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Please see below for information about the nineteenth session of the 2026-2027 Enemy Encounters in East Asia webinar series of the Research Training Group \"Ambivalent Enmity: Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East” at Heidelberg University and the Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies, Germany.
“Regionality and Family in Pirate Organization in the Fourteenth Century: Exploring the Role of `Solidarities’ (ikki) among the Waegu”
Peter Shapinsky
(Professor, University of Illinois)
In this session, Peter Shapinsky (Professor, University of Illinois) will share his thoughts on the first waves of Waegu piracy in East Asia:
In this presentation I offer some initial thoughts about debates surrounding the so-called first wave of Waegu, Japanese pirates that laid waste to Koryŏ Korea and raided late Yuan and early Ming China between 1350 and 1420. I address debates about the bases, organization, and scale of the Waegu by exploring possible connections between the piracy and “solidarities” (ikki) of Kyushu. A horizontal form of local organization, Ikki comprised villages, allied military families, or a single lineage based in specific locales. Ikki codified collective decision-making through ritual oath-taking to protect or enhance the economic and territorial privileges of members; they mediated conflict resolution and negotiations with overlords. Solidarities flourished during Japan’s long civil war of 1336-1392 in which warlords backed competing imperial claimants and sought to establish hegemony over the archipelago. Ikki proved useful to warlords to harness local support for military campaigns that crisscrossed Kyushu and its sea-lanes, opening potential avenues for raids across the seas. This civil war thus fueled the fourteenth-century wave of piracy, whose participants hailed from Tsushima, Iki, and the northern Kyushu region known as Matsura. Many of the Iki and Matsura participants drew from several solidarities of Kyushu enmeshed in the civil war. Although often described in EuroAmerican scholarship as ephemeral organizations that succumbed to hierarchical warrior lordship, many of the solidarities of Kyushu villages and warriors proved durable politically, judicially, and militarily.
BACKGROUND
For more information about the Research Training Group \"Ambivalent Enmity: Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East”, please visit the website https://www.ambivalentenmity.uni-heidelberg.de/en
The RTG also produces the podcast series Enemy Encounters which features interviews and in-depth discussions conducted by members of the RTG with scholars, researchers and journalists about various cases of ambivalent enmity in Eurasia as a whole. It can be accessed here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/enemy-encounters/id1783137716
Previous recorded webinar sessions can be watched on the YouTube channel of Heidelberg University here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuRaSnb3n4kSI9PBuEf3WECUVZ6V_k9mB
