panese Pirates’ Medieval Times (3) ——The Trials and Errors by the Kamakura Shogunate (2)——

Here, we are going to see 5 steps taken by the Kamakura Shogunate to suppress pirates around the Seto Inland Sea. First, in 1231, they started to urge provincial commander samurais to order manorial steward samurais to mobilize soldiers and boats and to arrest pirates. These orders were repeatedly issued. However, toward the middle of the 13th century, the number of piracies reported increased, and the problems of those who pretend not to see or know piracies were raised. In the meantime, in 1274, Kublai Khan (1215-1294, reigning 1260-1294), a grandson of Ghengis Khan, the fifth Khagan of Mongol Empire, and the first Emperor of Yuan Dynasty in China, attempted to invade Japanese islands. After Kublai’s unsuccessful attempt, the Kamakura Shogunate’s Hojo Regency Regime pursued two-track countermeasures agains Kublai’s further attempts; the defense against foreign countries and the punitive expeditions against them. In 1275, the regime ordered samurais in today’s Kyushu to report the number of boats, and the names and ages of rowers and steerers in their possessions. The latter punitive expeditions turned out to be financially impossible at all, but the registration process itself worked as the direct control over sea people, and thus as the second-step measure against pirates. Their third step was taken in 1301. All the boats became supposed to be engraved with its owner’s name and whereabouts so deeply as not to be erased easily. It was a kind of total boat survey, but it also shows that piracies had come to thrive so largely that the regency regime had to resort to a centralized detailed measure. Actually speaking, in 1309, pirates in Kumano, the south-east part of Kii Peninsula, rose up in revolt, and it took armies from 15 provinces to put them down. As a result, protecting coast lines became common duties for samurais in Sanyo and Nankai Regions, which included the provinces around the Seto Inland sea, on Shikoku Island, and Kii Peninsula, since 1312.