Wokou Can Be Put to Good Use (9)

There are truths that never change, no matter how much the times change.

One of them is the saying that a person even their parents couldn't raise into a proper person can never be fixed.

No matter how much time passed, even Soda Uemon Taro, a person his parents couldn't raise properly—or rather, someone addicted to Wako raiding—still couldn't quit Wako raiding.

"Hahaha, at this rate we'll be in Ningbo soon! Jiro, how much farther until we arrive!"

"I checked the North Star last night, and it looks like we'll arrive this evening."

"This evening, huh? Excellent. We'll get plenty of sword work in before sunset, have a drink of Ming liquor at night, and head back after that."

The Ming had focused only on blocking the Mongols and Jurchens in the north, and paid very little attention to countermeasures against Wako raiders in the south.

Because the cost of holding off the northern barbarians was so enormous that they had no room left to invest enough in southern anti-Wako defenses.

The barbarians might, if mishandled, have the power to bring down the Ming, but the Japanese bastards were at most capable of killing a few thousand people along the Ming coast—they were not a catastrophe that could destroy the country.

Therefore, the Ming relatively neglected Wako defense. For the sake of efficient budget use, of course.

"I heard it from some princeling bastard I ran into while raiding around Iki: the Ming idiots supposedly drive pine stakes into shipyards and don't even bother building warships."

"Is that true?"

"The Chiyoda, Takasugi, and Tanaka bastards who raid the open seas with me said they had never even seen the Ming navy appear. At most, if they pushed too deep in, the Ming imperial troops would swarm over them like ants and devour them."

During Zheng He's great expedition, more than 2,000 ships were built at a shipyard in Beijing over a period of just over ten years.

The Ming went, "Yeah, we're only going to worry about the Mongols!" and managed those warships so sloppily that the navy was already practically gone.

Therefore, the Ming's suppression of Wako was like sending firefighters to put out a blaze after a fire had already broken out.

Once reports of severe Wako damage reached the troops stationed in the provinces, they would only then rush out to put the fire out.

"Damn it, with the maritime ban in place, it's become easy to land and make a living by piracy. But there's not a single profitable Ming merchant ship in sight."

"Indeed."

"Still, if we sell the Ming bastards as slaves in Jeongui County on Jeju Island, the profits should be pretty good, so let's hurry to a nearby fishing village."

"Yes, sir."

The Ming may be lax about defending coastal villages, but they keep a nontrivial number of troops stationed in their cities.

So if you get caught raiding a rich house in the city for a pile of luxury goods, you're dead.

Soda Uemon Taro was spending his time thinking about how to make money safely and efficiently, and was just about to sip some sake...

"I can see a village!"

That was the signal to start their latest seaborne self-sufficiency operation—making money by relocating Ming people.

The instant they heard that, the Japanese pirates donned their shabby armor, and every sailor was armed in no time.

"Catch as many as you can, and interrogate them to find out first whether there are any nearby fishing villages or rich houses worth looting!"

Soda Uemon Taro was a samurai who had absorbed Tsushima's wisdom from raiding both Joseon and Ming.

So naturally, his mastery was on a completely different level from that of rookie pirates.

"Put the bows down and take only the swords and clubs! Every one of those bastards is money and rice!"

"Yes, sir!"

"For the next week—just one week—we'll loot hard and then return to Tsushima!"

If they stayed in Ming for more than a week, Ming troops might appear.

What was the point of coming to Ming to make money if you died here?

"Stick to the way we've always done it. Charge!"

Soda Uemon Taro succeeded in capturing 121 Ming people who were "illegally residing" along the Ming coast.

Together with the other Wako who had the same idea, more than 1,500 Ming fishermen were kidnapped.

Of course, this news was also delivered to the Ming emperor.

**

The Hongxi Emperor shouted at his ministers in the side hall of the Forbidden City.

"Just what on earth have you all been doing until now?"

No one dared to object to those words.

Even if the emperor's anger wasn't justified, the beautiful Ming tradition was to lop off the head on your shoulders the moment you offered honest remonstrance, just as in Joseon...

And the criticism he was leveling now was, in fact, justified.

