Chapter 842: Summer in Osaka (Part One)

In Naniwa-kyo (Osaka), Xiaowulang hugged a barely sharpened nodachi as he threaded through the streets of Naniwa-kyo, which in his eyes was extraordinarily bustling.

The streets were full of people, laughing crowds of three or five drifting everywhere, and though there were many people, no one mocked Xiaowulang for his foolish, unsophisticated look.

Because these people, like him, had all come to the Kinai region from the countryside.

The only difference was the provinces they came from; what they shared was that none of them had seen much of the world.

At this time, after the collapse of the handen system in Japan, large numbers of estates had formed in the provinces far from the Kinai region.

Most of these estates were established by powerful local families with armed strength. They had many men and great power, able to resist mountain bandits, river pirates, and the Emishi who had not yet been completely driven to Hokkaido, and they played a certain protective role in local social order.

And drawn by this relatively stable life, more and more peasants chose to commend their land to the estate lords, thereby turning themselves from peasants scattered unprotected in the wilds into estate residents.

The estate residents produced grain for the estate lords, wove household handicrafts, and even hunted and fished, while the estate lords were responsible for sheltering the residents' personal safety.

At this time, the authority of the Japanese court had not yet completely collapsed, so in order to resist exploitation by the provincial governors or provincial officials of their local provinces, estate lords would often choose to commend their estates to the great nobles or large temples of Kyoto.

In this way, the estate lord nominally lost ownership of the estate, but gained practical benefits.

The estate lord called the great noble or great temple power that accepted their commendation the "ryoke," paying a certain amount of produce to the ryoke each year as tribute, while he himself actually managed the estate in the capacity of geshi.

Of course, if the background or ability of a provincial governor or provincial official in some place exceeded that of the estate lord's ryoke, this arrangement could not be maintained.

So in certain places, in order to counter the background of the provincial officials or governors, the ryoke who accepted commendations would also lead the estates under them to commend themselves to an even higher level of super-great noble.

Once consent was obtained, they would call this super-great noble their honke, thus forming the honke-ryoke-geshi three tightly linked levels, an aristocratic class that carved up the tax revenue originally belonging to the court.

In the later shogunate period, Japan's political power structure evolved and strengthened from precisely this system.

The geshi, or estate lord family, to whom Xiaowulang commended himself was a branch of the Taira clan, and the lord family was the famous Taira no Sadamori, who in turn commended most of his estate holdings to the Minister of the Right, Fujiwara no Morosuke.

So when the Yan raiders attacked this time, Fujiwara no Morosuke, the Minister of the Right in Heian-kyo, sent men with his personal letter to Kazusa Province in the Kanto region to find Taira no Sadamori and ask him to send troops.

Taira no Sadamori then issued orders down to the estate lords and geshi beneath him, and in just a few days they had assembled a samurai army of nearly two thousand men.

Of course, this "two thousand samurai army" was only a manner of speaking; the samurai truly belonging to the Taira house numbered only a little over a hundred, and the rest were jito who helped the geshi manage the estates.

Well, if you put this jito in Chinese terms, you could also treat him as a head of household retainers or a hired guard.

Moreover, depending on the size of the estate, beneath the jito there would also be some roju and banto and the like.

So in the army led by Fujiwara no Hidesato and Taira no Sadamori, which claimed to be four thousand Kanto samurai, those who were truly samurai numbered only about two or three hundred.

The rest were the three or four hundred jito they brought along, and beneath the jito were over a thousand roju and banto, plus several hundred estate residents conscripted for labor.

Xiaowulang wandered around aimlessly for a while, until his stomach was growling with hunger, and only then did he follow the jito who had led them out back to their encampment.

As soon as he reached the encampment and had just entered the camp gate, Xiaowulang heard singing drifting out from inside, a lilting, drawn-out sound.

Unlike the Chinese poetry that the geshi and ryoke lords used to chant in Tang pronunciation, what Xiaowulang heard this time was waka written entirely in katakana and sung in Japanese.

The Heian period was an important time when the Central Plains culture brought back by the envoys to the Tang began to be localized in Japan.

