Wokou

• 1. Introduction

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  The word wokou means Japanese pirates. For roughly four centuries, from the 13th to the 17th, they raided the coasts of China and Korea. Yet the History of Ming says a wokou raiding party in 1555 was 70 percent Han Chinese and only 30 percent ethnic Japanese. That gap between the label and the crews is the puzzle at the heart of this story. Who were these raiders, really? Why did a name pointing at one island nation come to cover so many peoples? And what could have driven them from the sea after so many generations?

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• 2. A Name Carved in Stone

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  In Ji'an, in modern Jilin, China, a monument called the Gwanggaeto Stele holds the first recorded use of the term wokou. It was raised to celebrate the exploits of Gwanggaeto the Great of Goguryeo. The inscription says that wokou, written 倭寇 and meaning Japanese robbers, crossed the sea and were defeated by him in 404.

  The word joins two Chinese terms. Wō can mean dwarfs, or it can serve as a pejorative label for the Japanese. Kòu simply means bandit.

  Scholars divide the piracy itself into two academic periods. The early wokou mostly made camp on outlying islands of the Japanese archipelago, in the Sea of Japan. They raided Japanese as well as Chinese and Koreans. The wokou of the 16th century, by contrast, were mostly not Japanese. That 404 inscription is many centuries older than the first of these two eras, so the label was already ancient when the raiding began.

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• 3. Fallout From the Mongols

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  The Mongol invasions of Japan gave birth to the early wokou. The war weakened coastal defenses in China and Korea significantly. At the same time, people living on Tsushima, Iki and the Gotō Islands in Kyushu fell into extreme poverty. Looting along the Chinese and Korean coasts gradually intensified.

  Korean records describe the raids as especially rampant from roughly 1350. Almost annual attacks struck the southern provinces of Jeolla and Gyeongsang. The raiders then pushed north into Chungcheong and Gyeonggi. The History of Goryeo records a sea battle in 1380 in which one hundred warships were sent to Jinpo to rout the pirates there. That victory freed 334 captives, and raids decreased afterward.

  Gunpowder is credited with the final expulsion, because the wokou lacked it. Goryeo had founded the Office of Gunpowder Weapons in 1377. The office was abolished twelve years later.

  Force was not the only tool. Chŏng Mong-ju was dispatched to Japan to deal with the problem. During his visit, the Kyushu governor Imagawa Sadayo suppressed the wokou and returned their captured property and people to Korea.

  Punishment could be brutal. In 1405, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu sent 20 captured pirates to China, where they were boiled in a cauldron in Ningbo. Fourteen years later, Korean ships would sail for Tsushima itself.

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• 4. The Tsushima Expedition

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  On the 19th of June 1419, General Yi Chongmu led a fleet of 227 ships and 17,285 soldiers out of Geoje Island toward Tsushima. Known as the Ōei Invasion, it was the largest operation ever mounted against the wokou.

  The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, a Korean history book, report the first day's results. On the 20th of June, Korean troops captured 129 wokou ships and burned 1,939 houses. They killed 114 people and captured 21. They also rescued 131 Chinese whom the wokou had been holding.

  The campaign soured quickly. On the 29th of June, the Koreans burned 15 more ships and 68 houses, killed 9 people and freed 15 captives, both Chinese and Korean. But the wokou killed more than 100 Korean soldiers. By the 3rd of July, the army had withdrawn to Geoje Island. The Koreans gave up on landing again and occupying Tsushima because of their losses and worsening weather.

  The casualty count is disputed. The record for the 10th of July corrected the number of soldiers killed by the wokou to 180. Documents kept by the Sō clan put the Korean death toll at 2,500.

  Peace came by treaty rather than conquest. In 1443, Joseon and Sō Sadamori of Tsushima concluded the Treaty of Gyehae, which gave the Sō clan trade privileges. Wokou activity along the Korean Peninsula calmed down. On China's coast, however, the raiding went on.

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• 5. The Sea Ban

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  The Ningbo incident of 1523 broke order on the offshore islands of Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, including Shuangyu. Out of that collapse came the Jiajing wokou raids, which terrorized the Chinese coast in the 1550s.

  Ming policy had set the stage. Seeking to centralize political control, the dynasty banned trade, on the consensus that "unrestricted trade would lead to chaos". With maritime commerce outlawed, China's navy was reduced. It could no longer fight the smuggling that grew up in the ban's place, and the wokou took control of the southeastern coast.

