The Fifth Year of Chōkyū, Joseon's Prosperous Reaction, Wagoku's Savage Plunder, Great Compassion Descends!

"Oh! Buddha preserve us! We can go rob wealthy Joseon, where they can eat rice! ...But Lord Watanabe, since the Ming Dynasty has such mighty military power, enough to kill the demon king of the Mongol invaders, if the warriors of Kyushu plunder Joseon, won't they be attacked by the Ming army? ..."

"Yes! Maitreya Buddha bear witness! If Joseon is that rich, it must be a colossal thing too! Their Joseon warriors can eat rice at every meal, so they must be hard to deal with... They'd risk their lives for rice, wouldn't they? ..."

"Haaha! Murakami, you don't understand the subtlety here. The Muromachi shogun fears the Ming Dynasty, but the various warrior houses under the shogun aren't so afraid. Especially the smaller the warrior house, the less it needs to fear! Just like the Soni Clan and Ouchi Clan in Kyushu can't openly make a move, but our Ryuzoji Clan... cough, but the So Clan of Tsushima and the Matsuura Clan of Hirado often go to the Joseon coast... The logic in this is like how a giant beast can trample a crab to death, but can't crush the ants beneath its feet! ..."

The icy wind froze the white Sea of Okhotsk, which connected through the long, narrow Sea of Japan to the vast Eastern Sea of China. And the tales of slaughter that happened upon the ocean were like mottled weapons buried in the beach, silently engraved with death.

The "wokou" of history, or the Eastern Sea pirate groups, could roughly be divided into three stages. The composition of the pirate groups, their scale, and their level of shipbuilding technology were also clearly different, closely tied to the level of maritime trade.

The first stage was the early Ming period of the fourteenth to fifteenth