Twenty years ago, that is, around the year 93X, Chinese-style poetry was still the mainstream, and waka written in kana was looked down upon.

But now, in just twenty years, not only in the streets but even within the nobility, waka had gradually become the mainstream, rather like the feeling of Martian script used by the "burial love" family overturning normal writing.

Xiaowulang had attended school for a few days, so he had a little bit of culture, and from the sorrowful sound of the waka coming from inside the room, he discerned a sentiment of concern for the country and its people, and so he began to chant along.

The sound of the chanting drew the attention of the important figures inside, and before long, the geshi of the estate to which Xiaowulang belonged came out with several monks dressed in fine white cotton cloth.

Among Japanese monks of this era, especially those in the Kinai region, many still possessed a measure of patriotic sentiment.

This was related to the thought of figures like the monk Kukai, who had promoted the flourishing of Buddhism in the Kinai region.

These monks had accepted the Confucian ideas of loyalty to the sovereign and love of country during the Tang period, and after returning to Japan they combined these with the Dharma, putting forward for Japanese Buddhism the ideas of "loyalty to the nation, filial piety at home."

"Recite for the nation, pray for the nation, expound the Prajnaparamita for the nation," and other such ideas.

Therefore within Japan, from top to bottom, from officialdom to religion, the ideology of loyalty to the sovereign and love of country still had considerable currency, whereas among peninsular regimes like Wang's Goryeo, such a climate almost never appeared.

When the monks saw that Xiaowulang, a mere banto, also knew how to chant along with poetry about resisting foreign enemies and defending home and country, they were extremely pleased and praised him one after another.

The geshi, Taira no Sadahide, was also very pleased, and immediately said to Xiaowulang: "Well done! The young men of our Shimosa Province are all fine fellows. Go to the mess and receive one to of rice as a reward. If in the coming battles you win many heads of the Yan raiders, you may even be granted the surname Taira."

At this time, Japan's system of weights and measures was extremely chaotic, to the point that even within a single province there was no uniformity.

In the estate where Xiaowulang lived, one to of rice was roughly equivalent to twenty-four or twenty-five jin in later times, which counted as a very large reward, not to mention the honor of being granted a surname.

This immediately made the banto who had come with Xiaowulang so envious their eyes turned red, and Xiaowulang himself knelt down and wept loudly, tearfully expressing his loyalty to the geshi and the nation.

The people around him also began to cheer, everyone believing that they could win merit and receive rewards in the coming great battle to crush the Yan raiders.

If Murong Xinzhang could see all this now, he would understand what Zhang Zhao meant when he told him that Japan was the next Goguryeo.

This small country, confined to the east of the great sea, had in its early stages absorbed a great deal of culture from China, and then miraculously possessed the ability to localize it and form its own distinctive character.

This ability was very precious and also very frightening, exactly the same as Goguryeo several hundred years earlier.

That was why, historically, the Sui and Tang dynasties emptied their treasuries to destroy Goguryeo, to eliminate this dangerous seed of calamity lying beside the resting place of Chinese culture.

It was just that historically, by the time Japan possessed this same ability as Goguryeo, from the Song to the Ming, the former lacked the capability, while the latter was constrained by limited vision and, having witnessed the failure of the Mongol Yuan, gave up on conquest, thus leaving a calamity for hundreds of years and bringing great danger and harm to Chinese culture.

It also led to the situation that even in the later period of the various republics, this "Goguryeo" beside the resting place still had not been resolved, leaving endless harm.

Of course, objectively speaking, by the time of the Great Ming it was already too late; Japan's localization had already been completed.

And the best time to interrupt their process was right now!

The Seto Inland Sea, Osaka Bay — this was one of Japan's finest harbors, and at this time one could even omit the words "one of."

The whole of Osaka Bay was quite broad, and as many as seven rivers emptied into the sea in this bay, bringing rich plains, fertile fields, and abundant fishing to Osaka Bay.

At the same time, although the water of Osaka Bay was not very deep, it had few reefs and the current was relatively slow, making it overall quite calm, which was favorable for going out to sea to fish in an era when navigation skills were not very advanced.

