The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan

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TRADE AND PIRACY 245

voyage, any Japanese ship found in Korean waters without a permit

from the So was automatically suspect.

In short, the Koreans paid with privileges and direct emoluments for

the services of the

in policing the Japanese traffic. Logically enough,

in view of

this

inspector's role, So Shigemoto (1419-67) was in 1461 at

his own request appointed governor of Tsushima by the Korean court.

Not surprisingly, this appointment in

partibus

later fed the Korean

misconception that the island was a dependency of their country. In

actuality, the head of the So family used the political and economic

advantages he derived from his special relationship with Korea to con-

solidate his authority over Tsushima.

sure,

there were benefits for

the Koreans, too, not just for the

So:

As the fifteenth century wore on,

piracy did fade away, even if it did not totally disappear.

Japanese-Korean

relations

under the Kakitsu treaty

The framework of Japanese-Korean relations that was erected by the

Kakitsu treaty of 1443 and stood for a century and a half until de-

stroyed by Toyotomi Hideyoshi's aggression was on the whole an or-

derly structure. That structure was based on formal agreements be-

tween the Korean court and the

family of Tsushima. The

fell out

of grace with the Koreans once or twice but were readmitted to favor

and privilege because it was recognized that they were invaluable

mediators. Moreover, their self-interest dictated cooperation with the

Koreans. Hence, by applying levers on the So, the Koreans could

hope to moderate, if not perfectly regulate, the level of the Japanese

commercial influx into their country. And that, indeed, was a vital

consideration for the Yi dynasty. At first, the new and still-insecure

dynasty had been eager to appease the Japanese in its anxiety to see

piracy replaced by peaceful commerce, but its initial permissive atti-

tude toward the Japanese traders in Korea and fishermen off its shores

was not meant to last and was replaced by the desire to constrict their

activities. Overall, the Yi dynasty's policy toward Japan in the fif-

teenth and sixteenth centuries was marked by efforts to limit the

traffic from Japan in order to reduce the expense of diplomatic inter-

course, diminish the drain of resources caused by the Japanese trade,

and keep under control the sometimes-unruly Japanese community in

Korea. For all that, the policy was not rigid but retained the capacity

for compromise and the accommodation of Japanese interests.

In the course of the fifteenth century, the Koreans restricted the

number of Japanese envoys permitted to come as far as their capital

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246 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

city, Seoul, the number of Japanese ships allowed each year to carry on

trade, and the number of places where those ships could call. For all

these limitations, however, at the century's end, some two hundred

sail a year - ships sponsored by the Ashikaga shogun, by daimyo such

as the Ouchi and a whole list of other grandees, by holders of

toso,

and

by bearers of Korean titles - continued to have access to Korea. That

access was restricted to the "Three Ports" (K: samp'o, J:

sampo)

Pusan, Naeip'o (now part of the city of Chinhae), and Yomp'o (now

part of the city of Ulsan) in the southeastern corner of the peninsula,

and the Japanese were officially permitted to maintain no more than

sixty residential households in these three trading stations.

A census conducted in 1494 revealed, however, that the trading

factories had developed into fairly substantial Japanese enclaves within

Korea: There were 525 households (almost nine times the permitted

total) and 3,205 permanent foreign residents, who maintained four-

teen Buddhist temples on Korean soil, farmed rice fields in the vicin-

ity of the harbors, and exploited the nearby fisheries.

The inevitable

conflicts with the natives over fishing rights occasionally led to Japa-

nese attacks on Korean officials. Moreover, Japanese fishermen,

whether from the Three Ports or from Tsushima and beyond, were not

unknown to metamorphose into pirates, depending on the catch to be

had. It was also clear that the Three Ports were bases for smuggling.

The resident Japanese escaped Korean taxation, but the So family

collected taxes from their settlements through its own delegates

(daikan).

This type of Japanese presence in the country surely raised ques-

tions of the erosion of Korean sovereignty. But the major problem was

economic. Along with dyestuffs, spices, and Pharmaceuticals from

Southeast Asia, which were transshipped through the island kingdom

of Ryukyu and the flourishing entrepot of Hakata (now Fukuoka) in

Kyushu, the Japanese brought to Korea large amounts of copper, lead,

and sulfur, products of their own country. They took back from Korea

various luxury items, artistic objects, and Buddhist scriptures. Above

all,

however, they wanted Korean textile goods. In the fifteenth cen-

tury's last decades, it appeared more and more that an insatiable Japa-

nese demand for Korean cotton cloth was depleting the country's

supply of a precious manufactured product, which was also used as a

medium of exchange. (The cultivation of cotton in Japan itself was

10 A chart showing the numbers of Japanese residents in the "Three Ports" from 1436 to 1494

can be found in Nakamura, vol. 1, p. 643.

