many Buddhist monasteries sponsored trading ventures in order to raise funds, as did various families of feudal lords, including the Ashikaga themselves. In fact, the Ashikaga, in order to secure some of the profits of this trade for their shaky regime, accepted the Chinese theory that international trade was simply the bringing of tribute to the Chinese court by barbarian peoples and the beneficent bestowal of gifts upon the barbarians by the court in return. To fit this pattern, some of the Ashikaga Shogun, with complete disregard of the theory of imperial rule, permitted themselves to be invested as “Kings of Japan” by the emperors of the Ming dynasty of China and then sold credentials to private Japanese traders, to give them legal and official status in their trading ventures in China.
Despite the interest in foreign trade on the part of the monasteries and the Shogun in central Japan, leadership in overseas trading was taken primarily by the small feudal lords, the ordinary warriors, and the merchants of western Japan, who merged to form a class of adventurous and hardy mariners. Like their counterparts in Europe, these men of the sea were primarily traders, but they were not averse to piracy when opportunity offered. Credentials from the Ashikaga or trading permits from the Chinese court meant little to them. Already in the thirteenth century piratical acts by Japanese warrior-merchants had become frequent in Korean waters, and during the fourteenth century, Japanese pirates became a menace to the very existence of the kingdom of Korea. Emboldened by their successes in Korean waters, they shifted their activities more and more to the coast of China. As the Ming dy-
