Sometimes, an emergency is the best warning that you’re not ready for one.
Japan’s military leaders thought they were hot stuff, genuine Carolina Reapers in human form.
When the Mongols sent over ambassadors to intimidate them, the Japanese cut their heads off.
It was like pulling down your pants and presenting your bum to the largest empire in the world,
asking them to come take it.
The Mongols did try to come and take Japanese bum in 1274 and 1281,
but prematurely evacuated the battlefield without doing much.
However, getting slapped in the face twice by invaders made the shogunate,
the military government of Japan, take a long hard look at its weaknesses, and fix them.
The shogunate’s power grew, which you would think was a good thing, but it caused even
more problems and pushed the shogunate closer to a cliff.
At the time, Japan was ruled by two governments:
the Imperial court in Kyoto and the military shogunate in Kamakura.
Being the boys with the bows and arrows, the shogunate took care of defending Japan from
the mad Mongol marauders.
But they quickly realized that the samurai didn’t work as advertised.
The loyal, brave defenders of Japan were more like opportunistic mercenaries.
There’s no evidence that warriors saw themselves as part of the same country.
The idea of Japan as one nation, of one people, came much later.
No one was fighting to protect Japan. They fought for rewards.
Their loyalties were to their families, their houses, not to some fuzzy idea of a Japanese state.
It was hard to control these guys.
The shogunate needed generals to give orders to these men,
so they decided to use an existing office called shugo 守護, which is like a military governor.
Each province had a shugo that took care of military and policing issues,
so they were the reasonable choices to lead the defense.
But reasonable choices are not always reasonable.
Many of these shugo were not famous warriors.
So these samurai from far away would ride to the battlefield,
take one look at the inexperienced man they were supposed to serve,
then say, “He can shugo kiss my ass.”
People usually didn’t follow generals who still had mommy’s milk dripping from their lips into their diapers.
They looked around to join the unit of a more worthy general,
someone who looked more impressive, more brave, or more wealthy.
It was worse in battle.
Generals gave orders and warriors heard suggestions.
A general was there to fight off the Mongol invasion, but a warrior was there to collect
heads like he was a disgruntled Ash Ketchum after his Pokemon career,
heads he could later turn in for rewards.
People only respected and obeyed leaders who gave them stuff like land or horses.
What did some shugo they just met ever do for them?
After grabbing a few heads, a soldier was likely to just peace out and leave the battle.
Some people from other provinces even ignored orders and stayed home.
They were like, “Not my province, not my problem.”
Remember, they didn’t think of Japan as one unified state.
After the first invasion, the shogunate leaders were shaking in their sandals,
a Niagara Falls of pee just streaming down their leg armor, because they realized that if they wanted
to survive another invasion, they had better make some changes.
They needed more influence in Western Japan, and they needed these damn samurai to start
treating the shugos with some respect.
The shogunate had always ruled in the east, and tried its best to ignore Central and Western Japan.
But it was time to move out of the starting zone and see the entire map.
Kamakura gave some of its high-ranking samurai shugo positions in the Western provinces,
and forced a bunch of warriors to move their butts to Kyushu, the most likely invasion location.
The shugo office became more respectable, because it was held by these high-ranking samurai.
They were encouraged to secure the loyalty of men who fought in the invasions
by giving them lands and other rewards.
Then the shogunate made a big change: it gave land to shugo offices.
Before, only individuals owned land.
Land was the samurai currency.
Monopoly players have Monopoly money, girls have rich guy friends, and samurai had land.
The shugo office leveled up in authority like a Magikarp becoming a Gyarados.
Warriors who previously scoffed at shugos all of a sudden wanted to ride that Gyarados tail.
The new system made it easier for the shogunate to coordinate its warriors.
Defending the country became the job of shugo offices instead of individual samurai.
With the changes came new power and authority for the shogunate, but also new problems.
So we know that the Mongols only invaded Japan twice, but the Japanese didn’t.
The Mongol leader Kublai Khan actually planned a third invasion.
Japan was Moby Dick, and Kublai was a mad captain,
obsessed with a prize too costly for his men to attain, yet too enticing for his ego to ignore.
Even after the second failed invasion, the Mongols kept sending envoys to Japan,
touting the virtues of being his servant.
But Kublai died before he could invade a third time.
Meanwhile, the Japanese kept preparing for another attack.
They put men on wall duty for months at a time.
The shogunate banned its western samurai from leaving the west,
afraid that people would neglect their duties.
The defense project went on for decades after the invasions.
All the money for manning and building the walls came from the pockets of the people
manning and building the walls, which were the warriors in the west,
especially warriors from Kyushu.