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TRADE AND PIRACY 247

barely beginning as the century turned.) The Korean government did

not consider this a favorable balance of trade.

Each year, great sums were drained off from Korea through the

entertainment of the numerous Japanese merchants who were in the

country theoretically on official missions. Because trade was carried on

under the label of diplomatic relations, the hosts were responsible for

covering their visitors' living expenses during their stay and for provid-

ing supplies for the voyage home.

In 1485, the Korean court tried to

solve this problem by permitting the bypass of official channels for the

disposal of goods and sanctioning private trade between Korean and

Japanese merchants in the Three Ports. In 1495, this measure was

rescinded, the cure having been found worse than the ailment. But the

network of the direct contacts between merchants, once established,

could not so easily be unraveled. The prohibition of private trade and

the reinstitution of a government monopoly merely amplified the pres-

sures for an increase in the volume of commerce.

That this state of affairs could not be permitted to continue was the

conclusion reached in the councils of King Chungjong (r. 1506-44) of

Korea early in his reign. By way of remedy, it was decided to start

applying strictly the rules that had been set down in the past to govern

the relationship between Korea and Japan. The Korean court's resolve

stiffened in the face of several provocative incidents that occurred

between 1506 and 1509: at least three major cases of

piracy,

including

an armed assault carried out by Korean-speaking Japanese on Kadok

Island, halfway between Naeip'o and Pusan; arson by Japanese resi-

dents of

Naeip'o;

and demonstratively arrogant if not violent behavior

by members of

Japanese embassy in Seoul

itself.

Early in 1510, the Korean court therefore sent the lord of Tsushima,

So Morinobu (later known as So Yoshimori, 1476-1521), a message

demanding the suppression of piracy and the determined pursuit of

the perpetrators of all those illegal activities that poisoned relations

between the two countries.

Unless the Koreans obtained satisfaction,

the message warned, all Japanese residents of the Three Ports, except

for the officially permitted sixty households, would be expelled. The

11 A good idea of the expenses incurred by the Koreans in official entertainments may be

obtained from the rules governing the treatment of Japanese guests that are recorded in the

geographic work Haedong chegukki (Account of the countries east of the sea) compiled in

1472 by the noted statesman Sin Suk-ju (1417-75); see the facsimile edition, Chosenshi

henshukai, ed., Kaiw shokokuki, vol. 2 of Chosen shiryo sokan (Keijo: Chosen sotokufu,

!933)>ff-

111-26V.

12 Chungjong Taewang tillok, io:43v-44, entry for Chungjong 5 (i5io).2.[i3]:

Chos&n

wangjo

sillok, vol. 14 (1956), pp. 409-10; Richo jitsuroku no bu, vol. 5 (1981), pp. 1449-50.

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248 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

So were furthermore cautioned to check carefully before issuing per-

mits to Japanese traders bound for Korea and to make sure that the

toso

they presented as credentials were still valid and did not, in fact,

belong to dead souls. In the meantime, Korean officials charged with

supervising the Three Ports had begun to enforce rigidly the regula-

tions meant to govern life there. Some of the measures they undertook

departed from precedent. In response to these new and unaccustomed

rigors,

the Japanese rioted.

The rioters could claim that they had been provoked by an overly

zealous Korean officer, who had caused the deaths of four Japanese in

a squabble over fishing rights. Their actions, however, were not spon-

taneous but planned with the connivance of the So of Tsushima, who

agreed to come to their assistance. The incident began on May 11,

1510 (Chungjong 5 - Eisho 7.4.4), when the Japanese residents of

Naeip'o and Pusan assaulted and captured their Korean magistrates'

offices. On the same day, a

fleet

sent by the So attacked Koje Island off

Pusan. After having ransacked the environs of the Three Ports and

pillaged various localities on Koje, the Japanese gathered their forces

at Naeip'o with the apparent intention of keeping the place occupied

until they had intimidated the Korean government into backing down,

abandoning its rigorism, and letting them have their own way in Ko-

rea. But they were mistaken if they thought they could bring the

Koreans to terms. Although the news of this insurrection by foreign-

ers backed from abroad terrified some Seoul officials, the govern-

ment's armed forces reacted effectively to the Japanese threat. Thus

the "disturbance of the Three Ports" was brought to a speedy conclu-

sion fifteen days after its outbreak, when the Koreans attacked and

recaptured Naeip'o, taking 295 heads. The remaining Japanese fled in

their ships for Tsushima. Needless to say, in the wake of this incident

the Korean government severed its relations with the So.

