The Lost Samurai

Japanese Mercenaries in South East Asia, 1593–1688

Stephen Turnbull

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526758996
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

"An inherently fascinating, impressively well written, exceptionally informative, and meticulously detailed history" of Japanese overseas mercenaries ( Midwest Book Review ). The Lost Samurai reveals the greatest untold story of Japan's legendary warrior class, which is that for almost a hundred years Japanese samurai were employed as mercenaries in the service of the kings of Siam, Cambodia, Burma, Spain and Portugal, as well as by the directors of the Dutch East India Company. The Japanese samurai were used in dramatic assault parties, as royal bodyguards, as staunch garrisons and as willing executioners. As a result, a stereotypical image of the fierce Japanese warrior developed that had a profound influence on the way they were regarded by their employers. While the Southeast Asian kings tended to employ samurai on a long-term basis as palace guards, their European employers usually hired them on a temporary basis for specific campaigns. Also, whereas the Southeast Asian monarchs tended to trust their well-established units of Japanese mercenaries, the Europeans, while admiring them, also feared them. In every European example a progressive shift in attitude may be discerned from initial enthusiasm to great suspicion that the Japanese might one day turn against them, as illustrated by the long-standing Spanish fear of an invasion of the Philippines by Japan accompanied by a local uprising. During the 1630s, when Japan chose isolation rather than engagement with Southeast Asia, it left these fierce mercenaries stranded in distant countries never to return: lost samurai indeed!

Chapter 1

The Japanese ‘Wild Geese’

In 1639 a Portuguese missionary and traveller called Sebastien Manrique (1590–1669) visited the kingdom of Arakan in Burma, and wrote as follows:

as the news of my arrival had already spread, the Japanese Christians came with their Captain. They had accompanied the King, in whose guard they were serving. As soon as they had learned where I was they had come to see me. Their Captain, called Leon Donno, came forward and knelt to me.1

Manrique’s discovery – that certain members of the Japanese Christian community in Arakan were serving as its king’s bodyguard – is the sole reference ever made to this particular instance of a phenomenon to be found throughout south-east Asia during the seventeenth century: the Japanese overseas mercenary.

As soldiers fighting for a foreign employer the followers of Leon Donno (the suffix dono 殿 was used to indicate a leader in Japanese) fitted the first element of the usual definition of a mercenary, which is that of a paid fighter who comes from outside the society for which he fights, is not part of its regular forces, and is motivated primarily by the desire for private gain. An individual mercenary may also possess a romantic tinge as a soldier of fortune journeying far from home to seek adventure, although sympathy tends to replace admiration for those mercenaries who experience by choice or coercion the life of ‘The Wild Geese’: the mournful expression first used for the Irish Catholic soldiers who fled to continental Europe after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691.2 Many of the Japanese Wild Geese we will encounter in the pages which follow shared with their Irish counterparts that same factor of religious exile, because the persecution of Christians prevented them from ever returning to Japan, whose rulers were ignorant of their very existence. Those men were indeed the lost samurai.

The elusive samurai

Throughout my long writing career I have always had a fatal weakness for a snappy title, and this book is no exception. Its lead title The Lost Samurai is an obvious play on the name of a well-known film, but together with the subtitle it introduces three expressions which need to be clarified at this stage. They are the use of ‘samurai’ to identify the Japanese fighting men, ‘mercenary’ for their conditions of service and ‘south-east Asia’ for their area of operation.

Beginning with the word ‘samurai’, it will become obvious from the pages that follow that Japan’s overseas mercenaries do not fit into the popular stereotype of a samurai, which is that of a brave aristocratic warrior who knows his way round a tea bowl and never gets his hands dirty in a paddy field. That archetypal samurai was a superlative swordsman, loyal to the point of death, who would leave a battlefield holding a severed head and then reach for a brush and an ink stone to compose a poem about the beauties of the autumn moon. Few of the men who became Japan’s overseas mercenaries are likely to have been noble warriors or romantic poets. Many had past experience not of lordly service, but of mercantile activity or piracy, and far from having their loyalty assumed and their service valued by their employers, they were often treated as disposable commodities.

A samurai may, however, be more simply understood by his practice of bearing arms rather than any social status or aesthetic sensibilities. The word therefore becomes a generic term for any pre-modern Japanese fighting man, and there is something to be said for such a pragmatic view, because the official definition of the word samurai changed considerably over the centuries. For much of Japanese history (if contemporary writings are to be believed) everyone with something to defend – a landowner, a villager, a priest or a pirate – was armed to the teeth and was therefore a warrior (bushi 武士 or musha 武者) of some sort at some time. Yet back in the tenth century AD no fighter of any reputation would have wished to be called a samurai, because that expression still had connotations of menial rather than military service. By the thirteenth century the word had acquired the exclusively military meaning it enjoys today, although to be a samurai still involved the notion of subservience to someone else. The samurai’s superiors were leaders called gokenin 御家人 (‘honourable houseman’), whose élite status derived not only from their skills at warfare, but also from the ownership of the patches of land from which they took their surnames. Gokenin expected loyalty from the non-landowning samurai who followed them into battle. Their samurai followers (the European notion of a squire is a good parallel) were able to rise in society because of good service and the rewards that followed.

And rise they did, until the expression ‘samurai’ acquired an élite connotation that allowed it to encompass the entirety of Japan’s military aristocracy. The samurai’s upward social mobility found its greatest expression during the Sengoku Period, Japan’s ‘Age of War’, which is conventionally dated from 1467 to 1603. The long conflicts of the Sengoku Period sucked into their whirlpool a huge number of élite mounted warriors, lowly fighting samurai, armed monks, village communities and an intermediate class of jizamurai (‘local samurai’), who owned some land and were both farmers and fighters at the same time.

