Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 290 - The Divine Wind

Episode Date: December 17, 2023

You've heard of the Kamikaze. Now learn about where they got their name. Sources: https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/kamikaze-001995 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/141104-kamikaze-kublai-khan-winds-typhoon-japan-invasion https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-kamikaze-pilots-wwii https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/18/how-typhoon-sank-kublai-khan-weatherwatch https://www.thoughtco.com/the-mongol-invasions-of-japan-195559 https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/divine-winds-triumphant/

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust.

Consider joining the Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Lions Out by Donkeys podcast. I am Joe, and with me, to Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I am Joe, and with me, trapped on this island of Japan, I've ran out of intros, is Tom. What's up, buddy?

I am single-handedly destroying the Neo-Tokugawa Shogunate from Lions Led by Robots. We are taking the world by storm. I'm good, Joe. How are you? I am tired so me too last night was uh my was was a birthday party so i of course went out to a birthday party had not actually not that much to drink um but um i don't really drink much anymore but i except for me. Yeah, of course. Whenever we drink together, it is like I'm

actively trying to murder my organs with street food in Guinness. But I did steal quite a few cigarettes from a friend of the show and a guest over on the History of Armenia sub-series, Neil Hauer, who came and visited. And then this, I could not sleep because when I drink, I cannot sleep. Even if I, if I have more than two beers, I'm sleeping at most three hours. Right. Uh, so I've been up since like five, 6am, something like that. And I'm like, well, fuck it. I'm up early. I'm going to go to the gym. And I do deadlifts. And it is then at 9 a.m. while I'm doing deadlifts, I have remembered I have not eaten anything. The only thing in my body is residual cigarettes

and one too many Belgian quad beers that are like 10% alcohol. And my brain leaps into another dimension as I pull this weight upwards and i promptly black the fuck out you saw god yeah um i i collapsed to my knees and over the barbell i don't hit my head on the ground thankfully like i didn't fully pass out i'm fine but anybody who's who's seen videos of people dead lifting probably knows what i'm talking about um hey at least you at least you didn't piss yourself or vomit on the platform i just left that part out i have to have some dignity you know um i did what's called the

grand slam which is when i vomit shit and piss myself simultaneously yeah joe is uh bringing out a lions led by donkeys dead lifting diaper for anyone interested. Yep. And then after I was done, I finally got an apartment here and it's completely unfurnished, which is something I have grown unaccustomed to since leaving the United States. Most apartments come furnished in Armenia and this one does not. So I've had to order the finest furniture Ikea has to offer um and i have to be there for delivery and i live about seven kilometers away um and so i i grab like a spinach boric from one

of those very dutch food cabinet places on my way home from the gym because i just need to eat something um and i i have 45 minutes before i have to be i'm timing this perfectly tom i fucking nailed it right then i get a call hello is this joe well i'm almost i'm 20 minutes from your apartment fuck shit yasha is this joe we've got we've got your furniture we need to deliver to your house i i have a very important appointment later on I need to put boot polish on my face. And I'm like, fuck, shit. And I have to get there in 20 goddamn minutes. The tram takes 25, but cycling takes 16.

I can make it if I cycle. So I jump on my bicycle and I take off. I still have a spinach boric in my hand as I'm gunning it down the bike lane through the Hague. I cut off way too many people, including a car, and I make it there, but I have dressed too warm for this, and by the time I get there, I am sweating my fucking

balls off, and the moving guy, normally they send a team of people, it's just one small Dutch man, and he's moving this entire cabinet up the stairs into my apartment he's like oh excuse me could you help i was like god damn it fuck you were moving like a divine wind you could say so i'm dragging this shit up into my apartment and finally i put it down there and i'm like i gotta cycle the fuck back because I didn't bring any of my recording shit and jump back on my bike and cycle

the fuck back and that is how I've spent my entire day so far I mean like I came in nice and early this morning because I had deliveries of t-shirts coming they were supposed to come at 11

didn't come until 12 so Joe went and took a shower while we waited Yeah I was ripe by the time I got back between working out and panic peddling through downtown The Hague in a winter bomber jacket and the one day the Netherlands

decides to be like 50 degrees outside Yeah you definitely look like the world's most expedient crack dealer ever yeah I got some weird looks um but yeah um also uh don't really know when this episode's coming out but uh once again we're doing a

insert from future Tom about the January 26th and 27th first ever Lions Led by Donkeys live show in London. First and second, I guess we could say. Oh, fuck you. Okay, anyway, future Tom,

here you go. Hey everyone, so the first night, January the 26th is now sold out. That is, there are no tickets available left for January 26th. There is still some tickets for January 27th. That is the some tickets for January 27th. That is the Saturday night.