Therefore, around Osaka Bay, great cities of Japan such as Naniwa-kyo, Heijo-kyo, and Heian-kyo quickly formed.

But at the same time, relative to these benefits, the harm was also obvious: these conditions, while beneficial to production and livelihood, also made it very difficult to defend against enemies coming from the sea.

After Murong Xinzhang occupied Itsukushima (Hiroshima) in early April, he began to divide his forces, ordering Wang Jing to command five thousand infantry and cavalry to advance eastward along the coast from Itsukushima, clearing out the Japanese estates in the surrounding area.

The good son himself led an army of twenty thousand plus several thousand sailors, sailing east on large ships, and quickly captured Awaji Island, the barrier protecting Osaka Bay.

After taking Awaji Island, Murong Xinzhang had two choices: one was to take the northern route and force a crossing of the Akashi Strait, then join forces with Wang Jing's troops to attack Kobe and then advance on Osaka.

The second choice was to go south, landing at Wakayama Bay, seizing Wakayama, and then attacking Osaka.

As for landing directly in Osaka Bay, that was not a good option at the moment.

Because at this time Osaka Bay had not yet been developed to the scale it would reach in later ages, though it was broad, it was everywhere full of marshland, and the seawater was too shallow, which was actually unfavorable for the large ships of the Zhou army to come ashore.

Unless a warship had the ability to move flexibly without relying on manpower, directly landing at Osaka Bay was not a good choice.

At the same time, the Minister of the Left Fujiwara no Saneyori in Naniwa-kyo, Guanzhong, was also summoning a large number of senior military officers for discussion.

This Minister of the Left, how to put it, was a typical politician; scheming and intrigue were no problem for him, he had studied that since childhood, but strategic deployment and military strategy were not his strong suit.

The reason he was so anxious now was that he had never experienced major events, and problems had arisen in organization.

At the very beginning, when the Goryeo pirates came ashore, he should have begun mobilization, but for selfish reasons he took no action.

It was only when Murong Xinzhang's great army arrived that he knew to hurriedly assemble troops to resist, yet he did not even look at the balance of strength between the two sides.

He scraped together fifty thousand troops and thought that would suffice, and even divided them into two routes, by water and by land, with the result that he directly let Ono no Yoshifuru completely destroy the naval force.

With this, Fujiwara no Saneyori became even more panicked, panicked to the point of completely losing his composure, and issued an excessive mobilization order.

Now in Naniwa-kyo alone, the soldiers summoned in response to the Yamato court's call had already reached more than eighty thousand, and many more were still on their way.

The Yamato kingdom was originally not very rich in produce, and with so many people gathered in a short time, it immediately caused supply around Naniwa-kyo and its environs to become extremely difficult.

Then the supply difficulties spread from the army to the civilian population, causing the price of rice to soar.

At the same time, these loyalist troops came from various regions, their languages were not entirely mutually intelligible, and the differences in customs and habits were even greater.

The provincial guard envoys, pursuit envoys, and escort envoys who brought them also lacked experience and could not maintain strict control and deployment.

The court had not strictly designated encampment sites for them either, and had not even sorted out the distribution of military rations.

These items one by one led to extreme chaos in Naniwa-kyo; brawls, robbery, and extortion occurred endlessly, and even going to the toilet was a major problem.

Because no unified latrines had been prepared in advance, the more than eighty thousand outside soldiers all relieved themselves wherever they could, and in less than half a month, the entire city of Naniwa-kyo, front and back, left and right, was everywhere covered with the products of the cycle of the five grains.

Seeing money flowing out like water and order in chaos, and moreover hearing that the Yan bandits on the opposite side had only come with about twenty thousand men, the Minister of the Left Fujiwara no Saneyori felt there was no longer any threat to his life, and so now only wanted to divert some of these eighty thousand men out of Naniwa-kyo.

But after he expressed his intention to divide the troops and send them out to garrison Kobe and Wakayama, not many people responded.

