It was a peaceful day on the island of Tsushima.
Then everything changed when the Mongols attacked.
After years of asking Japan to come visit and getting ignored, Kublai Khan decided that
the only way to get the Japanese to acknowledge him as their emperor was by pew pew persuasion.
Kublai’s piece of the Mongol empire was called the Chinese Yuan Dynasty because he
really really wanted to be Chinese.
He gathered an invasion force of 15,000 Yuan soldiers and 8,000 Korean soldiers and tossed them at Japan,
and Japan took it in the Tsushima.
Now the Japanese weren’t caught totally by surprise.
They had been ignoring, for years, Kublai’s letters inviting them to come bow down to him.
Snubbing a Mongol warlord usually hindered peaceful negotiations.
Years before the invasion, the military shogunate in Japan told its warriors to prepare to defend the country,
though the shogunate didn’t seem too serious about it.
Warriors in Kyushu had to serve guard duty on monthly rotations, but it was more like
how you always had peacetime guards around the capital.
It wasn’t a fully stocked army ready and waiting to meet the enemy.
To be fair, they didn’t know when the attack would come.
Hard to support a large army for years like that.
They’d just eat up all your food, supplies, and women.
In 1274, the Mongol fleet reached Tsushima, and its main force landed on Komoda Beach,
where 80 Japanese samurai stood waiting and pissing their pants.
The defenders were led not by Lord Shimura, but Lord Sō Sukekuni.
The 80 defenders fought bravely against thousands.
Ever seen the movie 300?
The battle was like that movie if you skip to the end where the defenders all died.
A week later, the Mongols sailed to Iki island and repeated the process.
They slaughtered most of the men, and there were reports of them doing something not very nice to the women.
They drove holes through the hands of women prisoners and strung ropes through them to
keep the captives together, like they were making a necklace of bodies for a giant.
They also used the women as human shields, and tied their dead naked corpses onto ships
and advanced on Kyushu.
I don’t know if this scene from hell actually happened, but it was mentioned in 2 different sources,
a Chinese and a Japanese one.
The Mongol fleet then attacked Matsuura.
After devouring the appetizers, they moved on to the main course: Hakata Bay.
It was the only place in Kyushu where you could land a big army, and land they did,
right on top of a Japanese army.
This big shot warrior named Kikuchi Takefusa led the defenders.
Takefusa was a cook, because he served up the invaders’ asses on a platter.
The Mongols had to retreat.
Now, you would think that when an enemy runs away, it’s the best time to give chase,
but that’s not what Takefusa did.
This big shot warrior and his followers went the opposite way, and just skedaddled.
They left the battle. On their saddles.
It seems confusing, but what he did made total sense, for him.
You see, the shogunate had a real problem with its samurai.
Japan didn’t have a national army.
When the Mongols attacked, the shogunate called for any warrior in the west who wanted to
take up the hobby of Mongol head collection to rush over there.
That was how armies were formed.
Individual fighters rode to the battlefield in search of glory only decapitated foreign heads could give them.
Some were alone, some brought a few meat shields with them.
Over time, they would trickle in and be assigned to units.
Even after the fighting already started, people were still trickling in.
Another reason why procrastination kills.
People fought not to protect Japan, gods no, what were they, losers?
No, they fought to earn rewards like land or horses.
For that, they needed proof that they were heroic in battle.
What counted as proof?
A lot of things, like witnesses, the enemy’s armor, or body parts.
Mostly heads. They really liked heads.
So the main goal for many samurai was not necessarily to beat the invaders.
It was to charge in, kill some guys, grab a few heads, then get their asses out of there
to claim their rewards.
Like fathers, these samurai left whenever they felt like it.
Orders from commanders were more like strong suggestions.
For example, this one samurai was ordered to stay and wait for reinforcements.
And he was like, “Oh sure, sure” then, equipped with his bow and a plethora of profanities,
immediately charged into enemy lines and got shot off his horse.
He was saved by a fellow samurai, but he still received rewards.
Not for falling off his horse, but for other stuff he did.
But it shows that disobeying orders happened pretty often.
Warriors were mainly concerned with ensuring that people saw their deeds in battle so that
they had witnesses who could testify that they were totally killing it in the battlefield.