So if you haven't gotten your tickets, get them now. We are advising everyone to purchase their merch before the show, just because we have a hard curfew on both nights. So you'll have about an hour

between when doors open at 6pm and when the show starts around 7pm to get yourself a drink, get some food and pick up some merch maybe. So looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks. Thank you Future Tom. I've had a really good morning

like my shirts arrived from beneath the skin so I was really happy with how they came out. I'm having a good day. I haven't eaten anything and I'm going to go to the gym so I'm going to finish this, go across to the shop and take whatever pastries they have and shove them in my mouth before I go hit chest. Hell yeah. Speaking about hitting things, we talk about kamikazes a lot on this show, Tom.

That was just you doing deadlifts this morning. No coming back, boys coming back boys my soul hitting the fucking ground um and my and my spirit ascending the astral plane um so we did an episode about kamikazes year ago years ago i guess it's kamikaze i don't think there's a plural on that whatever um so you know the kamikaze are the suicidal latch last ditch effort weapon deployed by the empire of japan in the form of packing shitty planes full of explosives slapping a teenager behind the sticks and crashing them motherfuckers directly into american warships however we've never talked about the origin of the word kamikaze

and what it means, or divine wind. And for that, we have to go back to the 13th century when the Mongol Empire under Kublai Khan attempted to invade Japan. Oh man, I love Kublai Khan.

Just such an interesting historical figure and period in time we will eventually I suppose try and do a series about him but yeah yeah and I like Mongol related history in general and

you're probably wondering Joe if you like this period of history why the fuck don't you ever talk about it good question I don't know I got nothing for you i just write what i sometimes i fall into wormholes i can't help it much like everyone's dad in the like 2000s sitting on the couch watching tv we are obsessed with world war ii so you know i'm really not um it was never my field of study, either an undergrad or graduate school. As everybody is well aware, I got really into Napoleonic logistics in my undergraduate, and I studied lighthearted

subjects in grad school. World War II was never really my academic passion as much as it was. my academic passion as much as it was. Like many of your dads, I also watch too much history channel in the same time. I just happened to be like 10 years old and my mom was at work. So I've watched the most horrific shit ever on TV. And it's interesting because there's a lot of history podcasts, whatever. There's a lot pop history you know whatever you want to call it that focus a lot on world war ii but they don't they talk about like five specific things they leave a lot out so i always find it fun to like nobody's talked about this before you know but you know my bad today we're not talking about any of that uh never mind that bullshit here's some uh mongols yeah now kublai khan is an interesting guy uh and we really can't go into him all the way here but he presided over the breakup of the massive united mongol empire that had once been under the control of his

brother kublai called for an assembly of warriors to have them pick him as his brother's successor, which of course pissed off a lot of other people and led to the empire shattering into largely four different pieces. And Kublai Khan really didn't care. The others took over breakaway Mongol states in what today would be like Iran, Russia, and other places, but he didn't want those. He wanted what was the most important part of the empire, China. Yeah, you're about to run into some pretty big logistical challenges. Can't imagine what.

Anyway, let's go through history and see everybody else's run of this problem. He did something pretty remarkable while he was doing this. He abandoned much of the trappings of Mongol life and adopted what you could consider a Chinese lifestyle and attitude. Traditionally, Mongols were nomads of the grassy

steppes. Famously, everybody probably knows at least that about them. And Lee Harvey Oswald was the master of the grassy knoll fuck you it was gang it was chengis khan on the grassy knoll with a fucking bow and arrow it released as a pruder film we'll know kublai khan was there goddamn mongols keep killing my presidents um that they lived in you know mobile yurts um they moved around a lot they tended herds of livestock living on cheese mare's milk and hummus which is a kind of fermented horse milk that gets

you fucked up oh yeah which has to be the worst drunk ever i've seen uh videos on tiktok of like people in like kazakhstan drinking that, and I really want to try it. I would 100% try it if it was offered to me. Now, if you're listening to this, and you're going to bring fermented milk to the live show to try to get one of us to drink it, you're not a Mongol. I'm not drinking your milk. Don't bring strangers your milk.

