The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Contact with China was not always peaceful, and the first Ming emperor, Hung Wu-ti, delivered a severe telling-off to the Japanese when he sent a messenger to Kyushu in 1369, carrying a letter that complained bitterly of Japanese piracy. The sending of a mission was not a signal that Japan was being treated as an equal: the Ming emperor was determined to reclaim Chinese sovereignty over the entire expanse from Java and Cambodia to Korea and Japan; and Hung was also conscious of his peasant origins and therefore anxious to present himself as an emperor in the great Chinese tradition. And yet, paradoxically, the Chinese emperor banned Chinese merchants from trading overseas, preferring to revert to the old system of tributary embassies – those from Korea were welcome to come several times a year, and those from other kingdoms, such as Okinawa, much less often. The Japanese rulers did not react kindly to the reproofs that kept coming from their Ming counterparts, which even included hints that China would invade Japan:

  The Chinese Minister of Rites: You should look into the events of the past thousand years for reference. Examine them carefully! … If you really wish to find out who would win and lose and which of us is right or wrong, and which side is the stronger or weaker, I am afraid it would not be to your advantage. Examine this carefully!

  Prince Kanenaga: Heaven and earth are vast; they are not monopolised by one ruler. The universe is great and wide, and various countries are created each to have a share in its rule. Now the world is the world’s world; it does not belong to a single person.30

  Defiance, which was very rare, only made relations more difficult, and the Japanese learned that the political price was an occasional admission that even the Japanese emperor was a vassal of the Chinese one. However, this admission could bring great dividends: at the time of the early Ming voyages, around 1400, the Chinese sought to take tribute from a vast swathe of east Asia and the Indian Ocean; but the Japanese were compliant and were rewarded with gifts of silk, silver and lacquer, and were able to maintain their exports of horses and armaments to the mainland. Later, in 1432–3, these included over 3,000 sabres, and nearly 10,000 sabres in 1453. And then there was the massive political dividend, for acceptance of Ming overlordship, which involved no interference in the government of Japan itself, helped secure the claims of the Ashikaga shoguns to rule Japan.31

  This was a period in which control of the shipping routes off the Asian coasts shifted away from the Chinese, who had dominated navigation for several centuries, into the hands of other peoples, including the Japanese, though many of these were wakō pirates. The ban on foreign travel that applied to Chinese merchants and mariners left others free to ply the seas, and opportunities were seized by all the peoples of the islands that flank China, from Japan to Java. Japan was visited by ships from Siam and Java around 1400. In 1406 a Javan ship bound for Korea was carrying parrots, peacocks, pepper and camphor, and not surprisingly it was seized by Japanese pirates; however, five years later a Javan mission reached Kyushu safely.32 A particularly important role was played by the autonomous kingdom in the Ryukyu islands, with its centre at Okinawa, on the southern edge of this Japanese Mediterranean; this region provided southward links, connecting the Japanese seas to some of the longer-distance trade routes as far as the Malacca Strait (home to Melaka, Palembang and Temasek, the modern Singapore), which had become once again a very significant centre of the spice trade in the fifteenth century. Chinese withdrawal thus had the paradoxical effect of opening up the seas.

  II

  Although there are occasional accounts of sea battles off Korea, and although the wakō pirates became an increasing worry, the maritime history of the waters between Japan, China and Java is mainly a history of relatively peaceful relations. There were many tensions, revealed by the attempts to ban private trade by Japanese merchants, or to prevent the export of coin from China, but mass invasions were a rarity. The great exception is the Mongol attacks on Japan, news of which reached as far as western Europe, thanks to Marco Polo; indeed, his account of what happened furnishes valuable details that have been corroborated, as will be seen, by marine archaeologists, and by remarkable illustrated scrolls dating from between 1294 and 1316 that were copied again and again over the centuries for Japanese scholars.33 The Mongol attacks both were the product of the Mongols’ own insistence that the Great Khan was appointed by Heaven to rule the world (and woe betide those who opposed the divine command), and also betray the influence of earlier Chinese ideas about the superiority of the Middle Kingdom over all other territories. The Chinese ideas were adopted and adapted by Khubilai, the member of the Mongol royal house who seized control of China and established the Yuan dynasty, conquering the Southern Song capital at Hangzhou in 1275.34 Khubilai also coveted Japan’s famed wealth in gold and pearls. He proposed to tap into the wealth of Japan by exacting a large tribute, if at all possible, but if that were to prove impossible, the single-word answer any Mongol khan was bound to give was ‘war’.

