Dan Snow's History Hit - The Original Kamikaze: The Mongol Invasions of Japan

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

At the height of the Mongol Empire, Kublai Khan set his sights on the island of Japan. He launched two enormous invasions of that nation in 1274 and 1281 - but both of them were defeated, aided by sudden and disastrous storms that tore his fleets apart. The story of these kamikaze, or 'Divine Winds', would become legend in Japan, and inspire the name of the Japanese pilots that launched attacks on Allied forces in the closing months of World War Two.For the third and final episode in our series on the kamikaze, Dan is joined again by Christopher Harding, a cultural historian of India and Japan and author of 'The Light of Asia'. They talk about these gigantic invasions, the samurai that faced them, and the storms that turned the tide in favour of feudal Japan.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Anisha Deva.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's the third in our mini-series about kamikaze. Yes, the suicide aircraft that attacked Allied shipping from October 1944, 80 years ago, but also the original kamikaze, the legendary event that gave them their name, the so-called divine winds that smashed the Mongol invasion fleets which had come to conquer Japan in 1274, which is 750 years ago. So two big anniversaries in Japanese history this year. The first of our three-part series looked at the very bleak story of the Japanese kamikaze suicide missions from the Japanese point of view. Then we heard what it was like to face those attacks on flight decks and cockpits of the Allied fleet.

And now, finally, we're going to go all the way back. We're going to hear about the very fortuitous, if you're Japanese, perhaps even divinely sent typhoons that saved Japan from the mighty Mongols in the 13th century. In the 1270s, the Mongols were an astonishing global superpower. They'd conquered the most enormous land empire the world had ever seen to that point. It included vast swathes of East and Central Asia, down in Southeast Asia, including the hugely sophisticated Chinese Empire. They'd conquered the great Islamic states of the Middle East and Central Asia.

And they now sent ambassadors to Japan. Those ambassadors politely suggested that the Japanese might wish to surrender to the Mongols, to yield, to acknowledge their overlordship. The Japanese shogun, the de facto leader, initially welcomed the ambassadors, he brought them to court, he treated them civilly, but then he beheaded them. Now listen folks, I don't know much about history, but if there's one thing that you and I have learnt over the course of years of making this podcast, it is that there are some basic rules to history. One of them, take a winter coat when invading Russia.

But another one is treat Mongol ambassadors with respect. It was the murder of Mongol ambassadors that first drew Genghis Khan, the founder of that great empire, into Central Asia, where he went with devastating force to get revenge for that terrible insult. Don't forget, he forced the governor, who disrespected his ambassadors, to drink molten silver. So you won't be surprised to hear that when the Shogun executed the Mongol ambassadors, the great Khan reacted poorly. On not one but two occasions in the 1270s and early 80s, the largest empire on earth turned its crosshairs, focused its sights, its massive military might, on an offshore archipelago, Japan. And on the podcast now, to mark the 750th anniversary of the first of those two invasions, we've got Christopher Harding. He's back on. He's a cultural historian of Japan,

India and East-West connections. He's based at the University of Edinburgh. He's been on the podcast before, most recently, a couple of days ago, for an episode talking about kamikaze pilots of the Second World War. And now he's back on again to talk about these Mongol invasions. We're going to talk, we're going to talk about the invasions, we're going to talk about the ships, we're going to talk about the samurai who helped defeat them, but we're also going to talk about the weather that proved to be the ultimate destroyer of both of those invasions. In 1274, 750 years ago, a typhoon blew as the Mongol fleet was in the straits between Japan and Korea and destroyed it. In 1281, an even bigger Mongol force, a gigantic Mongol force,

was completely obliterated by an enormous storm that sent those wooden ships to the bottom, drowning the men as a few surviving comrades swam ashore to be butchered in the shallows by the waiting samurai. The Japanese ascribed their salvation to the gods. They started talking about the divine wind that blew. The name they gave it was kamikaze. So today, Chris is going to take us back to the 13th century to explain how the world's most powerful empire came a cropper when it tried to cross the seas. Enjoy.

T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God saved the king. Enjoy. Christopher, great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Just give us a sense of the size, the scale, the might of the 13th century Mongol Empire under Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, Genghis himself. Yes, absolutely. So it's this extraordinary span of territory all the way from the River Danube, the Euphrates in the west, running right through to China in the east.