I feel like Customs and Border Control will flag that immediately, although they do let me in with like 1200 cigarettes every time the last time i was at the uk i didn't speak to a single fucking customs person they didn't even look at me that wasn't coming from the eu either nobody get like the british customs really care they'd have to hire a few people now slowly kublai khan would absorb a lot of this Chinese culture

and do his best to reform himself as a Chinese emperor and establishing a dynasty. He left most of the previous Chinese government and bureaucracy in place, of course, with Mongol supervision looking down at them. Confucian traditions and rituals remained, though he and his people never stopped being Mongols. They were conquerors, and so they saw the Chinese as inferior to them and untrustworthy, as most imperial powers tend

to do. Rather than packing in the court with Chinese officials to help them govern and evolve and do whatever it is that they do, he did his best to surround himself with foreigners like marco polo for example he would show up at one point um of course he did like it's really funny because uh on my show about tattoo history we talked about uh marco polo's time in vietnam seeing the tattooing practice there of like someone getting like a massive

a massive crocodile back piece done by hand it's sick and this is in like the 12th century i'd like to think of marco polo showing back up home with like barbed wire tribal tattoos and like a butterfly lower back tattoos like you don't understand its culture yeah i mean he was technically on his gap year so now kublai khan also ran into other problems mainly that no matter what title he gave himself his own people would only ever see him as a mongol and expected him to follow mongol traditions traditionally mongol tribes gave complete obedience to a leader only in a time of war and conquest the khan's power loyalty and all all around clout you could say depended entirely on his success in defeating enemies

conquering territory but most importantly getting that sweet sweet loot yeah like this is the interesting thing when you talk about like the politics structure of nomadic cultures is that like generally they operate on a kind of autonomous basis from group to group and like very rarely do you see like massive amounts of people migrating and doing nomadic shit at the same time and are generally like united under times of conflict so it completely makes sense that he's a little bit like Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands War he was facing down and losing an election needed a good war to bolster

the voters. And much like Margaret Thatcher he deployed the Mongol aircraft carriers. Many people don't know about this The Falkland Islands belong to the Mongols. It's like a nuclear power submarine surfaces instead of launching torpedoes or whatever. It just fires a fucking horse off of a catapult. Kublai Khan was the original Peronist.

Oh, God. Well, condolences on losing the election, Kublai Khan. Now, this was easy enough for the Khan for a while, as he only controlled the north of China for a long time. The south of the country was still

largely under the control of the Chinese Song Dynasty, making them an easy target for constant expansion and war. Now, while he was dealing with them, he also conquered Korea, which was important for the Mongols, as they had something the Mongols traditionally did not. A tradition of seafaring and

boating. Who would have thought a whole bunch of horsemen from the steppe not great sailors? You know? Yeah, great MMA fighters, not great sailors. Nurgum Med off just scratching his head confusingly looking down at a speedboat it's all it's all that fermented milk that's like you know it makes you strong like if you drink like if you drink a lot of fermented milk to get fucked up the chances are that you don't really have a tradition of boating is probably

strong because if you did you'd get in the fucking boat and go somewhere where they have alcohol that is not made of fermented milk but this makes sense of how they were such good warriors because think of how high protein that milk would have been and if you're drinking it to get fucked up you know you're riding around all day you're drinking this fermented milk you're getting it to get fucked up, you're riding around all day, you're drinking this fermented milk, you're getting your macros in. Tom, I have an idea. Is this like the keto crickets again? Get on that donk milk.

Oh God, no. I don't like donk milk. It's too late. It's been birthed. Joe, that infers that we're milking you, and I am not a fan of people imagining you jelking. Look, I got bills to pay. Subscribe at the $25 Patreon tier to see Joe's feet.

