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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

TRADE AND PIRACY 255

incited to join in the raids. They may call themselves merchants but

are in actuality brigands."

The "trade called bafan"

The term often used for these Japanese rovers in the contemporary

lingua franca of the seas was

bahan,

or bafan in the Portuguese tran-

scription. One encounters it written with a variety of Chinese charac-

ters,

most often with the two that form the name of Hachiman (Ch:

pa-fan),

a deity of war whose cult was widespread in Japan. Presum-

ably, the pirate vessels flew pennants bearing Hachiman's name, and

the corsairs by extension came to be known by it. But this seems too

facile an explanation and no longer enjoys the confidence of scholars.

Of the several Chinese-character compounds that Cheng Shun-kung

lists and glosses for the term, the most evocative is

p'o-fan,

"tattered

sails,"

the bandits being called so because they are "nasty like sails that

break." But whatever the term's derivation, its meaning

clear.

Exten-

sively practiced in such Japanese regions as Satsuma, "the trade called

bafan ... is to go make prizes and rob the maritime localities and

settlements of China with many vessels armed for that purpose."

According to Ch'ou-hai fu-pien, Satsuma, Higo, and Nagato were

the Japanese provinces that were the most prolific breeding grounds of

pirates; next came Osumi, Chikuzen, Chikugo, Hakata (a city singled

out for mention among provinces), Hyuga, Settsu, Harima, and the

island of Tanegashima; natives of Buzen, Bungo, and Izumi also took

part in the raids on occasion, notably so among them the traders who

found themselves in Satsuma on business when the opportunity of

joining an expedition to China presented

itself.

(Curiously enough, the

only province of Kyushu that is not included on this roll of names is

Hizen, the home of the Matsuura-to and the base of Wang Chih.

Perhaps "Higo" was a slip of the pen for its neighbor province, or

possibly the identity of Hizen as a stronghold and refuge of the wako

was so well known that it was sometimes assumed as a given in such

lists.

To be sure, there is no lack of mentions of this province else-

23 Cheng Shun-kung, Jih-pen i-chien (Mikajiri Yutaka, ed., Nikon ikkan) (Kyoto, privately

mimeographed, 1937; copy in the Library of the Faculty of

Law,

Kyoto University), pp. 132-

8,474. Also see the maps and descriptions of routes from the south of Kyushu to Kyoto, pp.

424-58.

24 On

p'o-fan,

see ibid., p. 108. On bafan, see Padre Luis Frois SJ, Historia dejapam, pt. 1,

chap.

6, ed. Josef Wicki SJ (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, 1976), vol. 1, p. 46;

Matsuda Kiichi and Kawasaki Momota, trans.,

Furoisu

Nihonshi (Tokyo: Chuo kdronsha,

1978),

vol. 6, p. 72.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

256 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

where.

Jih-pen

i-chien,

for instance, names the Hizen ports Hirado and

Arima as veritable sumps of pirates.)

After noting that it was the poor people of these places who pro-

vided the bulk of the pirate crews,

Ch'ou-hai

fu-pien singles out the

general lack of authority in Japan as the critical factor in the rise of

piracy. Unlike in China, there was no central government in that

country. Nobody listened to the orders of the "lord of Yamashiro,"

that is, the Ashikaga shogun in Kyoto. Of the three great military

houses that had in the past maintained a measure of control over pirate

areas even as they champed at one another, the Ouchi of Yamaguchi

had recently fallen; the Amako of Izumo were in a state of collapse;

and only the Otomo of Bungo were left. Such authority as the Otomo

had did not extend past the borders of six provinces in Kyushu, and

naturally enough, the remainder of the island's nine provinces -

Satsuma, Osumi, and Hyuga - ranked among the most notorious of

the abiding places of the wako. Then what were the prospects of

seeking remedy in Japan? "To expect that country to keep the various

barbarians in check is absolutely impossible."

