Chapter 1106: Come Be the Great Ming's Running Dogs! (Seeking Subscriptions)

"Examinations?" Matsudaira Nobutsuna's brow was still furrowed. "My Lord, how many men do you intend to take? There are hundreds of thousands of samurai with no stipend to inherit. Recruiting a few hundred will hardly solve the problem!"

"Then recruit twenty thousand!" Tokugawa Mitsukuni gritted his teeth. "We can form them into a new army and use it to suppress the rebels in the western provinces! As long as we can pacify the traitorous factions of Toyotomi, Shimazu, and Mori, we can seize at least one million koku—enough to support twenty thousand new troops!"

This civil examination was also rather pitiful—only by passing could one become a mere soldier. Still, having a soldier's post was better than being a ronin!

"But what do we do right now?" Matsudaira Nobutsuna said. "The shogunate's finances are strained. How can we support twenty thousand new troops? And to raise a new army we also need guns, cannon, and gunpowder—all of that costs money!"

"We can borrow!" Tokugawa Mitsukuni said. "Borrow one million taels from the Celestial Court's banks, and that should be enough to build the twenty thousand new troops."

"The Celestial Court may not be willing to lend," Matsudaira Nobutsuna said. "The Celestial Court would probably be happy to see Tokugawa in the east and Toyotomi in the west."

Tokugawa Mitsukuni shook his head and said, "No. If three thousand Spaniards had not joined the western Toyotomi, the Celestial Court might indeed have sat back and done nothing. But now—the Celestial Court will not permit Spain to sink roots in Japan."

"Moreover, the Celestial Emperor is vastly ambitious. He has long wanted to drive the Westerners' power out of the Southern Seas, but he suffers from a shortage of troops—the Celestial Court does not have that many samurai! So he has always wanted to recruit soldiers in our country. This time, by holding civil examinations, we have also given the Celestial Court a great opportunity to recruit troops on a large scale!"

"Your Majesty, this is a memorial from the Tokugawa shogunate, submitted in the name of your subject Minamoto Ietsuna, King of Japan!"

Luo Dagong, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Great Ming, had received the memorial that very day—sent from the Foreign Ministry officials stationed in Yingtian Prefecture through the Left Office of Transmission to Wuhan—and had eagerly gone to East Lake Palace to request an audience.

Emperor Zhu was at that moment dancing with the little foreign filly Mancini in the Western Pavilion of East Lake Palace—dancing a strange sort of European court minuet that looked rather like two penguins hopping about to an out-of-tune dance tune played by a eunuch Western-style band.

If Mary Mancini had not promised to serve as a model for one hour for Zhu Cilang, who had recently taken a liking to sketching, Zhu Cilang would never have accompanied her in the penguin dance!

By the time Luo Dagong reached the dance floor of the Western Pavilion, Zhu Cilang and Mancini had just finished a dance and were seated, drinking afternoon tea—a milk tea Mancini had prepared herself, very fragrant, sweet, and delicious.

This kind of milk tea had recently begun to spread in Europe as well. It was said that Louis XIV was extremely fond of the taste of Mancini's milk tea, and under his influence, milk tea quickly became all the rage in French aristocratic circles, and was now spreading into Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy.

"Submitted in the name of our subject the King of Japan, is it?" Zhu Cilang savored his milk tea and smiled. "What does the memorial say?"

Luo Dagong had already seated himself in a round-backed armchair, and had just accepted a cup of milk tea from Mary Mancini's hand. Before he had a chance to drink, he heard Zhu Cilang's question.

"Your Majesty, Minamoto Ietsuna's memorial says that Japan is going to hold civil examinations, and they hope we can send people to provide guidance."

"Japan... civil examinations?"

"Yes!" Luo Dagong said. "Were it not for this matter, I would not have been in such a hurry to request an audience."

Zhu Cilang nodded. "It is indeed a good thing. Japan has finally taken this step. Joseon and Annam long ago established civil examinations just as our dynasty did, and that is why Confucian learning flourished there and their countries have enjoyed peace and stability.

But Japan has Confucian learning without civil examinations, and therefore its Confucian learning does not flourish, the state is unstable, internal strife never ceases, samurai fight one another, and the common people have no peace—truly like a hell on earth!"

Emperor Zhu's claim that Japan was a hell on earth was well founded!

