunt against Joseon...
Wouldn’t it be better to learn nothing at all than to learn from them?
“What do you think, Kim Eung-gyo?”
“Even after thinking it over, I believe there is more than enough merit to what he said.”
“If what that fellow says is true, then Hirado should be completely subdued as well.”
If I had been a subject of Ming, I would have submitted the following remonstrance after hearing Zheng He say that.
We should occupy every city that served as a base for the Wokou and relocate Ming subjects there, keeping a strict watch so that the Wokou could never rise again.
If I presented a logical case that Ming would no longer suffer damage from the Wokou if we did that...
Even though Ming had imposed the sea ban and was preventing even civilian merchant and fishing vessels from traveling across the sea, my earnest remonstrance would still be accepted.
But I was not a loyal subject of Ming; I was a servant of Joseon...
My duty as a Joseon subject was to feed them poison that appeared to be an elixir of immortality but would actually take their lives.
Let’s see. How can I bring Ming to ruin?
“Subduing Hirado would be good, but would that be enough?”
“What do you mean?”
“If Hirado is another base of the Wokou, then we should exterminate all the Wokou living there along with their families, and issue a stern warning to the King of Japan (the shogun). We should tell him that if Japan cannot control the Wokou, we will have no choice but to intervene directly as we have this time and sternly demonstrate the might of Great Ming.”
The shogun possessed a certain degree of authority in this period.
He also had a certain degree of authority to control the great daimyo.
But that authority had steadily shrunk, until now it had become almost entirely nominal.
Judging by the shogun’s direct domains, he possessed the largest territory of any daimyo in Wa.
Thus, one could certainly say that the shogun possessed considerable authority.
The problem, however, was that outside his own domain, he had virtually no power to control anything.
That was why, when he suppressed the Shoni clan, he had not gone himself but issued the Ouchi bastards a tsuito decree (an order to suppress rebels) and made them do it in his stead.
Given that the Shoni and Ouchi clans were the main daimyo families employing the Wokou...
‘Even if the shogun orders them to control the Wokou, they’ll just ignore it all, right?’
Ming, believing that the shogun could control the Wokou but was not showing good faith, would trust Wa even less and shut down tally trade altogether...
If tally trade were blocked and smuggling became more difficult, the Wokou raiding the Ming coast would become even more rampant.
Of course, Joseon would remain safe from the Wokou even then, so we could simply sit back and reap the rewards.
One should not concern oneself with misfortune befalling an enemy.
As long as it wasn’t happening to me.
“That is true as well. In fact, the Wokou are running rampant because the ‘King of Japan’ tolerates them.”
For reference, even now, the shogun was probably still ordering the Ouchi and Shoni clans, ‘Stop sending Wokou, you insane bastards!’
That was because the shogun monopolized Ming goods through tally trade, so he did not care whether Ming goods were procured through the Wokou.
If the Wokou disappeared and the shogun secured a complete monopoly on Ming goods, then under the law of supply and demand, the price of ‘shogun-monopoly Ming goods,’ with enormous demand and extremely limited supply, would soar dozens of times over.
Naturally, knowing this, the two clans would be ignoring him while taking great care to phrase ‘Fuck you, shogun’ in roundabout terms.
“Burn every Wokou to ashes.”
That way, the Tsushima Wokou who had become Joseon’s dogs could later raid the Ming coast more easily.
Not long afterward, Zheng He’s grand fleet wiped out Hirado as well.
After successfully suppressing the Wokou, Zheng He’s expeditionary force dropped me off in Hanyang before returning to Beijing.