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Divine Wind: the Mongol Invasions  CHAPTER 6 DIVINE WIND: THE MONGOL INVASIONS n the western outskirts of Fukuoka City along the shores of OHakata Bay is a long sandy beach called Iki no Matsubara. From the land this is approached, as the name suggests, by a wood of pines, which shields the coastline from the wind. On emerging through the trees and into the open, in places the path to the sea is barred by the foundations of a thick stone wall. Now barely three feet high, this barrier stretching along the shore is the best preserved remnant of what was once a series of formidable defences. It used to stand over fourteen feet tall, guarding the shore from attack as one of seven ramparts built around the bay in the thirteenth century. In most places these walls have disappeared beneath urban developments as Fukuoka has developed into a modern city, sprawling along the coast and down the valley towards Dazaifu a few miles inland. Nevertheless, traces can still be seen on some of the more remote beaches, along one stretch visible only in the shape of what appears at first to be a bank of sand dunes. These walls were built to protect the coast from the Mongols, who had carried all before them in Asia and beyond. Their leader Khubilai Khan ruled over an empire that now stretched over practically the known world. Having conquered the Korean kingdom of Koryŏ and even China, all that stood between them and the islands of Japan were the Tsushima Straits and the East China Sea. Mongol warriors are gen- erally noted more for their celebrated riding skills than any tradition of seamanship, but on one occasion already they had prepared a vast fleet and set sail, targeting Hakata Bay in an attempt to gain a foothold on the coast of northern Kyushu. Something of a hiatus followed in the aftermath of this first assault, providing valuable time needed to 103 Kyushu: Gateway to Japan prepare these defensive walls around the bay, but it was clear that a second campaign would follow. When they finally appeared off the Kyushu coast, the fleets assembled by the Mongols for the subjugation of Japan would amount to the largest seaborne invasion the world had ever seen. Waves of attacks followed on the shores of Hakata Bay. It came as a surprise to the inhabitants, therefore, when the assault finally stopped and the sails of the enemy ships disappeared over the horizon, never to return. Just as when a fleet of brigands had attacked Hakata Bay in the Toi invasion of 1019, the people offered up prayers at local shrines in thanks for their safe deliverance from danger. The sudden disappear- ance of the Mongol fleets seemed little short of miraculous, and such was the relief that popular legend grew in praise of a ‘Divine Wind’ (kamikaze), which had apparently risen up to smash the invaders’ ships off the Kyushu coast. This phrase was hardly new, having first been used by the poet Kakimoto Hitomaro in a verse to describe the stormy weather during the Jinshin War of 672.1 The story of a divine wind off the Kyushu coast, however, would later foster a headstrong belief that Japan’s shores were somehow immune from attack. There was no living memory of any suc- cessful invasions by sea, even if these may have occurred during migra- tions from the continent in unrecorded ancient times. This alone set the inhabitants of these islands apart from, for example, the English expe- rience of the Norman Conquest. The north coast of Kyushu, the closest point on the Japanese mainland to the continent, moreover, is 120 miles away from the Korean peninsula across the Tsushima Straits, six times the distance separating Dover from Calais. Any belief that Japan was safe, however, would prove to be a rather ineffectual insurance against modern gunboat diplomacy in the nineteenth century. In the culture of military expansion that followed, the notion would nevertheless persist. During the last months of the Pacific War in 1945, the ‘Divine Wind’ (kamikaze) was again invoked in a desperate show of bravado, lending symbolic weight to the suicide attacks by young pilots who flew out from the southern coast of Kyushu and tried, unsuccessfully, to protect their homeland from foreign control. Stormy weather certainly contributed to saving these islands from the Mongols. Yet this alone cannot account for their defeat, as the invaders encountered not just the elements but well-organized troops 104.
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