Chapter 841: Troubled Waves Beyond the Naniwa Capital

In the seventh year of Shaoming of the Great Zhou, on the eighteenth day of the third month, after Murong Xinzhang had already led his army ashore at Dazaifu, the dawdling Japanese combined land and sea forces finally arrived near the Akamagaseki Pass.

The commander leading the army was still Ono no Yoshifuru, the same man who ten years earlier had been appointed Pursuit Commissioner of the San'yodo and had taken part in suppressing the rebellion of Fujiwara no Sumitomo.

And after his superior, the Great General Who Subdues the Barbarians Fujiwara no Tadafumi, had died of illness, this man had at last gained the title of Great General Who Subdues the West.

One must understand that in an age when even the Great General Who Subdues the Barbarians could be called the Great General Who Subdues the East, the Great General Who Subdues the West, paired with the Subduer of the East, also held very high status.

But Ono no Yoshifuru, now sixty-eight years old, no longer had the same composure he had possessed when he marched out ten years before.

For back then, although Fujiwara no Sumitomo was the pirate chief of the Seto Inland Sea, his entire strength amounted to no more than four hundred-odd warships and three thousand-odd warriors, and even counting the sailors he had only around ten thousand men.

Moreover, although Japan at this time was an island nation, its shipbuilding capacity was not strong at all; they could barely manage flat-bottomed boats, let alone anything more advanced.

This was also the result of the court's deliberate suppression, because Japan at this time was a bargain-bin version of the Great Song.

Ever since they had used the envoys to the Tang to secure their own "Treaty of Chanyuan," the whole of Japan, freed from the worry of foreign invasion, had begun vigorously suppressing the warrior class.

The thinking of the emperor and the court nobles in Heian-kyo was this: if the low-ranking warriors gained the ability to build large seagoing ships, then the court would have to keep pace, or else it would lose control of the provinces.

But shipbuilding was such a waste of money and manpower! Better to conscript those resources and let everyone enjoy them.

So they simply adopted this absurd and laughable policy of being an island nation while doing everything possible to suppress the shipbuilding industry.

Ono no Yoshifuru had spent decades in the military, until his beard and hair had turned white, and he naturally knew that the Yan bandits and the pirates of the Seto Inland Sea were not the same thing at all.

However arrogant the Seto Inland Sea pirates might be, they still sailed small boats and played by the maritime rules of Japan itself.

But the Yan bandits had crossed the sea from Silla, and the fact that they could send tens of thousands of troops across the strait in the depths of winter at least proved that their warships were tall and stable, and their seamanship was probably beyond anything his own side could match.

And so, after leading his great army to the Sabagawa River, more than seventy li from Akamagaseki, Ono no Yoshifuru refused to go any farther.

With their flat-bottomed boats, once they entered the deep waters west of the Makan Strait they would certainly be no match for the Yan fleet in battle, so they might as well wait here in the shallows.

At the same time, of the fifty thousand combined land and sea troops Ono no Yoshifuru had brought this time, only the four hundred-odd large and small ships under his direct command, along with the thirteen or fourteen thousand sailors and marines aboard them, had actually arrived.

Because Japan's naval transport capacity was insufficient, there was no way to bring large numbers of land troops over by sea.

The thirty thousand-odd land troops were still trudging along near Itsukushima (Hiroshima), more than a hundred li away, and in order to retake the Saikaido, Ono no Yoshifuru had no choice but to wait for them to arrive.

So after ordering the fleet to rest and refit at the mouth of the Sabagawa, Ono no Yoshifuru immediately sent men to notify the Koreans at Akamagaseki.

Although the situation was already fairly clear, Ono no Yoshifuru still did not quite trust these Koreans, and after much deliberation he simply issued an order demanding that the Korean fleet leave the naval port east of Akamagaseki and rush to the mouth of the Sabagawa.

When Hong Sangdong received this order, his whole body went numb, and he quickly realized what Ono no Yoshifuru meant.

This was to make the several thousand sailors under his command serve as bait to lure the Yan pirate fleet over!

Because if the Yan pirate fleet ignored them, the Korean and Japanese fleets could join forces, and since the Korean fleet was quite familiar with the combat capabilities of Murong Xinzhang's fleet, once the two sides exchanged intelligence, the tactics they devised would certainly be more effective.

