The Year of Rice and Salt

His advisers were not enthusiastic about the plan. For one thing, the treasury was still depleted. For another, the Ming court was already drained by all the previous dramatic events of the Wanli reign, not only the defence of Korea but also the racking dissension caused by the succession problem, still only nominally solved by the Wanli's choice of his elder son, and his younger son's banishment to the provinces; all that could change in a week. And around that highly combustible situation, like a civil war in waiting, constellated all the conflicts and jealous manoeuvrings of the court powers: the Empress Mother, the Empress, the senior civil servants, the eunuchs and the generals. Something in the Wanli's combination of intelligence and vacillation, his permanent discontent and his occasional bursts of vengeful fury, made the court of his old age a flayed and exhausted nest of intrigues. To his advisers, particularly the generals and the heads of the treasury, conquering Nippon did not seem even remotely possible.

The Emperor, true to form, insisted that it be done.

His senior generals came back with an alternative plan, which they hoped very much would satisfy his desire. They proposed that the Emperor's diplomats arrange a treaty with one of the minor Nipponese shoguns, the Tozama Daimyo, who were out of leyasu's favour because they had joined him only after his military victory at Sekigahara. The treaty would stipulate that this minor shogun would invite the Chinese to come to one of his ports, and open it permanently to Chinese trade. A Chinese navy would then land at this port in force, and in essence make the port a Chinese port, defended by the full power of the Chinese navy, grown so much bigger during the Wanli's reign in the attempt to defend the coast against pirates. Most of the pirates were from Nippon, so there was a kind of justice there; and a chance to trade with Nippon as well. After that, the treaty port could serve as the staging centre of a slower conquest of Nippon, conceived of as happening in stages rather than all at once. That would make it affordable.

The Wanli grumbled about his advisers' meagre, partial, eunuchlike enactments of his desires, but patient advocacy by his most trusted advisers of that period finally won him over, and he approved the plan. A secret treaty was arranged with a local lord, Omura, who invited the Chinese to land and trade at a small fishing village with an excellent harbour, called Nagasaki. Preparations for an expedition that would arrive there with overwhelming force were made in the rebuilt shipyards of Longjiang, near Nanjing, also on the Cantonese coast. The big new ships of the invading fleet were filled with supplies to enable the landing force to withstand a long siege, and they assembled for the first time off the coast of Taiwan, with no one in Nippon except for Omura and his advisers any the wiser.

The fleet was, by the Wanli's direct order, put under the command of one Admiral Kheim, of Annam. This admiral had already led a fleet for the Emperor, in the subjugation of Taiwan some years before, but he was still seen by the Chinese bureaucracy and military as an outsider, an expert in pirate suppression who had achieved his expertise by spending much of his youth as a pirate himself, plundering the Fujian coast. The Wanli Emperor did not care about this, and even regarded it as a point in Kheim's favour; he wanted someone who could get results, and if he came from outside the military bureaucracy, with its many entanglements at court and in the provinces, so much the better.

The fleet set out in the thirty eighth year of the Wanli, on the third day of the first month. The spring winds were constant from the northwest for eight days, and the fleet positioned itself in the Kuroshio, the Black River, that great ocean current which runs like a river a hundred li wide, up the long southern shores of the Nipponese islands.

This was as planned, and they were on their way; but then the winds died. Nothing in the air stirred. No bird was seen, and the paper sails of the fleet hung limp, their cross slats ticking the masts only because of the rippling of the Kuroshio itself, which carried them north and east past the main Nipponese islands, past Hokkaido, and out onto the empty expanse of the Dahai, the Great Ocean. This shoreless blue expanse was bisected by their invisible but powerful Black River, flowing relentlessly cast.