It was a huge hit to their bank accounts.
Many of these men had already been forced to move to Kyushu,
a place of cheap food and cheaper whores, a place out in the boonies.
They felt exploited by a faraway government that seemed to only care about eastern warriors.
The shogunate had even more problems.
All the samurai that fought in the invasions came a-knockin’ at Kamakura’s doors, asking for land.
Usually, after you won a war, you were supposed to distribute the conquered land as rewards
to your soldiers.
But it was a bit hard to distribute land you didn’t have.
They just fought the Mongols off, they didn’t capture any lands.
The shogunate leaders looked everywhere under the couch,
but they couldn’t find enough land to give.
People waited years for their rewards.
And much of the land the shogunate did give out was sad and tiny.
Imagine waiting years for a large pizza, and all you got was a flaccid little slice,
and it had Japanese farmers on it.
Not only that, all of the new land giveaways were in Kyushu, freaking boonie-ass Kyushu,
to keep the local warriors there in case of another Mongol attack.
People were pissed.
Most land rewards went not to samurai, but to temples and shrines.
These were called “rewards for subjugating the foreigners.”
Warriors were mostly okay with this.
They only complained in some cases when their own lands were being split off and given to
the temples, but most people agreed that the gods saved Japan, because of prayers.
Internet article writers love to burst their penile pipes over battle tactics and which
side had the bigger harder armor, but another battle raged all over Japan at the same time:
the spiritual battle.
When news reached the capital of a typhoon blowing the Mongols back into their mother’s womb,
a court recorder could not stop his tears, convinced that it was divine intervention.
The gods had answered their constant prayers.
This other half of the war raged in temples and shrines.
Even in 1268, when a Mongol attack was just a possibility, the Imperial Court started
doing prayers and curses against the invaders.
Religious curses were seen as military action.
The court prayed and prayed for days.
In the second invasion, major temples busted out their most vicious
Harry Potter spells and rituals, and did it 24/7.
At one point in the capital, the ceremonies had more than 250 court members and the emperor
praying furiously, desperately doing kegels to hold in their pee.
They had people pray in shifts to make sure there were no gaps in prayers, like how soldiers
made sure there were no gaps in the front lines.
To these people, the gods were not just things you discuss on Sundays and then forget about
when you’re cheating on your wife.
No, the gods were on the battlefield with them.
A samurai in battle would pray for the gods to distract his enemies, guide his arrows,
and if the time came, delete his internet history.
After the typhoon came and blew the Mongols into the Upside Down,
everyone was convinced that it was because of all the prayers and rituals,
even the soldiers who fought in the actual battle.
Temples raised their hands to take credit for things that happened in the invasion.
Some temples said they caused a god to shoot down an enemy general, others claimed their
prayers protected high-ranking samurai, and many said, “That typhoon? That was us.”
The shogunate rewarded temples and shrines more than they did the samurai.
Again, samurai generally thought this was fair, the priests did call forth a typhoon after all,
who were they to argue with results?
Only when the land rewards conflicted with their own lands did they go,
“now now hold on a minute there.”
Temples needed these land rewards to help them pay for the hard work of cursing foreigners.
It was serious work.
People with bad cursing and praying abilities were fired, and they brought in skilled cursers,
real masters of the dark arts, men who could make that girl from The Ring crawl right out of your ass.
In 1309, the temples really displayed their usefulness
when they stopped the third Mongol invasion of Japan.
Now you may be saying, wait I don’t remember a third Mongol invasion.
Yeah, that’s because the temples claimed that their prayers were so good,
they crushed the third invasion even before it arrived on Japanese shores.
They were incredible.
Temples gained even more power because similar to shugo offices, they started assigning lands
to religious offices instead of individuals.
This was to help temples continue cursing the enemy.
Now while the shogunate gained power, many shogunate samurai weren’t happy with their
tiny slices of pizza.
And warriors in general started finding it hard to compete economically with a growing
class of artisans and moneylenders.
Also, samurai started becoming more independent from their families.
Either because they received new land rewards or because they started serving under shugo
or local strongmen instead of their families.
The heads of powerful families loyal to the shogunate actually hated this and blamed the
shogunate for their men leaving.
A soup of strife was brewing.
And what happens when you have poor, independent badass fighters who thought they deserved better?
Bandits and local warlords popped up all over Japan like zits on a teenager right before her first date.
All these issues, from outlaws to money problems,
eventually helped push the shogunate off a cliff half a century after the invasions.
For more Mongol invasion stuff, check out these videos on the right.
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