But if Murong Xinzhang sent his fleet in pursuit, then the Koreans would still be holding the Makan Strait, and if the battle went well it would be fine, but if it became a stalemate or went badly, having their retreat cut off would be fatal.

After two days of agonizing, in the end, with no choice but to bow his head under someone else's roof, Hong Sangdong ordered his own nephew Hong Gyeong to take one thousand sailors and two thousand oarsmen, man the great majority of the Korean warships, seize the favorable wind, and burst out of the harbor, heading east all the way to join the Japanese fleet.

The mouth of the Sabagawa, near what would later be the Japanese city of Hofu, was at this time still only a crude little fishing harbor, and so it could not hold several hundred warships.

Ono no Yoshifuru did not dare moor all his warships in the harbor either, for if they were blockaded it would be a disaster.

So the Japanese fleet was scattered among the nearby large and small bays and islands, and Ono no Yoshifuru had simple beacon towers built nearby to relay messages.

In the seventh year of Shaoming, on the twenty-seventh day of the third month, at noon, the Korean pirate Hong Gyeong led more than a hundred warships at full speed to the Sabagawa, and after Ono no Yoshifuru confirmed everything was in order, he ordered Hong Gyeong's warships to enter the mouth of the Sabagawa as well.

At weizheng (two in the afternoon), the warships led by Chen Hui also arrived on the sea outside the Sabagawa.

In this battle Chen Hui had mobilized a total of eleven thousand men from the Henghai naval force, plus the four thousand men of the former Jinghai Coastal Defense Command, now the imperial guard's Jinghai naval force, brought by Zhao Yanjin.

In addition there were more than a thousand sailors who had volunteered for the campaign, making sixteen thousand men in all, and counting the oarsmen a full thirty thousand.

Hong Gyeong watched the Yan fleet advancing ceaselessly over the rolling waves on the distant horizon, his eyes filled with despair.

From observation alone, in the distance there were at least two tower ships and more than thirty combat junks.

These were all great ships of over a thousand liao, and at the naval battle of Jeolyeong Island, Hong Gyeong had suffered enough at the hands of these great ships; if the enemy simply charged at them, the waves alone could swamp and sink their little boats.

And looking back at the Japanese side — damn it, after two or three hundred years, their so-called warships were still about the same as they had been at the Battle of Baekgang.

No! They seemed even worse. They did not even have a few warships of five hundred liao (one hundred sixty or seventy tons). What the hell was the point of fighting!

Hong Gyeong looked at his deputy, who was likewise drenched in cold sweat, and asked: "Have the men sent to make contact returned? Not one of the three groups of envoys has come back?"

The deputy shook his head bitterly and said: "No, none of them have returned. It seems it is the same as before — either the Yan men killed them or imprisoned them."

"Motherfucker!" Hong Gyeong roared with false bravado, though his face looked as if he were about to cry.

Even as he cursed, he tore the futou from his head in a few quick motions and flung it onto the deck — the headwrap he had painstakingly practiced wearing for so long in order to pass himself off as a son of Han.

"This King of Yan truly gives a man no way out! I was even willing to tie up that Hong Sangdong and hand him over to them, and still they would not agree."

The deputy looked at Hong Gyeong, this filial nephew prepared to sell out his own uncle as the price of his life, and felt despair in his heart as well.

"The Yan warships are too powerful; they have no use for us at all, so they do not care in the least whether we surrender. General, we can only fight to the death!"

"Fight to the death, my ass!" Hong Gyeong shook his head rapidly. "Japan is so big, and the King of Yan has only a few tens of thousands of troops. I refuse to believe they can occupy every mountain and river in Japan.

We speak Japanese, and we have several thousand men — there must be some use they can find for us."

Hong Sangdong and Hong Gyeong's branch of the family were originally descendants of the Mok clan, a great family of Baekje.

And after Baekje had been destroyed by the Great Tang, a great many Baekje people had fled to Japan, and it was said that the imperial family of Japan were themselves the descendants of a Baekje prince who had crossed the sea and remained in Japan back when Baekje was still powerful.

Therefore most of Hong Gyeong's people could speak Japanese, and their accent was even closer to that of the Japanese court in Heian-kyo than that of the Japanese in the Kyushu region.