Indeed, in 1562, when Ch'ou-hai fu-pien was compiled, no ready

solution to the acute problem of authority was visible in Japan. In

particular, Kyushu - the area of greatest concern to us - was in a state

of turmoil. The Chinese "bible of wako studies" was up to date in

reporting on the six provinces of the lord of

Bungo:

Otomo Sorin had

by 1559 accumulated six military governorships

(shugoshiki)

in Kyu-

shu and had even obtained the title of Kyushu tandai, the shogunal

deputy in the island. But these distinctions granted by the Muromachi

bakufu conveyed prestige, not power. At best, Sorin exercised a tenu-

ous hegemony over northern Kyushu, where he had many challengers

and few trustworthy friends. The other three of Kyushu's military

governorships

—

over those notorious provinces of Satsuma, Osumi,

and Hyuga - had been, since the 1190s intermittently and since the

1390s constantly, in the hands of the Shimazu family.

This

shugo

family, however, had a history of violent internal quar-

rels.

As a result, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, even its

hold on Satsuma was shaky, and its ability to control affairs in the

larger area of southern Kyushu was weak. In 1508, Shimazu Tadamasa

committed suicide in despair or disgust at the seditiousness of his

faithless relatives and overbearing liegemen. In the next eighteen

years,

four lords followed one another in quick succession, and the

Ch'ou-hai

fu-pien, pt. 2, f. 22rv.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

TRADE AND PIRACY 257

house's main line was tested severely as it tried to maintain itself in the

face of the revolts of other branches of the Shimazu, the fluctuating

loyalties of vassals, and the perpetual attempts of petty local lords

(kokujin)

to assert themselves. The problem of authority was not fully

resolved, even through the strenuous efforts of the famed "restorer" of

the family's fortunes, Shimazu Takahisa (1514-71), who became

shugo

in 1526 and for the next forty years - until he passed on the office to

his son Yoshihisa (1533-1611) - fought tenaciously

subject the recal-

citrant barons to fealty. Throughout those years, southern Kyushu was

a cockpit of contention.

It was not until Yoshihisa's day that the head of the Shimazu family

managed to consolidate his dominion over southern Kyushu and estab-

lish himself

a Sengoku daimyo who would brook no opposition. In

1569,

Yoshihisa subdued Hishikari Takaaki, a powerful baron of north-

ern Satsuma; in 1570, the rebellious Irikiin and Togo families of

Satsuma were reduced to submission; in 1574, Kimotsuki Kanesuke

and Ijichi Shigeoki, magnates of Osumi whose families had been a law

unto themselves for generations, surrendered to their Shimazu over-

lord; and by 1578, the Shimazu had destroyed the great house of Ito,

lords of a major portion of Hyuga, and were ready to engage the

Otomo in a contest for the ascendancy over all of Kyushu. Thus the

Shimazu daimyo showed that he had the power to overawe the refrac-

tory. At the time of the great wako raids on China in the 1550s,

however, this development still lay in the future. The Shimazu had not

yet managed to suppress the independence of various contending fac-

tions.

The authority of the daimyo had not yet been imposed over all

of the farming and fishing population. Disordered circumstances still

prevailed in southern Kyushu.

Does not the history of this regional pell-mell help explain why

Satsuma, Osumi, and Hyuga had such a reputation as rookeries of

pirates? That reputation reached as far as Malacca, where the Jesuit

Luis Frois, the future chronicler of the Roman Catholic mission in

Japan, recorded on December 1, 1555, the news brought by Portu-

guese ships from China about the "very great conflicts and strife be-

tween China and Japan, and how a great armada had made ready at

Cangoxima [Kagoshima, the central place of Satsuma] and had devas-

tated many Chinese localities that were on the sea, as well as a very

populous city, where the Japanese wrought great destruction."