That those relations should have been resumed as soon as they

were - in 1512, after Tsushima had asked the shogun and the Ouchi to

intercede - testifies to the accommodative nature of Korean policy

and to the perceived indispensability of the So. To be sure, under the

new agreement the privileges of the So were trimmed, the three ports

of entry reduced to one (Naeip'o), and the rights of permanent resi-

dence and the exploitation of

fisheries

by Japanese eliminated, but the

basic framework of Japanese-Korean relations stayed intact. For all

the new restrictions, more than sixty Japanese ships a year were still

permitted access to Korea. Moreover, the Japanese for a time sue-

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TRADE AND PIRACY 249

ceeded in expanding that access: For example, in 1521 Pusan was

reinstated as a port of call, and in 1523 the head of the So family was

granted the right to add five annual trading vessels to the twenty-five

permitted by the agreement of 1512.

Their proclivities toward piracy, however, set the Japanese back

again. A raid carried out by twenty or more wako ships on Saryang

Island off the southern coast of Kyongsang Province in 1544 caused

relations between the two countries to be severely curtailed for three

years.

The so-called Tenbun treaty of 1547 restored an ordered com-

merce but again restricted Japanese access to one port (this time Pusan)

and reduced the So to twenty-five vessels each year. Until the last

decade of the sixteenth century, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasion

Korea destroyed their prospects, the So of Tsushima did not abandon

hope of remedying the conditions that governed Japanese commerce

with Korea, retrieving their lost privileges, and regaining the status

they held before 1510. Paradoxically, their hopes were raised as

result

of yet another pirate incident, the

1555 wako

raid on Tallyang and other

areas of the South Cholla coast, Korea's southwestern corner. This raid

by more than seventy pirate ships from the Goto Islands and the rest of

the

Matsuura region apparently reminded the Koreans of the usefulness

of the So. In any event, by 1557 the So were back up to thirty annual

vessels, and by 1567 the Koreans had agreed to restore some of the

privileges that had been withdrawn from the holders of

toso.

The

wako

no longer bothered Korea. And there matters rested until Korea came

within the compass of Hideyoshi's aggressive designs.

The

second

tide of brigandage

To be sure, it was not so much action by the So that kept the pirates

from bothering Korea after 1555. As it happens, the marauders' atten-

tion had already been diverted elsewhere, toward more profitable tar-

gets.

Even the Tallyang raid, for all its large scale, was actually no

more than an aberrant eddy within the great tide of brigandage that

swept East Asian waters in the 1550s and 1560s. This resurgent tide

did not, however, flow toward Korea but swirled about the coasts of

China. It threatened at first to submerge Kiangsu and Chekiang and

then shifted to beat on the shores of Fukien. The intensity of

this

new

wave of pillage may be gauged from a telling set of figures: In more

than a century, from 1440 to 1550, Chinese sources recorded only 25

wako

raids, but they mentioned no fewer than 467 separate incidents

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250 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

in the single decade between 1551 and 1560 and added another 75 for

the ten years from 1561 to 1570, when the tide began to ebb.'

In contrast with the previous type of wako, however, the pirate

bands of the middle sixteenth century no longer consisted preponder-

antly of Japanese. Although wako, or "Japanese brigands," remained

the common label by which they were identified, most of

these

bandits

were in fact, if not in name, Chinese. Moreover, although Japanese are

listed among the leadership of some of their groups, the masterminds

of the far-flung activities of this new type of

wako

were unscrupulous

Chinese adventurers. The Tallyang raid, for instance, was just one of

the notorious exploits of the Chinese buccaneer Wang Chih, who at the

time had his headquarters in Japan, in that old wako lair, Hirado, and

availed himself of a comfortable base of operations in the Goto Islands.

