Chapter 65
One of the bound Wokou spat at me and let fly a stream of filthy curses.
“I’d sooner believe a dog could speak than believe your words. From the looks of it, you’re fair-skinned and delicate—perfect as a wakashudo partner! How about it? Would you be honored to share the pleasures of cloud and rain with me?”
Was he trying to die with a bit of swagger since he was going to die either way?
Freedom of choice aside, he really was something else.
To think he'd be cursing me out and asking if I had no intention of getting screwed, when I could subject him to all manner of torture with a single word.
If he had been born in the 21st century, he probably would have made a fine keyboard warrior.
As I smirked, the interpreter looked at me with a very troubled expression.
He seemed worried that if he translated those words exactly as they were, there would be trouble for him.
Of course, I had no intention of causing that interpreter any trouble.
“Kim Hundo.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It seems the Wokou here haven’t been fed properly and are spouting nonsense. Bring some rice, soybean paste soup, grilled fish, and kimchi. If you feed them, they’ll stop spouting nonsense.”
Whatever I said, those guys wouldn’t believe me.
According to Joseon law, Wokou are sentenced to death regardless of the severity of their crime.
The Wokou leader gets torn apart, and all the Wokou lackeys are beheaded.
They all knew that much. So of course they wouldn’t believe me when I said I’d spare them.
If I wanted to get any information out of them, I first had to show that I had no intention of killing them.
‘A meal for a hungry man can also be understood as a promise to spare his life.’
Let’s slowly, very slowly, melt those bastards’ hearts.
“Understood. I don't know what you see in these bastards, but I'll do as Lord Jeongrang says.”
Before long, the Wokou were served a meal piled high with rice.
We loosened the ropes that bound them and let them into the prison cell so they could eat.
The moment they got inside, they started eating like they were starving.
Some of them even shed tears as they ate.
If they had been ordinary subsistence criminals, I might even have felt sorry for them.
I wondered how starved they had to be to eat with such gusto.
Of course, they were trash who stabbed, killed, and looted Joseon people all over the place, so they weren’t worth even a speck of sympathy.
Once the Wokou had more or less finished eating, they were brought back out of the cell and seated in chairs with their hands and feet tied.
“Now I’ll ask again. Who among you here is the highest-ranking one? If you answer honestly, I’ll give you a generous dinner tonight as well. Answer without hesitation.”
“The captain was killed by Joseon soldiers’ arrows, and among those here, I’m the highest-ranking.”
“What’s your name?”
“Tanaka Taro.”
“So you had a family name; I guess you were a samurai.”
At my words, Taro nodded.
“Who is the lord you serve? And where are you from?”
“I’m just a masterless wandering samurai and Wokou.”
“Why did you become Wokou?”
“A ronin turning to theft—what other reason could there be? To make a living, of course. The others here are the same. They’re doing it because they have no way to survive.”
Historians classify these guys as subsistence criminals.
In fact, until the Edo period, Japan was not a place fit for people to live.
The land wasn’t barren, and the climate was actually far more favorable for rice farming than Joseon’s...
They’d been fighting endless civil wars since ancient times, and the shogunate, shugo daimyōs, and samurai were all extorting enormous taxes.
Japan’s current effective tax rate is 50%.
Add in all the little cuts they take under the table, and even if you earned 2 million won, you’d probably only end up with about 400,000 won in hand.
As a result, poor farmers who can’t even get enough to eat band together to survive and raid prosperous neighboring Joseon.
For the record, when daimyōs run out of money, it’s also common for them to pull a “Wokou cosplay” and come raid Joseon.
“Could the reason you’re having such a hard time making ends meet be the maritime bans of Ming and Joseon?”
At my words, Tanaka Taro flinched.
As expected, this guy was very different from ordinary subsistence Wokou.
He said he was just a masterless wandering samurai, but if he was struggling to survive because of the maritime ban...
Even if I couldn’t guess his rank as a samurai, it would be easy enough to tell which region’s samurai he was.
“The one you serve is the lord of Tsushima.”
“Didn’t I tell you I had no lord?”
Hmm, judging by that reaction, the one this guy serves is definitely the lord of Tsushima.
Since the groundwork for the information I needed was all in place, it was time to end this tiresome probing.
“Honestly, whether you serve the lord of Tsushima or not doesn’t matter to me. The lord of Tsushima you serve claims he can control all the Wokou, but did you really think the Joseon court wouldn’t know that was a lie? We knew all about it and just pretended to be fooled because we felt sorry for you.”
Joseon often grants Tsushima precious goods and food such as rice and beans so it can do a better job keeping the Wokou in check.
The reason is that Tsushima’s location makes it the best gathering place for Wokou.
So the island’s ruler, the lord of Tsushima, was naturally mistaken for the Wokou boss.
Saying it this way might make me sound like some lunatic trying to bad-mouth Joseon for giving Tsushima gifts on the basis of bad information...
Joseon was fanatically obsessed with the Jurchens, and during King Danjong’s reign it had to identify and report the population of Jurchen tribes living near the border, along with the names of the chieftains’ family members...
