'The Bay Was Packed With Ships'
How did a 'divine wind' save Japan from Mongolian invaders 700 years
ago?
By Hideko Takayama
Newsweek
Aug. 16 issue - Kublai Khan was a conqueror of boundless appetite.
When Japan refused to obey and pay tribute to the Mongolian ruler, he
was outraged. Twice during the 13th century he sent massive fleets to
invade Japan, possibly trying to seize its storied gold. Each time,
though, the khan's aggression was repelled not by the Japanese
military but by sudden storms that killed most of the invaders and
destroyed their ships. The Japanese dubbed these storms kamikaze, or
divine wind.
That's the myth, but what exactly happened in the high seas more than
700 years ago? Archeologists have been trying for decades to nail
down the specifics. From which direction did the kamikaze blow? How
strong was it? For that matter, how big were the Mongolian ships? And
how did they manage to sink? Now, more than seven centuries after the
fact, Japanese archeologists are finally getting some answers.
Artifacts uncovered in an expedition that ended last week tell more
about the battles that took place off the coast of the tiny island of
Takashima at the mouth of Imari Bay, 1,000 kilometers southwest of
Tokyo.
Digging up the sea bottom to salvage the pieces from the Mongols'
invasions is a difficult task, to say the least. Excavations that
started in the 1980s, now led by Kenzo Hayashida, archeologist and
president of the Kyushu and Okinawa Society for Underwater
Archaeology, managed to uncover many ceramic jars used for
containers. In recent years his team found Mongolian pottery-shelled
bombs, swords, large anchors and a bowl with Chinese characters that
belonged to a 100-man unit under a commander named Wang. In July his
team of scientists and divers worked on a site about 70 meters from
the shore and 13 meters below the surface of the sea. By pumping
water through a hose and suctioning up the sand, they found human-
skull parts, animal bones, timbers from the ships and an anchor rope.
Hayashida and his crew fell short of finding an intact ship. The
reason: shipworms most likely have reduced these once mighty vessels
to shards. "It is like having 4,000 different sets of puzzles," says
Randall Sasaki, a graduate student in the nautical-archeology program
at Texas A&M University who was a member of Hayashida's team. "Those
pieces were put in a blender of sea and were mixed together. It is
difficult to figure out which piece goes to which ship." Judging by
the hundreds of wooden pieces the team turned up, as well as those
from earlier expeditions, Hayashida thinks that some of the ships of
the Mongolian fleet could have been 40 meters, and made in Chinese or
Korean ports.
Today the island (population: 2,800) is covered with lush green pine
and sweet-acorn trees, and the fishermen pride themselves on their
tasty blowfish. It's hard to imagine that this bucolic island was the
site of two of the biggest and most devastating sea battles in
history. Experts say that some 40,000 soldiers aboard 900 wooden
ships attacked northern Kyushu in 1274 and killed virtually
Takashima's entire population. For some unknown reason, the fleet
left after two weeks and was destroyed by the divine wind on its way
back home. In the second invasion, in 1281, 140,000 soldiers arrived
in 4,400 ships. When the typhoon hit Imari Bay that summer, about
3,000 ships and 100,000 soldiers are believed to have vanished under
the sea.
Shinji Takano, archeologist with the Nagasaki Prefectural Board of
Education, thinks that the fleet gathered in the bay to let the
typhoon pass. A study of a Southern Sung dynasty military ship
excavated in China, which may have been similar in design to the
Mongolian ships, shows that a wind of nearly 200kmh would have been
enough to destroy the ships. Takano thinks that a mega typhoon wind
blew from the south to the shore. "The bay was packed with their
ships. They must have tied their ships to one another to stay
together," he says. The strong wind and high waves probably crushed
them, and they sank.
Hayashida's expedition is hardly the last word. So far his team has
not covered even 1 percent of the battleground. If he can find the
money and manpower to continue his work, we can expect a lot more
details to unfold about the Mongolian invasion attempts.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
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