So the largest land empire ever seen. Absolutely extraordinary achievement. I mean, it's so big that you can't actually believe it. I mean, is this an empire that we should think about in the modern set? I mean, is the one man in charge and he gets to sort of run things? Or is it quite a looser setup? Or is Kublai Khan able to mobilize resources from this vast empire and send it against his enemies like Japan? I think it's much more the second. It's a rather loose conglomeration. They leave lots of local people in power. For example, if we're thinking about East Asia, they still have their Korean allies in power, officially part of the empire, but they rely very heavily on these local leaders.

So fairly loose knit, you couldn't have sent your armies all the way from one end of it to the other to pacify people if you wanted to. I suppose the other thing is, of course, when you've got an empire of that size commanding that kind of wealth, there are always people after your job. So Kublai Khan is never terribly secure. By the time he's begun his pacification of China, regards himself as very much a Chinese-style emperor. So that's really the part of the world that he's focused on. Yes, that's right. Let's focus on the eastern section of the empire, what we would call China today. And he actually establishes the Yuan dynasty. So it starts to look and feel like another one of these Chinese dynasties. He feels like a Chinese emperor,

does he? I think that's right. Yes, he has lots of Han Chinese advisors. He goes about rebuilding some of the infrastructure, the roads, the buildings in China. He goes about rebuilding some of the infrastructure, the roads, the buildings in China. He's a great patron of the arts, and he's also trying to allow a kind of religious tolerance in China as well. So there are all sorts of things in the positive side of the column, I suppose, for Kublai Khan. And that's certainly how he would imagine himself as an emperor in the Chinese style. He starts to look towards Japan. What was the relationship between China and Japan like before that? So at this point, across much of the 13th century, you have in the southern part of China, the Southern Song Dynasty. And although the Japanese and the Chinese, they don't have official diplomatic relations, they do have an enormous

trading relationship. And really importantly for Japan, I think they have a relationship of sort of shared culture. So in the Japan of this period, Zen Buddhism becomes really big. They have various sects of Buddhism in Japan, but Zen becomes a really big one. And that really is the product of these cultural relationships with Southern China. Also relationships trading art, trading all sorts of other goods. So it's quite a rich relationship. And I think that feeds into the reasons why the Japanese, as we'll see a bit later on, reject what starts as overtures from Kublai Khan. Are the overtures to sort of willingly join this vast agglomeration of imperial might, or are they a little bit more kinetic, the overtures? They're very peaceful at first. So I think it tends to be the way that the Mongols have done business over many years, which is that they will first offer peace. But they offer peace in rather a haughty way. So they send a letter in 1268 to Japan. It's maybe worth just a quick word on what Japan looks like in this period, if that

might be useful. Centuries before, it was an aristocracy surrounding an emperor in Kyoto that had the real power in Japan. But more recently, in the late 1100s, you've had a great civil war, the rise of the Kamakura shogunate. They're the real power in Japan by this point. And so it's the rulers of the Kamakura shogunate who receive this letter. And it's friendly, but yes, it's rather haughty. So just to give you a quick flavour of the words they're using, they say, we, the great Mongolian empire, have become the master of the universe. Therefore, innumerable states in far off lands have longed to form ties with us. This has not happened with Japan. This must be because you are not fully informed. Therefore, I hereby send you a special envoy to inform you of our desire. So they talk about

friendly relations, but it really looks to the Japanese as though this would be a tributary relationship of the sort that the Japanese used to have with China centuries before. And they really didn't want anything like that. They had a certain sense of pride, I think, in themselves as a country. Also, the samurai as a class had that very strong sense of their own worth. So this kind of letter was never going to get very far, and so they resolved to basically ignore it. The OG passive-aggressive communication, I love it. Absolutely. At this point, would the Chinese have regarded the Japanese as sort of recalcitrant siblings, you know, culturally, ethnically? Am I just imposing modern terms on this? Or would they have just been a neighbouring people, but who ought to be under Chinese control?