But the Wokou came from beyond the sea, so Joseon judged they couldn’t pose a threat to the state’s survival, and since it had no way to plant spies across the water in Japan, it had been terribly lax about them.
The lord of Tsushima knew this background and made enormous profits by acting as though he were the Wokou's leader right up until just before the Edo shogunate was established.
The interpreter also looked momentarily flustered.
Because the information I had just mentioned was something truly no one in Joseon knew.
So all I had to do later was excuse it by saying I'd 'bluffed' to fool the enemy.
“Since you lied first, does Joseon have any reason not to do the same? In that case, Joseon can simply say you’re a vassal of the lord of Tsushima and lodge a protest with your precious shogun. Then do you think the Shoni clan would really leave the lord of Tsushima alone?”
To sum it up, the expedition against Tsushima had little effect on suppressing Wokou.
However, it was enough to instill fear of Joseon in the Ashikaga shogunate that ruled Japan.
‘The Ming bastards can keep getting raided by a few Wokou along their coast without ever having the mainland attacked, but the Joseon bastards actually fire cannons at them?’
Looking at the surviving records, the Ashikaga shogunate is said to have trembled before Joseon’s military might.
Well, when you consider how little that mattered, there isn't a single line in the textbook account of the Tsushima expedition saying, 'The Ashikaga shogunate feared Joseon.' But still...
The current lord of Tsushima is a vassal of the Shoni clan and owns Tsushima, as well as part of a fief in northern Kyushu.
So if the Shoni clan gets stripped by the Ashikaga shogun, there’s a very high chance they’ll lose not only Tsushima but also the northern Kyushu fief that supplies Tsushima with food and belongs to the Tsushima lord’s family.
And to appease Joseon, which might mobilize more than 10,000 troops and attack Kyushu, they’d probably cut off a few Tsushima samurai heads and offer them to Joseon.
“Even so, I can’t trust you! Just kill me!”
Hmm, it looks like that samurai Wokou who’s supposedly the highest-ranking one here can’t be used after all.
Well, I’ve already gotten all the information I needed from him, so that’s fine.
The Wokou captured here are from Tsushima, and the reason they raided Joseon was that they had no way to make a living.
Now I need to ask someone else.
Before that, that socially inept Wokou captain had become worthless, so...
“Put that bastard on the rack.”
As soon as the ferocious Wokou bastard began to be tortured, the faces of the Wokou who had just let their guard down after eating their fill turned pale.
“If you answer me properly, I might spare you all. But if you don’t cooperate, I’ll make you beg to die quickly.”
Even in the military, there’s a saying that a drill instructor can be a devil or an angel depending on how you act.
Once you’ve been discharged, that sounds like nothing much... but while you’re in the military, those words feel terrifying.
Because once that drill instructor gets a devilish mind, he can come up with all kinds of painful, ingenious punishments.
I’m showing them the upgraded version of that.
By making them think they’ll live if they cooperate and get a feast, then torturing them in every way until they beg to be killed if they don’t.
“Now, what’s your name? And why did you become Wokou? Answer honestly, and I’ll give you rice again tonight.”
The answers from everyone I asked were exactly the same.
They answered that they became Wokou to make a living.
They had fallen right into my leading questions.
“So not just Tsushima, but quite a few of the people who became Wokou actually made their living through trade with Joseon?”
“There are two kinds of Wokou. One is poor commoners who somehow scrape together some money, take a small boat, and head out to sea to plunder on their own. The other is the kind of Wokou led by samurai from daimyō families, like us.”
We usually think of samurai as “officers” and the men under them as “grunts,” but the reality is a little different.
The samurai class spans the range from NCOs to officers to generals.
The highest-ranking Taro here would amount to nothing more than a low-level NCO in our army.
But that Wokou bastard is effectively a “regular army” led by a samurai, so he’s not someone a commoner could dare take on.
In fact, the real threat to Joseon is the latter.
Maybe not in an age with guns, but in an age without them, civilians running around with swords can still be stopped just fine if villages band together.
“As long as Joseon reopens trade with us, we won’t go around raiding as Wokou.”
That’s exactly the answer I wanted.
Even in actual history, once His Majesty King Sejong increased Tsushima’s trade volume through the Gyehae Treaty, Wokou raids dropped sharply.
With this alone, you can’t exactly say they borrowed the wisdom of those milk-tea drinkers who left Jo Mal-saeng aghast.
And I don’t think those guys would stop being Wokou just because trade with Joseon had opened up.
They’d probably just focus on Ming and leave Joseon alone.
“Then if we simply allowed unlimited trade not just with the lord of Tsushima but with the other daimyō as well, they’d probably act the same way.”
“Yes, they would... so please spare us...”
I didn’t listen to the rest of their pleas.
Those Wokou bastards deserve to die, so why would I promise to spare them and leave room for 'misunderstanding'?
And I should send a secret letter to His Majesty King Sejong suggesting that, as the price of opening trade with Japan, we let the Wokou go raid Ming instead of Joseon.
Through Jo Mal-saeng, of course.