Chapter 1
The Japanese âWild Geeseâ
In 1639 a Portuguese missionary and traveller called Sebastien Manrique (1590â1669) visited the kingdom of Arakan in Burma, and wrote as follows:
as the news of my arrival had already spread, the Japanese Christians came with their Captain. They had accompanied the King, in whose guard they were serving. As soon as they had learned where I was they had come to see me. Their Captain, called Leon Donno, came forward and knelt to me.1
Manriqueâs discovery â that certain members of the Japanese Christian community in Arakan were serving as its kingâs bodyguard â is the sole reference ever made to this particular instance of a phenomenon to be found throughout south-east Asia during the seventeenth century: the Japanese overseas mercenary.
As soldiers fighting for a foreign employer the followers of Leon Donno (the suffix dono æźż was used to indicate a leader in Japanese) fitted the first element of the usual definition of a mercenary, which is that of a paid fighter who comes from outside the society for which he fights, is not part of its regular forces, and is motivated primarily by the desire for private gain. An individual mercenary may also possess a romantic tinge as a soldier of fortune journeying far from home to seek adventure, although sympathy tends to replace admiration for those mercenaries who experience by choice or coercion the life of âThe Wild Geeseâ: the mournful expression first used for the Irish Catholic soldiers who fled to continental Europe after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691.2 Many of the Japanese Wild Geese we will encounter in the pages which follow shared with their Irish counterparts that same factor of religious exile, because the persecution of Christians prevented them from ever returning to Japan, whose rulers were ignorant of their very existence. Those men were indeed the lost samurai.
The elusive samurai
Throughout my long writing career I have always had a fatal weakness for a snappy title, and this book is no exception. Its lead title The Lost Samurai is an obvious play on the name of a well-known film, but together with the subtitle it introduces three expressions which need to be clarified at this stage. They are the use of âsamuraiâ to identify the Japanese fighting men, âmercenaryâ for their conditions of service and âsouth-east Asiaâ for their area of operation.
Beginning with the word âsamuraiâ, it will become obvious from the pages that follow that Japanâs overseas mercenaries do not fit into the popular stereotype of a samurai, which is that of a brave aristocratic warrior who knows his way round a tea bowl and never gets his hands dirty in a paddy field. That archetypal samurai was a superlative swordsman, loyal to the point of death, who would leave a battlefield holding a severed head and then reach for a brush and an ink stone to compose a poem about the beauties of the autumn moon. Few of the men who became Japanâs overseas mercenaries are likely to have been noble warriors or romantic poets. Many had past experience not of lordly service, but of mercantile activity or piracy, and far from having their loyalty assumed and their service valued by their employers, they were often treated as disposable commodities.
A samurai may, however, be more simply understood by his practice of bearing arms rather than any social status or aesthetic sensibilities. The word therefore becomes a generic term for any pre-modern Japanese fighting man, and there is something to be said for such a pragmatic view, because the official definition of the word samurai changed considerably over the centuries. For much of Japanese history (if contemporary writings are to be believed) everyone with something to defend â a landowner, a villager, a priest or a pirate â was armed to the teeth and was therefore a warrior (bushi æŠćŁ« or musha æŠè
) of some sort at some time. Yet back in the tenth century AD no fighter of any reputation would have wished to be called a samurai, because that expression still had connotations of menial rather than military service. By the thirteenth century the word had acquired the exclusively military meaning it enjoys today, although to be a samurai still involved the notion of subservience to someone else. The samuraiâs superiors were leaders called gokenin ćŸĄćź¶äșș (âhonourable housemanâ), whose Ă©lite status derived not only from their skills at warfare, but also from the ownership of the patches of land from which they took their surnames. Gokenin expected loyalty from the non-landowning samurai who followed them into battle. Their samurai followers (the European notion of a squire is a good parallel) were able to rise in society because of good service and the rewards that followed.
And rise they did, until the expression âsamuraiâ acquired an Ă©lite connotation that allowed it to encompass the entirety of Japanâs military aristocracy. The samuraiâs upward social mobility found its greatest expression during the Sengoku Period, Japanâs âAge of Warâ, which is conventionally dated from 1467 to 1603. The long conflicts of the Sengoku Period sucked into their whirlpool a huge number of Ă©lite mounted warriors, lowly fighting samurai, armed monks, village communities and an intermediate class of jizamurai (âlocal samuraiâ), who owned some land and were both farmers and fighters at the same time.
The Sengoku Period had begun with a succession dispute within the family of the shogun, the institution that had ruled Japan for almost four centuries by commission from the sacred emperor. When Japanâs court and capital dissolved into chaos both land and status were up for grabs, and the local warlords who had once governed provinces only on the shogunâs behalf saw the opportunity to create petty kingdoms of their own that were independent of any central control. These daimyo 性ć (literally âgreat namesâ) â the gokenin of their age but on a much larger scale â controlled samurai armies and fought each other for land and prestige until Japan was reunified in 1591 under a brilliant general called Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537â98), a samurai who had begun his own military career as a simple foot soldier. In 1588 Hideyoshi set in motion the katana gari (sword hunt), a nationwide pacification process whereby local militias, temples and villagers were forcibly disarmed. Hideyoshiâs agents confiscated all weapons from anyone except the followers of daimyo, most of whom were by then Hideyoshiâs appointees chosen from his most loyal generals. A thorough land survey was already under way and rapid progress was also being made towards the total separation of the warrior and farmer classes, so that the samurai â now much more closely defined as men who fought and did little else â were removed from the land and became stipendiary warriors in the new castle towns.