  Although doubt has been cast on the claim that Khubilai Khan and Marco Polo even met, Polo’s account of Japan must reflect stories that he heard somewhere out in the East:

  I will tell you a wonderful thing about the palace of the Lord of that island. You must know that he has a great palace which is entirely roofed with fine gold, just as our churches are roofed with lead, insomuch that it would scarcely be possible to estimate its value. Moreover, all the pavement of the palace, and the floors of its chambers, are entirely of gold, in plates like slabs of stone, a good two fingers thick; and the windows are also of gold, so that altogether the richness of this palace is past all bounds and belief. They have also pearls in abundance, which are of a rose colour, but fine, big, and round, and quite as valuable as the white ones. They also have quantities of other precious stones. Khubilai, the Great Khan who now reigns, having heard much of the immense wealth that was in this island, formed a plan to get possession of it.35

  A contemporary Buddhist monk from Japan, Togen Eian, thought that the Mongols were awestruck by the quality of Japanese armour and the excellence of Japanese archers: ‘our armour makes even the gods tremble … Once Japan’s warriors are under their control they will be able to conquer China and India.’ He argued that ‘with the strength of Japan and the Mongols combined, no country could resist. That is why the Mongols now desire to subjugate Japan.’36

  Even so, Khubilai might well have left Japan alone and might have concentrated more on Vietnam (another obsession), but for the breakdown of Mongol relations with Koryŏ, whose king was now master of all Korea. At the start of the thirteenth century, as Mongol power spread over vast tracts to east and west, the Koreans had co-operated with the Mongols, even sending troops to help them subdue troublesome neighbours in northern China in 1219, though they had to agree to send a heavy tribute to the Mongol khan, and the Mongol treatment of the Koreans swung between extremes. The Koreans had their own grievances against the Japanese as a result of the raids by the wakō pirates, which carried on until 1265.37 A Korean supporter of the Mongols named Ch’oe-I fed information to Khubilai, who seems to have been impressed by Ch’oe-I’s account of the sophisticated customs of the Japanese. He suggested that Khubilai Khan might like to send an exploratory embassy to Japan, and when a letter from the khan reached Japan, at the start of 1268 (though it had actually been written in August 1266), the message was unusually friendly from a Mongol perspective, even though the letter threatened war if the Japanese did not agree to cordial relations, with the not so diplomatically phrased question: ‘it will lead to war, and who is there who likes such a state of things? Think of this, O king!’38 There was a second letter from the king of Koryŏ begging the Japanese to take heed, and pointing out that Khubilai had no intention of interfering with the running of the Japanese Empire. At this stage Khubilai was not inclined to go further than mild threats. He still had to take control of the lands of the Southern Song in China’s deep south, and was building up his power in Korea. He may have felt that he could not ignore Japan, because o
f its strong trade relations with his Southern Song enemies; the Japanese were probably sending essential supplies to the Song, such as weapons. Song refugees who reached Japan included dozens of very influential Buddhist monks of the Zen school; in a sense, the Japanese kept Song culture alive when China lay under Yuan rule, for the bakufu, the Japanese military elite, wished to project an image of themselves as refined followers of Chinese fashion able to compete with the scholars and poets of the closeted imperial court at Kyoto. On the other hand, Khubilai had no particular quarrel with Japan, which posed no direct military threat.39