The Sengoku Period had begun with a succession dispute within the family of the shogun, the institution that had ruled Japan for almost four centuries by commission from the sacred emperor. When Japan’s court and capital dissolved into chaos both land and status were up for grabs, and the local warlords who had once governed provinces only on the shogun’s behalf saw the opportunity to create petty kingdoms of their own that were independent of any central control. These daimyo 大名 (literally ‘great names’) – the gokenin of their age but on a much larger scale – controlled samurai armies and fought each other for land and prestige until Japan was reunified in 1591 under a brilliant general called Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98), a samurai who had begun his own military career as a simple foot soldier. In 1588 Hideyoshi set in motion the katana gari (sword hunt), a nationwide pacification process whereby local militias, temples and villagers were forcibly disarmed. Hideyoshi’s agents confiscated all weapons from anyone except the followers of daimyo, most of whom were by then Hideyoshi’s appointees chosen from his most loyal generals. A thorough land survey was already under way and rapid progress was also being made towards the total separation of the warrior and farmer classes, so that the samurai – now much more closely defined as men who fought and did little else – were removed from the land and became stipendiary warriors in the new castle towns.

Unfortunately for Hideyoshi, he did not enjoy his triumph for long, because his dynasty passed away within one generation in favour of the family of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), whose descendants were to rule Japan until 1868. Hideyoshi’s new class system was retained and flourished, so the precise definition of a samurai now took its final form within the social stratification of the ensuing Tokugawa Period, which would be a time when samurai and farmers were two separate social classes divided by an unbridgeable gulf. Only the samurai now enjoyed the right to wear swords, although subsequent events would show that the attempts at disarming the non-samurai classes had been far from complete. Yet even though a few minor revolts shook the confidence of the Tokugawa, they would ultimately be no more than an insult to the pride of the all-powerful samurai élite.

Because the overseas service of the Japanese mercenaries happened precisely during this time of great social change, it is difficult to use the term ‘samurai’ for them in anything but the broadest terms, and the situation is further complicated when we examine the mercenaries’ sources of supply. The first trawl, which happened while the Sengoku Period was at its height, came from within the ranks of the wakō 倭寇, a term that is usually translated as ‘Japanese pirates’, even though the word does not appear in medieval Japanese texts and derives from the Chinese word wokou (literally ‘dwarf bandits’), a pejorative term that was meant to indicate a distinctive Japanese origin for the raiders.3 There are records of the employment by China of Japanese pirates as mercenaries from the fourteenth century onwards, but by the mid-sixteenth century these savage marauding bands had acquired a strong international dimension. Many now had Chinese rather than Japanese leaders, and combined seaborne raids on places like the Philippines with organised crime at home, operating out of small defensible harbours on the Chinese coast as illegal yet highly efficient trading organisations. As Jonathan Clements drily observes, ‘It was helpful to blame China’s new coastal problems on foreigners’, rather than accepting that some of them were Chinese fishermen driven to desperation by their own rulers’ policies.4

The first instance of China enlisting mercenaries from within the wakō ranks came when Hu Weiyong, the Grand Councillor of and rebel against the Ming, requested military assistance for a planned coup in 1378 against the Ming leader Zhu Yuanzhang. A Japanese warrior called Joyō (who is supposed to have been a Zen monk) headed for China with 400 soldiers in the guise of an embassy paying tribute. Their plot involved the assassination of Zhu Yuanzhang using smuggled gunpowder and swords concealed among large candles, but when the coup failed the ringleaders were executed.5 Recruitment of wakō as mercenaries by neighbouring Korea began in about 1400 when the Yi dynasty took some of them into its employment as part of its own programme to curb the pirates. In the words of one commentator, ‘some surrendered to Korea, accepted government positions, and received grants of food, clothing and shelter’, although the nature of the tasks they performed is not clear.6 Recruitment of wakō by powerful wakō leaders might also be classed as mercenary activity. For example, in 1578 a noted Chinese wakō leader called Lin Daoqian 林道乾 (known as ‘Vintoquián’ in the Spanish records) is noted as having used Japanese wakō for an unsuccessful attack on Siam.7

To the Chinese who suffered their raids wakō were simply pirates, but on the outlying islands of southern Japan where many of the gangs were based the distinction between wakō and legitimate overseas traders was a very loose one. Some very influential Japanese daimyo of the Sengoku Period even boasted of having wakō among their ancestors, and when Hideyoshi began to curtail their piratical activities several erstwhile wakō leaders found a legitimate outlet for their skills by acting as his admirals of the fleet for the invasion of Korea in 1592. Not surprisingly, to the Koreans that savage operation was little more than a huge wakō raid that was being conducted with official approval.

The Matsuura family of Hirado Island, whose name will appear frequently in the pages which follow, were a very prominent example of a daimyo lineage that could trace its forebears back to a pirate band. The Matsuura were keen to establish links with the European traders who started arriving in the late 1540s, and that trade consisted of much more than cloth and other goods because successive Matsuura daimyo made samurai available as well. In particular, Hirado would become an important source of supply for the Japanese mercenaries who served the Dutch East India Company, which established a base on the island in 1609. For almost a decade the Hirado soldier trade was carried on with the full support of the shogun, and unlike all their other employers the Dutch hired inside Japan itself. The company’s ‘soldiers from Japan’ (soldaten van Japon) tended to be unemployed and masterless rōnin 浪人 (‘men of the waves’) who had been thrown on to the scrap heap by the death or disgrace of their former leaders during the wars of the Sengoku Period. They were exp...