At a time like this, if you protested or tried to voice a different opinion, you would surely turn from a minister into a corpse that had once been a minister.

"Didn't 45 fishing villages near Ningbo in Fujian Province get attacked by Wako, with roughly 2,000 Ming commoners now kidnapped or killed? Just what in the world did the Fujian provincial administration commissioner and regional military commissioner do about it!"

"I apologize, Your Majesty."

"And what does apologizing solve? Does it solve anything, I ask you!"

Hongxi was so furious he tried to get up from his seat.

But without a carriage, even moving around was difficult for him, so he found it hard to get up and simply gave up.

"Emperor Hongwu said that the reason Wako swarmed the seas was that the common people engaged in private trade, freely handing Ming's precious goods over even to the pirates, and that the Japanese who saw those goods grew wicked intentions and wanted to plunder them at will."

Emperor Hongwu Zhu Yuanzhang was a man who hated commerce to a remarkable degree.

How much must he have hated merchants to issue a maritime ban and prohibit sea trade outright?

He even said that privately operating craftsmen making goods would make the people decadent, and went so far as to ruin private artisans by forcing all craftsmen to work for the government at absurdly low pay.

It was the result of an ignorant fool who knew next to nothing about Confucianism clinging to the wrong beliefs.

"The Great Ming is the center of all under heaven, and within Great Ming there is everything the country needs... If private trade stokes the greed of the Wako, then it is only natural that they become pirates."

Someone said that.

It has been said that if the Ming emperors, while leading Zheng He's great expeditions, had pursued commercial profit, the Age of Exploration might have begun in the Ming rather than in Europe.

But the Yongle Emperor of the Ming, thoroughly high on Sinocentrism, went as far as India and even Africa, strengthened his royal authority with the receipt of some rather unusual items, and then called it quits, saying that was enough.

"Emperor Hongwu said that to stop Wako from infesting the coast, the people living along the shore had to be moved inland. There should be no one living on the coast at all, and yet the local officials are failing to properly carry out the resettlement, aren't they?"

Of course, there are complicated circumstances here too. Trade itself doesn't pose any major problem to the Ming's survival even if it's stopped for the moment.

They can always find a workaround through smuggling and secretly bring in foreign luxury goods, and the Ming is so vast that it already has every kind of thing anyway.

But if you suddenly move the people living in fishing villages inland, they will have no way to make a living.

If the people left without a means to live simply starve quietly, that would be lucky, but humans are as tenacious as weeds, so they become bandits just to survive.

So the Ming local officials, to avoid a disaster in which banditry would suddenly surge during their own terms, turned a blind eye and let the fishing villages slide.

"Minister of War."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"At once, order the provincial administration commissioners and regional military commissioners throughout the country to move all the people living on the coast inland."

"But, Your Majesty... the people living in fishing villages are much poorer than those who farm for a living. If you suddenly order them to move inland..."

"I know very well what the Minister of War is worried about. People with no way to make a living are likely to become bandits, aren't they? But I have a brilliant idea."

Hongxi, for all his extreme obesity, was not a foolish emperor.

If the people were thrown out of their livelihoods without warning, wouldn't they become bandits or something else and make Ming's public order unstable?

"I'll make them all military households, have them farm the land and perform military service. Just now, the Liaodong surveillance commissioner submitted a memorial saying he didn't have enough men to use as soldiers, didn't he?"

"Your Majesty's grace is as boundless as the sea and sky. If all those who broke the law were to be executed as they should be, Your Majesty's mercy instead has given them a way to live. They will all cry out, 'Long live the emperor.'"

Living as illegal squatters in a fishing village is hard enough, but living as military households is even more miserable.

Not only might they be summoned at any time from some far-off backwater for military service, but in the early days of the system they were given land...

Now there isn't even any land left to give to military households, so they're being told to reclaim wasteland instead.

Reclaiming wasteland is one thing, but being told to farm it, never knowing when the head of the household might be dragged off for military service, and even having to provide their own equipment for the army...

"It's absurd, but..."

However, the Minister of War valued his own life more.

"I will turn all the people living on the coast into military households."