What Were Smuggled to Japan (9)

     Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) half put an end to the Warring States Period (1467-1568) and half unified Japan.  He killed his younger brother, Nobukatsu (1536-1557), and unified Owari Province in 1559.  He knew quite well of the importance of gaining naval supremacy of water and controlling water transportation from the very beginning.  As soon as he unified Owari Province, one of his vassals, Senshu Suetada (1534-1560), trapped the pirates around Hazuzaki, the southern tip of the Chita Peninsula, the southernmost part of the province, between Ise and Mikawa Bays, into obeying him.

     Suetada took advantage of being a chief priest of Atsuta Shrine in Owari Province, one of the oldest shrines in Japan, and proposed a business talk to the pirates to buy wood through them from Kii Province to rebuild the shrine.  As the pirates believed in the shrine heartily and also found it a good deal, they sailed all their boats off to Kii to meet the request.

     Suetada secretly set fire to pirates’ village, whose security was weak then.  Besides, he innocently started to fight the fire with his men, rescued the pirates’ families, and took good care of them.  The pirates returned to find their village burned out, and to know Suetada helped their families.  They thanked Suetada for his rapid and conscientious responses, and handed wood over to him for free.  As the villagers were hardly able to get by without their homes, Suetada gave them land to live on away from the sea.  Thus, he cleared pirates from Hazuzaki.

     Suetada was killed in the Battle of Okehazama as he attacked, with no more than 30 men, the advance troop of Imagawa Yoshimoto (1519-1560), who was leading no less than 20-25 thousand men in total to mount a military expedition to Kyoto to dominate the whole country.