Well, I think the Chinese do have this very, very long standing sense of being the centre of the universe, you know, geographically, almost cosmically, I suppose you could say. And so they do have these tributary relationships with all sorts of countries around them. And then if you go further out, imagining it in terms of concentric circles, much of the rest of the world are simply barbaric. And of course, that's the view that many centuries in the future, the Chinese emperors take of Westerners. So that's there. And also lots of Japanese culture by this point, by the 1200s, is distinctively Chinese in origin. You know, the kanji that they use to write with the Chinese in

origin, much of their food, their architecture, their poetry, their laws. So there's a real sense of a cultural big brother type relationship with China. But nevertheless, the Japanese do see themselves as being on a par by this point with China. They have an emperor, the Chinese have had their emperors. Now you have the Mongolian emperor. And one of the mistakes that the Mongols make in that letter, I think, is to refer to the king of Japan as opposed to an emperor. And that, again, you say passive aggressive. I think that's quite an important part of it. Whether that's deliberate or an oversight, I think it's certainly a bad mistake. Wow, what a piece of diplomacy. Or not. Yes. Well, first of all, how did the Japanese reply to this letter? I think I can imagine.

And where did things go from there? So you have the Kamakura shogunate based in this town of Kamakura. You also have the emperor in Kyoto. And although the emperor doesn't have any real power or even very much money at this point, nevertheless, he's considered to be divinely descended, the real ultimate seat of power in Japan. So both the opinion of the shogunate and the opinion of the imperial court matter. And both of them simply decide to ignore it, not to reply at all. And that is really how they leave it. So they ghost Kublai Khan. Okay, how does this go down in China? So over in China at this point, I suppose it's quite important to remember that although

Kublai Khan has had all these extraordinary successes, military successes in China, he hasn't yet finished off, if we're thinking about the late 1260s, the early 1270s, he hasn't yet finished off the Southern Song Dynasty. And the Japanese feel quite warmly towards that Southern Song Dynasty. I'll bet they do. Yeah, because while they're still fighting and Kublai Khan hasn't yet consolidated the whole of the Chinese Empire, there's still the kind of residual, vestigial bits of the former dynasty still hanging on to bits of Southern China. Yes, exactly. And they've had these warm relationships for many, many decades. Lots of Japanese would go over to China to learn various arts, to learn about different forms of

Buddhism, etc. So there's really no reason for them to have warm relationships at all with the Mongols instead. So having ignored that first letter, they don't simply do nothing at all. They do two things which I think become really important for the way the Japanese remember what goes down next in future centuries. One thing they do is they start trying to protect areas of Japan which might be vulnerable to invasion. And I suppose a really quick sense of the geography is worthwhile here, isn't it? So Japan consists of four main islands. The southernmost of those four main islands, called Kyushu, is only 100 miles or so off the coast of the southern Korean peninsula. So it's fairly obvious which parts of Japan are most vulnerable to attack. And so those are the

parts of Japan where they try and send some samurai down there to at least have a kind of minimal form of defence. There aren't really the numbers in Japan to mount a serious defence at this point. But nevertheless, the shogunate sends down some samurai to Kyushu, just in case the ignoring of the letter turns out to go down badly with the Mongols, which of course it does. And the Mongols begin to put together an invasion force, which they send from Korea in late 1274. That's when things basically all start to kick off. This is so fascinating. It's the Mongols who are the ultimate steppe warriors. People have listened to this podcast and they'd be very familiar, I think, with other episodes, lots of discussion about the Mongols. They fight from the saddle,

they're ultimate horsemen, extraordinary speed, agility, ability to deliver effect on the great steppe of Eurasia. But now they've taken to ships. So this is one of the great transformations. Yes, and rather a fateful one as well. It's worth trying to get a sense of the numbers, although the sources we have from this period, there's a constant tendency towards massively exaggerating numbers, I think on both sides. But we think probably the Mongols managed to put together a mixed force of about 30,000 men, as you say, across hundreds and hundreds of ships. And they tried to come across to Japan a kind of, I suppose what we call in modern parlance, an island hopping strategy. A couple of islands in particular that lie between the southern part

of the Korean peninsula and Japan. So Tsushima Island and Iki Island before getting actually to Kyushu itself and Hakata Bay. And it actually goes quite well at first for the Mongols. They managed to take both of those islands and they managed to land in Hakata Bay on Kyushu with those men. And they're facing a samurai force, which is, we think, again, hard to be sure about numbers, but we think quite a lot smaller, probably no more than about 4,000 or 6,000 samurai. And you've alluded there to the tactics that the Mongols tended to use. And I think they contrast actually with what goes on in Japan. So by this point in Japan,

