Wokou

Wokou (Chinese: 倭寇; pinyin: Wōkòu; Japanese: Wakō; Korean: 왜구 Waegu), which literally translates to "Japanese pirates" or "dwarf pirates", were pirates who raided the coastlines of China, Japan and Korea. Wokou came from a mixture of ethnicities.

The term wokou is a combination of Wō (倭), referring to either dwarfs or the Japanese, and kòu (寇) "bandit".

History

There are two distinct eras of wokou piracy. The early wokou mostly set up camp on Japanese outlying islands, as opposed to the 16th century wokou who were mostly non-Japanese. The early wokou raided the Japanese themselves as well as China and Korea.

Early wokou

Records report that the main camps of the early wokou were the island of Tsushima, Iki Island, and the Gotō Islands. Jeong Mong-ju was dispatched to Japan to deal with the problem, and during his visit Kyushu governor Imagawa Sadayo suppressed the early wokou, later returning their captured property and people to Korea. In 1405 Ashikaga Yoshimitsu sent twenty captured pirates to China, where they were boiled in a cauldron in Ningbo.

Life Support

When I think of it now that it's done
How it might've gone without a place to belong
I can see we played into their hands
And they picked our bones until we proved them wrong
It's only a moment
The minutes and hours, they fly from me now as then
It's all in the detail
I've been here before but still don't remember when
As we stared in the face of the storm
And the change began to gather over the bend
There was always a chance it would come
But if you can't make it happen nobody can
It's all but forgotten
The minutes and hours, they're nothing that can't be
bought
It's all in the detail