Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan by Peter D. Shapinsky (review)

Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan. By Peter D. Shapinsky. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2014. xiv, 326 pages. $65.00, cloth; $25.00, paper.

In this long-awaited study, Peter Shapinsky literally opens new territory with regard to our understanding and definitions of medieval lordship, casting his eye seaward, to explore sixteenth-century Japan “from the water-line” (p. 7). Despite their obvious importance to an island nation, mariners, navies, and maritime activity have hitherto received surprisingly little attention from premodern historians, particularly those publishing in English. In fact, George Ballard’s 1921 overview of naval history, a handful of studies of thirteenth- to fifteenth-century “Japanese pirate” (wakō) activities in the coastal waters of China and Korea, and brief treatments of eighth- to twelfth-century sea banditry in broader monographs on Heian warriors and warfare constitute pretty much the extent of the literature on this subject.¹ Shapinsky’s new volume is a welcome contribution.

He focuses his study on the fortunes of a group of loosely related families surnamed Murakami, who plied the waters of the Seto Inland Sea. Although Shapinsky uses the term “pirates” in the book’s subtitle, he is quick to point out that the Murakami and their associates had little in common with the eye-patch-wearing, parrot-toting characters familiar to fans of Errol Flynn movies and Disneyland rides. While they did engage in their share of Blackbeard-esque seaborne raiding and banditry, they are, he argues, more properly viewed as maritime counterparts of the land-based daimyō of the period: “sea lords” and masters of autonomous “littoral estates” and networks of people, resources, and travel lanes, in Shapinsky’s terminology.

Such sea lords, he says, operated primarily in the islands and channels of the Inland Sea, where waterways served as the principal routes for travel, communication, and transport of goods. Here they built domains based on protection networks, control of maritime production and trade, and the patronage of competing land-based patrons and suzerains. Emerging during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they exploited the growth of commercial market systems in and around the Inland Sea area, collecting fees from merchants and political authorities to guarantee safe passage for shipping. By the sixteenth century, they were behaving even more like sengoku daimyō, maintaining coastal fortifications (“sea castles”) at strategic choke points along interisland waterways, and purveying naval forces to the regional hegemons of the era. Their autonomy, which depended on their ability to market their services among competing daimyō, ended when Toyotomi Hideyoshi became strong enough to impose vassalage on them, handling them as he did his other liegemen—including moving them to other parts of the country, away from their ancestral bases, and thereby rendering them indistinguishable from other early modern daimyō.

Shapinsky sharpens his point concerning the resemblance of Murakami predominance and power to other forms of medieval lordship with an extensive discussion of the extent to which medieval and early modern historical sources contrived to conceal the roles of sea lords within the late medieval polity. He argues that written records from the sixteenth century need to be understood as the product of authorities and institutions suffering from what he terms “terracentrism,” a bias that premised land-based authority and political economy as normative, and sought to impose this “particular, self-serving perspective, obscuring alternative visions and agendas” (p. 8). Intriguingly, he notes, the Murakami themselves eventually became party to this same distortion of the historical record, during their early modern transformation into land-based domainal officials and lords, which included the creation of genealogies and chronicles that portrayed their ancestors as faithful retainers to regional lieges—in particular the Mōri and the Tokugawa.

The book is more encyclopedic and descriptive than thesis-centered, offering up a wealth of detailed information on a wide range of subtopics relating to piracy and seafarers in premodern Japan. In his introduction, Shapinsky sets the stage nicely, outlining his reasons for rejecting the term “pirate...