Chapter 206
When Sejong heard the suggestion that they rebuke the shogun by telling him to “control the Wokou,” he looked puzzled.
“As I recall, the King of Japan (the shogun) has almost no power to control the daimyo under him. Would there really be any point in sending an embassy all the way there to rebuke the King of Japan and tell him to control the Wokou?”
Of course, it would be completely useless.
That it would have absolutely no effect on curbing the Wokou...
I would stake Hwang Hui’s resignation on it.
If the King of Japan’s orders to the Wokou actually proved effective, I would take responsibility and help Chief State Councillor Hwang Hui retire.
‘But that could never happen.’
Hwang Hui’s fate was to work himself to death before His Majesty King Sejong passed away, and the fact that ordering the daimyo to stop sending Wokou would accomplish nothing was a truth on the level of a scientific law.
“As Your Majesty said, it truly will be completely useless. Even if Your Majesty were to sternly rebuke the King of Japan and order him to crack down on the Wokou, the Wokou would never decrease. However, if Ming heard that the King of Japan had voluntarily sternly rebuked the Wokou despite not even being instructed by Joseon to do so, what do you suppose His Imperial Majesty would think of it?”
“Ming would be very pleased, thinking that Joseon had followed its wishes to the letter.”
“This alone would dispel much of Ming’s suspicion of Joseon. No, beyond that, it would even become convinced that Joseon had no intention of joining hands with Northern Yuan. We might be able to demand something more from Ming while we have the chance.”
There is a saying: ‘There are no free alliances in this world.’
Even if Ming’s national power was far greater than Joseon’s and it possessed the ability to crush us whenever it wished.
They would still have to pay a price to maintain their alliance with us.
To put it bluntly, Joseon currently has to maintain the alliance, even if we have to swallow our tears and mustard, because there is a risk that the entire country will be wiped out if we do not forcibly hold hands with the Ming bastards and laugh and joke with them...
Those bastards keep using us as an unpaid, “do-it-for-the-passion” ally, while worrying that we might become barbarians like the Japanese bastards across the sea.
That is why they keep trying to tame us in one way or another.
Yet if they keep bullying Joseon like this without also giving us some bait to placate us, their anxiety will only grow.
Hwang Hui supported my opinion.
“Your servant, Chief State Councillor Hwang Hui, respectfully reports. As Eung-gyo Kim Daebeom said, Ming does treat Joseon high-handedly, considering us beneath them. Yet when Joseon is paying them this much loyalty, they will worry that if they, as the suzerain state, give Joseon nothing in return, Joseon might grow dissatisfied and turn against them like the Wokou. It is truly a case of a thief’s guilty conscience.”
“They treat us like cows or pigs in order to tame us, then arbitrarily fear that Joseon might become barbaric because they give us nothing... Truly, this is the sort of thing Ming would do.”
It is not for nothing that people say this when judging China.
China is a great power because of its huge population and vast territory, but since the hearts of its people are no bigger than a sardine’s guts, it is the world’s smallest of small states.
So, when the two are combined, you get China: a country only middling in size.
A remarkably accurate assessment of those Chinese bastards.
“Since we are doing this anyway, it would be even better to broadcast throughout the Central Plains just how loyal Joseon is to Ming. From the emperor at the top down to the lowliest servant, the people of Ming are firmly convinced that Chinese civilization is supreme under heaven, so if we create public opinion that Ming must repay Joseon’s loyalty simply to preserve its face as the world’s greatest power, I think it would be beneficial.”
Even though no one had taught him how to wage public-opinion and information warfare against foreign countries, His Majesty King Sejong had mastered it on his own.
As expected of the man who created Hangul entirely through his own efforts, his ability to apply what he learned was astonishing.
“I shall promote Kim Mandeok, the Senior Seventh-Rank Jikjang of the Gyeongsi Office under the Ministry of Revenue, to the Junior Sixth-Rank post of Hagae Jubu, and order him to identify the market merchants engaged in smuggling with Ming. I shall tell them that Joseon will turn a blind eye to their smuggling, provided that they actively cooperate with the court from now on.”
So my father-in-law is getting promoted like this.
