Japanese Pirates’ Medieval Times (9) ——Kobayakawa Clan: A Case of Samurais from the East (5)——

What kind of shift which caused the change of the character of Kobayakawa Clan was occurring around the Seto Inland Sea? Put simply, ownership of lands and people had been changing; from ancient public ownership to medieval private one. Tax rice and salt, for example, had become commodity rice and salt. In ancient times, pirating meant pirating taxes, which might have damaged local and central governments, but those governments would never stop, as the matter of course, taxing, or at least trying to tax. In medieval times, however, pirating meant pirating commodities, which could just hinder trading, and might decrease marine transport. That meant less opportunities to pirate.      What sea people and powerful families in and around the Seto Inland Sea were facing was a kind of a “pirate dilemma.”  If you were an only pirate in your region, you could build a fortune, more than a fortune, as Taira Kiyomori (1118-1181) did during the latter half of his life at the end of ancient times.  If all the players in the region were pirates, no one would dare to trade through the region, and you could find no ship to rob. Pirates were to learn how to maximize their takings out of marine transport.      Kobayakawa Clan tried to occupy the islands between Aki and Iyo provinces across the Seto Inland Sea to control all the sea freight through the waters.  That attempt would eventually turn out to be impossible.  There were just too many small islands to occupy one by one, and too many straits to watch for smuggling and piracy.      It was sea people that would arrive at a solution to the pirate dilemma:  to form a network among would-be pirates, and to rake off profits from trading ships, evenly and fairly.  The question is what could hold the network together, and what might be a fair cut. We have to see what was happening on land to approach the answers.      What was the shift of land ownership like at the time? In the middle of the 14th century, a social class called “koku-jin” (namely “provincial people”) emerged.  A “provincial person” was a lord of an estate and neighboring vicinities.  Ancient manors used to be developed outside government-owned land, and were sometimes scattered disregarding the topography of the region.  Pieces of land rewarded to steward samurais as vassals of Kamakura Shogunate were sometimes scattered disregarding geopolitics of the region.      By the middle of the 14th century, government-owned land had been diminished, manorial ownership by ancient noble clans had been weakened, and hierarchical up-and-downs had been played.  As a result, land ownership had been centered around some powerful lords of estates.      Government-owned provincial land was easily taken over by provincial guardian samurais, but ancient ownership over manors did not die out so instantly.  There could have been some resistance against samurais who newly arrived from the East.  In the face of samurais, even descendants of those who had been categorized as villains by Fujiwara Yasunori (825-895) needed to be supported by farmers.  In other words, medieval farmers, unlike ancient ones, had finally come to have the choice: to choose gentler hands.  By supporting ancient forces, farmers could have gained some better conditions.  However, to support sometimes meant to fight with spears in their hands.  Farmers living in an estate’s vicinities also had become a source of combatants for the lord of the estate in case of emergency.      With physical strength, even a farmer could become a samurai.  A local samurai could become a lord as far as he was resourceful.  Seeds for the Warring States Period, the world in which inferiors overpowered superiors, were sown.      That was the case even on the sea.