Hong Gyeong had always firmly believed that he could use this advantage to find another way out.

As for his uncle Hong Sangdong, Hong Gyeong did not approve of him; the old man was rigid in his thinking and actually still wanted to remain loyal to the Goryeo royal house.

It was sheer madness. A man of Baekje who did not understand how to read the times, yet still wanted to be a loyal subject of Goryeo — what was he thinking.

Ono no Yoshifuru's face was taut as he watched the enormous fleet appear before him without a word; had his nerve not been extraordinarily strong, he would have turned and fled on the spot.

He finally understood why no one from the Fujiwara family had come to take the post of Great General Who Subdues the West — this was nothing less than a death sentence!

Chen Hui stood at the bow of the Hengbo, dressed in a conspicuous brocade robe, looking thoroughly triumphant.

After all these years, Lin Renzhao, who had once been his equal in reputation, had already become a Commander of the imperial guard, while he had been toiling away in the navy the whole time.

Now he had finally made it. The campaigns against Goryeo and Japan were the moment for this fierce naval general to show his mettle.

Gazing at the hundred or so large and small battle flags standing over the distant sea — they looked imposing, but the warships bearing them were so low and small they seemed like planks floating on the water — Chen Hui could not help laughing aloud.

This was a battle of utterly lopsided strength!

Most of the Wa kingdom's warships were only around a hundred liao (thirty-some tons), carrying a dozen or two sailors and marines.

On his own side, there were more than twenty warships of over a thousand liao. The two sides were simply not in the same class.

"Sheer force overcomes all skill. Today, regardless of wind or current, the whole fleet will advance abreast and help these Wa people recall the old days of Baekgang!" Amid loud laughter, Chen Hui issued the battle order.

Naval warfare at this time did not rely much on speed, because the method of fighting was too simple: mainly, when two ships passed each other, they shot at each other with bows and crossbows and thrust at each other with long spears. At most, the more skilled threw a few fire-oil jars.

As for shooting winch crossbows, hurling stones from catapults, striking with swape poles, and sending fireships downwind—those were the exclusive arts of the Great Tang. The Wa kingdom could not yet afford such things.

Their naval battles consisted of small boats shooting and thrusting at each other on the sea, with larger ships closing in for boarding actions.

And this style of fighting met with great difficulty on rolling, surging seas.

Because the rise and fall was too great, it left bows and crossbows with hardly any power. So Wa naval battles were generally fought in coastal waters where the waves were not high, and the ships' speed was not very fast either.

Of course, when they had the chance, they would also seize the windward position and the favorable current.

With the wind behind them, their arrows carried greater force. With the current behind them, their ships moved faster, and their thrusts could borrow that force—they could even ram and capsize an enemy ship.

But all of this was completely useless against the Great Zhou warships.

Don't be ridiculous. You're going to take your little boats of a few dozen or a hundred liao, with wind and current at your back, and charge thousand-liao and fifteen-hundred-liao great ships? Are you coming to fight or to kill yourselves?

On the sea, gongs and drums sounded in waves. The Great Zhou fleet formed its center with the two tower ships, led by the Hengbo, and its wings with the battle junks, led by the Dingbo. Outside them, large numbers of swift assault ships spread out to envelop the enemy, and a hundred patrol boats fanned out to hunt down stragglers. They deployed directly into a crane-wing formation on the sea and surged toward the Goryeo and Wa fleets.

The Wa navy's war drums also began to pound, but as the Great Zhou fleet drew closer and closer to the Wa fleet, a terrifying pressure bore down on the heart of every Wa man.

A shaven-headed pirate from Iyo Province on the Nankaidō simply stared in stupefaction. He stood at the prow, watching his little boat, which had seized the windward position, sail hopelessly toward the enemy under the strong wind.

The reason for his despair was that what he faced was none other than the Zhou fleet's flagship tower ship, the Hengbo. Before the Hengbo, which towered more than ten zhang high, his little boat, with a total weight of no more than two hundred liao, was like a toy.

The shaven-headed Wa pirate raised the bow in his hand, but suddenly could not summon the will to shoot, because his arrows could not even reach the enemy's gunwales.

When the Hengbo spotted this Wa warship, a creaking sound rang out. The taut swape pole smashed down with tremendous force. The shaven-headed pirate let out a shriek and was the first to leap into the water.

