Epilogue

 

     Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598) was the third pirate king of Japan, the biggest Wokou.  He became the chieftain of Japanese smugglers, and formalized Japanese smuggling into red-seal ships.  After Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616) took over the status although he avoided doing piracy in Korea or China.  It was Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604-1651, reigning 1623-1651), the third shogun of the Edo Shogunate, who changed the diplomatic policy drastically.  He closed up the country, shut up the triangular merchandising of death, and, to support the new policy, introduced the well-known “samurai philosophy”:  It’s cowardly and means to use a gun.  An one-to-one sword-to-sword combat is graceful.  The tranquil world introduced by Iemitsu was broken when leftover rifles of the American Civil War were exported to Japan; the Meiji Restoration.