In summer 2002, Japanese archaeologists off the southern coast of Kyushu raised the remains of a sunken warship lost during an abortive invasion of Japan in 1281 by Kublai Khan, the Great Khan of the Mongols, and the recently crowned emperor of a conquered China. News of the discovery sparked intense interest in Japan and abroad. This first look at one of the Khan’s lost warships followed 20 years of archaeological survey for submerged remains of the “Mongol Invasion,” an event that has special meaning in Japan.
In the last desperate months of World War II in the Pacific, Japanese strategists turned to a powerful legend of how foreign invaders would never conquer the sacred soil of Japan itself. Japan was a divine land ruled by a divine being, an emperor who could call on his ancestors, the gods themselves, to unleash a divine wind that would sweep the enemy from Japan’s shores. Twice before, according to the legend, a foreign invader on the brink of defeating Japan’s defenders had been destroyed by this divine wind, or kamikaze.
The legend told how the kamikaze had sunk two massive invasion fleets sent from Korea and China by Kublai Khan. The defeat of the Khan’s fleets in 1274 and 1281 was clear proof of Japan’s divine protection. Indeed, “history” recorded that the Emperor Kameyama and the priesthood of Japan had prayed for the defeat of the Mongols, in the face of an onslaught from a ferocious, deadly enemy who already had swept across much of the known world.
In October 1944, the Japanese invoked the story of the kamikaze as Allied forces closed in on the home islands. Nearly three years of intense combat had pushed Japan itself closer to being attacked. As the noose tightened with the fall of the Ryukyus, the destruction of Japan’s Imperial Navy and merchant marine, and the bombing of Japanese cities, more than 2,000 young men turned themselves into “human bullets” to turn the tide of the war. In the name of the kamikaze, they struck at the encircling U.S. fleet, sinking 34 ships, damaging 288 others, and killing thousands.
From where did their deeply grounded belief come? It was the result of a policy dating back generations before World War II. It was intended deliberately to inculcate a culture of complete obedience on behalf of the state through the concept of a divine Emperor who ruled a land unlike any other—separate from, superior to, and protected from the outside world. The story of the Mongol Invasion and the kamikaze was one tool employed to reinforce that belief.
What is emerging now, nearly six decades after the war, is that Japan’s devoutly held belief in the kamikaze is the result of a process to reinvent and reinterpret history to serve nationalistic and militaristic purposes. Recent scholarship, both in Japan and in the West, is rewriting the history of the Mongol Invasion. Rather than being a “revisionist” history, this new interpretation corrects the previous “understanding,” thanks to a critical look at the original documents, new archaeological research with the recently discovered wrecks of the invading Mongol fleet, and ongoing scholarship into the politics and philosophy of Meiji and post-Meiji Japan.
Japan’s “Historical Memory” of the Mongol Invasion
Japanese history of the Mongol Invasion is largely a creation of the Japanese State after it was forced in the mid-19th century to open itself to the outside world. Japan’s Tokugawa shoguns closed Japan, forbidding foreign travel and contact. The Japanese withdrew behind their island borders after 1636 and ruthlessly stamped out “foreign” concepts, most notably Christianity that had been introduced by Portuguese and Dutch traders. As their country closed, the shoguns changed the rules for shipbuilding so vessels built to fish and trade along the coast no longer could withstand a prolonged voyage on the open ocean. Mention of the Mongol Invasion was prohibited, and in time many people forgot about it. As late as 1808, when a Japanese novelist wrote a book in which the invasion played a part in his historical drama, the Japanese government made him remove any mention of it. But when the United States forced Japan to open starting in 1854, memory of the invasion was revived to remind the Japanese people that once before Japan had been able to resist the forced introduction of something foreign.
The last decade of the 19th century was one of incredible change. While Japan Westernized rapidly in response to the “opening,” it did so to emulate and ultimately compete with the powers that forcibly had ended the country’s self-imposed isolation. Part of this “new” Japan was a change from the military dictatorship of the shogun and Japan’s feudal system of government—with power held by provincial lords and samurai—into a new national state headed by the emperor. It reinvested him with power as head of state and as the central religious figure—virtually a god who was himself the ancestor of the gods who had created Japan in the mythical past. Under the Emperor Meiji, who took the throne in 1867, Japan abolished the old government system, industrialized, and modernized.
The emperor’s advisors, in fact the actual rulers of a young and easily manipulated sovereign, reintroduced and reinforced key elements of the “past.” They supported the critical concepts of resistance to foreigners and the protection embodied in Japan’s gods and emperors. They advocated nationalism and devotion to the state, and they espoused the concept of ultimate sacrifice to protect the emperor and the state. All this was in the name of expanding the Japanese empire and imposing Japanese values on its neighbors, particularly those countries that had threatened in the past, such as Korea, China, and Mongolia.
