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5 Pirates, Gunpowder, and Christianity in Late Sixteenth-Century Japan Maria Grazia Petrucci In the late sixteenth century, more than sixty domains, each ruled by a warlord, and often in conflict with each other, divided Japan territorially. In southern Japan, the disputes among warlords incited political and social instability, but as this coincided with the arrival of Chinese outlaws and Portuguese adventurers, it also brought about economic opportunities for the lower strata of the population, particularly ambitious warriors, mercenaries, and pirates. They exploited the period of warfare by finding diverse occupations, by switching their loyalties, and by engaging in profitable activities, such as trade and smuggling. The participation of Japanese warlords in international trade, who used the pirates’ services to sustain their wars of conquest, further augmented their window of opportunity. I contend that the strong daimyo or warlords of southern Japan, acting as catalysts for Chinese outlaws, Japanese pirates, and Portuguese traders, created ideal conditions in their territories for the upward social mobility of local Japanese pirates. In fact, by seeking to expand their trading zones throughout the greater China Seas region, powerful Japanese daimyo allowed both Chinese marauders and Japanese pirates to advance to positions of authority and relative independence within Japan’s feudal domains. Three factors help explain this rise in social standing: Chinese brigands found a niche for their exports in Japan, supplying materials for the newly imported Portuguese warfare technology; the daimyo managed to sustain local weapon production; and the Japanese pirates benefited from the expansion in trade by becoming low-ranking retainers of powerful daimyo because of their newly acquired warfare and nautical skills. Hence, the daimyo later legitimized the positions that Japanese pirates had often won by force. This gave the pirates the opportunity to fulfill various occupational roles, and to accelerate the economic expansion taking place by revitalizing sea routes and harbor towns along the paths of their activities. 60 Maria Grazia Petrucci Goto and Bungo between Chinese Outlaws and Portuguese Traders The Japanese and Chinese pirates, known in the sixteenth century by such terms as kaizoku and wakō, operated during a period of early international economic globalization in which Western expansion clashed with East Asian domestic and foreign policies. In the 1550s, China, eager to protect its coast from foreign raiders and keen to maintain official trading under the umbrella of its tributary system, issued a series of bans on maritime trade that, however, had the unintended consequences of increasing piracy on the South China coast, and causing some of the major “piratical” gangs to relocate elsewhere in Asia (as Igawa Kenji explains in the following chapter). In southern Japan, the daimyo of the Matsuura, Ouchi, and Ōtomo families, welcomed the foreign traders, who brought economic benefits to their fiefs (Goto, Hizen, Bungo, and Nagato). These daimyo effectively achieved a symbiosis with both external and indigenous pirates (see Map 5.1). The period between the 1550s and the 1590s proved crucial for understanding piracy in light of the geopolitical and economic changes occurring in China and Japan, on both domestic and international levels. Sakurai Eiji has shown that marginal geographic and economic circumstances had often forced individuals to lead lives of crime and turn into pirates. Sakurai’s original work also claimed that the pirates, whom he labeled kaizoku, played dual roles as “sea robbers” and “maritime guards.”1 Fulfilling these various functions, Japanese pirates assumed multiple positions in society. There, many pirates who began as petty looters managed to expand their fleets and extort passage fees along important bottleneck straits in the Seto Inland Sea, elevating their standing to what Peter Shapinsky has called “sea lords,” with rights and duties similar to those of land-based lords.2 Of course, not all Japanese pirates became successful sea lords. However, in this period of economic expansion and maritime bans, skilled individuals in lower social echelons could rise in status by taking advantage of the many possibilities offered by the changing economic needs of Japanese warlords, such as the Matsuura, Ōtomo, and Ouchi, and the determination of Chinese outlaws to engage in trade. In China, the Ming government made an effort to eliminate the pillaging of coastal areas by issuing stringent bans on sea trade, but these were loosely enforced before the 1550s, thereby giving private merchants the opportunity to sail abroad and trade, even though it was nominally illegal. One of these merchants who turned pirate was Wang Zhi. According to the Illustrated Compendium...

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