I thought that was going somewhere worse. I thought you were going to say subscribe to the 25 bill of patreon to milk joe no that's the two and a half thousand dollar a month you get to milk joe deal now it's called jilking now uh so he conquered korea he he he got all these people who are very good at boating a very good tradition of seafaring and also not not too far away from Korea, famously, Japan. I didn't just sneak up on them. It's always been there. Welcome to Obvious Shit Joe Says, the podcast.

Now, the Khan knew about Japan thanks to Marco Polo, who informed him that Japan was ridiculously wealthy with gold. Which is partially correct. Marco Polo did kind of not fully understand Japan, but he did know that much. And the Japanese at the time, while not entirely unified, but kind of, were very friendly with the Song Dynasty and were trading with them, which the Khan was trying to put down. Now, at first, the Khan reached out to Japan in 1268, trying to be nice and courteous, as they possibly could, but they're Mongols. They fucked it up. Now, Japan at the time was ruled by Emperor Kamiyama. And as the emperors pretty much always were in Japan until the Meiji Restoration, he was more of a figurehead. The power really fell to Hojo Takemune, regent of the shogun, and the shogun is effectively the military dictator of Japan. Takemune had actually a fair amount of knowledge in comparison to most Japanese when it came to the Mongols,

in comparison to most Japanese when it came to the Mongols, as his close advisor was actually a Buddhist monk from China who had survived the Mongols butchering his entire monastery while he was there. Now, the Mongols actually spared the man that becomes advisor because according to the monk, so, you know, who knows if this is true or not, but according to the monk, he was so calm and peaceful during this massacre of this Buddhist temple. The Mongols just left him alone. Like, this guy, he's taking this way too well, bro.

We should just leave him. I'm scared. Yeah, his vibe seems pretty chill. You know, I think we just leave him. Yeah, the Mongols famously attuned to vibe shifts um and you know i mean i you could make that argument fair enough yeah it's true god damn it tom fuck you we're surviving the mongol vibe shift sitting in a town that's being besieged by the mongols and severed heads are flying overhead from catapults. Like, man, I really feel like

the vibes are fucked up in here. The volume shift is separating the vertebrae from your fucking skull. That is the ultimate, that's the last pent-ultimate vibe shift. Now, the monk told this story to Takemune and he pretty openly explained to him, like, you do not want to fucking trust these people

then in the letter that the con sent he addressed it to the king of japan not the emperor which was considered a grave fucking insult because according to the japanese the emperor was directly descended from amaterasu omikami the the sun goddess. So calling him a king made him a man, not a divine being. He's literally committing heresy and also just rude. Yeah, you really don't want

to piss off Amaterasu. Do you have the contents of the letter? I did have some of it, yeah. I did not put it in the podcast. I have it right here if you want me to read it. Cherished by the mandate of heaven,

the great Mongol emperor sends this letter to the king of Japan. The sovereigns of small countries sharing borders with each other have for a long time been concerned to communicate with each other and become friendly, especially since my ancestor governed at heaven's command innumerable countries from afar,

disputed our power and slighted our virtue. Goryo rendered thanks for my ceasefire and for restoring their land and people when I ascended to the throne. Our relation is feudatory like a father and son. We think you already know this. Goryo is my eastern tributary. Japan was allied with Goryo and my eastern tributary. Japan was allied with Goryo and sometimes with China since the founding of your country. And by Goryo

he means Korea. Yeah. So, however, Japan has never dispatched ambassadors since my ascending to the throne. We are afraid the kingdom is yet to know this. Hence, we dispatched a mission with our letter, particularly expressing our wishes.

Enter into friendly relations with one another from now on. We think all countries belong to one family. How are we in the right unless we comprehend this? Nobody would wish to resort to arms. Kublai Khan has like the globe emoji in his twitter bio yeah i mean when you think about it you know he believes that he is uh you know um is chosen by god to be the emperor of china and according to their beliefs he can be the only emperor so therefore the japanese emperor cannot be emperor and furthermore it cannot be divine so like

there's he's just like pissing all over every aspect of the japanese which you know it's not how you make friends i mean like the like the the concept of the divine right of kings is really weird when you think about it is like you know the reason the world is so fucked is because god is just kicking back he's like yeah no i was kind of made a mistake with that one. These guys now have the mandate of heaven. You have lost the mandate of heaven. This is not a place of honor. That's the opening of the

live show. Right before someone runs on stage and attempts to milk you. Oh no. It's gonna be like Shinzo Abe but instead of a doohickey it's someone with a fucking Hulk can.