Between 1870 and 1905, Japan had conquered neighboring islands, most notably, Okinawa. In 1894-95 it went to war with China and defeated that larger empire, adding Korea as a vassal state and Taiwan. Forced by foreign powers to relinquish some of its gains, it went to war with the closest of them, Russia, in 1904- 05 to gain full control of Korea and to thwart Russian dreams of domination in the region. Joining the Allies in World War I, Japan gained Germany’s Pacific colonies as a spoil of war, spreading into the Marianas and Marshall Islands in an expansion blessed by the Treaty of Versailles.
In the 1930s, Japan’s expansion continued with an undeclared war with China that saw it occupy much of China, creation of a “puppet state” in Manchuria, and a political alliance with Germany and Italy to form the “Axis,” which in time meant the occupation of French Indochina. Japanese expansion and the brutality of the war waged in China brought foreign condemnation and a U.S. embargo, which culminated in Japan’s decision to seize all foreign territories and colonies in Asia, including those of the United States, and to attack and attempt to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet. This led to the entry of the United States and Japan into World War II and a bloody contest in the Pacific that killed millions. As the end of that long road of conquest and expansion ground to a halt and collapsed, the venerable story of the Mongols’ defeat was invoked in a desperate last measure to stem the tide. Why was the story so powerful?
Ghenko: Legend of The Mongol Invasions
The traditional Japanese story of the Mongol Invasions, repeated without critical analysis in the West for several decades, comes directly out of Meiji-era “histories” written for a distinct purpose—to shape and mold Japanese thought through a “historical lesson.” Drawing from a handful of sources that dated back to 1274-81 and still available in the late 19th century, as well as legend, the story of the Mongol Invasions is a compelling tale.
Following his ascension as Great Khan of the Mongols in 1260, Kublai Khan set about concluding the Mongol conquest of Sung Dynasty China. In 1268, Kublai sent envoys to Japan to demand that the Japanese subjugate themselves to his authority. Japan’s military dictators, the bakufu, rebuffed the Khan’s demands. Kublai’s response was to order his Korean vassals to build an armada and provide the bulk of an army to invade Japan by way of the narrow, 100-mile wide Straits of Tsushima that separate Korea from Kyushu.
Sailing from Koryo, Korea, in early October 1274, the fleet, said to be nearly 1,000 ships packed with 30,000 Mongol, Chinese, and Korean soldiers and sailors, overwhelmed Japanese garrisons on the islands of Tsushima, in the middle of the strait, and Iki, close to the Japanese coast. In mid- October, the armada struck the mainland of Kyushu, finally landing at Hakata Bay (modern Fukuoka). The Japanese met the invaders on the beach. The battles that followed fared badly for the Japanese. The legend stresses how valorous Japanese samurai were defeated by Mongol tactics such as fighting en masse as well as by superior weapons such as poisoned arrows and exploding shells.
Falling back, the Japanese retreated inland to the fortified castle of Daizafu, while the Mongols retired to their ships, wearied by the fighting. That night, a strong wind blew up, scattering the fleet, wrecking hundreds of ships, drowning thousands of men, and ending the invasion. In the aftermath of the failed invasion, the bakufu strengthened their defenses at Flakata Bay, building a 24-mile-long, 5- to 7-foot-high stone wall, set back from the beach. Local samurai organized their vassals into a militia, known as the ikoku keigo banyaku, and requisitioned fishing and trading vessels to build a coastal naval force.
Kublai Khan was not idle during this period, having sent another envoy in April 1275. Japan’s answer was the execution of the Khan’s envoy and his entourage. The Khan made one last demand for surrender in June 1279, but this time the Japanese executed the envoys on the beach at Hakata as they landed to negotiate. Furious, the Khan ordered Koryo once again to build a fleet and prepare for invasion. From the just-conquered Sung Dynasty Navy, the Khan assembled a fleet of Chinese warships.
Split into two divisions—the Korean force numbering 900 ships and 57,000 men and the Chinese force numbering 3,500 ships and 100,000 warriors—the new invasion force was to strike in a coordinated attack in early summer 1281. The Korean fleet sailed first, in May, striking Iki in early June and then landing at Hakata Bay. Stone walls built by the Japanese thwarted the landing, and the troops pulled back to occupy Shiga Island in the middle of the bay. The Japanese used their small defense fleet to cut into the Khan’s force, with armed samurai springing onto the enemy ships and killing the crews and soldiers defending them. Badly mauled, the intruders retreated.
