the Veritable Records for the Jiajing era, the Senior Grand Secretariat Xu Jie, was keen to denounce his predecessor and political enemy Yan Song in this work, but in doing so he beclouded the whole wokou affair in the histories. Since the History of Ming is among the Twenty-Four Histories, the set of official histories of China, many writers up to the 20th century considered it the authority on the events of the Ming dynasty, including the Jiajing era wokou raids. The traditional interpretation characterizing the wokou as a Japanese phenomenon carried into the 20th century. During the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s, both Chinese and Japanese writers illustrated the Jiajing wokou using this narrative to instill nationalistic feelings in their respective countries. Japanese writers like Takekoshi Yosaburō, Tomaru Fukuju, and Mogi Shuichiro were more interested in the military aspect of the raids and considered the wokou part of a "noble tradition for the Japanese navy and for Japan's empire-building". Chinese writers of the time like Chen Mouheng and Wu Chonghan likewise blamed the Japanese (and sometimes the "imperialist" Portuguese) as the instigators of the Jiajing wokou raids while their Chinese counterparts were treated as mere traitorous collaborators. Chinese studies of the period also focused on the devastation caused by the wokou and the Ming response without delving too much on the wokou themselves. This narrative prevailed well into the Korean War, when wokou studies again became imbued with patriotic rhetoric. The cultivation of Qi Jiguang as a national hero was a byproduct of the propaganda efforts at the time. Despite being a minority during the 1930s, Japanese researchers of international diplomacy like Fujita Toyohachi, Akiyama Kenzo, and Kobata Atsushi were keen to point out the link between the piratical activities and foreign trade. This line of interpretation was picked up by Katayama Seijiro and Sakuma Shigeo in the 1950s and 60s who noted that although all coastal pirates were labelled "wokou", the raids were actually carried out by "treacherous merchants" (奸商) and influential families of China. They conclude that the disturbances had its roots in the social and economic changes in Chinese coastal society and were hence not an offshoot of Sino-Japanese diplomacy. Taiwanese historians in the 1960s agreed with this view, adding that the connection between trade and piracy was a result of the Ming prohibition against private sea trade. In the 1970s and 80s, when Mainland