26 Irmao Luis Frois SJ to the Padres and Irmaos SJ in Goa, dated Malaqua, December I, 1555,

Josef Wicki SJ, ed.,

Documenia

Indica, vol. 3,

Monumenia Missionum Societatis

Iesu 6, Monu-

menia

Historica

Societatis

Iesu 74 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1954), p. 319.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

258 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

Hangchow, which was attacked in June or July 1555, may be the large

city meant here, but it is difficult to say, as that year's pirate band,

organized by Hsii Hai with a following that reputedly consisted of

Japanese from Izumi, Satsuma, Hizen, Higo, Settsu, and Tsushima,

terrorized the entire populous area between Chiangyin on the Yangtze

and Hangchow, striking inland as far as Soochow.

A stray group of

sixty or seventy from this band penetrated as far as Nanking in the late

summer, but could the news of this shocking event have traveled so

fast that it reached the ears of Frois's informants before they sailed? In

any event, unless we believe that those Portuguese informants - who

were surely expert in the ways of the seafaring demimonde of the

China Sea - were fooled by the Chinese goverment's propaganda and

suborned into libeling the Japanese, we have no grounds to assume

that the "great armada" of the pirates did not in fact have its origins or

at least fit out in the Satsuma region.

Frois himself was at this time still a distant and unprejudiced ob-

server. Later on, in

Historia de

Japam, he would reserve some of his

most rancorous passages for Satsuma, the sworn enemy of his hero

"King Francisco of

Bungo,"

that is, Otomo Sorin. When, for instance,

he calls Satsuma such a miserable place that it had, of old, no claim to

fame whatever but was despised by all and ignored by the central

government, Frois is exaggerating. But it no longer sounds purely

hyperbolical when he adds that the province was so poor that its

people were driven to seek sustenance by plundering China, even at a

terrible risk to their lives. In most years, the greater part of

those

who

went there - Frois says - remained there. Others were lost on the sea

in their small and fragile craft.

Owing to the lack of contemporary Japanese sources, it is impossi-

ble to document an involvement of the Shimazu in the "trade called

bafan," a trade that was without a doubt practiced widely in the three

provinces under their nominal jurisdiction. Chinese sources, however,

actually attribute membership in this daimyo family to two of the

archest buccaneers. Ch'en Tung, who led the

bahan

fleet

from Hizen,

Chikuzen, Bungo, Izumi, Hakata, and Kii that attacked the Shanghai

area in 1555, is described as "the younger brother of the lord of

Satsuma, the chief of his secretariat." Naturally, "many of his follow-

ers were Satsuma men." And Hsii Hai's right-hand man, the ferocious

27 See Ch'ou-hai t'u-pien, pt. 8, ff. 27-28. Also see Ming

shih,

vol. 27, pp. 8352-3; Seishi

bu,

vol. i, pp. 294-5.

28 Frois, Historia, pt. 2 [B], chap. 40, ed. Wicki, vol. 4 (1983), pp. 292-3; Matsuda and

Kawasaki, trans.,

Furoisu

Nihonshi, vol. 8, pp. 168-9.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

TRADE AND PIRACY 259

Shingoro, "whose venom infected the entire region of Wu, whose

intent was to swallow up all of

Chekiang,

and who was on the lurk for

Nanking," is called "the younger brother of the ruler of Osumi."

This attribution of brotherhood with the mighty may rest on noth-

ing more than the empty vaunting of the individuals in question or of

their captors. In any event, their identities cannot be determined.

Ch'en Tung may be the Chinese nom de guerre of a Japanese pirate,

the garbled transcription of

Japanese name, or a rebus. Shingoro is as

good

Japanese name as any, but the name by itself is in neither case a

sure prognostic of nationality. The "lord of Satsuma" and "ruler of

Osumi," Shimazu Takahisa, had two younger brothers, Tadamasa (d.

1561) and Naohisa, also called Matagoro. The latter, whose domain

was in the Kawanabe district of Satsuma that juts into the east China

Sea (the general area of what are now Bonotsu-cho and the city of

Makurazaki, Kagoshima Prefecture), is a shadowy figure reputed to

have been the patron of pirates; the date of his death is unclear.