We do not endorse Milking Joe. We do endorse Hulk hands though. This is not the first time they've come up with this show. So this letter made the Japanese government so mad that they even bothered to respond to it. So the Khan sent another emissary who

was again ignored. Though this time the Mongols kidnapped two Japanese people and this actually does not end the way you assume it does. They brought them back to China to show them all the wealth, the power, and the grandeur of the empire. Like this is what you could belong to blah blah blah

and it's like send them back to Japan and let them spread the word of how great everything is. And like I said, literally the best thing that could happen to you if you're kidnapped by Mongols. But this did not seem to faze the Japanese. Between 1266 and 1273, the Mongols sent a further six letters and all of them are pretty much the same. There is a demand for tribute

and the veiled threats of what would happen to them are pretty much the same. There is a demand for tribute and the veiled threats of what would happen to them if they did not submit. The Japanese lived 10,000 li across the sea and although they were in constant contact with China, they did not carry out the practice of sending annual tribute. Yet

in the past, the Chinese did not care. They would treat them, in brackets, the Japanese kindly when they came and would not interfere with them if they did not come. The old policy of the Chinese was that the receipt of tribute from abroad added little to the culture of kings, nor the absence of tribute detracted little from the prestige of the emperors. But now, under our sage emperor, all under the light of the sun and the moon are his subjects you stupid little barbarians do you dare defy us by not submitting yeah uh they kind of had the vibe of a guy who doesn't get a reply on tinder uh look i i really swiped left on the the mongols

is left the bad one? I don't know. The youths are going to have to tell us. It's fine. You're supposed to be the young one of the podcast. God damn it, Tom. I haven't used the dating app in nearly five years. I never have.

I'm too old. You just used to stand outside with a sign Saying wanna milk me It brings in A unique person you know One after my heart And also my milk This episode is Fucking off the rails

So the Khan sent his personal Representative Zhao Liang Bai In 1270 the japanese damn near murdered him on the spot before finally like hold up pump the brakes on this one everybody breathe get rid of them uh and they just told him to leave instead but he was like you know a horse hair you know using a a kind of measurement that the Mongols would, I assume, use when doing absolutely nothing from dying, from getting his head cut off. And this

turned out to be the last straw for the Khan. He began planning for war. However, this is actually a massive undertaking, unlike anything the Khan had ever done before. Mostly because it required a full-scale naval invasion. It was so large that the Khan seemed to underestimate the time it would take for him to get together 900 ships and 25,000 men that had got delayed

over and over again for months. The Mongol fleet finally left Korea on October 29, 1274, towards their first two targets, two islands, Tsushima, of Ghost of Tsushima fame, a video game which I have yet to be able to play, and Iki. The idea being they would act as a communication logistical hub for the possible invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's home islands. On Tsushima, the Mongol fleet appeared on the horizon, and its 60-year-old deputy governor, So Sukikuni, ran out to rally his forces.

Of... around 80 guys. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Like, look, the... So, for any nautical people, the crossing between Korea and japan depending on the time of year can be much easier sailing or much more difficult if you are in the call that foreshadowing

yes when you are in the seasons where typhoons are much more common, you're pretty much fucked. And unless they were liaising with, you know, Korean sailors who have obviously done this trip quite a lot, I don't think they would have expected what was about to come. Well, the Koreans were 100% manning their ships. They were doing all of this. Yeah. And, you know...