Whether it was Zheng Jiangong, who had spent many years in Japan, or Tokugawa Taka and Takada Miho, who had come from Japan into Emperor Zhu's rear palace, all said that Japan was a hell for peasants—with so many samurai in Japan, what did they eat? What did they drink? What did they use to amuse themselves with geisha and keep mistresses? In the final analysis, they fed on the peasants! And these samurai were all professional head-choppers, utterly unafraid of peasant uprisings. Even if peasants did not rebel, they might be seized for sword-testing; if they dared rebel, would they not be hacked to pieces?

So Japan's peasants lived in hell! And the reason they could live "peacefully" in hell was that the people in hell had developed an effective method of controlling population growth to ease the pressure between people and land—primogeniture and apprenticeship service.

The former essentially stripped all non-eldest sons in a family of their inheritance rights and their right to reproduce! In ordinary farming families, a non-eldest son who reached the age of ten would generally leave home to make a living in the towns and markets, a practice called apprenticeship service, becoming cheap labor for commerce and handicrafts.

And Japan's commerce and industry, severely repressed under the domain-bakufu system, in fact had no capacity to absorb this surplus rural labor. So the vast majority of non-eldest sons who went into service could never scrape together enough money to marry and establish a household, and in the end lived out their lives alone and wretched—and their sacrifice bought the stability of Japanese society.

Of course, primogeniture existed not only among ordinary commoner families; the vast majority of samurai families likewise could only practice primogeniture. Because most samurai families also had little stipend to pass down, non-eldest sons often sank into becoming country samurai or ronin, and they in turn became a destabilizing factor in Japanese society!

In other words, the non-eldest sons of peasant families who could not wield a sword became cheap labor—unmarried, childless, serving until death, and thereby securing the peace of the Tokugawa shogunate. While the non-eldest sons of samurai families who could wield a sword roamed the country with their great blades, ready to make trouble at any opportunity, leaving the shogunate to bear the consequences!

To call such a country a hell would hardly be wrong.

"Your Majesty," Luo Dagong, who still knew something of Japan—he too knew Japan was a hell and knew the causes of that hell—said, "relying on civil examinations alone, I fear, will not be enough to resolve Japan's predicament."

"Is there not still the Celestial Court?" Zhu Cilang smiled. "Dagong, why do you think Tokugawa Mitsukuni submitted the memorial in Ietsuna's name to request guidance? Do you think he truly does not know how to hold examinations?"

Indeed—Tokugawa Mitsukuni was so clever; how could he not know how to hold examinations? It was simply a matter of using difficult questions to eliminate most people. But the problem was that those eliminated professional head-choppers would still make trouble!

In fact, what gave Mitsukuni the greatest headache now was not Toyotomi's western army, but the ever-growing number of professional head-choppers in Japan for whom no place could be found!

"Your Majesty, you mean—"

Zhu Cilang smiled. "These past few years the Tokugawa shogunate has behaved with great deference, and We are well pleased! Now they have begun to emulate the Celestial Court by instituting civil examinations, which shows they sincerely intend to come over to us. What reason, then, do We have not to lend a hand? The shogunate's difficulty is simply that there are too many samurai with no way out. We shall give them a way out!

It is merely forty taels of silver a year. Recruit a hundred thousand or eighty thousand, and a year costs no more than four million. For use in the Southern Seas, that is still very good value!"

So Tokugawa Mitsukuni's purpose in memorializing the Celestial Court was to hint that the Ming court should take part in this Japanese civil examination—the Tokugawa shogunate would use the examinations to recruit a batch of officials and a samurai army, while the Great Ming Celestial Court would seize the opportunity to recruit a batch of failed non-eldest-son samurai to go abroad and serve as cannon fodder.

In this era, losses in land warfare in the Southern Seas were calculated thus: however many died in battle was one matter, but first the various epidemics would wipe out half your force!

How could Zhu Cilang bear to send the new army he had so painstakingly built to the Southern Seas? Moreover, ordinary new army troops simply could not endure such a death rate from disease. Only the Nine Borders Youth Army could endure it—and the Nine Borders Youth Army was so precious; how could it be expended like that?

Besides, Emperor Zhu still wanted to send the Nine Borders Youth Army to the New World to conquer territory!

They had few ties in the Ming homeland, so they could serve long-term in the New World; and their training was of such high quality that one of them could match several ordinary soldiers—they were the most suited for the New World.

As for the Southern Seas, they would still have to use worthless Japanese samurai to charge ahead!

Zhu Cilang had already risen to his feet and said with a smile to Luo Dagong, "We have long wanted to strike hard in the Southern Seas, but could not bear to spend the lives of the new army.

Now all is well. With Japanese samurai to charge into battle, the lands of the Southern Seas will sooner or later belong to the Celestial Court!"

(End of Chapter)