Wang Chih and his congeners - such as Teng Wen-chun, whose base

was Yobuko in that same Matsuura region, and Ch'en Tung, who had

close connections with the prominent daimyo family of southern

Kyushu, the Shimazu - were part of

syndrome that was more com-

plex than the wako plague that had afflicted Korea and threatened

China in previous times.

What were the causes of this new wave of piracy? Contemporary

Chinese sources put the onus for the resurgence of the wako on Chi-

nese merchant adventurers, their greed, and their perverse incitation

of the Japanese to plunder China. That celebrated "bible of wako

studies," Ch'ou-hai fu-pien (A maritime survey: collected plans,

1562),

asserts, for instance: "Maritime brigandage originated when

rogues from the seacoast of China, seeking profits, broke the prohibi-

tions [of overseas trade]. First they took up with the Western Barbari-

ans and then extended their activities to Japan, which they made the

very base and heartland of their banditry.'"

In other words, the

appearance of the Portuguese (who are meant here by "Western Bar-

barians") gave a great boost to the officially proscribed but actually

uncontrollable private overseas trade of China. The private commer-

cial networks spread to include Japan just at the time when the official

tally trade, inadequate to start with, was petering out. At first, the

13 See the chronological chart set out by Tanaka in Wako: umi no rekishi, pp. 203-7. For a

detailed descriptive chronology, see Ch'en Mou-heng, Ming-tai wo-k'ou k'ao-liieh (Peking:

Jen-min ch'u-pan-she, 1957), chap. 3, pp. 47-128.

14 Ch'ou-hai fu-pien, comp. Cheng Jo-tseng, ed. Shao Fang, under the auspices of Hu Tsung-

hsien, governor of Chekiang (revised by Hu Tsung-hsien's descendants Hu Wei-chi, Hu

Teng, Hu Ming-kang, and Hu Chieh-ch'ing; prefaces by Mao K'un, 1562, and Hu Ssu-shen,

1624;

copy in the Toyoshi Collection, Library of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University),

pt. n, f. 6.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

TRADE AND PIRACY 251

entrepots of the illicit trade were on or just off the coast of China, but

the Ming government's countermeasures eventually forced the traders

to seek safer bases as far away as Japan and to enlist the aid or at least

the acquiescence of Japanese regional rulers and maritime barons in

their schemes.

The Portuguese first intruded into China's commercial sphere in the

second decade of the sixteenth century. In 1511, they conquered the

Malayan sultanate of Malacca, a place much frequented by Chinese

overseas merchants, and by 1513 their own merchants were visiting

the China coast. They sought official relations with China through

Canton from 1517, but five years later they were forcibly driven away

from that area as a result of the piratical behavior of the captain of

their 1519 embassy, Simao de Andrade. Thereupon (until in 1554 they

finally gained official toleration of their trade in Canton), they engaged

in a thoroughly illicit but highly lucrative trade, not at major ports but

at island anchorages on the coast of South China. There they ex-

changed spices, ivory, aromatic woods, and other products of their

South and Southeast Asian trading colonies, for Chinese silks and

porcelains. Needless to say, these anchorages were not haphazardly

chosen. Rather, they were the strategically located offshore bases of

the Chinese smuggling bosses, who often operated with the collusion

of the coastal officialdom.

The most notorious of these contrabandists' nests, called Liampoo

by the Portuguese, was Shuang-hsii-kang in the Chusan Islands off

Ningpo, which became important from 1526 onward. In its heyday,

the middle 1540s, Shuang-hsii-kang was run by the Hsu brothers,

whose theater of operations extended from Malacca to Kyo-domari

(now part of the city of

Sendai,

Kagoshima Prefecture) in Japan. Their

chief lieutenant, Wang Chih, traveled to Japan to bring back with him

more recruits for the illicit trade. The Portuguese, according to the

Tractado

(1569-70) of the well-informed Dominican friar Gaspar da

Cruz, "were so firmly settled" in Liampoo "and with such freedom,

that nothing was lacking them save having a gallows and [municipal

whipping

post]."