Somewhat disappointingly, there is evidence that Naohisa was still

alive in 1571, whereas the heads of Shingoro and Ch'en Tung are

known to have been delivered to Peking in 1556, along with those of

Hsu Hai and Ma Yen.

Who the other Japanese captains and confeder-

ates of the

bahan

trade were - the picturesquely named Urumi ("Red-

Brown") Taro, Keiten ("The Sky's the Limit") Shinshiro, and Hakata

Sukezaemon among them - likewise cannot be determined. Appar-

ently, they did not seek notoriety in their native land.

"When they return to their islands from plundering," states Ch'ou-

hai fu-pien, "they say they have come back from trading. They will

not speak of those who were captured or killed by our troops, keeping

it a secret. Even the neighbors do not know, or [if they know], they

think it honorable."

The reluctance of the perpetrators to publicize

their part in plundering expeditions is understandable, although it is

difficult to fathom how they could have kept it a secret in places such

as Satsuma and Hirado. The "famed pirate and cruel killer of the sort

that go to rob China" does make his appearance once or twice in Jesuit

reports of deathbed conversions to Christianity.

In any event, al-

29 On Ch'en Tung, see Ch'ou-hai fu-pien, pt. 8, f. 28v. On Shingoro, see ibid., pt. 9, ff. 22-23;

and Afingshih,

chuan

205: "Lieh-chuan 205, Hu Tsung-hsien," vol. 18, p. 5412; Seishi

bu,

vol. 1, p. 205. On Shimazu Naohisa, see Ota Akira, Senhi kakei daijiten, vol. 2 (Tokyo:

Kadokawa shoten, 1963), p. 2874.

Ch'ou-hai

fu-pien, pt. 2, f. 35V.

31 For example, Frois, Historia, pt. 1, chap. 47 (Arima, 1563), and chap, m (Hirado, 1576),

ed.

Wield, vol. 1, p. 330, and vol. 2 (1981), pp. 469-71; Matsuda and Kawasaki, trans.,

Furoisu

Nihonshi, vol. 7, p. 17 and vol. 10 (1979), pp. 72-4.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

260 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

though it must be reemphasized that contemporary Japanese sources

on the wako are next to nonexistent, it must also be stressed that their

lack is not a convincing argument for the absence of Japanese from the

bahan

raids. Rather, it is beyond dispute that the pirate chiefs of the

1550s, whatever their nationality, had safe bases and powerful patrons

in Japan and that they drew much of their fighting manpower from

that island country. The best example is Wang Chih - also known as

Captain Wu-feng (Goho Senshu) and even styled Hui Wang, the King

of Hui - who lived like a true sea king in Hirado, surrounded himself

with luxury and a train of Japanese myrmidons, maintained cordial

relations with not only the local petty eminence, Matsuura Takanobu

(1529-99), but also with such great names as Otomo Sorin and Ouchi

Yoshitaka, and sent bands of pirate-traders off to seek their and his

fortunes in China.

The "trade called bafan" of the 1550s was the culmination of

long

seafaring tradition in Japan. The political conditions of that confused

time of Japanese history - at the climax of the Sengoku period (1467-

573)5 before unification- permitted the existence of armed groups

that ventured overseas seeking gain. Although plunder was not their

sole objective, what they could not get by peaceful trade they obtained

by pillage.

What were the wako after? According to Chinese sources, the Japa-

nese above all sought raw silk (which fetched ten times its Chinese

price in Japan), floss silk, cotton cloth ("because they do not have

cotton wool"), pongee thread, brocade, red thread, quicksilver (ten

times the Chinese price), needles, iron chains, iron pots, porcelain, old

copper coins ("the Japanese do not mint their own but use old Chinese

coins exclusively"), old paintings, old calligraphy, old books, pharma-

ceuticals, carpets, horse blankets, facial powder, bamboo ware, lac-

quer ware, and vinegar.