the samurai as a fighting class, I think have quite a high sense of themselves and their own sense of how you go about honorably fighting a battle and the way that that would normally take place. And this is often romanticized, so it's hard to get a reliable idea. But apparently what they would do is you'd have a single samurai would come forward, would fire an arrow over the heads of their enemy to announce the start of the battle. They had this little gadget on the arrow, which would make a whistling sound as it came down. And supposedly this was to try and draw the attention of the gods to the great feats of bravery, which were about to play out on the battlefield. And so they do this after the Mongols land at Hakata Bay. And if our sources are to be believed, the Mongols just reply with enormous laughter. It

seems like a ridiculously anticlimactic way to begin a battle. And then the next thing that the samurai would normally do in battle was individual samurai would find a worthy opponent on the other side, and they would call out their own family name. In some of the romanticised versions of this, they wouldn't just call out their name as a war cry. They would give a mini history of their family and all the honourable deeds that attached to them. And then you would have one-to-one combat, initially with bow and arrow from horseback, and then later, if necessary, sort of hand-to-hand.

But as you've alluded to, the Mongols don't tend to fight like that at all. So in response to this single, slightly pathetic-sounding arrow from the Japanese side, you get this cloud of arrows from the Mongol side, some of them we think dipped in poison. And you also, this is probably the first time that a gunpowder explosion is heard in Japan. These gunpowder bombs that are delivered with catapults over to the Japanese side, which aren't just damaging physically, but I think psychologically to men and horses alike. So initially it goes quite badly for the Japanese and the Mongols are pushing from Hakata Bay to this major centre called Dazaifu. That's really the first stage, I think, in this battle, in the first invasion.

You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the original kamikaze. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So the invasion has started as Kublai Khan would have imagined. The Japanese are being pushed back. Their way of war was sort of no match at this point.

Well, it sounds extraordinary. The vast numbers and the tactical and, in fact, the technological advantages that the Mongols have. Yes, absolutely. I think the only thing that the Japanese have on their side at this point is that individual warriors are pretty proficient at what they do. You have these stories of the Japanese being able to resist despite the enormous advantage in numbers on the Mongol side. But even so, yes, the Mongols are having the best of it at this point. And it's then difficult to work out exactly what happens next. It seems to be that on the way to this major centre of Dazaifu on the island of Kyushu,

which would have been a terrific victory for the Mongols if they'd got there, one of their leaders, Liu Fuzhang, is killed. And they mount, for some reason, a kind of tactical withdrawal, where they go back to their ships. Some people think that's just an awful military decision. Other people would say, well, maybe this first invasion was more a kind of probing of Japan's defences than it was intended to be an all-out attack on Japan. And so they withdraw to their ships and they set sail for Korea, where they could have set up camp on the

shoreline. In retrospect, that might have been the better decision, because for some reason, on their way back, these ships, large numbers of them are destroyed. And probably somewhere in the region of 10,000 to 13,000 men die drowning in that sea, around a third of the invasion force. So this was towards the end of 1274, we think probably November 1274. And it may have been that a powerful typhoon struck them. This was typhoon season in the area. So it's a kind of mini kamikaze. It's nothing like the one that we'll talk about in a minute during the second invasion. But nevertheless, the first invasion kind of peters out. And from the Japanese side, especially those who've been praying to Shinto gods, to Buddhist gods to protect the Japanese islands, it looks as though a sort of divine intervention alongside the bravery of the samurai has saved Japan at the

end of 1274. Okay, but it's unfinished business because in 1279, Kublai Khan smashes the Southern Song at the Battle of Yaman, this naval battle. This is another podcast I want to do one day. The 13-year-old final emperor of the Song is picked up by his prime minister, and the prime minister jumps overboard with him, and they get sucked down to their death. So he commits suicide. And that is the end of Southern Song power. So Kublai Khan is pretty much, I suppose, unchallenged within China.

