Chapter 155: Japan's Strategy (V
"Stop, who are you?" The people guarding the city gate saw a man wearing only underwear. One of them raised the musket in his hand and pointed at the man and asked. Although this place had become the rear of the battlefield, they were still on guard.
"Soldier, I am a merchant from the Ming Dynasty. I was robbed by a group of Japanese on the road." The man was Tokugawa Munebayashi. Although he was afraid, he still mustered up the courage to walk to the city gate.
"Oh, why don't you follow the team?" The man did not put down the musket in his hand. At that time on Jiuguo Island, only the people of the Ming Dynasty robbed the Japanese. It was the first time he heard that the Japanese robbed Ming Dynasty merchants.
"Soldier, you don't know that I am a Ming Dynasty merchant doing business in Japan for more than ten years. Who would have thought that after finishing a business this time, I was robbed by the Japanese on the way." Tokugawa Munebayashi quickly thought of an identity for himself. In recent years, there have been many Ming Dynasty merchants doing business in Japan, and there are even some Ming Dynasty people who ran to Japan to find a job and settled there, so the identity mentioned by Tokugawa Munebayashi did not make the man suspicious.
"Well, okay, I'm your soldier. Don't act alone here in the future. Find a team to join." The man lowered the gun, waved his hand, and let Tokugawa Munebayashi go into the city.
Tokugawa Munebayashi quickly thanked them and then entered the city. He took a look inside and found that it was really bustling. There were tens of thousands of Japanese being detained in the small city, and most of them were under 35 years old. Men and women were separated, and a large number of Ming people with weapons were guarding them. Tokugawa Munebayashi asked around and found out that this city was already the rear of the battlefield and was used by these Ming people as a transit point for supplies. Japanese and supplies were constantly being sent in and constantly being transported away. Tokugawa Munebayashi walked through most of the city and found that the other half of the city was populated by Japanese men, women, young and old. The guards here were not very strict. Those Japanese seemed to be grouped as families and were treated well. At least in terms of food, it was much better than the Japanese in the other half of the city.
Tokugawa Lin was very curious, and thought that these Ming merchants here were all kind-hearted people, why did they treat these captives so well? Driven by curiosity, Tokugawa Munebayashi asked around, and found out that these Japanese were recruited by those Ming merchants. Most of the young men among them would join the auxiliary army, so they were treated so well, because Prince Tang would treat better those who surrendered to him.
When the Tokugawa family was destroyed, Tokugawa Munebayashi remembered that prince closely in his heart. It was this Prince Tang who made Tokugawa Munebayashi, who had lived a glorious life, fall into such a state of desolation. Thinking that Prince Tang had become so powerful, Munebayashi couldn't help but sigh in his heart and began to look for a place to feed himself.
Generally speaking, each caravan had a fixed number of people before setting out, and there were rarely people joining in the middle. These merchants were usually led by big merchants from the Ming Dynasty. Most of them were groups of hundreds or even thousands of people, and teams of dozens of people were very rare. Tokugawa Munebayashi wandered around for a while and finally found a team of only dozens of people. This team was made up of several impoverished small merchants who came to pan for gold with the big merchants.
The leader of this team was called Li, who was in his thirties and did not look very smart. He did not care about Tokugawa Munebayashi's request to join and took him into his own team to carry supplies. Tokugawa Munebayashi had been trained as a samurai since he was a child and was very strong, so he was qualified to be a porter.
Of the hundred Japanese soldiers in the group, only about thirty were men. The rest were women and children. After the cargo was loaded onto a dozen or so horse-drawn carts, it was time for dinner. The food and dishes were quite good, comparable to those during the time when Tokugawa Munebayashi was the naval commander. Munebayashi inquired and discovered that the food, however, wasn't particularly good. This was because their group was small and couldn't profit much. It was said that the larger groups had meat for every meal.
The Japanese had a low standard of living. Even foreign generals like Tokugawa Munebayashi couldn't afford to eat meat every meal. The common people of Japan were even worse off. Generally speaking, they rarely had a full meal. Once Japanese people reached a certain age and were no longer able to work, their children would send them to the mountains to live in old age, saving food for the younger generation.
