A Brief History of Japan. Jonathan Clements

ran straight for home.

      A year later, a new embassy arrived from Khubilai, presenting the shikken regent with a golden scroll that offered to make him the “king of Cipangu.” It was a gesture of reconciliation, suggesting that everybody could spare themselves further trouble if the natives just bowed to the khan and admitted that he was their overlord. The regent made his feelings plain by having all the ambassadors executed.

      It was Khubilai’s retaliation—an even larger fleet—that Marco Polo saw being assembled. Thanks to modern marine archaeology, we now understand the significance of his report of 15,000 ships on the river Yangtze—a great distance from the Korea Strait, and a reflection of numerous botched and poorly organized planning decisions. Khubilai’s second fleet was packed with everything the Mongol warlords could scrape up, including condemned barges and creaking riverboats. The timbers were warped; even the nails have been shown to have a high sulfur content, suggesting that corners were cut in every possible stage of sourcing and construction. Over-loaded with horses and supplies for a long campaign, packed so closely with men that three thousand troops were dead from disease before land was even sighted, the armada set sail in two task forces, one from Korea and the other up the coast from the mouth of the Yangtze.

      Fearful of being boxed in again at Hakata Bay, the Mongols dithered offshore, many of their unseaworthy vessels lashed together in a vast floating fortress. They were particularly wary of a seaborne attack, since many of their troops were timid Chinese and Korean conscripts, worried about reports of “dragons in the water” and all too ready to surrender. They had started out with three months’ supplies, two-thirds of which they had already consumed, and they had still not made permanent landfall.

      Samurai boats came out to the armada in ones and twos—numbers so small that the Mongols assumed they were there to offer terms. But the boats contained suicidal platoons on one-way missions; they cut down their own masts to make boarding ramps and stormed the larger warships.

      And then the real storm came: a second typhoon, even more powerful than the earlier one. Modern marine archaeologists, examining the smithereens on the sea bed, estimate it to have been a Category 3 storm—a “major hurricane” with gusts of 199 kph (123.5 mph) that whipped up waves into storm surges of up to 4 meters (13 feet). Equivalent modern storms have been seen to strip the roofs off buildings, blow away mobile homes, and uproot trees. For the close-packed boats of the Mongol armada, it was a veritable apocalypse. Some 30,000 men managed to make it ashore from the sinking boats—bedraggled, starving, and without fresh water. They were easy pickings for the samurai defenders.

      The Mongols had every intention of coming back for a rematch, but they never did. An office within Khubilai’s administration was supposedly tasked with putting together a third armada, but it was underfunded and overlooked, and largely powerless after 1286. Khubilai died in 1294, and his descendants more or less ignored the indomitable islands in the east.

      The great storms gained their own legendary status among the natives. Before long, certain religious cults were claiming that the no-show by a third armada was the result of their intensive prayers. The Mongols, it was now claimed, had been fought off not merely by the warrior elite, but by the combined efforts of the entire nation, and even by the very elements themselves. In sending the weather to deliver the death blow, the gods had sent a Divine Wind, or Kamikaze. Their country, the locals believed, was special; it was unique; it was blessed by its particular gods and would never know defeat.

      For decades afterwards, guards on the shores watched the seas for a new attack, but none came. Meanwhile, the defense took its toll in a different, mundane way. It was not merely the loss of life; it was the colossal expense of the project, which bankrupted many local lords. When, in earlier times, the samurai had been fighting one another, there was always a loser whose lands could be confiscated as the spoils of victory. But when the enemy came from another country, they left nothing behind but their dead; there was no reward that could be bestowed. Within a generation, the Kamakura shōgunate’s hold on power had collapsed, and the samurai had turned upon each other in another civil war, this time in the name of two rival emperors.

      As for Marco Polo’s Cipangu, word of it was carried back to Europe. His tall tales of great riches and fierce knights would enter popular parlance. Two centuries later, Christopher Columbus would set out in search of the Spice Islands and this legendary Cipangu, sailing west in the hope of reaching the East, and finding something entirely unexpected.

      Today, we know more about the land that would be called Cipangu, Xipangu, Xipang, Japón and then Japan in the languages of the West. But even in a modern, interconnected world, this name often seems at one remove. “Nippon” was the local people’s own word for their archipelago, deliberately coined to imply that Japan was the land “of the rising sun.” Today, with the additional allusions offered by modern time zones, it is often regarded as a land a few steps into our own future, or a grim vestige of a warlike past. This is its story.

      CHAPTER 1

      THE WAY OF THE GODS:

       PREHISTORIC AND MYTHICAL JAPAN

      The old women said the sea used to be lower. There were bays and inlets that had once been flat ground but were now steeped in saltwater. It was getting harder to find deer. There used to be all sorts on the wide plains. The old women said that they were good meat. The old women had plenty of stories like this, but the young only knew what they could see themselves.

      The men hadn’t caught a deer for months. But there was always food. Down by the shore, you could pull shellfish from the shallows. One day, one of the girls pulled up something else—a bone knife.

      The old women said that we, or people like us, had once lived there, but now the land was returned to the sea.

      The old women said that if the deer were gone, then we would soon follow. We should leave these long, thin islands and head north, to the greater lands beyond the rising sun.

      Everybody knew they were there. You could see the clouds that formed above them. You could see the birds that returned there. Some of the fishermen, straying too far in their canoes, even claimed to have seen the lands themselves: lush and green, with smoking mountains.

      Not all the old ones agreed. Most of the womenfolk did not mind the dwindling deer. Stick to the fish from the reef, they said. Save nuts and berries in jars against lean times. There were always shellfish to be pulled from the mud, and mud to make pots.

      Then there were Ship People. They came from the direction of the setting sun. If we moved, they might not find us again. The Ship People came to take our cowrie shells, and traded them for magical wonders: hard tools that did not break; the pig creatures that ate anything and yielded succulent meat; the wondrous disc that reflected everything it saw, shining with the sun’s light when turned upon it, revealing your true self when you stared into it.

      The old people argued about the future, and their children were dragged in like canoes at the edge of a whirlpool. All were agreed there were too many of us. The shoreline was getting crowded. You had to walk further into the shallows to find enough shellfish for dinner. It took longer and longer to find fruits from the forest. We should move on, onward toward the rising sun, to the new lands that looked so green.

      No, some said, we should stay. Save more shells for the Ship People, to trade for more of their pigs and their strange seeds.

      The arguments had been boiling for months, even years, but people were hungrier than they admitted, and that made them easier to anger. The wiser old women feared encounters with other tribes.

      What if there are already people in the green lands, they wondered. What then?

      But the menfolk were sure of themselves. We shall wield our mallet heads, they said. Wielding our stone mallets, we will crush them.

      Both sides thought they had won. The fishermen and their families got into their boats and headed to the north and east. They took any of the forest folk who wanted to go. But simply by leaving, they were making it possible for others to stay. Tell the Ship People—they said—tell them that we have gone toward the rising sun, where the