  Major wokou groups of the 16th century were led by Chinese traders whose livelihoods had been halted by the bans. Corruption made matters worse. Many Chinese officials had ties to the pirates and profited from them, which made it hard for central authorities to gain control.

  A tally of approximate pirate raids on Ming China, sorted by reign period, reports a total of 746. The Jiajing reign, which ran from 1522 to 1566, accounts for by far the largest share. To break the pirates' hold, the Ming would turn to a pair of commanders.

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• 6. Defending the Coast

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  Two names stand out among the Chinese commanders who fought the wokou, Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou. Yu Dayou was a Ming general assigned to defend the coast.

  In 1553, Qi Jiguang became Assistant Regional Military Commissioner of the Ming dynasty. He was only 26 years old. His orders were to "punish the bandits and guard the people", which meant taking on the wokou attacking the Ming east coast. On the eve of the following year, his successes earned him a promotion to full commissioner in Zhejiang.

  The defenses built against the raiders have not all vanished. Some coastal forts survive in Zhejiang and Fujian. The well-restored Pucheng Fortress stands in Cangnan County, Zhejiang. Chongwu Fortress, in Chongwu, Huai'an County, Fujian, is also well restored. Only ruins remain of the Liu'ao Fortress in Liu'ao, Fujian.

  By the 17th century, Chinese reprisals and strong clamp-downs by Japanese authorities had made the wokou disappear.

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• 7. Pirates, Traders and Missionaries

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  Historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam argues that the wokou had an unexpected side effect. Their existence stimulated clandestine private trade between local traders on the Fujian and Zhejiang coasts and the Portuguese. That trade allowed travellers and Jesuit missionaries, such as Francis Xavier, to record much information about China in the 1540s and early 1550s.

  The Portuguese found their way to Japan in 1543 with help from Wang Zhi, a wokou merchant-mediator who died in 1559. After the Portuguese landed at Tanegashima in the south of Japan, he helped them communicate with the local lord.

  The wokou also had a darker business. Around the 1550s they were recorded as being involved in human trafficking and slavery in Japan. Zheng Shungong's report of 1556 noted 200-300 Chinese slaves in Satsuma who were treated "like cattle" and put to labor. Many Japanese shared that fate.

  The wokou even reached the Philippines. Aparri, in northern Luzon, was established as a pirate city-state under their patronage. Wokou fought Spanish soldiers in the Cagayan battles of 1582. The pirate-warlord Limahong tried and failed to invade Manila. He then set up a temporary pirate state in Caboloan, in Pangasinan, until the Spanish expelled him. Whether the men behind such ventures were truly Japanese is a question historians still argue over.

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• 8. Who Were They Really

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  Censor Du Zhonglu, in a memorial dated 1553, gave a very different breakdown of the pirates. He said they were 10 percent barbarian people and 20 percent Ryukyuans, with the rest from the Fujian and Ningbo areas of China. The historian Ray Huang saw collaboration instead. In his account, Japanese pirates frequently worked with Chinese groups, and Japan served as a base that supplied much of the military expertise and equipment.

  In 1966, Professor Takeo Tanaka of the University of Tokyo proposed that the early wokou were Koreans living on the outlying islands. A vassal named Yi Sun-mong, who lived from 1386 to 1449, once told King Sejong that only one or two raiders in ten had been real Japanese. According to Yi, Korean peasants had dressed in Japanese clothing and formed gangs. His proposed cure was the Hopae, a personal identification system.

  Other researchers give Yi's claim little weight. He did not live in Goryeo times, so he was probably repeating rumour or legend. His speech was also mainly about weakened national security, and he may have leaned on unreliable information to make his case. The Goryeosa records 529 wokou raids between 1223 and 1392. It mentions "fake Japanese" only three times.

  The prevailing view comes from Shōsuke Murai, who showed in 1988 that the early wokou came from multiple ethnic groups rather than a single nation. He describes them as "marginal men" living in politically unstable areas without national allegiances, an idea akin to the Zomia thesis. Supporters point to Ajibaldo, one of the early leaders. Period sources variously called him Mongolian, Japanese, Korean and an "islander", and his name appears to be of Korean and Mongolian origin.

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