If you go up to a person and ask them,
“Hey when the Mongols invaded Japan, how did the samurai defeat them?”
the person would probably say, “Oh cool, the Mongols invaded Japan?”
If you go up to a slightly smarter person, they would probably say, “The typhoons saved Japan.”
Yeah that is the popular story handed down to us by Internet experts.
Japan would have been doomed if it weren’t for the typhoons that destroyed the Mongols.
But let’s find out if that’s true or if it’s just propaganda from the gods.
The Mongols invaded Japan twice, and twice they returned bruised and bloody,
leaving their balls in a foreign land.
In the first invasion, there was actually no clear evidence of a typhoon.
A Chinese history book says that a great storm did arrive, but it hit the Mongol fleet after
they had already decided to leave.
They were running low on supplies and one of their commanders took an arrow to the face like a man.
But later on, it contradicts, mentioning that the claim about a great storm was a lie.
Japanese sources didn’t make a big deal about any typhoons.
One detailed Japanese text about the invasions doesn’t even mention a storm,
which is weird because why would you leave out such a big event if it actually happened.
It’s like writing a biography on John F. Kennedy and leaving out his assassination by aliens.
The diary of one Japanese nobleman does mention that a “reverse wind”
blew the invaders back home, but doesn’t elaborate.
It could mean that convenient winds gave the Mongols a good opportunity to sail back home.
And it wasn’t even typhoon season.
The most you could say was that maybe there was some bad weather,
but it didn’t make a difference.
The Mongols had already chosen to cut short their invasion vacation.
They might have played up the idea of a typhoon as an excuse, so they didn’t have to say
they ran home like little boys.
The second invasion was a little different.
All the sources confirmed that a typhoon did smash into the Mongol fleet and just demolished them.
It was a hand from god and the Mongol fleet must have claimed belief in evolution.
The Mongol fleet sank like the hearts of children when I bully them.
But the question is, did the typhoon save Japan?
Without a typhoon, could Japan still have won?
To answer that, we need to answer how big the armies were.
The main Chinese source on this says that the invaders had two fleets.
The Eastern fleet had 40,000 men, and the Southern fleet had 100,000.
They sailed these huge armadas across the sea to Japan.
If these numbers were true, the Mongols could’ve won just by coming in, dropping their pants,
and smacking the Japanese with their tanuki testes.
The Japanese only had a few thousand defenders.
Problem is, you can’t trust the Mongol numbers.
Investigating army sizes is like asking a guy how many seksual partners he’s had.
You often get exaggerated numbers.
The invasion of Normandy in WaWa2 was the largest recorded sea operation in history,
and that invasion had about the same number of men: 160,000.
And they only had to cross the English Channel, while the Mongols had to sail a much larger distance.
Most likely the Mongol number was smaller.
How much smaller? No one knows.
One historian went as low as 10,000.
Whatever the number, the Mongols seemed to have outnumbered the Japanese,
but it wasn’t enough to go totally all nine-tailed fox on them.
The Mongols couldn’t even get past the walls that the Japanese put up along the coast.
The Japanese did really well.
They kept the Eastern fleet in the waters, not allowing them to land for almost 2 months.
Although to be fair, the larger Southern fleet hadn’t arrived yet.
The invaders may have had more soldiers, but we gotta talk about the sorry state that the
Mongol army was in.
The Mongols are known for having one of the greatest militaries in the world
among YouTube history video watchers.
People have always dampened their pants fantasizing about how well the famous Mongol horse archers
would do against the Japanese samurai.
Those people should feel disappointed, because that wasn’t what happened.
The badass Mongol cavalry was only a tiny part of it.
Horses took up way too much space on ships, their behinds didn’t fit in the seats.
The invaders were mostly made up of people the Mongols conquered, like Koreans and Chinese.
Coming from different backgrounds made it tough to cooperate.
The Mongol leader Kublai Khan knew this, and actually reminded the soldiers before the voyage
that they had better cooperate with each other, or they were doomed.
They were former enemies of the Mongols who fought against them only a few years earlier.
Morale was low, and they might have had infighting within their ranks.
Even the ships themselves were rushed during construction, especially those of the Southern fleet.
There’s some evidence that the Southern Chinese were embezzling money that should
have been going towards shipbuilding.
A fool and his badly constructed ship are soon parted, by typhoons.
Also, a large force of samurai reinforcements were coming from the north ready to join the defenders.
So if I put all of that info into my genius brain, and ask the question,
“Could Japan have won without a typhoon?”
the answer would be: “Maybe.” I mean, it was certainly possible.
The Mongols couldn’t even land for 2 months, and they seemed like they had a rough time.
It’s also hard to resupply your troops across the sea.
At the very least, it would have been a long bloody war.
So where did this idea come from that a divine wind saved Japan?
From the Japanese actually.
They prayed for the gods’ protection constantly, and when the typhoon finally came in to wash
away the enemy, everyone thanked the gods for the help.
The government even rewarded shrines and temples for their prayers,
for doing their part to defend the country.
For more related videos, check out these ones, I’ll see you there.
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