The Divine Wind: Why Hōjō Tokimune Could Not Pay His Soldiers After Defeating the Mongols

In the summer of 1281, Hōjō Tokimune was thirty years old, the de facto ruler of Japan, and watching the largest invasion fleet in pre-modern world history attempt to land on the beaches of Kyūshū. The Yuan-Korean-Southern Song armada totaled approximately 4,400 ships and 140,000 troops. By the standards of the period, it was a force comparable to the entire Roman army at its first-century peak. The defending Japanese force was a mixed group of perhaps 40,000 samurai and conscripted footmen, equipped with traditional weapons, organized along provincial lines, and dispersed across a coastline of several hundred kilometers.

Two months later the invasion was destroyed. Not by Japanese arms — though the defending forces fought well and held the beaches longer than the Mongol commanders had budgeted for — but by the typhoon now famously named the kamikaze, the divine wind. The Mongol fleet was caught at anchor in Imari Bay during a major typhoon in August 1281. Most ships were destroyed; most men aboard drowned. Approximately one-quarter of the original force survived to retreat to the mainland. It was the second time in seven years that this had happened to a Mongol invasion of Japan. It was also, though no one in Kamakura yet realized it, the moment that doomed the institution that had successfully defended the realm.

The Strategic Setup

The Mongol crisis began in 1268, when Tokimune had been Shikken (regent) of the Kamakura Bakufu for less than a year. The first Mongol embassy demanded Japanese submission to the Yuan dynasty. Tokimune refused to receive the envoys. A second embassy in 1271 was likewise rebuffed. A third embassy in 1275 was arrested, taken to Kamakura, and beheaded — an act of deliberate, theatrical defiance that made eventual war certain.

Between the rebuffed embassies and the actual invasions, Tokimune ordered a massive defensive build-up along the Kyūshū coast. Stone walls were built across the bays where landing was practical. Coastal observation posts were established. Provincial samurai were ordered into permanent rotational duty. Imperial Buddhist services were commissioned at major temples for the protection of the realm. The preparations took six years and cost the bakufu treasury enormously.

The First Invasion: Bun'ei (1274)

The first Mongol invasion, called the Bun'ei in Japanese chronology, arrived at Hakata Bay in November 1274. The invading force — approximately 30,000 troops in 900 ships — landed under fire from samurai defenders. The fighting on the beach lasted one day. The Japanese tactical doctrine of single combat (challenging an enemy and then engaging in formal duel) was a poor fit against Mongol massed formations and Korean-pattern crossbow volleys. By evening the Japanese were in retreat to the inland fortifications.

What followed was decisive. The Mongol commanders, having taken heavier casualties than expected, withdrew their forces back to ships for the night, intending to consolidate before pushing inland the next day. A typhoon arrived overnight and destroyed approximately one-third of the fleet. The surviving ships withdrew to Korea. The campaign was over in less than seventy-two hours.

The Second Invasion: Kōan (1281)

The second invasion, the Kōan, was much larger. Khubilai Khan had been preparing it since 1275. It involved two separate fleets — an Eastern Route Army of 40,000 from Korea, and a Southern Route Army of 100,000 from the recently conquered Southern Song territories of China — that were meant to converge on Kyūshū in the summer of 1281. The Eastern Army arrived first, in early June, and was held off the beaches by the stone walls Tokimune had ordered built. The Southern Army arrived in late July. The combined force began landing in earnest in early August.

For approximately two months the Japanese defenders held. They could not stop the landings altogether but they made the Mongol position on the beaches untenable. Mongol troops who came ashore in small groups were defeated in detail; Mongol troops who came ashore in large groups had no fresh water (the Japanese had poisoned wells) and could not move inland. The Mongols pulled back to their ships at night and tried to land again in the morning. They were doing this when the August typhoon arrived.

The typhoon in 1281 was much more destructive than the 1274 storm. The fleet was caught at anchor with no time to disperse to open sea. Approximately three-quarters of the ships were destroyed. The crews drowned in their thousands; chronicles describe the bay surface 'paved with bodies.' Approximately a quarter of the original force survived to return to the mainland. The invasion was over. Khubilai Khan attempted to plan a third invasion in the 1290s but was repeatedly delayed by other Mongol military commitments and finally died in 1294 with the Japanese plan unrealized.

The Bill

The Mongol crisis cost the Kamakura Bakufu enormously. The defensive preparations of 1268–1281 had drained the treasury. The mobilization of provincial samurai for years of coastal duty had drained their personal finances. By the end of the second invasion the bakufu owed thousands of warriors substantial rewards for service rendered.

The problem was that there was no land to give them. Defensive wars produced no defeated enemies whose territories could be redistributed. Even the Mongol equipment captured during the invasion was minimal — most ships had been destroyed, most weapons had sunk to the bottom of Imari Bay. The bakufu could give some honors and some titles, but the fundamental currency of samurai loyalty — grants of land — was unavailable.

Tokimune himself died in 1284, three years after the second invasion, at thirty-three. The cause was officially exhaustion; the underlying cause was almost certainly the strain of the unprecedented decade of crisis. His successors inherited the financial wreckage. Over the next forty years, the unpaid samurai of the Mongol wars and their descendants drifted away from the bakufu's authority. By 1331, when Emperor Go-Daigo launched his revolt, the warriors who would historically have rallied to Kamakura's defense were too disaffected to do so. Kamakura fell in 1333, fifty-two years after the typhoons that had saved it.

What Tokimune Bought

What Tokimune's leadership bought was Japanese sovereignty. Of the great seaborne invasions of premodern Asian history, the Mongol attempt on Japan is the only major one that failed. Korea fell to the Mongols. Southern China fell. Vietnam was nearly subdued. Indonesia was attacked. Japan held — and the institutional shock of holding fed directly into Japanese cultural self-conception for centuries afterward. The phrase 'kamikaze' would be used at the end of the Pacific War, six and a half centuries later, in conscious reference to Tokimune's typhoons.

What it cost was the Kamakura Bakufu. The institution that had won the wars could not sustain itself in peacetime because it had spent everything it had on the wars and could not pay back the men who had won them. The cost was, in a sense, fair: a country had been preserved by exhausting its government. The government collapsed under the weight of having done so.

"Throw away cowardice."