CHAPTER EIGHT
KUBLAI KHAN’S LOST FLEET
A gentle breeze sighs through the trees and leaves flutter gently in response. Robed priests slowly walk through the shrine’s precincts, stopping in front of the main altar to clap loudly and bow. The smoke of incense fills the air, and wooden placards painted with the prayers of the devout line the walkway. I am inside Hakozaki, one of Japan’s three most sacred Shinto shrines. Established in 923, Hakozaki has existed for more than a thousand years. The grounds of the shrine are filled with monuments and buildings, and it is in front of one of them that I stand gazing at a stone weight for an ancient ship’s anchor. A small plaque, in English and Japanese, explains that it came from a lost ship, part of a fleet sent by China’s Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan, to invade Japan in 1274.
A stone tablet nearby has musical notes and writing in kanji, or traditional Japanese script. I am told that it is a traditional song about the Mongol invasion. To my surprise and delight, our host stops a tour group of Japanese schoolgirls and requests them to sing the song. I ask my host and translator what the words are, and, with less grace than the girls but with gusto, he sings the song for us in English. The last stanza is the most significant:
There it is, the story of how the gods sent a divine wind to sink the Mongol invasion fleet and save Japan. The anchor stone is displayed at Hakozaki as proof of that long-ago event and as a reminder of how Japan’s shores were protected by that wind — a wind whose name in Japanese is kamikaze.
The story of the kamikaze was used to lethal effect in the Second World War. In the name of that “divine wind,” nearly two thousand young Japanese men strapped themselves into airplanes and dove out of the sky to suicidally crash onto the decks of American and Allied warships. The deadly toll they wrought did not turn the tides of war, however. In defeat, the Japanese were told that their emperor was not a god and that the ancient story of the kamikaze was a myth. But the story of the Mongol invasion and the kamikaze remains a powerful part of the national consciousness of modern Japanese.
I’ve journeyed to Japan with fellow members of The Sea Hunters to visit an archeological site where a lost ship of Kublai Khan’s fleet has surfaced from the gray-green waters near Takashima, a tiny island off Japan’s southwest coast. History, myth or a combination of both? The remains of the ancient ship will tell us much about what really happened off these shores more than seven centuries ago.
Under Chinggis Khan, a great horde of “barbarians” swept out of the Mongolian plains in 1206 to win a series of military conquests that made them not only the masters of much of Asia but also of an army poised on the doorstep of Europe and the Middle East. History would have been very different had the Mongols achieved Chinggis Khan’s dream of absolute conquest. As it was, the world will never forget the saga of the Mongols and of battles like their capture of the Turkmen city of Merv in 1221. In revenge for the death of his son-in-law, Chinggis ordered the death of every living thing in the city, and seven hundred thousand people were put to the sword.
Battles against the Muslims, the Russians and other eastern European kingdoms continued under Chinggis’s son Ögodäi; however, the death of Ögodäi’successor not only doomed the Muslim campaign but stalled the conquest of China. The next Mongol leader, Kublai Khan, soon controlled more territory than any sovereign in history. But he wanted more territory, more riches and, above all else, recognition of his supreme status as ruler of much of the world.
Even while he was engaged in a bitter struggle to conquer China, Kublai sent envoys to the Japanese court in 1268 to demand subservience. The Japanese military dictatorship, the bakufu, ignored the Mongol demands. In response to this defiance, Kublai Khan ordered his vassals in the subjugated Korean state of Koryo to build a fleet of nine hundred ships to invade Japan. The relatively narrow straits of Tsushima, spanning 284 miles between Korea and the coast of Japan’s Kyushu Island, had been a trade route for centuries. Now it would become a highway for war.
The invasion fleet departed from Koryo on October 3, 1274, after embarking twenty-three thousand soldiers and seven thousand sailors. Two days later, the fleet attacked the island of Tsushima in the middle of the strait, overwhelming the eighty Japanese troops stationed there. The island garrison of Iki, closer to the Japanese coast, fell next. On October 14, the Mongol fleet attacked the Kyushu port of Hirado, and then moved north to land at various points along Hakata Bay (near modern Fukuoka). Groups of samurai and their retainers rushed to meet the invaders at Hakata Bay — in all, historians estimate that some six thousand Japanese defenders stood ready to fight the far more substantial Mongol army.
Among the defenders was a samurai named Takezaki Suenaga. He left the only contemporary pictorial records of the Mongol invasion on two scrolls that he commissioned later in order to petition the government for a reward for his services. The scrolls, known as the Moko Shurai Ekotoba, are one of Japan’s great cultural treasures.
Dating to around 1294, the first scroll unrolls to reveal samurai in armor riding off to battle in 1274. The battle was unequal not only in numbers but in weapons and tactics. Mongol weapons were more advanced than those of the samurai: their bows had greater range, firing poisoned arrows, and they also had explosive shells hurled by catapults. In battle, the Mongols advanced en masse and fought as a unit, while the samurai, true to their code, ventured out to fight individual duels. In a week of fighting, the Japanese were slowly forced to give way. The scroll shows the Mongol forces firing arrows as horses and men fall, and Suenaga himself bleeding and falling from his horse as a bomb explodes in the air above him. The Japanese retreated, falling back to Daizafu, the fortified capital of Kyushu. The Mongols sacked and burned Hakata, but time was running out for them: Japanese reinforcements were pouring in from the surrounding countryside. The Mongol commander was wounded, and the sailors aboard the invading ships were wary of an incoming storm that threatened the fleet in its crowded anchorage.
On October 20, the wind shifted, and a number of Mongol ships dragged anchor, capsizing or driving ashore. In all, some three hundred ships and 13,500 men were lost. Battered and depleted, the surviving Mongols retreated to Koryo, leaving the Japanese to cheer their salvation thanks to the storm that had ended the invasion.
Knowing that the Mongols would be back, the bakufu ordered the construction of defenses at Hakata Bay. In a six-month period in 1276, laborers erected a 12½-mile, 5- to g-foot high defensive stone wall set back from the beach. The samurai also organized their vassals into a compulsory defense force and requisitioned small fishing and trading vessels for a coastal navy.
Kublai Khan renewed his demand for Japan’s surrender in June 1279, just as the last remnants of the Sung dynasty in China crumbled before the Mongol onslaught. The bakufu cut off the heads of the Mongol envoys as they landed. Furious, Kublai Khan ordered Koryo to build a new fleet of nine hundred ships to carry ten thousand troops and seventeen thousand sailors; and in China, he ordered a fleet of nearly thirty-five hundred ships and an invasion force of a hundred thousand Chinese warriors to prepare for battle.