‘A Green Dragon . . . Raised Its Head from the Waves’

It was one of the most massive naval invasions the world had ever seen—a two-pronged assault from the sea with thousands of ships and tens of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Mongol troops, coursing toward the coast of Japan in June 1281. The Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan—grandson of the legendary Genghis Khan—ruled from the edge of Europe to the coast of East Asia, and he was determined to bring Japan under his boot heel as well.

He had tried before, in 1274, with an estimated 900 ships and 23,000 troops, and had succeeded in putting Hakata to the torch before a typhoon drove off the fleet, wiping out a third of the Mongol invasion army and some 300 ships. To the Japanese, such a meteorological deus ex machina had been a very positive omen.

Since that thwarted first attempt, Kublai Khan had continued to send emissaries to offer Japan (a) a trade partnership and (b) a threat to either kowtow to the Great Khan’s superiority or be crushed. Each time, the feudal military rulers of Japan responded with blunt clarity—decapitating the Mongol Emperor’s hectoring messengers.

By 1281, the frustrated Khan was ready to make another attempt to subdue the recalcitrant Japanese—and now he had a significant force multiplier: In 1279, he had succeeded in overthrowing the Song Dynasty and conquering China (see “A Clash of Fleets, a Dynasty’s End,” August 2021, p. 9), which added immensely to his naval assets and troop strengths. And so it was that, in June 1281, two squadrons set sail for Japan, one from the Chinese mainland, the other from Korea. The target, as it had been in 1274, was Hakada Bay, but Khan’s mighty invasion force this go-round dwarfed that of his previous attempt.

Japan, meanwhile, had not been idle. Samurai leaders had constructed extensive earth and stone fortifications around Hakada Bay. And when the first squadron of Mongol and Korean troops arrived, their amphibious landing was stymied by that daunting wall of coastal defenses. Forced to fight on a narrow stretch of shoreline, unable to launch the trademark cavalry onslaught that had been the Mongols’ stock-in-trade across the Eurasian land mass, the invaders retreated to their ships and anchored offshore to await the arrival of the other squadron. And while they waited, the Japanese made their move.

They had no great fleet to match that of the enemy, but they had plenty of fast, light, small craft with which they proceeded to launch wave after wave of night attacks, with samurai archers delivering their deadly payloads, killing sailors and soldiers on the ships at anchor, burning those ships, boarding them, fighting to the death.

“Although the numbers of the defenders, both in ships and men, were small by comparison, the invaders underwent great slaughter,” noted the 19th-century English Japanologist Sir Edward Reed. “The smaller and lighter boats of the Japanese were readily destroyed and sunk, but their deficiencies in material strength the proud defenders made good by their valour.”

When the samurai lost one of their boats in the battle, they let it sink and kept on fighting: “When their vessels failed them they swam to the enemy, climbed upon his decks, put his crews to the sword, and fired the ships,” Reed wrote. “One gallant fellow, Kusana Schichiro, attacked them with two small vessels, and wrought wonders of war upon them.”

Having had enough punishment, the invaders withdrew. They holed up at Iki Island to continue waiting for the arrival of the other squadron. By August, it had arrived, and the combined elements of the invading force rendezvoused at last. For weeks, fighting raged on various offshore islands, while the samurai boats engaged the ships with the same bedeviling tactics they had used before. And on the Kyushu mainland, the defenders manned their barricades and waited for the major invasion to inexorably arrive.

But that invasion never came.

Japanese officials, even the Emperor of Japan himself, had been praying to the gods for deliverance from the coming assault. And that deliverance came borne on the winds of a tropical cyclone—a typhoon—that arose seemingly out of nowhere and blew the living hell out of the Mongol invasion fleet. An estimated 4,000 ships were lost and some 70,000 to 100,000 men killed as the typhoon ripped through the invaders and signaled the death-knell of Kublai Khan’s Japanese ambitions.

“A green dragon had raised its head from the waves,” as one samurai put it, and “sulfurous flames filled the firmament.” So great was the destruction of the invasion fleet that contemporary accounts described how “a person could walk across from one point of land to another on a mass of wreckage.”

Twice now, the Mongol Empire had tried to conquer Japan. Twice now, divine intervention in the form of a mighty sweeping wind had spared Japan that fate. Centuries later, in 1588, when another island kingdom—England—was spared a similar fate at the hands of an overwhelming invasion force—the Spanish Armada—it again was the timely arrival of a vicious storm that saved the day. In England too, it was viewed as divine intervention. “God blew his winds, and they were scattered” became the commemorative phrase.

It is a phrase that would have resonated profoundly in the Japan of 1281. Henceforth, if ever faced again with the existential peril of invasion, the Japanese would look to the skies for their salvation—look to the skies and pray for a reappearance of the divine wind—kamikaze.