Chapter 818: Executing the Wokou by Firing Squad

Zong Yizhen turned his head and glanced at the retainer who had advised him to abandon the castle and flee. This man was Sasu Moriya, the chief elder of the Tsushima Sō clan — clearly a loyal and devoted samurai!

"Baka!" Zong Yizhen truly wanted to flee, but he still gritted his teeth and rebuked him, "Sasu! Do you want to make me a criminal who abandons the soil of Japan and runs away?"

"But..." Sasu Moriya said, "But the Mongols came too suddenly. There is no time to gather men. There are only 48 people in Fuchū Castle right now."

The Tsushima Sō clan was a daimyo of the hundred-thousand-koku rank, which in theory meant it could field an armed force of three to four thousand men — that number, of course, was not a standing army but the figure after mobilization.

But the Tsushima Sō clan's rank was nominal. It only indicated the clan's status, not that it truly held a hundred thousand koku of territory. Because Tsushima Island was covered in mountains with little land suitable for growing rice, it was also a "no-koku" domain. However, the Tsushima Sō clan also held a small plot of land in Hizen Province on Kyushu with a yield of ten thousand koku, so its actual koku rating was ten thousand.

Of course, although the Sō clan's actual koku rating was pitifully small, that did not mean the house was poor. On the contrary, the Tsushima Sō clan was one of the rare wealthy daimyo in Japan, and the Sō clan's wealth came from trade.

Because the Sō clan, which had long ruled Tsushima Island, served as the bridge for intercourse and trade between Japan and Joseon, the Sō clan was not only a vassal of the Tokugawa shogunate but also held the status of an outer vassal of the Joseon kingdom. And the Tokugawa shogunate, for the convenience of its diplomacy with Joseon, also recognized the Sō clan's "one servant, two masters" status.

From a legal standpoint, the Tsushima Sō clan could not by any reckoning be considered true wokou. They were only "Wo" and not "kou" — a wealthy merchant lord.

Because the Sō clan was an outer vassal of Joseon, it was permitted to establish a "Waegwan" in Joseon's Busan, and at the same time received permission to send twenty "annual tribute ships" to Busan each year.

And the Tokugawa shogunate also needed to conduct negotiations with the Joseon kingdom through the Sō clan — the shogunate's way of thinking was rather strange. On the one hand, it wanted to establish diplomatic relations with Joseon and ease the hostile relations caused by Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasion of Joseon; on the other hand, it was unwilling to conduct equal diplomacy with Joseon, instead wanting to treat Joseon as a country one rank below Japan.

Because of this rather impractical diplomatic outlook, the shogunate was not very willing to deal directly with Joseon, so it granted the Sō clan great diplomatic authority. This allowed the Sō clan to treat Japan-Joseon diplomacy as a business, and over thirty or forty years they accumulated enormous wealth, with financial resources far exceeding those of daimyo who truly held a hundred-thousand-koku rank.

But this financial power could not quickly be converted into combat power, because the Sō clan's wealth was not built on industrial and commercial cities with large populations, nor on farmland with large populations, but on a few merchant ships — the quota of twenty "annual tribute ships" did not mean twenty ships, but rather the quota of ships that could enter Busan harbor to trade each year. From Busan to Hakata was not far; one ship could easily make twenty round trips in a year.

So the military force the Sō clan could control at hand was very limited — just a small number of retainers and the sailors on a few merchant ships. Moreover, most of these merchant ships were not at Tsushima Island but at Hakata and Nagasaki.

If the Mongol navy had given the Tsushima Sō clan a little time to prepare, the Tsushima house could have spent money to hire soldiers. In this era, the one thing Japan had no shortage of was samurai (ronin). If the Tsushima house's savings were brought out, an army of ten thousand ronin could be gathered in northern Kyushu without even needing to go to southern Kyushu.

But the Tsushima house never imagined the Mongols would come. What era was this? How could there be a "Mongol invasion"?

So now there were fewer than 180 samurai in total on Tsushima Island, and they were scattered in various places — Tsushima Island was not one island, but two large islands, north and south, plus many small islands. Although there was only one Fuchū Castle (the other castles had all been demolished by order of the shogunate), there were still many villages that needed samurai to administer.

Therefore, here at Fuchū Castle, Zong Yizhen could only muster a mere 48 men!

And most of these 48 men were not professionals at killing people. The samurai whose job was killing were called "banyaku," and they did not make up a high proportion of the domain's retainers.