And he turns his eyes again on Japan, doesn't he? He does, that's right. And there's a very strange incident that happens, worth briefly talking about, just a few years before in 1275. So before that ending of the Song Dynasty, there is an attempt to send Mongol envoys to Japan, a kind of diplomatic mission. And very strange, I don't know why this happens,

but they're escorted under guard all the way from Kyushu to the stronghold of the Kamakura shogunate, and they're beheaded. They're all put to death. And this is the kind of thing that up until this point would be completely unheard of. It's simply not what you do to envoys. But nevertheless, that's what happens to them. And at the same time, you have more prayers being made in Japan and this massive defensive wall built in the Hakata Bay area. So there's a clear sense in Japan that they are not prepared to negotiate. There's even talk of actually invading the Korean Peninsula to try and forestall any further invasion. That doesn't happen. But nevertheless, within Japan, there's that clear sense of confidence in dealing with the Mongols.

And that's the backdrop, as you say, the ending of the Song Dynasty in 1279, and the preparation of a second, much larger invasion. I suppose one of the big advantages the Mongols have at this point, because they've done away with the Song Dynasty, is that they can include southern Chinese troops in a new invasion force. So they probably have, when they begin again in 1281, the second invasion, they probably have in the region of 100,000 men. So they have these split into two armies, an eastern route army and a southern route army, and they begin in May 1281. I think one of the disadvantages that the Mongols perhaps have is that their route to Japan is so obvious after the first invasion that the Japanese can be reasonably

ready for a second one because they do take more or less the same strategic approach. So you see those two islands, Tsushima and Iki, again being attacked first. This is the Eastern Route Army, one of two who do that. Then they make this really strange decision, the plan officially, because Hakata Bay on Kyushu is quite a difficult ask in terms of an invasion. This is where they know their intelligence tells them that there is a new defensive wall. Because of that, they planned that these two armies, the Eastern and the Southern, would link up first and then attack together. But for some reason, the Eastern Route Army attacks by itself Hakata Bay in June

1281. And this actually fails. This goes really badly for the Mongols, partly because you have that defensive wall where Japanese archers can fire from the top at the invading force. You also have samurai firing arrows from horseback. You also have this wonderful and heavily romanticised plan on the part of the Japanese of sending out these small boats stuffed with samurai to attack these much larger Mongol vessels with bows and arrows, grappling hooks, getting onto the boats and fighting hand to hand on these boats. And this seems to work really well, actually, for the Japanese. And there are all sorts of stories of Derring-Do on the part of the Japanese managing to cause the Mongols serious harm. And I suppose it goes back

to what you said a little while ago, Dan, you know, that they are used to fighting on planes in open country, the Mongol armies. And so instead to be attacked and forced to fight hand to hand, many of them are armoured a lot less well than the Japanese, some of them just wearing heavy coats rather than armour at all. And so those sorts of combat situations really go against the Mongols. And so quite quickly, the second invasion is turning into a bit of a nightmare. Astonishing sort of victories against the odds here, because the Mongols have overwhelming numbers of ships and men. So they're being harassed, they're being harried by these samurai, very smart tactics being used. What's the decisive point of the invasion though? So I think at this point,

although they're being harried by these small ships, you have the southern route army at last turning up in the area. And at this point, really, you've got the remnants of the eastern army, you've got this brand new, fresh southern army. So at this point, despite the setbacks the Mongols have suffered, it really looks as though an overwhelming invasion of Japan is now on the cards. And so the Japanese are furiously praying away, including the emperor sending envoys to the grand shrine at Ise, which is dedicated to the sun goddess Amaterasu, who is his ancestor according to Japanese mythology. So there's a sense that shrines, temples are doing what they can alongside what's actually going on in the battlefield. And I think against that context of prayer, it's hugely significant

from the Japanese side that late in the summer of 1281, while all these Mongol ships are anchored just off the coast of Hakata Bay, this enormous typhoon blows up. And this is attested to on both sides, you know, the Chinese histories, the Mongol histories, I should say, and also the Japanese histories. And this is absolutely devastating for the Mongol side. We think probably tens of thousands of men from the invading force are killed at this point because their ships go down, they're dashed off rocks, or they're beached. A lot of the men are left in the water basically to wash ashore in Japan where they are swiftly killed by samurai on those beaches. And the