This, of

course,

looks like an ordinary shop-

ping list, but it does not tell the whole story. It would appear that the

sixteenth-century wako, like their fourteenth-century predecessors,

not only sought general merchandise but also engaged in slavery.

Cheng Shun-kung reported the story of some two hundred or three

hundred Chinese slaves kept by Japanese families in the vicinity of

Takasu in Satsuma (actually, in Osumi; now part of the city of

Kanoya, Kagoshima Prefecture). And the Jesuit Luis de Almeida

wrote in 1562 of his efforts to safeguard the honor of a shipload of

women he saw in the harbor of Tomari in the Kawanabe district of

32 Ch'ou-hai tu-pien, pt. 2, ff. 32-33V.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

TRADE AND PIRACY 26l

Satsuma (now Bonotsu-cho): They had been bought by some of his

Portuguese compatriots from "the Japanese who seize them in war in

China and then sell them." Almeida made sure that they were well

protected on their voyage thence.

By 1562, however, the peak of

the bahan

raids on China had passed.

The greatest of the pirate bands were broken up in the late 1550s by

the successful counteraction of the Ming authorities. In 1556, the

governor of Chekiang, Hu Tsung-hsien, through a clever intrigue,

first incited Hsu Hai to deliver Ch'en Tung and Ma Yeh into his

hands,

and then he destroyed Hsu Hai. This coup meant that three of

the pirate chiefs having the closest connections with Japan had been

eliminated at one blow. In 1557, Hu scored his greatest success when

he lured Wang Chih, the godfather of organized

wako

activity, back to

China with the promise of

pardon for his past crimes and misdemean-

ors and a relaxation of the maritime prohibitions, with the effect of

permitting trade with the Japanese - conditions that delighted not

only Wang and his confederates but also his commerce-minded Japa-

nese friend, Otomo Sorin.

The promises of Hu Tsung-hsien turned

out to be dross, and Wang Chih was beheaded at the end of

1559

or the

beginning of 1560.

The capture and execution of the captain of all captains of the

bahan

trade presaged the end of the wako. Buccaneers such as Hung Tse-

chen, a former lieutenant of Wang Chih, continued to replenish their

strength in Japan, and the wako remained active for several more

decades, but they had lost much of their sting. The focus of their

activity shifted from the Yangtze Delta and Chekiang to the coasts of

Fukien and Kwangtung, and given the increasing distance from Ja-

pan, the intensity of Japanese participation diminished. And then in

1567,

the wind was taken out of the

bahan

sails when the Ming govern-

ment finally - after two centuries - took its maritime prohibitions off

the books. Mainland Chinese were permitted to travel overseas, and a

prospering trade began with the Southeast Asian countries, removing

some of the pressure that had initially led to the rise of the wako.

Because of the depredations associated with the Japanese, however,

33 Jih-pen

i-chien,

p. 136. Irmao Luis Dalmeida SJ to Irmaos SJ, dated Vocoxiura [Yokoseura in

Hizen],

October 25, 1562, Cartas qve os Padres e Irmaos da Companhia de

Iesus escreuerao

dos

Reynos de Iapao & China aos da

mesma

Companhia da India, & Europa, des do

anno

de IS49-

ali 0 de 1580. (Em Euora por Manoel de Lyra. Anno de M.D.XCVIII.), vol. 1, f. 106.

Compare the slightly different version in Frois, Historia, pt. 1, chap. 33, ed. Wicki, vol. i, p.

215;

Matsuda and Kawasaki, trans.,

Furoisu

Nihonshi, vol. 6, p. 270.