Even if all 48 of these men were banyaku samurai, resisting an attack by several thousand Mongol invaders with sturdy ships and powerful cannon would still be utterly hopeless.

But Zong Yizhen still did not dare to simply run away. He would have to commit seppuku! How painful that would be!

"Even with 48 men, we will fight to the end!" Zong Yizhen gritted his teeth and roared with tears streaming down his face, "Men of the Sō clan would rather die than surrender!"

The wokou of the Tsushima Sō clan were fake, and Oboi, this "Mongol invader," was of course also fake — but the war was real, and it was being fought in deadly earnest!

The baturu of the Plain Blue Banner's Europa jalan, De Belasco, was a genuine Spanish naval officer, and a veteran captain at that, who had participated in at least dozens of naval combat operations, with extremely rich experience in both warfare and navigation.

To avoid being discovered and intercepted by the "Japanese fleet" stationed at Geoje Island, De Belasco commanded his fleet to use the cover of night to detour through the open sea, circling directly to the southeast of Tsushima's southern island — that is, passing through the waters near Japan's Kyushu — and appearing to the east of Izuhara Town's harbor.

Then, the five Western-style armed merchant ships (not all provided by Spain) formed a bombardment column with the New East as flagship and began shelling the two small batteries at the entrance to Izuhara Town's harbor with 6-pounder naval guns.

They did not intend to destroy them, only to draw the wokou's attention.

At the same time, the Manchu First Baturu Oboi led his 1,000 "Elite Camp" warriors ashore at an undefended bay about ten li north of Izuhara Town and Fuchū Castle, and occupied a fishing village. They had truly come to the wokou's lair to fight the wokou!

Oboi, who had heard many tales from the Koreans about how ferocious the wokou were, did not dare let down his guard at this moment.

He divided his Elite Camp into three. One niru guarded the fishing village and built fortifications. The other two niru, carrying "light muskets" produced in the "Barcelona Prefecture of Spain" that could be fitted with bayonets, lit their match cords, fixed their socket bayonets, and advanced in clusters of a hundred men along the mountain roads straight toward Fuchū Castle.

The landing of over a thousand men and their cautious advance took up considerable time, and also gave Zong Yizhen, who had at one point been prepared to hole up in the castle and defend to the death, an illusion — he thought he could somehow work a miracle of one man beating ten.

So that evening — the evening of the eleventh day of the third month of the second year of Jōō in Japan — he made the wrong decision to venture out and launch a surprise attack.

Because of the mobilization over the previous half day, Zong Yizhen's retainers had already gathered nearly 300 miscellaneous soldiers from nearby Izuhara Town — all fishermen and small peddlers. Fuchū Castle at this time held enough weapons and armor to equip 3,000 men (a hundred-thousand-koku rank entitled one to that much equipment), so Zong Yizhen organized these miscellaneous soldiers and the castle's samurai into a 320-man "Mongol-Subduing Army" according to the formation methods then current in Japan (mixing arquebusiers, pikemen, and mounted samurai), and then personally led them out of the castle to set an ambush, hoping to catch the enemy off guard.

The plan was quite good, but a major problem arose in its execution.

Because most of the Sō clan's samurai and miscellaneous soldiers were not professionals at killing people, and even the professionals were experiencing their first battle today — every one of them was extremely nervous.

So before Oboi's vanguard even entered the ambush zone, several arquebusiers trembling with nerves fired wildly, and the remaining arquebusiers, not understanding the situation, saw others firing and fired along with them.

The battlefield was instantly filled with the choking smell of gunpowder smoke!

But unlike the jittery wokou, the warriors under Oboi were all battle-hardened veterans, and had also been drilled by the "Europa bannermen" and had secretly learned the Ming army's "bayonet tactics," so not a single one of them fired wildly.

Not only did they not fire wildly, they directly raised their bayonet-fixed muskets and formed several "skirmish lines" (in reality just a rough deployment — the terrain on Tsushima Island was rugged, and proper formations could not be spread out), and pressed toward the wokou who had finished firing their arquebuses.

The samurai and miscellaneous soldiers under Zong Yizhen had no idea what a bayonet was, and since the light was somewhat dim at the time, they also failed to notice that the "short spears" their opponents carried were actually muskets fitted with blades. So they charged out of the woods in confusion, rushing headlong at the "Mongol invaders'" muskets... What awaited them, of course, was volley after volley of ranked gunfire!

(End of Chapter)