A whole hundred years of the Warring States Period!
It is very interesting that Japan, which has been at war for hundreds of years, has a population that does not decrease but increases.
This is because a large number of barren hills and swamps have been reclaimed, agricultural technology from China has been rapidly introduced, and Japan's cultivated land area and per-mu yield have nearly doubled.
However, an increase in population does not mean a good thing.
The more people the lords have at their disposal, the less they take human life seriously. The average life span of Japanese people has dropped to twenty-five years, and 95% of the people are chronically hungry.
The Ming Dynasty arms dealers in Foshan once sold firearms to Japan like crazy. This move was boycotted by businessmen in other industries.
Because of the popularization of firearms, the intensity of Japan's wars escalated, and the number of war casualties continued to increase. The lords exploited the people even more cruelly. The vast majority of the people were not fully clothed. They wore linen in winter and stayed at home waiting to die, because there was no way
No money to buy daily necessities.
Sales of Daming industrial products, represented by cotton cloth, continued to decline, and some small trading companies (foreign trade companies) even went bankrupt as a result.
As a result, the arms dealers in Foshan were unlucky and were reported to be manufacturing smuggled firearms. The court's actions were ridiculously fast. The three law departments jointly investigated and found the evidence in half a month. The arms smuggling ships were also attacked by other merchant ships.
The arms trade between China and Japan is almost cut off.
Some Japanese lords could also imitate firearms themselves, but the production efficiency could not improve, and the quality was also unbearable.
More than ten years have passed like this, and Japan has gradually returned to the cold weapon era. Firearms troops with more than a thousand soldiers no longer appear. The soldiers are also numb from fighting, and they are unwilling to fight for their lords. More than 3% of the casualties will inevitably collapse.
If a lord fights a war for several years, he may only die a few hundred soldiers.
By the time Zhu Cizhen ascended the throne, Japan had become a country with a population of tens of millions, crushing many countries in Europe.
So the war resumed, and the shape of the war changed.
The lords implemented the policy of "separating soldiers from peasants" one after another, and professional soldiers began to appear in the thousands. The morale of the army also improved as a result, and a small number of troops could withstand more than 20% casualties. The rapid development of city-building technology also caused siege warfare to become more complex.
More frequent and more severe.
Fighting year after year, fighting month after month, until now, the five major forces of Shimadzu, Mori, Uesugi, Ichijo and Nanbu have finally competed.
The Nanfang clan is very poor, but also very rich.
It is poor because agriculture is underdeveloped and the latitude is high, so it is more seriously affected by the Little Glacier climate. It is rich because of the supply trade. Ships from Daming to Yinzhou must supply supplies in the territory of the Nanfang clan.
Safe Harbor.
At this time, in Japan's easternmost port, Zhang Mei and Fang Wenxiu landed to get some fresh air, while the fleet was conducting supply trade at the port.
The cotton cloth and salt shipped from the Ming Dynasty are the best-selling products in the Nanbu clan. It is the coldest place in Japan, and cotton cloth is in great demand. Japanese salt is produced on the coast of the Seto Inland Sea, where the Nanbu clan is at war, so it is shipped from the Ming Dynasty.
The salt that comes here is actually cheaper.
In fact, the Shimazu family's territory also mainly bought salt from Daming.
Because the sun-dried salt method has long been popularized in the south of the Ming Dynasty, the cost is lower than boiled salt, and the yield is higher than boiled salt. Smuggling it into Japan can be called a dumping product.
"This port is also prosperous." Fang Wenxiu nodded in approval.
Zhang Mei said: "There are many Han people here."
Half of the shops near the port were built by Han people. There are more than a thousand Han people living in the port. All of them are masters. Officials of the Nanfang clan must speak respectfully even when they see Han servants.
There is no other way. Once the Ming Dynasty is offended and another port is used as a supply point, the Nanfang clan's finances will be cut in half.
It was spring at this time, but the spring was very cold, so Zhang Mei needed to wear a cotton robe.
But the Japanese coolies on the dock only had a piece of crotch protection cloth all over their bodies. They moved boxes of goods from the ship and boxes of supplies onto the ship, like humble ants who can be drowned by spitting.
Early the next morning, babies were crying from the pier.
There were more than twenty babies lying side by side in a row, as well as several young children who could run and jump, and most of them were girls.
This is a Japanese tradition. Children who cannot be fed and old people who are useless are sent to the mountains to fend for themselves. Since the Han people came, they have another option. Send their children to the dock, and there is a very low probability of being killed.