remains of the force basically turn tail and head back to China and Korea. And that really is the end of that second invasion, which ought to have been this overwhelming victory for the Mongol forces. But a combination of two things seems to have saved Japan. One is the ability of the samurai to force them back onto their ships, which is a poor situation for the Mongols to be in. And then this seemingly miraculous divine wind, Kamiakaze, which blows up in August 1281 and takes out, as I say, tens of thousands of men, persuading the Mongol force to go home. The extraordinary thing I find as a sailor myself is that we are very vulnerable even today when you're on ships, on boats, to wind. And so the

idea of 800 years ago with the more primitive anchors and ropes and equipment they would have had, these winds could have just devastated entire fleets all anchored and moored up in a bay. It's just a terrifying prospect. Absolutely. And I think in the last few decades, there's been archaeological work done around this area, which actually has found some fragments of these ships. It's found bits and pieces of Mongol armour, one with a skull still inside it. So although there's been

a certain amount of romanticising of what's gone on, as you say, that genuine vulnerability to the elements on the part of the Mongol fleet. And also, I think for the Mongol side of it, there was a sense that these winds are not entirely natural. They don't just come out of nowhere. There's a part of the Yuanqi, which is one of the historical records on the Mongol side of this, which says this about these winds coming up. They say, they saw the shadows of hills floating on the waves. They became suspicious that a rock might lie hidden somewhere. Then they saw a great serpent appearing on the surface of the water, and the water began to smell of sulfur. So there's clearly something going very badly wrong

beyond pure nature, as far as the Mongols are concerned. It's always quite hard to work out in retrospect how people at the time might have felt when these awful winds came up. But certainly as it's remembered on both sides, this in the end was an invasion which in some sense was meant to fail, that there was an element of the divine at work there. I think it's really striking that both sides end up remembering it that way. Yes, that's the interesting thing. Japanese obviously, do they start to develop those ideas that you can see perhaps in Tudor England after the Armada, God Blue, the Gods and Englishmen, there was a Protestant wind. Do you see ideas of Japanese exceptionalism grow up and divine favour?

And in China, what's their view? It's best just to leave the blooming water alone. How does this act then on subsequent Chinese and Japanese thinking? From the Mongol side, soon they've got their own problems in China. The Yuan dynasty doesn't last much past the mid-1300s anyway. So having basically given up on the idea of trying to get to Japan, they seem to have more internal trouble after that. Plus, to be honest, thinking about the Mongol side again and Kublai Khan, why he wanted to invade Japan in the first place, no one really seems to know. It might be simply because it was there, it was the next natural place to get to. There's also a suggestion, and it's actually partly thanks to Marco Polo, the famous European traveller who was in China at this point and worked for Kublai Khan, that there was aller who was in China at this point and worked for

Kublai Khan, that there was a sense that in Japan there was this enormous gold mine, huge quantities of gold to be had if you could get out there. People who read the diaries of Marco Polo find him talking about huge palaces that are covered inches thick in fine gold. And it might have been that having actually got to Japan and discovered that the reality was more brutal and also perhaps a bit less refined than Kublai Khan might have hoped for, there was a sense that it's probably not really worth it anyway. And I think from the Japanese side, the parallel you make is really interesting with the Tudors, because you find in Japan more and more the phrase, land of the gods, being used about Japan, this sense that the gods really were protecting it. And I think it's much more than rhetorical. There's almost a parallel in

some ways with ancient Greece, this sense that when you get great moments of human history and human drama, the gods and human beings are somehow being brought together. And this is very much how the Japanese seem to have felt about the battlefield. You know, from the calling of the kami to pay attention with that whistling arrow, through to samurai being terribly keen to try to record what their own deeds were, to get rewards both here and potentially in the afterlife as well. There was that real sense of the battlefield being charged with cosmic meaning. And so for the Japanese, this was an enormously important event. And you see it then, of course, in the Second World War, the choice of kamikaze, again, to describe some of those

attacks that were being launched at the very end, a sense that really, in the end, Japan will be saved by some kind of divine power. Well, thank you very much for coming and talking to us on this anniversary of that destruction of, well, of both, on that destruction of the first invasion and indeed the deployment of the kamikaze attacks in World War II. Christopher Harding, thank you very much indeed. Thank you. you