But they were just like fuck these guys they will get there hold that thought now these guys these the samurai that were mustered and rallied on tsushima were mostly mounted samurai along with their retainers uh meanwhile uh the mongols were unloading a thousand men and their horses and catapults something the japanese had never seen before which must have been fucking terrifying. Yeah, like you just see this giant, like whatever type of

projectile flying through the air you would freak the fuck out. Hey, bro, what is that flying through the air? Is that? Oh god, it's raining comets or something! What the fuck? Yeah, like, being a

soldier at, like, any point in history must have been terrifying because you go into battle and you just see some new shit that's about to kill you. And that's gonna happen a lot to the Japanese during this saga. Now, the samurai were professional warriors, but they fought

completely differently than the Mongols. They didn't fight in units or they didn't even really have commanders in the traditional sense. Every samurai was an individual and they did what they wanted. Sometimes they worked in small groups. And this is not a great thing to be doing when organized units of mongol warriors came at them when i mean they're also numbered like fucking 100 to 1 so it really doesn't matter the samurai outnumbered and with no hope of reinforcement fought to the death as their honor deserved and you know demanded not that the mongols were gonna take prisoners yeah before long

they were all dead and the mongols killed everyone on the island that they could find and then they burnt down every single building yeah this served a purpose though uh also a sidebar for anyone interested and get the dothraki in game of thrones a lot of people attribute uh their whole characterization to the mongols it's actually to the Scythians. I assumed the Huns. No, it was the Scythians because the Scythians were like another nomadic horse riding based culture

from the steppes, but they predate the Mongols by I think they were like 500 ish BC. Yeah. Sidebar over. We'll have to contact George R.R. Martin when he's done writing all those books that he's not writing. Now,

burning everything down and killing everybody served a purpose. It was a terror weapon that the Mongols had been using since effectively they became the threat that they were. Submit without resistance and nothing will happen to you. Resist and, well, you got our postcard, right?

After the fall of Tsushima, Iki came next. Taria Takagawa, the island's deputy governor, and when you're deputy governor, you're also the commander of the local forces, had prepared for the invasion since he had heard what was going on over in Tsushima. Though, there's only so much he could do. He had 40 samurai. Yeah, they're really not prepared for that. Yeah, it doesn't matter how much you prepare, man.

You might as well just lay down on the beach and be like, just stab me! I don't want to die tired, man. Just fucking gut me. I mean, like, after a series of increasingly threatening letters, you think that you would maybe bolster your defenses a little bit? Ah, one of the problems with, you know, no central government. I mean, yeah,

to be fair, they were too busy fucking fighting each other. Pretty much, yeah. Now, the deputy governor ordered all of the women and children he could find behind the walls of Hinosume Castle and waited. Though, the term castle might be a bit strong here. It was a wooden shack,

especially when you realize what the Mongols had been fighting all of these years. It was a few wooden walls, watchtowers. It was nothing for the Mongols. So knowing he was doomed, the deputy governor sent a samurai along with his daughter towards Kyushu to warn them what was coming, and then he prepared for his last stand. Mongols rained arrows down on the castle and quickly burst through the gates. As the samurai prepared to fire their bows at close range at the charging Mongols, they saw something that really sounds like it would only exist in some grim dark fantasy novel. The Mongols had made human shields of Japanese civilians. Literally. They had punched

holes in their hands and ran ropes through the wounds, physically tying them together and forcing them to walk in a line. This horrified the samurai to the point that it stopped them in their tracks and they were

quickly overwhelmed by the mongols and the slaughter across the castle and the island continued i i am just awestruck at this like i know a lot of people talk about like in the like pre-modern period in terms of like you know when you had like guns the people who won were the people who like had the supremacy of violence but like this is just a whole other level and to not only that but like horrify a samurai like samurai are you know lionized and turned heroic because people like swords and whatever and they think of all this you, the Bushido code and all this other nonsense, but they're intensely violent people. Like, someone of the samurai caste could and often did behead civilians

if they looked at them because it was against the law. And the Mongols managed to do something so horrifically violent, it terrified the samurai. Jesus Christ. Yeah, mark that down on your bingo card as this is a new type of corpse infrastructure.