But it was too late. The swape pole, with kinetic force of at least a hundred dan, came crashing down with immense power, and its head was wrapped in iron plate studded with spikes.

That single blow smashed the little Wa boat into a wreck. The hull was nearly broken in two, and of the twenty-some Wa sailors aboard, more than a dozen were crushed to pulp on the spot.

Although the shaven-headed pirate had leaped into the water first, he was still caught by the impact. The tremendous force left him dizzy and dazed.

Though he was an excellent swimmer and could keep himself from sinking into the sea, the crossbowmen on the Hengbo had already noticed him. Almost at the same instant, three crossbows fired at the conspicuous shaven head, and he died on the spot.

Boom! An even greater explosion rang out. It was the cannons on the battle junks fighting on both wings beginning to roar. Though there were not many of them, the impact was truly terrifying.

On this sea, under a gloomy sky with a cold wind carrying the smell of salt and brine, the orange-red flames burst forth as if spewed from the mouth of a hellish demon. The terrifying deterrence of hot weapons against humans of the cold-weapon age was magnified to its utmost.

The advantage brought by a generational gap in weapons was just that plain and unadorned. The more than five hundred small boats of Goryeo and Wa on the sea could not harm the Great Zhou navy in the slightest.

On the Great Zhou navy's side, the soldiers only needed to stand on decks as high as city walls and shoot downward from their elevated position.

The swape poles of the tower ships and the cannons of the battle junks were even more lethal instruments hastening the collapse of the Wa navy.

The battle ended before the hour of shen, having begun at the hour of wei—that is, it lasted from two in the afternoon until four. In just that single two-hour period, of the Wa kingdom's four hundred warships, at least a hundred were sunk, and the Goryeo ships also lost several dozen.

The reason casualties mounted so quickly was that after Chen Hui used the tower ships and battle junks to break the Wa navy's formation, the swift assault ships and patrol boats began hunting and encircling them in waves. The Great Zhou navy's coordination of large and small vessels brought its killing power to the maximum.

Ono no Yoshifuru watched from afar, so frantic that tears streamed down his face, but he was utterly helpless. If nothing unexpected happened, total annihilation was fast approaching.

But his luck was not bad. Just at the final moment when Ono no Yoshifuru was about to be encircled, the wind and waves on the sea suddenly rose. His house retainers seized the chance to bundle up this General of the Western Expedition, and with a dozen or so small boats, fled desperately eastward.

On the Goryeo pirate side, Hong Gyeong looked at the last two thousand or so men remaining around him and simply steeled his heart.

He abandoned all the warships and led these desperate Goryeo warriors straight ashore, planning to seize a small estate and secure a foothold first.

At the end of the hour of shen (five in the afternoon), the battle was completely over. Of the more than five hundred large and small warships of the combined Wa and Goryeo fleets, over four hundred were sunk or captured.

The Goryeo pirate leader Hong Gyeong abandoned his ships and fled. The Wa General of the Western Expedition, Ono no Yoshifuru, escaped eastward.

Of the combined fleet of roughly twenty thousand men, over ten thousand died in battle or drowned. The sea's surface was covered with shattered hulls and vast stretches of corpses floating in every posture, rising and falling with the waves. The Wa kingdom's entire maritime defense force was nearly wiped out.

At Akamagaseki, Murong Xinzhang personally led fifteen thousand troops to uproot this land fortress blocking the Kanmon Strait.

But although Akamagaseki was not large, it had been built in the old days when the Wa kingdom was militarily strong, to guard against a Great Tang attack on Wa from Baekje, constructed together with the Dazaifu's Ōno Castle and Mizuki Castle. Thus its terrain was strategically vital and its defenses were extremely complete.

At the same time, the Goryeo garrison still numbered over a thousand men. The garrison commander, the former Goryeo Vice Minister of War Hong Sang-dong, was extremely obstinate, and the garrison knew they had no way of retreat, so they resisted fiercely.

Therefore, Murong Xinzhang led his troops in fierce assaults for three days, yet still could not take it.

This pass leaned against a sheer cliff and faced the sea. There was only a small stretch of beach directly in front where troops could be deployed, so a frontal assault still posed considerable difficulty.

But soon, news arrived that Chen Hui had utterly routed the Wa navy at the mouth of the Saba River.