Because at this time Kobe, still called Owada-no-tomari, and Wakayama, called Okayama, were still relatively barren.

More importantly, anyone with clear eyes could see that the Yan bandits would only land at Owada-no-tomari or Okayama; this was not going out to divide troops and garrison, it was actually going to be a punching bag.

Loyalty to the sovereign and love of country can be shouted as much as one likes, but most people will not single-mindedly go and do such a thing; even if they want to be loyal ministers, the great majority still need to obtain considerable benefit before they will do it.

Since Fujiwara no Saneyori was a shrewd politician, he of course understood this principle, and so after he put forward his plan, what followed was a series of coordination and exchanges of interests.

In the end, the unlucky Ono no Yoshifuru was pushed forward again; he was assigned to lead the armies of six provinces—Bizen, Bitchu, and Bingo of the San'yodo, and Iwami, Izumo, and Hoki of the San'indo—to garrison Owada-no-tomari (Kobe), with the head of the wealthy Yamana family of the San'indo serving as his deputy commander.

And the defense of Okayama (Wakayama) was assigned to Tachibana no Tomoyasu, the governor of Mino.

At last the tasks were assigned, and Fujiwara no Saneyori breathed a sigh of relief.

As long as Ono no Yoshifuru and Tachibana no Tomoyasu each took ten thousand men and separately garrisoned Owada-no-tomari and Okayama, the supply pressure on Naniwa-kyo would lessen; in any case these two places were not far apart, and if anything happened they could reinforce each other.

In the distance, Fujiwara no Hidesato, who had been promoted to Junior Fourth Rank, Lower Grade, and governor of Shimotsuke for pacifying the rebellion of Taira no Masakado, seemed about to speak but stopped.

Unlike Ono no Yoshifuru and Tachibana no Tomoyasu, military men who had basically spent these years enjoying peace in the Kinai region, Fujiwara no Hidesato, located in the Kanto region and constantly having to deal with Emishi raids, was more familiar with military life and had a stronger sense of crisis.

He felt that now, whether dividing troops to guard Owada-no-tomari or Okayama, it was meaningless, because the naval force had already been completely destroyed, and the Yan bandits had ample time to choose where to attack from.

Rather than dividing troops to block them, it would be better to first streamline and reorganize these eighty thousand men in Naniwa-kyo.

With these eighty thousand rabble as they were now, fighting the Emishi would be no problem, but to deal with the Yan bandits they were far from sufficient.

Only by finding a way to streamline them into forty thousand elite troops, then relying on the advantage of fighting on home ground, simply letting the Yan bandits come ashore, and carrying out a scorched-earth policy while firmly defending a strong city like Heijo-kyo, might there still be a chance.

But until the military council ended, Fujiwara no Hidesato did not open his mouth to propose anything.

Because he was a minor noble sent to guard the frontier; although he had worked his way up to the position of provincial governor, he had become a provincial governor through military merit rather than bloodline, which at this time was looked down upon, regarded as a man who advanced through luck and a breaker of the rules.

So Fujiwara no Hidesato had no standing to speak at all; if he spoke, no one would care about his opinion, and worse, he might well be mocked.

The Minister of the Left Fujiwara no Saneyori had in fact noticed Fujiwara no Hidesato's hesitation, and he too had sensed to some degree that perhaps the army needed to be reorganized.

But among these troops, those that truly belonged to the court were only the two thousand armored soldiers of his own family and the thousand-odd imperial guards of Heian Palace; the rest were all private soldiers of various nobles. To reorganize these troops of complex origins into a single force—how could that be easy?

The price to be paid was one the Minister of the Left Fujiwara no Saneyori did not wish to bear, so he simply pretended not to have seen it.

On Awaji Island, Murong Xinzhang was also in no hurry to cross the sea; it was not that he had not chosen a good place, but that he first wanted to clear out the pirates entrenched in the Seto Inland Sea.

These Yamato water monkeys knew the local geography and hydrology well and were scattered everywhere; if they were not dealt a harsh blow, the supply ship convoys coming from Dazaifu would always be under threat.