The delayed Chinese fleet finally sailed in June and rendezvoused with the Korean fleet. Instead of hitting Hakata, they massed 30 miles south at Imari Bay, pouring ashore at the small island of Takashima. Fighting raged on the island for two weeks, with the invaders met once again on the water by the Japanese coastal defense force while warriors fought ashore in the hilly countryside of Takashima. To protect against the cutting-out actions used by the Japanese at Hakata, the crews of the Mongol ships chained their vessels together and constructed a planked walkway, building a massive floating fortress to repel the Japanese.
The Japanese ships—including fire vessels—struck at the Mongol fleet but were unable to do much against it. Once again, the battle was turning against Japan. The Imperial Court, however, had prayed for divine intervention, beseeching the goddess of the Ise Shrine for help. Its prayers were answered on the evening of 30 July, when “a green dragon had raised its head from the waves . . . sulfurous flames filled the firmament.” A storm smashed into the Mongol fleet. Nearly 4,000 ships sank as the ships tried to disengage from one another and flee the bay through the narrow harbor entrance. Nearly 100,000 men were drowned or washed ashore, where the Japanese executed them. Once again, the gods had saved Japan from foreign invasion, with a heaven-sent divine wind.
Memorials and Relics of the Mongol Invasion
In summer 2002, as part of a team of divers and archaeologists—the crew of a National Geographic Television International series, Clive Cussler’s “The Sea Hunters”—my colleagues and I were invited to Japan to participate in the final excavation of the wrecked “Mongol” ship at Takashima. We journeyed to Fukuoka and then to Takashima. What we found was that all the shrines and monuments date to the Meiji period or to the reigns of his successors, the Taisho Emperor and the Showa Emperor (Hirohito).
Fukuoka’s principal monuments to the Mongol Invasions, or the Genko, as they are termed in Japanese, are a monument to Emperor Kameyama, who prayed for divine intervention, and a monument to a Buddhist monk, Nicheren, who warned Japan of the Mongol peril, but was ignored. Archaeological excavation in the 1920s and ’30s exposed portions of the defensive stone wall, which were restored and opened for public visitation. At Fukuoka’s principal Shinto temple, the Hakozaki Shrine, memorial plaques and a stone anchor, said to come from a wrecked “Mongol” warship, are displayed as they have been for several decades.
The centerpiece is in the heart of Fukuoka at Higashikoen Park. The statue of Kameyama towers above its park setting on an artificial hill, an imposing presence, the “elevated” status of which is a less-than-subtle suggestion that victory in 1274 and 1281 came thanks to the emperor and the gods. Nearby is a powerful piece of symbolism, a monument to Nicheren, who rejected “standard” Japanese Buddhism and instead founded a strongly nationalistic, xenophobic sect. He also was a critic of the Japanese government in his time and endured exile and barely escaped execution for his beliefs. Nicheren warned of outside influences, including the Mongols, that would overwhelm Japan, but the warnings of the outcast monk were rejected. Nicheren’s sect survived his death, but remained obscure until the end of the 19th century, when his brand of religion was seen to be an ideal fit with state-supported Shinto as it advocated preserving a unique Japanese identity against all foreign influences.
Nicheren’s status was elevated from obscurity by the government precisely at a time when Japanese militarism and foreign conquest were escalating with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. The 35-foot-high bronze statue of Nicheren that surmounts the memorial to him was built between 1894 and 1904. When it was dedicated, its structure included a portion of the mainmast of the battleship Mikasa, flagship of the victorious Japanese fleet at the Battle of Tsushima. On the grounds near the monument is a bronze bust of Admiral Heihachiro Togo, victor of Tsushima who had been a frequent visitor to the monument. Here also is Hakozaki Shrine, which displays a bust of the admiral and original calligraphy inscribed by him exhorting Shinto virtues.
The modern Japanese handout visitors receive at the Nicheren monument offers a politically correct interpretation of the monument, noting in English that it “serves as a memorial to the souls of both sides who died in the invasion.” The statue sits on a high pedestal ornamented with cast bronze panels that the guidebook explains, “depict important events in Nicheren’s life.” Most are of the Mongol invasion, and the most striking of them is one that shows the Mongols in Japan, brutally invading. A vanquished samurai lies dead, with a Mongol foot on his chest. A Mongol soldier grabs at the robes of a fleeing Japanese woman. An old man pleads as a mother is dragged away with her crying child by another Mongol, while another woman, held down by a gleeful Mongol, has her palms split open with a knife. The latter image refers to a story circulated at the time the monument was built of how the Mongols cut open women’s palms and hung them from the sides of their ships, screaming, to break the resolve of Japan’s defenders. The Nicheren monument is Meiji-era propaganda that warns of what happens when the foreigners come, while the nearby statue of Kameyama is a reminder that when they come, Japan will be defended by the gods and the divine wind.