Murong Xinzhang immediately ordered Chen Hui to bring the battle junk Dingbo into the Kanmon Strait, then used the Dingbo's four three-thousand-jin cannons and three winch crossbows to bombard fiercely, finally collapsing a section of Akamagaseki's wall.

Murong Xinzhang hated Hong Sang-dong to the bone, and ordered Zhao Sixu to lead the Qihuo Lang into the city to purge it.

Hong Sang-dong was like a madman. Before Zhao Sixu broke in, he killed Wang Uk, the son of Wang Geon whom he had set up as king, atop the wall, then leaped down from Akamagaseki himself.

After Zhao Sixu entered the city, he ordered his men to kill all of the more than seven hundred Goryeo pirates in Akamagaseki. This nail blocking Murong Xinzhang's line of advance was finally pulled out.

On the first day of the fourth month, Murong Xinzhang left Zhao Yanjin to garrison Dazaifu, giving him two thousand men to suppress unrest on Kyushu. Then he mustered the great army and advanced by both land and sea along the Seto Inland Sea toward Heian-kyō.

On the tenth day of the fourth month, the army converged at Itsukushima in Bingo Province (near Hiroshima). After brief resistance, the local Bingo samurai fled together with the governor of Bingo Province, and the army easily occupied Itsukushima, a place rich in fish and rice.

However, before fleeing, the Bingo samurai burned all of the tens of thousands of dan of grain stored on Itsukushima. Murong Xinzhang could only leave a force to guard the island while ordering grain and supplies brought from Dazaifu to be stockpiled there.

Osaka—this city held an extremely important place in Japanese history, and Osaka's Hongan-ji was known throughout the land.

Osaka was located to the northeast of what would later be Osaka Bay. To its northeast lay Heian-kyō, the capital of the Wa kingdom at this time, and directly to its east lay Heijō-kyō, Nara, the capital of the Asuka period.

Moreover, Osaka had actually once used a name beginning with the character for "capital"—at this time it was called Naniwa-kyō, named after the emperor's Naniwa Palace in the city.

By this time, news of Ono no Yoshifuru's disastrous naval defeat had long since reached Heian-kyō.

To resist the Yan army, the Heian-kyō court displayed a rare unity. Even the Minister of the Left, Fujiwara no Saneyori, stopped playing his petty tricks.

He quickly petitioned Emperor Murakami and the Cloistered Emperor Suzaku to appear jointly and summon all the samurai of the realm to Heian-kyō to serve the throne.

At the same time, the great families of Wa also mobilized urgently, pulling every possible fighting force they could from their domains.

Even Wa Buddhism, stirred up by high-ranking monks who had received great benefits, sent out large numbers of warrior monks to aid the war effort.

On the twentieth day of the fourth month, in the seventh year of Shaoming of the Great Zhou, the samurai, warrior monks, and ashigaru levied from peasants gathered at Naniwa-kyō numbered close to seventy thousand.

It could be said that virtually the entire fighting strength of the Wa kingdom had been concentrated in this city. They swore an oath that they would hold Naniwa-kyō at all costs.

On the twenty-second day of the fourth month, the Left Minister Fujiwara no Saneyori arrived with two thousand Fujiwara clan warriors and one thousand five hundred Heian-kyo imperial guards.

These men were the elite of the Wa kingdom; most of them had a full suit of armor, and the swords, spears, bows, and crossbows they used were of the finest quality. This greatly heartened the warriors from all over the Wa kingdom who had gathered at Naniwa-kyo, that is, Osaka.

On the twenty-fourth day of the fourth month, more good news followed: Fujiwara no Hidesato and Taira no Sadamori, the Kanto martial magnates who had put down the rebellion of Taira no Masakado, arrived with four thousand Kanto warriors.

In the Wa kingdom, the Kanto warriors were akin to the Liangzhou great cavalry, the Bingzhou fierce riders, the Youzhou iron cavalry, the Weibo yabing guards, and the Huaixi Cai brigands of the Central Plains — they counted as the ceiling of fighting strength.

This time, with four thousand Kanto warriors having come, everyone felt even more certain that defeat was impossible; victory seemed already in sight, and morale at once recovered considerably from the total annihilation of the fleet.

(End of Chapter)

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