34 Hsu Hsueh-chu (died c. 1617), Chia-ching

Tung-nan

p'ing-vto

tung-lu (Nanking: Kuo-hsueh

t'u-shu-kuan, 1932 facsimile reprint). On Wang's capture, the debate on his fate, and his

execution, see also Ch'ou-hai tu-pien, pt. 5, ff.

v-32 & 34V-35V, and pt. 9, ff. 24-9.

262 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

Japan officially remained off limits to the Chinese traders, and vice

versa. But that continuing ban served the interests of the Portuguese,

who established a highly profitable carrying trade between China and

Japan. The raw silk that the Japanese sought so dearly thus came to

Japan from China in Portuguese bottoms.

From pirate bands into navies

What happened to the Japanese pirates?

This question is intimately

connected with the problem of the reestablishment of authority

throughout the Japanese body politic during the second half of the

sixteenth century. The pirates did not disappear; they were put under

control. In the process of unification, the maritime armed bands

(kaizokushu) lost their independent character and were transformed

into navies

(suiguri)

that served the major daimyo and then the national

hegemon. In a few notable instances - the Kuki of the Kii peninsula

and the Kurushima of the Inland Sea, not to mention the Matsuura of

Hizen - their leaders themselves became daimyo whose families sur-

vived the Edo period as peers of the Japanese empire.

Pirates were recruited from a maritime populace that lived accord-

ing to the principle enunciated by that expert on seafaring, Mephis-

topheles: "All that counts is a ready grip: / You catch a fish, you catch

a ship."

In the Middle Ages, enterprising fishermen of

this

type were

occasionally employed as guards of vessels transporting rents from

landed estates

(shoeri)

in outlying provinces to their proprietors in the

Kyoto-Nara region, but they were not above attacking and plunder-

ing such shipments themselves. In some cases, their bosses established

checkpoints at dominant spots on the waterways, where cargoes were

controlled and fees had to be paid before a ship could proceed; in

others, they simply exacted protection money from those who wanted

to ensure an unmolested passage for themselves. Needless to say, they

also took part in the bahan trade. Some of the locally prominent

captains who headed groups of fishermen and on occasion used them

for armed robbery came to exercise a dominant influence over similar

seafaring entrepreneurs of a wider area. These newly risen maritime

barons could easily sell their services as naval auxiliaries to one or the

35 A concise essay on this question is Utagawa Takehisa, "Chusei kaizokushu no shumatsu,"

Nihon rekishi 333 (February 1976): 22-39.

36 "Da fordert nur ein rascher

Griff,

/ Man fangt den Fisch, man fangt ein

Schiff."

Goethe,

Faust, 11,5:3(11, 178-11,179).

TRADE AND PIRACY 263

other of the contending forces in a country that was rent by constant

warfare.

Such a one was Murakami Takeyoshi (1533-1604), who ruled his

fleets from an elaborate fortress located on the island of Noshima in

Iyo Province (now Miyakubo-cho, Ehime Prefecture), at one of the

narrowest but busiest straits of the Inland Sea. As the wars of unifica-

tion entered a critical phase in the late 1570s with the beginning of the

campaigns of Oda Nobunaga (1534-82) against the powerful Mori

family of western Honshu, both sides bid for Murakami's services

with promises of rich enfeoffments and great prerogatives. As late as

1586,

when the unification regime of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (i537?-98)

had already made substantial inroads into the area all around Mura-

kami's marine microcosm, the voice of this "greatest corsair of all

Japan" evidently still sufficed either to raise or to assuage the terrors of

a crossing of the Inland Sea. Indeed, we learn that the people of "the

shores and seacoasts of other provinces each year pay him a tribute for

fear of being destroyed" by him and his pirates, who "continually go

out on raids."

Obviously, such a buccaneer's continued indepen-

dence was incompatible with the aims of national unification, as was

that of others like him. They were brought into line.