Next to the Nicheren memorial is a museum, a display, according to the guidebook, of “weapons of the Mongolian army and other items of those days,” operated privately by the Nicheren sect. When we toured the museum, our guides were loath to take us in and in the end stayed out while I went in alone. To be sure, the museum does display some weapons, most of them Japanese and from a period much later than the Mongol Invasion. Two statues depict victorious samurai stomping and stabbing vanquished Mongols, and a series of paintings, painted by artist Yada Issho in 1896, show scenes of the Mongol invasion. It includes the palm slitting (this time a crying child clutches a sneering Mongol’s leg as her mother, a boot to her head and her robe tom open, lies on the ground while her hand is stabbed through). This is no museum. The artifacts within it are part of an elaborate stage setting, like the memorial itself, that vilifies the foreign invader, extols the martial spirit of Japan, and merges with the statue of Kameyama to remind that behind it all is divine protection.
At Hakozaki Shrine, the stone anchor from the Mongol ship stands next to a stone tablet with the words and music of a song carved on it. After I asked, one of my older guides sang it for me and then translated it. It was, he explained, the “Mongol Invasion Song,” written in the Meiji era. I found the words published in a book written by Nakaba Yamada and published in 1916 as Ghenko: The Mongol Invasion of Japan. The only Japanese “history” of the invasion published in English, it is a heavily embellished exhortation of Japan’s “superior spirit” and martial prowess. The song sums it all up, with lines about how there “looms a peril to the nation . . . From the Tartar shores barbarians, What are they, the Mongol band, Fellows insolent and haughty. ‘Neath their heaven we will not stand.” The song goes on to tell of how the defenders fought, but dying “we become the guardian Gods of home, for which we fell, To Hakozaki’s God I swore it, and he knows the pure heart well.” But then, the song ends:
Heaven grew angry, and the ocean’s billows were in tempest tossed; They who came to work us evil, Thousands of the Mongol host, Sank and perished in the sea-weed, Of that horde survived but three. Swift the sky was clear, and moonbeams Shone upon the Ghenkai Sea.
Confronting the Legend
One leaves Fukuoka with a clear sense of how, in a relatively short time, Japan’s political and military leaders took an old story, forgotten and at one time banned, and turned it into a powerful myth that served a base political and military purpose.
Some Japanese scholars, including archaeologists, join a few Western scholars in reevaluating the invasion through the objective study of the few surviving original documents and archaeological remains. One source, two detailed picture scrolls, or emaki, painted for a samurai defender named Takezaki Suenaga and studied by Thomas Conlan of Bowdoin College in Maine, not once mentions or illustrates any storms or sinkings, just samurai and their retainers fighting on the beaches and on the water in desperate pitched battle. Conlan’s analysis of the Japanese archives also downplays dramatically the size of fleets, armies, and casualties. He suggests the first invasion was ended not by a storm but by a shift in the winds that gave the stalemated Mongols, who faced an uphill fight, a chance to leave with honor intact. The second invasion ended in a storm or storms, but Conlan can find no contemporary account of losses as severe as the myth suggests or even contemporary use of the term “kamikaze.” He finds only a few mentions by Kameyama’s courtiers of divine intervention.
Another aspect of the reinterpreted history stresses that the Japanese defenders who met the Mongols on the beaches in 1274 and 1281 fought not for the defense of a Japanese “nation” or even for their emperor, who at that time was a distant and politically weak religious figurehead. The power was held by the military dictatorship, the bakufu, and the defenders who fought the Mongols did so out of loyalty to their regional lords, for their individual honor and stature, and for the possibility of reward. Suenaga’s scrolls were painted as part of his petition for rewards for his service to his own lord, who did reward him.
The seeming end of the “old” ideology with the defeat of Japan in World War II has challenged the new generation of Japanese scholars and their view of the Mongol Invasion. And the archaeologists now follow up on earlier discoveries. Stone walls and scattered artifacts raised from the seabed in the early 1980s were viewed more as relics that gave “life” to the legend. Working over the last decade, a team of underwater archaeologists at Takashima Island, site of the final battle of the invasion, now seek not only relics, they seek to answer key questions: Who exactly came to invade? How many of them were there? And what sank them?
