Pirate of the Far East

Introduction: The World of the Pirate

Over a period of ten centuries the coastal areas of China, Korea and Japan were ravaged by bands of fierce pirates. The name given to them appears in Chinese as wokou, and in Korean it is pronounced waegu. In each case the first character in the two-ideograph word is the ancient name given by the inhabitants of China and Korea to Japan, which shows clearly where they believed that their tormentors had come from. In many cases the identification was correct, and the name entered the Japanese language as wako. But piracy in the Far East was by no means confined to one country of origin, and by the mid-16th century individual pirate bands had acquired a decidedly multinational character. Chinese, Korean and even Portuguese freebooters were involved in massive raids on coastal communities. Some of the most influential pirate leaders were renegade Chinese who based themselves on Japanese islands and sailed from there to terrorize their fellow countrymen under the convenient anonymity of ‘wako’ – with a strong emphasis on the character ‘Wa’. That is why the present work is called ‘Pirate of the Far East’ and not simply ‘Pirate of Japan’.

The first use of the expression wokou to refer to raiders from ‘the country of Wa’ appears on a stone tablet erected in AD 414 in southern Manchuria to the memory of the hero King Gwanggaeto of the Goguryeo state of Korea. This was a time when there was considerable military involvement between Japan and Korea’s three kingdoms of Baekje, Silla and Goguryeo. Troops frequently came from Japan to fight on the Korean peninsula, and the use of wokou on the monument probably refers to Baekje’s willing use of Japanese troops in its wars against Goguryeo rather than pirate raids in the later meaning of the term. Several centuries had to pass before the word wako was to become associated with ongoing raids arising from uncontrolled aggression that was usually and casually attributed to Japan.

Indeed at that time the prevailing image held by the inhabitants of continental East Asia of the Japanese was a positive one. Japanese armies frequently fought in Korea as the allies of the Baekje kingdom, on whose behalf they suffered a heavy defeat at the battle of the Baekcheon river in 663. Otherwise the only Japanese visitors to China and Korea were cultivated diplomats, earnest students, or disciplined Buddhist monks in search of truth. In 719 the arrival of a group of envoys from Japan to China occasioned the comment that Japan was a ‘country of gentlemen, where the people are prosperous and happy and etiquette is carefully observed’.

During the ninth century, in fact, the Japanese tended to be the victims of piracy, not its perpetrators. In 811, 813, 893 and 894 Korean pirates took advantage of the turmoil caused by the break-up of the Unified Silla Kingdom to raid Japan, but eventually suffered heavy casualties and withdrew. Japanese pirates did exist, but their activities were confined to domestic targets. These were the days when the emperors of Japan were beginning to hire local landowners with military skills – the first samurai – to guard the palace in the capital city of Nara and to protect them against rebels and evildoers. The early samurai were frequently called upon to quell pirate raids, either from Korea or from their fellow countrymen. The perpetrators of these domestic outrages were not called wako; there was no confusion over their native origin. Instead they are referred to as kaizoku, which literally means ‘sea robbers’ and became the generic term for Japanese pirates operating within Japan.