One would scarcely expect this place, populated by

Portuguese freebooters and their Lascar

crews,

Chinese smugglers and

their Japanese partners, to have been a well-ordered, peaceful munici-

pality. Indeed, we are told by da Cruz that "the Chinas who accompa-

nied the Portugals, and some Portugals with them, came to disorder

themselves in such a manner that they began to make great thefts and

robberies, and killed some of the people." At length, the flagrancy

with which its laws were being flouted moved the Ming government to

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252 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

appoint the hardheaded Chu Wan as governor of Chekiang Province,

with the clear mandate to eliminate Shuang-hsu and other coastal sore

spots in his own province as well as in Fukien and northern Kwan-

tung. From the official Ming standpoint, the traders who gathered at

such anchorages were either outlaws guilty of high treason or barbar-

ian brigands. When Chu Wan was ordered "to drive the pirates from

all the coast," da Cruz notes, "all the merchants . . . were included in

this number of pirates."

Chu Wan did his job energetically. In 1548 he destroyed Shuang-hsii

(where his troops captured at least two Japanese alive) and scattered its

denizens to the four winds. The next year, he successfully blockaded

the coast of Fukien, where his catch included two junks carrying some

thirty Portuguese; some of these captives he summarily executed.

Because some of the most influential members of the Fukien gentry

were among the heaviest investors in the illicit overseas trade, it is not

surprising that after this thorough sweep, Chu Wan should have been

traduced, disgraced, and driven to suicide. Perhaps more surprisingly,

his successes against the contrabandists are often cited as the proxi-

mate cause of the regeneration of the wako. Indeed, it is held that

deprived of their accustomed bases, the overseas traders had little

choice but to transform themselves into bands of armed rovers.

According to this school of thought, when the Ming government

cracked down on their illegal activities, the Chinese entrepreneurs

enlisted Japanese swashbucklers, known far and wide to be "tough

and ferocious" types, into "safeguarding and abetting" their schemes,

by force of arms if need be.

The armed clashes that resulted between

the smugglers assisted by their Japanese strong-arm men and the

troops mobilized by the Chinese authorities generated widespread dis-

turbances along the littoral of the South China Sea. Some of the Chi-

nese coastal populace turned to banditry, making common cause with

the intruders in preference to being raped and looted by troops who

had been quartered on them ostensibly to guard them against the

wako.

Bands of Chinese robbers with no connection with the sea

15 Padre Frey Gaspar da Cruz OP, Tractado em que se cdtam

muito

por

esteso

cousas

da China

(title page: 1569; colophon: Euora em casa de Andre de Burgos impressor (1570); copy in the

Lilly Library, Indiana University), chap. 23, unfoliated; C. R. Boxer, trans, and ed., "Trea-

tise in which the things of China are related at great length," in South China in the Sixteenth

Century, Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, vol. 106 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), pp. 192-3.

16 Ch'ou-hai tu-pien, pt. 11, f. 5v.

17 Chang Shih-ch'e, the president of the Board of

War,

used strong terms in arguing against the

practice of saddling the population with levies from distant provinces: "This is their nature -

swinish greed and wolflike brutality. They practice extortion and robbery by broad daylight;

by night they pollute the women. Should anyone resist, then out comes the sword and that

TRADE AND PIRACY 253

went about in the guise of Japanese in order to capitalize on the terror

universally inspired by the name of

wako.

And local officials, intent on

minimizing the extent of popular discontent in their jurisdictions,

labeled all armed disorders, regardless of their cause, as outrages per-

petrated by the wako, thereby cravenly libeling the Japanese in order

to mask their own malfeasance. Thus the reality was camouflaged at

the time, and the false image has persisted in history. That much

would appear to be the consensus at least of the Japanese historians

who have recently written on this subject.

By and large, Japanese scholars do their best to minimize the num-

ber of Japanese participants in wako bands. Moreover, insofar as they

do admit the involvement of their sixteenth-century countrymen in

these Chinese adventures, they tend to be charitable toward the seafar-

ers,

whose motivation (they claim) has been misunderstood and true

nature misrepresented. One widely sold text suggests, for instance,

that the

wako

phenomenon was, in effect, a plea for free trade against

protectionism and that the Japanese who ventured to China in armed

groups were forced to go under arms as

measure of self-defense in the

insecure conditions under which they conducted commerce.

An-

other author, who clearly admires the pugnacity of

the

wako,

in appar-

ent seriousness puts them in the "forefront of the people's liberation

war" in China.