Those hardworking and honest Japanese captives were generally given adequate food. After all, the Ming merchants alone could not transport enough supplies. Most of these Ming merchants, influenced by the "Call to Arms" newspaper, understood the importance of employing divisive tactics when using slave labor, rather than resorting to relentless coercion. After all, this was on foreign territory, and riots caused by coercion were uneconomical for the merchants.
Rewards for good performance, punishments for poor performance. This minimized the possibility of riots. Of course, some riots did occur, but they were often small-scale and easily suppressed by the merchants themselves. Furthermore, with Mongol and Jurchen cavalry patrolling the main transport routes, these merchants could always count on support. After Tokugawa Munebayashi left the city with this small group, he encountered more than a dozen cavalry patrols while escorting the goods.
It was the first time Tokugawa Munebayashi had witnessed an army so polite to ordinary civilians. While the cavalrymen along the way were not all murderous, they were friendly to the merchant caravans they encountered. These merchants were also very welcoming to the patrols, often offering the soldiers food such as wine and meat. The soldiers would also give the merchants spoils of war, primarily weapons like swords and bows and arrows. These weapons were obtained from the Japanese army. Tang Tong's soldiers had no need for them. They had muskets for long-range attacks and high-quality weapons for close combat, made of Tang steel. They would not care for these inferior Japanese weapons. The weapons they collected on the battlefield were mainly used to arm the merchants.
After setting out on the journey, Tokugawa Munebayashi's group obtained some weapons from a cavalry group they encountered. Tokugawa Munebayashi also received a sword. The leader of the group, Li Li, also received a set of armor from the Japanese army. Armor was rare in the Japanese army, so this kind of spoils was also rare. Li Li put on the armor.
I was happy for a while.
Tang Tong's army all had uniform military uniforms. The cavalry's uniform was standard leather armor, the navy's was a white uniform similar to the hind leg, and the army's infantry was divided into two types. The regular army's was camouflage, and the auxiliary army's was gray-blue. Therefore, those soldiers who got the Japanese armor could not equip themselves with this Japanese stuff.
Tokugawa Munebayashi saw many horse-drawn carriages along the way and was very curious. You know, although there are horse-drawn carriages in Japan, their number is not very large. Later, he found out that it turned out that merchants from the Ming Dynasty brought production tools with them and produced them locally using the wood from the local area. Although the products were a bit shoddy, they were cheap, so the merchants who came here liked to use this means of transportation very much. After all, it was a short trip (sexual products), so as long as it was cheap, it was good.
There were so many carriages but few horses that could be robbed along the way, so most of the carriages were pulled by Japanese slaves. Tokugawa Munebayashi followed the team for a few days and finally arrived at another larger city. This was the territory of the Satsuma Kingdom, but there was a large army stationed here to guard the city. After Tokugawa Munebayashi followed the leader of the team into the city, he came to a place that seemed to be a large warehouse. There were crowds of people here, but there were people queuing in front of the team to register and inspect the goods. After the inspection, the goods were divided into two halves and pulled to different warehouses.
When it was the turn of Gori and his group, Tokugawa Munebayashi saw that the goods in the team were divided into two parts, and one part was taken away by a group of Japanese soldiers, and the other half was taken to a warehouse under the leadership of Gori. Tokugawa Munebayashi heard that this was the warehouse allocated to Gori and his group by the army. The things in this warehouse belonged to them privately. Before leaving Japan, these goods would be temporarily placed here to free up time to plunder more things on Japanese territory.
There is a large army guarding this place, and it is far away from the battlefield. There is a seaport nearby, and there is naval support at any time. There is no need to worry about the Japanese attacking this place. After the things are placed in this warehouse, they can be slowly transported away after the war is over, or if the team does not want to plunder anymore.
As for those slaves, Li Gan sold them all to merchants who specialized in purchasing slaves. Seeing his compatriots being sold like pigs, Tokugawa Munebayashi felt very uncomfortable. He couldn't help but inquire about their fate. Only then did he know that these male slaves were generally not sent elsewhere, but would stay in Japan to mine, and the female slaves would mostly be transported to places in Southeast Asia to be sold to local people. Now all the merchants in Ming Dynasty know that Southeast Asia is a very wealthy place. As long as they belong to Prince Tang, they are all wealthy landlords. And those ordinary immigrant families often have hundreds of acres of land, which is also a small landlord level in Ming Dynasty.
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