Just to smash under my boots the last remnants of this myth that samurai were
mega-loyal chads with an honor fetish...
there were even samurai who arrived, signed their names, then just left because they didn’t have to stay.
Anyways, reinforcements arrived and chased the Mongols back to the coast.
After some aggressive partying that got out of control, the Japanese pulled back.
Seeing the Japanese retreating, the Mongols aggressively got back on their ships to sail for home,
but not before burning some buildings first, including a famous shrine.
Now even with the problems in the Japanese army, they still pretty much tore up the battlefield.
There’s a popular narrative that the Mongols came in bows blazing, kicking ass and taking heads,
and that Japan was only saved by a typhoon.
But popular does not mean right, just look at Kanye.
Let’s poke some gaping holes through this popular narrative.
So there’s a myth that the samurai had this traditional way of fighting wars, where they
only fought in honorable one-on-one duels and would stand there before each duel declaring
their names and titles and accomplishments like they were Daenerys ready to take over the Seven Kingdoms.
A typical battle was full of warriors fighting one-on-one duels, and when the Mongols saw this,
they just mowed down these samurai mid-introduction, killing them one by one with an organized army.
Now the only way this could have been true was if the islands of Japan were inhabited by morons.
This myth came from old stories where people called out long introductions and challenged
worthy foes from the other side while reciting poetry and rescuing fair maidens with the whitest of faces.
It was cool in the stories.
It introduced the reader to important characters, it sounded romantic, and it would’ve been
batshit crazy in the real world.
Because even if it were a thing, the first time some chatty samurai stepped in front
of the Mongol army and deep-throated a mouthful of arrows would have been the last time it happened.
The Japanese weren’t thickheaded.
No, they fought in groups of mounted archers, and they did pretty well.
The Mongols did not have an easy time, and even praised the Japanese for their skills
with the horse and bow.
The invading army wasn’t all that great.
It wasn’t the army of badass, horse blood drinking mounted archers that you normally
picture when you think of the Mongols.
This was more an army led by Mongols, but made up of Han Chinese and Korean foot soldiers.
The famous Mongol horse archers were only a small part of it.
I’m not taking a dump on Chinese and Korean soldiers,
just saying it was likely hard to manage such a diverse army,
especially when it was full of people who the Mongols had invaded.
Morale couldn’t have been high.
These were soldiers fighting for their conquerors, soldiers dreaming of going home to their wives
after visiting a prostitute.
You don’t usually think of grenades in early medieval battles, but the Mongols actually used bombs.
Archaeologists dug these bad boys up from an old shipwreck.
They didn’t seem to make much of a difference though.
So how big were the two armies?
Estimating army sizes in history is an art, meaning there’s a lot of BS involved.
You can’t just accept eyewitness accounts.
For example if some samurai saw an army pass by and he writes down,
“Hark, a 2000-man army just passed,” can you really trust his estimate?
Did he have drone footage of the army?
Did he have a helicopter taking pictures?
No, he probably just thought, “Uh...that’s a huge army, that’s gotta be like 2000 people.
Well anyways, time to turn in this head.”
If you thought medieval battlefields were savage, you should see historians argue over army sizes.
The number of historian casualties in these debates are uncountable, and only increase
when they debate over those casualty numbers.
Reasonable estimates for the number of Japanese troops?
Around 2,000 to 6,000.
Some historians say the Mongols outnumbered the Japanese 4-to-1, some say both were around the same size,
and some were murdered.
The Mongols’ own account says they were outnumbered by the Japanese,
that the Japanese had 102,000 men, but no one takes that seriously.
My guess is that the two armies were of similar size,
since the Mongols did not just wipe the floor with the Japanese.
And then we have the typhoon.
Did the gods send a divine wind to save Japan?
Nah, probably not. There’s no strong evidence.
A typhoon did blow away the Mongols in the second invasion, but not this first one.
It wasn’t even typhoon season.
The Mongols wrote down why they left.
One of their commanders took an arrow to the face and had to be rushed back to his ship
so they could put his face back together.
They were also running out of supplies.
And so they left, and the Japanese didn’t need no divine wind to save them.
The battle at Hakata Bay lasted one day, and the whole invasion lasted about a month.
Alright, if you wanna see more Mongol invasion videos, check these out.
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