Yet another has meticulously combed Chinese sources

to show that in them, terms such as

chen-wo

(J: shinwa, "real Japa-

nese") and

ts'ung-wo

(J: juwa, "follower of Japanese"), which imply

that Japanese had the chief part in the wako raids, are outweighed by

kou-wo (J: kowa, "inciters" or "seducers of Japanese") and similar

terms,

which show that the initiative was Chinese.

Such scholars frequently quote the passage from the official history

Ming

shih,

which in referring to the brigands in the great raid of 1555

states that "about three of ten were real Japanese, and seven of ten

person's dead; they don't give murder another thought! Hence the proverb says, 'Cross, if

you must, a Japanese bandit's path, but never a garrison soldier's.' Run into a Japanese, and

there's still a chance you'll get away. But meet a soldier, and you're done for." Ch'ou-hai

t"u-

pien,

pt. 11, f. 66v.

18 Iwami Hiroshi and Taniguchi Kikuo, Dento

Chugoku no

kansei, vol. 4 of

Chugoku

no rekishi,

vol. 4 of

Shinsho

Tcyoshi, Kodansha gendai shinsho, no. 454 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1982, 4th

printing), p. 91.

19 Yobuko Jotaro, Wako shiko (Tokyo: Shin jimbutsu orai-sha, 1971), p. 272. Alternatively

Yobuko speaks of the wako as a "Japanese-Ming allied army

[Nichimin

rengogun]";

see p. 280.

20 Ishihara Michihiro, Wako, vol. 7 of Nikon

rekishi sosho

(Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1964),

pp.

71-5, 233-4. Ishihara has also strained all possible references to the quality of mercy

among the wako out of the sources; see his "Wako no onjo ni tsuite," Nihon

rekishi

166 (April

1962):

38-45.

254 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

were persons who subordinated themselves to the Japanese."

Or they

seek support from other Chinese sources, such as the passage in

Ch'ou-

hai fu-pien that maintains, "If today's pirates mobilized, they would

number several tens of thousands. They all pretend to be Japanese. To

be sure, those who actually come from Japan amount to no less than

several thousand, but all the rest are Chinese subjects, scoundrels who

attach themselves to the invaders."

Many such passages may be

found, making it possible to assert that the proportion of Japanese

among the brigands who pillaged the coastal regions of China in the

1550s was no greater than one in ten.

As easily found, however, are other accounts that indicate that the

Japanese contribution to the exploits of the wako was anything but

insubstantial. The chief picaroons - the likes of Wang Chih, Hsu Hai,

and Yeh Ming, alias Ma Yeh - may have been Chinese (although there

is an argument that the characters Ma Yeh really represent a rebus for

the Japanese name Aso), but knowledgeable Chinese sources also con-

tain a veritable rogues' gallery of pirate captains with indisputably

Japanese names and an extensive gazetteer of their nesting places in

the Japanese archipelago. When

Jih-pen

i-chien

(A mirror of Japan, c.

1564) states, for instance, that Sukegoro of Tanegashima, Kamon the

Pilot of Satsuma, Hikogoro of Hyuga, and Hosoya of Izumi (the name

smacks of a Sakai merchant) in 1556 at the behest of Hsu Hai orga-

nized a band of fifty thousand to sixty thousand pirates who set sail in

one thousand vessels to pillage Kwangtung but suffered severe damage

in a storm and hit South Chihli instead, we may assume that the

numbers are exaggerated. But we have no reason to question the

essential accuracy of the story of massive Japanese participation in this

pirate fleet. Any reader of Jih-pen

i-chien

will conclude that its author,

Cheng Shun-kung, was well informed - as well he might have been,

for he had gone to Japan in that very year of 1556 as an official envoy

charged with gathering intelligence on the wako and enlisting the aid

of the daimyo of Bungo, Otomo Sorin, in their suppression. Cheng's

"Mirror" reflects the observations of

half-year's stay in the country.

Hence it is particularly interesting to see him first take a swipe at

Chinese "exile drifters" who lurk in Japan and lure its inhabitants to

cross the seas and plunder China but then draw the categorical conclu-

sion: "From Kii on these barbarians' eastern seacoast to the south and

west, through the San'yo and the San'in regions to Wakasa and the

barbarians' west, there is no place where the people have not been

21 Ming shift, vol. 27,

8353; Seishino

bu,

vol. i,p.295.

Ch'ou-kait'u-pien,pt. II,

f. I.