In the seventh year of Shaoming, on the twenty-second day of the fourth month, Murong Xinzhang finally swept away most of the pirates of the Seto Inland Sea.

At the same time, on shore, Wang Jing had also successively broken through more than ten Yamato manors and stockades, and the great army appeared on the west side of Owada-no-tomari.

Murong Xinzhang immediately ordered Li Hanqiong to lead three thousand men to go and link up with them, and before setting out, Murong Xinzhang also gave Li Hanqiong a large number of banners and drums, so the display of force was tremendous.

And Ono no Yoshifuru, who was garrisoning Owada-no-tomari, had recently been beaten into fear; seeing Li Hanqiong's banners blotting out the sun and drums shaking the heavens, he immediately assumed that Li Hanqiong was the main force, and so desperately and ceaselessly sent letters begging for help to Naniwa-kyo.

When Fujiwara no Saneyori and the others in Naniwa-kyo received the news, they basically believed it, because in their view, this was the optimal solution—a pincer attack by water and land.

Thus, on the twenty-seventh day of the fourth month, the samurai corps in Naniwa-kyo were all mobilized, divided into vanguard, center, and rear armies, a full fifty thousand men setting out for Owada-no-tomari to break the siege.

But they had been deceived; by the time they reached Owada-no-tomari, Wang Jing and Li Hanqiong had already joined forces and chosen to withdraw to Mount Rokko, northeast of Owada-no-tomari, to hold fast.

The eight thousand men of Wang Jing and Li Hanqiong were not Murong Xinzhang's main force, but they too wore armor in great numbers, their armor strong and their weapons sharp; holding the mountain, even if the Yamato had sixty or seventy thousand men, they simply could not take it.

Of course, Wang Jing did not choose to sortie either; although he felt he might be able to defeat these Yamato, he still decided to carry out Murong Xinzhang's plan.

On the third day of the fifth month, Fujiwara no Saneyori, who was besieging Mount Rokko, suddenly received word that the Yan bandits at Owada-no-tomari were not the main force, and that the main force had already landed at Okayama.

Okayama, that is, Wakayama, was mostly mountainous, with only a very few small plains, so it could barely be called easy to defend and hard to attack.

Okayama Castle, garrisoned by Tachibana no Tomoyasu, was just like that: backed by high mountains, facing the sea, with the road before the pass allowing only three or four people abreast, making it impossible to deploy large siege engines.

Tachibana no Tomoyasu had ten thousand men under his command; he deployed nine hundred of them in Okayama Castle, while the rest camped on the plain at the mouth of the Hidaka River behind Okayama Castle, ready to rotate at any time.

In Tachibana no Tomoyasu's thinking, his arrangement was without flaw, because Okayama was so strategically formidable that it could not be taken in a short time, and thus he would have ample time to rotate his men, waiting at ease to block the Yan bandits.

But reality dealt a heavy blow to this Yamato general who had personally slain Fujiwara no Sumitomo: Okayama Pass was indeed very hard to attack, but that was from the perspective of Yamato military strength, not the Yan army.

Murong Xinzhang ordered the fierce general Zhang Jianxiong to take three hundred brave men, wearing three layers of armor, using rattan shields wrapped in iron as cover, with a large number of crossbowmen behind them to suppress the defenders of Okayama Castle.

The Yamato troops on Okayama Castle had only thrown a few rounds of logs and stones before they were suppressed by the wooden single-bow crossbows with an effective range of over two hundred paces, so that they dared not raise their heads.

Zhang Jianxiong and his men then charged to beneath the pass, dug pits and buried explosives, and with a thunderous blast, directly blew open the natural stronghold that Tachibana no Tomoyasu had believed in.

Moreover, the Yan army's attack speed was extremely fast; by the time Tachibana no Tomoyasu, camped near the Hidaka River, heard the sound and immediately dispatched troops, it was already too late.

Watching the Yan army pour down from the hill like a tide, Tachibana Toyasu did not dare resist at all. He could only choose to burn the bridge over the Hidaka River and lead his soldiers back toward the Naniwa Capital (Osaka).

(End of Chapter)

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