The Wreck
Lying in 45 to 50 feet of water in a small harbor on the southern end of Takashima, the wreck lies beneath five feet of mud that the archaeologists have stripped away carefully to reveal the shattered and burned remains of a warship loaded with supplies, arms, and ordnance. Among the most amazing discoveries have been several ceramic shells filled with gunpowder and shrapnel (tetsuhau)—the world’s oldest bombs yet found and the earliest direct physical evidence of explosive ordnance at sea. Stacks of iron crossbow bolts, more than 80 sabers and edged weapons, an intact Mongol cavalry helmet, fragments of leather “lamellar armor,” and a small bowl with its owner’s name and rank still painted on it after seven centuries (it reads “Weng, commander of 100 units”), join the broken remains of one drowned sailor and warrior as archaeological evidence of what this ship carried.
The number of artifacts and their level of preservation are remarkable. The leather armor is still bright red. Two delicate tortoise-shell combs, probably used to comb lice from sailors’ hair in the less than sanitary conditions of shipboard life of the time, retain all of their teeth. The wooden fragments of the ship still bear deep scorch and burn marks, making one wonder if a storm sank this ship after all. Perhaps the burning is direct evidence of a successful attack that hit at the edges of the Khan’s fleet.
Typhoons sweep along this coast with regularity, and the remains of the ship, despite the burn marks, also show the effects of churning and tossing, as the ship lies close to shore on a rapidly shelving bottom. Japanese archaeologists believe the Khan’s fleet was hit by a seasonal typhoon that sank a number of ships. But how many were really there and how many were lost? Dr. Kenzo Hayashida, head of the excavation, says he believes there were not 4,000 ships wrecked at Takashima; perhaps only 400 or so went down. He bases that in part on a rule of thumb Thomas Conlan suggests—that the legend exaggerates forces by a factor of ten—and the fact that the seabed is simply not carpeted with artifacts. A mathematical model of artifact density supports Hiyashida’s contention.
The new interpretation, based on the archaeology, reconstructs the “Mongol” fleet as a complex Chinese- and Korean-built naval force of 1,170 large war junks, each about 240 feet long. Each carried about 60 crew and soldiers and was capable of transporting horses. They towed a landing craft known as a battoru, which could carry up to 20 men. There were also smaller warships, including 300 Korean two-masted fighting ships and supply vessels. The dimensions of the larger warships, twice that of contemporary European vessels, come directly from the wreck excavated at Takashima. The timbers of the keel are huge and hint at the ship’s bulk, but its anchor tells all. A one-ton mass of red oak and granite, it has a shank that measures 21 feet long and was carried suspended from the bow.
The fleet was “Mongol” only in terms of some of the troops and the fleet’s allegiance to Kublai Khan. The ship and most of the artifacts found on the wreck are Chinese, with only 1% of them attributed to the “Mongols.” The wood used, Chinese oak and pine, shows the wrecked warship’s origin, and the granite in the anchor has been traced by the archaeologists to China’s Fujian Province. The wreck is a reminder that the Mongol Empire was made up of disparate parts melded by political allegiance to the Khan.
The archaeology at Takashima also suggests ships equipped with hastily assembled equipment and provisions that speak of shortcuts and compromises. Anchors were made not in the traditional style with one large stone stock, and cruder examples have two smaller stone stocks, which probably were not as strong, a factor that may have contributed to the sinking of the ship being excavated. Pieces of crudely made pottery also had been thrown hastily and glazed by the thousands, as feverish preparations were made for war.
But the archaeology also shows the ships the Khan brought from China came from what had been the world’s most advanced and largest navy, that of the Sung Dynasty, which fell to the Mongols through conquest and internal treachery at the time of the invasion of Japan. The Khan’s advantage is seen not only in the apparent size of the wreck. Unlike European warships of that time, this one had watertight bulkheads, a rudder, a compass, and explosive projectiles. And if the Khan used them properly and in sufficient numbers, he had a fleet that could have dominated the world. But he failed in Japan because he did not have enough ships to bring sufficient troops to fight and win on land. A naval battle was out of the question. First, the Japanese did not have a navy to fight, his fleet split and fought separate battles on land without a coordinated effort, and the Japanese fought on a terrain difficult for the invaders to handle. In addition, seasonal typhoons brought havoc and disaster when the invaders arrived too late in the season and stayed too long in their prolonged fights ashore. The divine nature of Japan and its emperor had nothing to do with it.
Had the story of brave Japanese defenders, two invading armies defeated through a combination of a military stalemate, a hastily assembled and poorly organized invasion force, and the timely intervention of annually recurring storms been the story presented to generations of Japanese before World War II, perhaps history would have been different. “What if?” notwithstanding, the lesson here—certainly not a new one or unique to this story and reinforced by the evidence brought up from the seabed— is how history can be manipulated and used to deadly effect.