  The shogun’s government was, however, wise to Mongol wiles; precisely because there was now regular contact across the sea with the Song, the shogun knew perfectly well what the Mongols demanded of their subjects, notably punitive amounts of tribute. The islands themselves seemed safe. The Mongols had never ventured across the sea. Why should one concern oneself with empty threats? So the bakufu in Kamakura chose to send back the envoys with no reply. There was the same reaction at Kyoto from the court of the emperor, in whose name any recognition of Mongol superiority would have been made, even though real power rested with the shogun and bakufu. In 1269 seventy Mongols and Koreans turned up on Tsushima and demanded an answer to the khan’s letters; once again the shogun did not deign to answer and the mission returned home with a couple of captives, who were allowed to visit Khubilai’s palace before being sent home, in the hope that their reports of his power and grandeur would shock the bakufu into a response; even then there was silence in Japan.40 But after rejecting the khan’s approach and hearing rather more about Khubilai’s character and aims the Japanese began to show signs that they were more rattled than they had been willing to admit while the original envoys were in their midst. They even drafted a reply at long last; but it was never sent. They required prayers for peace to be recited, and they issued a ritual curse against the Mongols. In addition, the Japanese laid plans for a raid on the coast of Korea, to knock out whatever facilities were in place for building a fleet to attack Japan. When it became more obvious that the Mongol threat was not an idle one, the Japanese decided that attacking Korea would only make things worse.

  In October 1274 the first Mongol assault duly struck Japan. In fact, it was a joint attack by the Mongol khan’s army and navy and by the army and navy of his vassal the king of Koryŏ. Nine hundred ships took the predictable route past Tsushima island to Hakata Bay, the shortest direct route from the southern tip of Korea.41 There were said to be nearly 30,000 men on board, though this figure should be taken with a pinch of salt. To strike terror into their foes, the Mongols are said to have nailed the naked corpses of Japanese women to the thwarts of their ships.42 Hakata was set on fire, but the Japanese put up a very tough resistance. The samurai Takezaki Suenaga recorded in his illustrated scrolls how he encountered another Japanese warrior who had had a productive day:

  I met a warrior on a dapple grey horse at Komatsubara. He wore purple armour with a reverse arrowhead design, and a crimson billowing cape and, having just defeated the invaders at their encampment, was returning with a hundred horsemen. The pirates had fled. Two had been taken. He looked most brave and had two retainers walking before him on his left and right carrying heads – one pierced on a sword, the other on a naginata [rather like a halberd].

  ‘Who passes here looking so brave?’ I asked, and he replied:

  ‘I am Kikuchi Jirō Takefusa of Higo province. Who are you?’

  ‘I am Takezaki Gorō Hyōe Suenaga of the same province. Watch me attack!’

  Saying so, I charged.43

  After a day of fighting against such highly motivated heroes, the Mongol–Korean forces withdrew discomfited.44

  Khubilai was even more determined to conquer Japan after the humiliation of the rapid defeat suffered in 1274; but for the moment he concentrated on a much more important target, the conquest of southern China. The year after the Japanese fiasco he could take pride in the occupation of Hangzhou; in 1277 the great port of Quanzhou, which Marco Polo claimed to know well, surrendered, after its leaders realized that any hope of maintaining its prominent position in maritime trade would be left in ruins by a Mongol assault on the city. In 1279 the Mongols proved that they could win a major battle at sea: only nine Song ships escaped destruction or capture, out of a fleet of 900; and the admiral not merely committed suicide by jumping into the waves, but threw the child emperor into the sea as well. The Song dynasty was extinguished.45

  The second attack on Japan took place six and a half years after the first; the Mongols conscripted large numbers of former Song soldiers into their army for the new attack on Japan. This time the Great Khan intended not just to impose Mongol overlordship but to settle the land, for the ships carried farm tools as well as weapons. Those awaiting death sentences were released so long as they agreed to serve in the vast army Khubilai Khan was putting together. But the Japanese were once again confident, to what might seem a foolhardy degree, in their ability to survive this assault. They decided to admit the Mongol ambassadors to Kamakura, which must have seemed a good sign; but once the ambassadors arrived, they were beheaded and their heads were put on display, rendering attack inevitable.46 Painfully aware that Hakata had been destroyed during the brief attack in 1274, the government ordered a long stone wall, twelve and a half miles long, to be built around Hakata Bay, bits of which still survive.47 And Hakata Bay became the scene of intense fighting on sea and on land, as the Japanese ships and ground troops harried the much larger invasion force that had come by way of the islands of Tsushima and Iki, while a second wave of attackers gathered at the western tip of Kyushu, off the little offshore island of Takeshima.48

