At this time, the wokou were a mixed bag of Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese, hired by a new boss to do their worst by savaging their targets as never before. These new pirates were led by a former Chinese merchant, Wang Zhi, who soon became known as the King of the Wokou.
The Wokou in China
Zhi majored in assaulting the most lucrative targets - official buildings, county and district treasures and granaries. In the surrounding countryside, towns and villages set up high palisades for security but these were no match for Wang or his wokou.
In 1552, Wang dispatched hundreds of pirates to attack places sited all along the coast of Zheijiang on the Chinese east coast and in 1553, several hundred ships repeated the exercise. Garrisons that were supposed to stand guard to frustrate attacks were taken prisoner for as long as the plundering lasted.
Another year, and the wokou were building their own fortifications along the Zheijiang coast where large numbers of pirates convened to prepare for long distance assaults into Chinese territory.
These campaigns took them within reach of great cities as far distant as the delta of the River Yangtze. Ultimately, the wokou forts and bases were staffed by up to twenty thousand men.
This was how an international ‘band of brothers’ became the new wokou pirates and the new scourge of the Chinese coast which they attacked and sacked with terrifying frequency.
The Chinese fight back
The Chinese were fortunate in having two superlative commanders, Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou, who between them turned the tide of wokou piracy. In 1553, forces led by Yu Dayou stormed Putuoshan island, off the coast of Zheijiang, where the wokou had an extensive camp: they sent the pirates packing.
Two years later, Dayou caught a wokou force north of Jiaxing, which was also in Zheijiang, and killed around 2,000 of them.
Qi Jiguang commanded the 4000-strong force known as the Qi Family Army, which consisted mainly of miners and farmers. The Army fought a series of successful engagements against Wang Zhi and the wokou forces.
The “Napoleon of Japan”
Subsequently, Japan itself was the scene of successful pirate-hunting led by a daimyo, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who became kampaku or regent of Japan, in 1585.
Hideyoshi was dubbed the “Napoleon of Japan” for his exploits in bringing down the kaizuku pirates inside Japan through his large-scale, brilliantly executed invasions of Shikoku in 1585 and Kyushu in 1587. These operations featured large numbers of samurai warriors who were specially shipped into the battle zones.
Hideyoshi Reforms Japan
Hideyoshi did not stop there. He initiated fundamental reforms throughout Japanese society, several of which counted as brakes on pirates and piracy. Firstly, in 1585, weapons were confined to the daimyos and the samurai warrior class; this, effectively, made possessing them illegal for everyone else, including pirates.
Later, in 1591, the samurai were formally separated from the rest of Japanese society, so emphasising their monopoly of military activities. If by any chance daimyos, a class which had once flirted with piracy, allowed pirates to ply their trade, they would be deprived of the lands they held in fief: since land tenure provided the basis for their position as feudal warlords, this meant any offending daimyos were effectively ruined.
The Wokou in southeast Asia
After Toyotomi Hideyoshi died in 1598, the wokou experienced a long, but final, fling in places far distant from their previous haunts in China and Korea. They ravaged targets in South east Asia, including the Spice Islands of Indonesia, and Siam (Thailand), Vietnam and Cambodia.
Wokou depredations also reached across the Pacific Ocean to the Philippine Islands which was a Spanish possession after 1565. These raids so alarmed the authorities that in 1605, after many years’ experience of the wokou threat, the governor of the Philippines feared that a full-scale pirate invasion was imminent.
It never happened, for despite alarming appearances, the wokou had been declining for some time and other moves which, ironically, had nothing to do with pirates or piracy, would soon bring wokou power to its end.
Persecuting Christians
The catalyst was suspicion of Catholic missionaries and their converts by the Tokugawa shogunate which came to power in Japan in 1603. Suspicion was based largely on the loyalty which converts - 300,000 in number - owed to the pope in Rome. The Tokugawa saw him as a foreign, and therefore subversive, ruler who had to be exorcized from Japanese society.
Selective persecution of Christians had occurred before the advent of the Tokugawa, notably in 1597 when Hideyoshi banished missionaries from Japan and executed several foreign priests. However, the Tokugawa shoguns had no patience with such half measures.
In 1633, Iemitsu, the third Tokugawa shogun, issued the first of three ‘Seclusion edicts’ which forbade the practise of Christianity in Japan. Later edicts banned overseas travel which might introduce knowledge of foreign parts into Japan and prohibited the Portuguese, the only foreign nationals officially allowed into the country, from entering any Japanese port.
In July 1540, in an attempt to overturn the anti-Catholic policy, a Portuguese captain and crew sailed into Nagasaki harbor. They hoped to persuade the shogun to change his mind but paid very highly for their temerity: fifty-seven crewmen were decapitated.
Japan in Isolation
Foreign sailors shipwrecked on the shores of Japan were treated in the same way, so desperate were the shoguns to block any information about the outside world from leaking into the enclave they had made of Japan.
The Japanese slumbered on in their feudal isolation for over two centuries until after 1853, when the United States forced them to open their ports to international trade and so join the modern world.
For all that time, though, the Seclusion Edicts severed the wokou, the kaizuku and other pirates from everything that had once made them rich, successful and profoundly feared. Without the oxygen of opportunity, all of them became history.
Sources
Milton, Giles: Samurai William : The Englishman Who Opened Japan (New York. NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003) ISBN-10: 096512407x/ISBN-13: 978-0965124072/ASIN: B000BTH562
Turnbull, Stephen: Pirate of the Far East: 811-1639 (Warrior) Colchester, Essex, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2007) ISBN-10: 1846031748/ISBN-13: 978-1846031748
Brenda Ralph Lewis - My interest in history dates from childhood. I am presently the author of 120 books and hundreds of articles, all on historical ...