Adopted by Han people.
The same was true for the poor people in the Ming Dynasty. They simply abandoned babies and drowned them, but rarely abandoned the elderly because abandoning the elderly was considered unfilial.
More than a dozen healthy women got off the boat and checked the babies' breathing. Four of them had already frozen to death. They took all the rest away, and a few walking children followed obediently.
These healthy women are all nannies, a must-have for every trip to Yinzhou. Sending their children to be fostered in immigrant families is also an alternative way of immigration. It was originally a rule set by the governor, and the cost was not very high, so it has been preserved.
this tradition.
The Japanese mothers who were watching in the distance happily left when they saw their children being taken away.
Only the mother of the four babies who had frozen to death silently stepped forward to take away the bodies, her expression numb as if nothing had happened.
Suddenly, a mother sang: "Although I am afraid of the way back, I have passed it, I have passed it... This is the path of Hades, this is the path of ghosts and gods, pass gently and go to the other side..."
I don't know who created this "Passage Song", but it quickly became popular all over Japan.
Children under seven years old belong to another world. Only Japanese children who have lived past seven years old are considered human beings. If they are under seven years old and the family cannot feed them, then take them into the mountains and kill them, so as not to leave them to endure hunger and cold in the world.
.
In the past ten years or so, the intensity of the sudden war has intensified, and Japan's population has begun to decline sharply. The average life expectancy has probably dropped to less than 30 years old.
During the Warring States Period, Japanese farmers basically had no private rights at all. Whatever oil and water they had left was squeezed out by the samurai sent by the lords to collect food. The daily staple food was miscellaneous grains. If you were lucky enough to pick wild vegetables, you would have to give it to the lord if you were hungry.
Served in corvee service.
Originally, women could still make some money by weaving, but the dumping of cotton in the Ming Dynasty meant that they could not even make extra money and could only spin linen to wear themselves.
That's what war is like. Huge amounts of money and food are consumed, and farmers must be exploited.
When the lord encountered a serious financial crisis and the external situation was bad, he would really not care whether the peasants lived or lived, and would even take away the last rations.
It is not uncommon for entire villages of farmers to starve to death.
There were even many "girlless villages" where all the girls were captured by the lords, sold collectively to merchants of the Ming Dynasty, and sent to the Ming Dynasty or Nanyang to work as prostitutes to make money.
Before the Shiba clan was annexed by the Nanbu clan, they were forced to jump over the wall, robbed all the peasants under their rule, and then gave each of them a bamboo spear to force the peasants to fight. As a result, more than half of the villages and towns in the territory were deserted, and the people all hid in the mountains to eat grass and starve.
They even prey on each other's human flesh, and human skulls can be seen everywhere in the wilderness and mountains.
If the war continues, it is estimated that Japan's population will fall below 7 million again in another twenty years.
Some merchants of the Ming Dynasty also proposed that Japan should be kept at peace and the Japanese people should have a little money, so that they can sell more goods.
But it's easy to say, but too difficult to do.
Want to unify?
Impossible, otherwise they would have been unified decades ago.
Because behind each Japanese lord, there were multiple Ming merchant forces. These Ming merchants also competed with each other for territory. If one of them was annoyed, they would quietly smuggle firearms over.
If it doesn't work, then just assassinate him directly. There are many Japanese ronin who are willing to be the killers.
Three years ago, the Uesugi clan, which occupied central Japan, was about to unify Kanto, but the head of the family was suddenly assassinated. Although the Uesugi clan did not split due to this, the successors were busy dealing with internal struggles, and it was impossible to expand in the short term.
The most interesting thing about the Shimazu family is that because the head of the family was unable to give birth to an heir, he actually adopted the son of a wealthy family in Fuzhou as his heir. This heir also intermarried with a wealthy family in Ningbo, and the Shimazu family received full support from the two major families in China.
This seems difficult for people to understand. Even if you can conquer the country, isn't it still passed on to outsiders?
In fact, this situation is very common in Japan, where the adopted son often inherits the family business, as long as the surname remains unchanged.
The Shimadzu family developed rapidly from this, and even picked up four obsolete armed merchant ships for nothing. There were 300 ronin equipped with muskets on board. These were gifts brought from home by their adopted son. If this development continues, the Shimadzu family is likely to return to business.
There is hope for annexing Shikoku Island and even unifying Western Japan.