He is exceptionally capable, so while others who pass the civil service examination and enter at Senior Ninth Rank take a good ten years to achieve seungnyuk (promotion to Junior Sixth Rank), he managed it in just three.
Once today’s court session ends, I should set aside some time to congratulate him.
“That said, would it not be a shame to use the mission to Wa solely to pull the wool over Ming’s eyes?”
I have not the slightest intention of teaching the silver-separation method to Wa right now.
If I did that, the Japanese bastards would surely scour the land for silver mines such as the Iwami Silver Mine, causing an explosive economic boom in Wa as a result.
I should keep the best things to myself and make use of them as much as possible; I must never go around carelessly teaching them to others.
Because in relations between countries, the more good things you share, the less there is left for you to claim.
Conversely, the more bad things you foist onto other countries, the better.
This is something no human being ought to do, but that is simply how diplomacy works.
And considering that Ming has tormented Joseon for thousands of years, while those Japanese bastards sent Wokou whenever they pleased, drove Goryeo to the brink of destruction, and viciously attacked Joseon until only recently—isn’t it all right to do a few bad things to them?
No, shouldn’t I absolutely do it for them?
“What about making a secret pact with the shogun to open a single port, then using it to buy Wa copper (copper from Wa)?”
“Copper, you say?”
“Joseon is desperately short of copper. Joseon currently boasts roughly 140,000 soldiers, but even excluding the supplies held by the navy and at various fortresses, we ought to possess at least 4,000 Hyeonja Chongtong and Hwangja Chongtong cannons. Yet our actual artillery holdings fall far short of that. The biggest reason we are so short of cannon is that there is an obvious limit to how much copper can be mined within Joseon.”
The army I used as a reference when overhauling conscription this time was Gustavus Adolphus’s Swedish army during the Thirty Years’ War.
It was a powerful army that possessed some of the tercio’s ability to stop cavalry, while also being able to pour firepower into enemy infantry in the field with matchlocks and light artillery.
However, to create this army, we would need a great many cannons, and Joseon’s copper production and current trade volume clearly imposed a limit.
“And isn’t Joseon overflowing with steel as it is? Moreover, once Commander Jang (Jang Yeong-sil) has a new loom made, producing cotton cloth will become easy as well. It would be good to pay for copper with steel and cotton cloth.”
If the spinning machine and cotton gin made by Jang Yeong-sil were merely put into circulation, Joseon would be thrown into chaos.
If the labor required to remove seeds from cotton were drastically reduced, and spinning thread from the ginned cotton were simplified as well...
The labor required to weave cloth would be reduced enormously...
As a result, the cost of producing cotton cloth would fall, and the market price of cotton cloth would naturally drop.
Everyone who made a living weaving cotton cloth and everyone who had accumulated their wealth in cotton cloth would suffer a major blow.
That was why His Majesty King Sejong had personally inspected the performance of those two machines and flatly declared, ‘These cannot yet be distributed indiscriminately throughout the country.’
But if a loom for actually weaving thread into cloth were introduced as well...
The three key machines that ushered in the early Industrial Revolution would all be in place.
Of course, even with all three machines, we would still have a very long way to go.
"Four thousand cannons, combining the Hyeonja Chongtong and Jija Chongtong. My heart races just thinking about it."
I had blurted out 4,000 as a starting figure, but once we firmly made the technology of casting cannons by mixing iron and copper our own...
we would be able to possess even more cannons than that.
Until now, copper had always been a problem because Joseon was perpetually short of it.
At the height of Wa’s copper exports, it exported more than ten million geun (6,000 tons) of copper without exaggeration...
If Joseon monopolized all of it, copper would overflow throughout the country.
"Besides, if Joseon sells various precious goods to Wa, we could make a great profit. And if we can properly obtain accurate information about Wa... we might even be able to make them move however Joseon wishes."
"Do you think that will be possible?"
It seemed entirely feasible.
To put it bluntly, the majority of Wa’s great daimyo cared far more about protecting their own territories than about loyalty to Wa...
If we could convince them that Joseon could offer greater benefits than Wa’s bakufu, some of them might even try to place themselves under Joseon’s authority.
"I cannot go so far as to say it is certainly possible, but at the very least, we should be able to handle the Wokou in accordance with Joseon’s intentions far more effectively than we can now."