  Among acts of bravery those of Kawano Michiari stand out; he had already helped resist the invaders in 1274, and this time he showed how brave he was by standing outside the defensive wall and engaging directly with the invaders. One day he saw a heron pick up an arrow and drop it on one of the Mongol ships. This was surely an augury of Japanese victory; so he and his uncle decided the time had come to strike a blow at the heart of the Mongol fleet. They set out across the bay in a couple of small boats; they had no difficulty penetrating the Mongol fleet, because the Mongols thought they must be bringing an offer to submit; so they came alongside one of the flagships whose astonished crew surrendered after Kawano had killed a fearsome giant of a soldier.49 Kawano took one of the Mongol generals prisoner, even though he was wounded in the shoulder, and even though his uncle was killed. Kawano then had time to write a poem commemorating his achievement while he was heading back to dry land.50 These exploits made him a Japanese hero. Under the military rule of the bakufu, esteem for the martial prowess of the samurai had risen to new heights; one or two defenders of Japan against the Mongols were even worshipped as gods by later generations.

  All these efforts were not enough to hold back the waves of invaders. Korean ships arrived in Tsushima; the islanders tried to escape to the hills, but the cries of their children gave away their hiding places, and the Koreans ruthlessly massacred the islanders. The invaders then bombarded the inhabitants of Iki, the next island between Korea and Japan, with exploding ceramic spheres launched from catapults. On the other hand, the cramped conditions on board the Mongol navy helped disease to spread, with the loss of 3,000 men, as Chinese sources admitted. The Mongol commanders found it impossible to co-ordinate the actions of the different detachments arriving from Korea and from much further south, and they realized that Hakata Bay was well defended and not suitable for a mass landing. The naval detachments that had arrived near Hakata Bay lashed their ships together to create a continuous line of boats, a sort of counter-wall, facing off the Japanese but without very clear objectives about what to do next.51 Small Japanese boats pestered the Mongol fleet like wasps, crowding the waters. Takezaki Suenaga described the chaos in Hakata Bay:

  ‘I am acting on secret orders. Let me on the boat!’

  I brought my boat by Takamasa’s.

 
‘The shugo [provincial governor] did not order you here. Get your boat out of here!’

  Having no recourse I replied: ‘As you know, I have not been called up by the shugo. I am the deputy shugo but arrived late. Heed my command.’

  ‘Lord Tsumori is on the boat. There is no more room.’52

  In the end, Takezaki was allowed to board, and fought with vigour, even though he was wounded.

  Nonetheless, all was going quite well for the Mongols, who managed to hold a patch of land for a while, though they were beaten back to the offshore islands. That was not the same as seeing them off; the threat remained real. And then, in answer to the defenders’ prayers, ‘a green dragon raised its head from the waves’, the sky darkened and suddenly a great typhoon struck. Many ships, still fully loaded with soldiers, were tossed around the sea or on to dry land, and others collided with one another. It has been suggested that it was no more than an easterly wind that blew the Mongol ships back to the Asian mainland just when they were inclined to withdraw anyway. Some Japanese writers, notably the warrior Takezaki Suenaga, who was there, do not mention this ‘divine wind’.53 Yet the hard physical evidence that will be confronted in a moment tells a different, and more traditional, story. Japanese, Chinese and Korean descriptions of what happened largely concur, so the fact that this ‘divine wind’, or kami-kaze, became such a powerful Japanese legend should not obscure its historical foundation. It is said 100,000 men drowned and 4,000 ships sank, for which read perhaps 10,000 men and 400 ships.54