Unfortunately for Hideyoshi, he did not enjoy his triumph for long, because his dynasty passed away within one generation in favour of the family of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542â1616), whose descendants were to rule Japan until 1868. Hideyoshiâs new class system was retained and flourished, so the precise definition of a samurai now took its final form within the social stratification of the ensuing Tokugawa Period, which would be a time when samurai and farmers were two separate social classes divided by an unbridgeable gulf. Only the samurai now enjoyed the right to wear swords, although subsequent events would show that the attempts at disarming the non-samurai classes had been far from complete. Yet even though a few minor revolts shook the confidence of the Tokugawa, they would ultimately be no more than an insult to the pride of the all-powerful samurai Ă©lite.
Because the overseas service of the Japanese mercenaries happened precisely during this time of great social change, it is difficult to use the term âsamuraiâ for them in anything but the broadest terms, and the situation is further complicated when we examine the mercenariesâ sources of supply. The first trawl, which happened while the Sengoku Period was at its height, came from within the ranks of the wakĆ ććŻ, a term that is usually translated as âJapanese piratesâ, even though the word does not appear in medieval Japanese texts and derives from the Chinese word wokou (literally âdwarf banditsâ), a pejorative term that was meant to indicate a distinctive Japanese origin for the raiders.3 There are records of the employment by China of Japanese pirates as mercenaries from the fourteenth century onwards, but by the mid-sixteenth century these savage marauding bands had acquired a strong international dimension. Many now had Chinese rather than Japanese leaders, and combined seaborne raids on places like the Philippines with organised crime at home, operating out of small defensible harbours on the Chinese coast as illegal yet highly efficient trading organisations. As Jonathan Clements drily observes, âIt was helpful to blame Chinaâs new coastal problems on foreignersâ, rather than accepting that some of them were Chinese fishermen driven to desperation by their own rulersâ policies.4
The first instance of China enlisting mercenaries from within the wakĆ ranks came when Hu Weiyong, the Grand Councillor of and rebel against the Ming, requested military assistance for a planned coup in 1378 against the Ming leader Zhu Yuanzhang. A Japanese warrior called JoyĆ (who is supposed to have been a Zen monk) headed for China with 400 soldiers in the guise of an embassy paying tribute. Their plot involved the assassination of Zhu Yuanzhang using smuggled gunpowder and swords concealed among large candles, but when the coup failed the ringleaders were executed.5 Recruitment of wakĆ as mercenaries by neighbouring Korea began in about 1400 when the Yi dynasty took some of them into its employment as part of its own programme to curb the pirates. In the words of one commentator, âsome surrendered to Korea, accepted government positions, and received grants of food, clothing and shelterâ, although the nature of the tasks they performed is not clear.6 Recruitment of wakĆ by powerful wakĆ leaders might also be classed as mercenary activity. For example, in 1578 a noted Chinese wakĆ leader called Lin Daoqian æéäčŸ (known as âVintoquiĂĄnâ in the Spanish records) is noted as having used Japanese wakĆ for an unsuccessful attack on Siam.7
To the Chinese who suffered their raids wakĆ were simply pirates, but on the outlying islands of southern Japan where many of the gangs were based the distinction between wakĆ and legitimate overseas traders was a very loose one. Some very influential Japanese daimyo of the Sengoku Period even boasted of having wakĆ among their ancestors, and when Hideyoshi began to curtail their piratical activities several erstwhile wakĆ leaders found a legitimate outlet for their skills by acting as his admirals of the fleet for the invasion of Korea in 1592. Not surprisingly, to the Koreans that savage operation was little more than a huge wakĆ raid that was being conducted with official approval.
The Matsuura family of Hirado Island, whose name will appear frequently in the pages which follow, were a very prominent example of a daimyo lineage that could trace its forebears back to a pirate band. The Matsuura were keen to establish links with the European traders who started arriving in the late 1540s, and that trade consisted of much more than cloth and other goods because successive Matsuura daimyo made samurai available as well. In particular, Hirado would become an important source of supply for the Japanese mercenaries who served the Dutch East India Company, which established a base on the island in 1609. For almost a decade the Hirado soldier trade was carried on with the full support of the shogun, and unlike all their other employers the Dutch hired inside Japan itself. The companyâs âsoldiers from Japanâ (soldaten van Japon) tended to be unemployed and masterless rĆnin æ”Șäșș (âmen of the wavesâ) who had been thrown on to the scrap heap by the death or disgrace of their former leaders during the wars of the Sengoku Period. They were exp...