As Sengoku daimyo sought to extend their sway over regional do-

mains, they tried to subordinate maritime armed bands to themselves

by absorbing the chief corsairs into the body of their own vassals, if

not to strengthen their military forces by adding a navy, then to secure

the routes of commerce in and about their domains by eliminating

piracy. When more and more daimyo became integrated into a grand

structure of fealty as the process of unification advanced under

Hideyoshi, it became possible for the hegemon to plan the elimination

of all private arms-bearing nationwide. In 1588, Hideyoshi issued his

famous "sword hunt" edict, in which "the farmers of the various

provinces" were "strictly forbidden to keep swords, short swords,

spears, firearms, and other types of military weapons." If they were

permitted such "unnecessary implements," the document added, then

they would be tempted to "evade their taxes" or even "plot uprisings"

(ikki, perhaps the worst word in the vocabulary of the feudal ruler).

Far less known, but as significant an illustration of the thoroughgoing

effort of Hideyoshi's regime to reduce the capacity for violence or

armed resistance on the part of any social group in Japan, is the other

37 Frois, Historia, pt. 2 [B], chap. 33, ed. Wicki, vol. 4, p. 248; Matsuda and Kawasaki, trans.,

Furoisu

Nihonshi, vol. 5, p. 198.

264 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA

edict that he issued on the very same day, a prohibition of piracy. If the

former document decreed a sword hunt, then the latter ordered a

dragnet through which must pass "the sea captains and fishermen of

the provinces and the seashores, and all those who go in ships to the

sea." They were to be subjected to an "immediate investigation" by

the local representatives of their daimyo and made to "subscribe to

written oaths that henceforth they shall not engage in the slightest

piratical activity," for "pirate vessels are strictly prohibited on the seas

of the various provinces." If, hereafter, the recipient of a fief were to

prove so negligent that pirates should happen to be discovered in a

place under his jurisdiction, then that fief "shall be confiscated in

perpetuity."

It has been argued that although Hideyoshi's sword hunt edict "may

not have been class legislation in intent, it had the broadest social

impact in practice, for it helped to underline the social distinction

between samurai, whose profession it was to handle weapons, and

farmers, whose job it was to till the soil and cultivate the mulberry."

Mutatis

mutandis,

much

the

same may be said about the decree concern-

ing piracy; surely it is no accident that the two were issued together.

The social distinction between samurai and farmers -

hei-no bunri

- is

often talked about. It may be time that the term for the separation

between the warrior's and the fisherman's status -

hei-gyo bunri

came into wider usage. In the Sengoku period, neither distinction was

strict, but under Hideyoshi both became so. Unfortunately, the new

definition of their status did not mean, for either farmers or fisher-

men, a total exemption from military service.

Just as peasants were mobilized as laborers (jimbu) and bearers

(bumaru) in military camps and campaigns, so ordinary fishermen

were drafted into service as sailors on naval vessels or transports. This

fact and its consequences are dramatically illustrated in a document

issued by Hideyoshi in 1593, which contains "strict orders" to round

up "all the mariners from the age of fifteen up to the age of sixty that

are left on the seashores of your domain," because the "sea captains

38 The two edicts, both dated Tansho 16 (1588).7.8 and issued over Hideyoshi's vermilion seal,

were meant to have a universal application; hence they have no particular addressee. For the

prohibition of piracy, see Tokyo daigaku shiryo hensanjo, ed.,DaiNihon

komonjo,

iewake 11:

Kobayakawa-ke

monjo,

vol. 1 (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1979), no. 502, pp. 478-9.

For the sword hunt edict, see ibid., no. 503, pp. 479-81.

39 John Whitney Hall, "Japan's Sixteenth-Century Revolution," in George Elison and Bardwell

Smith, eds., Warlords, Artists, &

Commoners:

Japan in the Sixteenth Century (Honolulu:

University of Hawaii Press, 1981), p. 15. On the applicability to fishermen, see Miki

Seiichiro, Teppo to sono jidai, vol. 108 of Kyoikusha rekishi shinsho "Nihonshi" (Tokyo:

Kyoikusha, 1981), pp. 175-7-