Yeah, we got a... It's def... We got a fence. It's a corpse fence. It's a defensive corpse infrastructure. Yeah, yeah. We have other stuff, unfortunately, too. The Mongols, afterwards, collected all the corpses of women,

stripped them naked, and nailed them to the sides of their ship. Jesus Christ. What? Some of them weren't dead yet. Holy fuck. So imagine this. You have a fleet of Mongol warships

full of thousands of warriors sailing towards Kyushu and their ships are literally screaming in pain because they nailed people to them as they went. This is like, this is some, like you said, this is some fucking like Warhammer 40k shit. Yeah. Oh, look. Oh, here comes the whaling fleet. No, not that kind of way.

Like the one where the women are screaming because they've been nailed to the side of it yeah this is like some like chaos Marines leaving the warp type shit exactly it's so fucking wild and it seems like it's so over the top that it was invented to make the Mongols look more brutal from a by a foreigner but

the Japanese are not the only people that witness the Mongols do shit like this. This is not a one-off. This is something that happened like, well, one time is too many. Jesus Christ. Exactly. So the Mongol fleet is

making their way towards Kyushu with the goal of landing at Hakata Bay. The Japanese were ready for them this time, and they had days to prepare for the coming assault, putting up a call for reinforcements for all the provincial lords to send their samurai, the retainers, and anybody who had enough fingers attached to their hands that could hold a weapon. And we actually have no idea how many soldiers fought on either side of this. The history of Juan states that on either side, it was around 3,000 or 4,000, but we're not really sure. Whatever it was, it was the first large-scale battle the Japanese would ever fight

against a foreigner, specifically a foreign invader. And since none of these guys were present on the other islands, because none of them lived, nobody had any idea what to expect, and none of them knew how the Mongols fought. The Mongol infantry advanced up Hakata Bay in something similar to a phalanx. They smashed cymbals and drums. They chucked bombs at the Japanese samurai as they marched, and the bombs, the drums, and the cymbals, and the screaming terrified the samurai's horses and most of them were forced to dismount and run into battle again on their own or in small groups on foot yeah their whole their horse uh fear level bar just filled up immediately the horse they just got booked off the horse turns back to the same like y'all could fucking stay but i am leaving

fuck this the ground is exploding what are the what are these metal things making noise i fuck this i'm going to the horse union now there's another thing that they learned pretty quickly now at this point the typical samurai sword the katana was not what we think of it as it was still kind of a thing but it hadn't turned into what it would and so the samurai as they ran into battle found out that if they got their sword stuck in a mongol's armor it would fucking snap in half and that's never happened to them before now all of this didn't enrage the samurai as much as it did just really fucking confuse them according to the hachiman gurukan a source believed to be from right about after the invasion quote according to our manner of fighting we must

first call out by name from someone in the enemy ranks, and then they would meet us, and we would attack in single combat. But they, the Mongols, took no notice of such conventions. They rushed forward all together in a mass, grappling with any individuals they could catch and killing them. Just imagine, like, the samurai, like, sword out, like,

you, with the face, whatever, like, they can't understand anything they're saying and this whole like just one samurai in front of a wall of mongol phalanx or shield wall just stabbing them and just immediately gets like turned into pink mist by a bomb yeah the bro got evaporated mongolian style some other samurai's like well it didn't work for him but i like my chances steps forward to do the same thing catches an arrow to the face well shit i used to be a samurai until i took an arrow to the face i used to be a samurai until 80 mongolians killed me the the japanese force is pretty much immediately fractured by the nature of samurai combat. Individual honor and glory came over everything else,

including listening to orders. For example, one samurai had been ordered not to rush forward since the Hakata mudflats were directly in front of them and horses would not be able to navigate it. The samurai, Sunigawa, said fuck all that,

took his retainers and charged forward, immediately got stuck in the mud, as he had been warned, and the Mongols then pelted him with arrows. Nearly all of them died and they had to be rescued by a different group of samurai. Fucking hell. As badly organized as the Japanese defenders were, they fought savagely, making the Mongols struggle for the first time for over every inch of land and the individual charges of honor and all that did actually work at various points for example at one point the mongol commander got shot in the face with an arrow because one guy had simply ran forward thought that guy looks important and just scored one in the T-slot. You know what I'm saying? A bro got

hit so hard he started T-posing. Though by the end of the day, the samurai withdrew towards Mizuki Castle, which again was not really a castle. It was more of like a dirt berm with a moat. It had been constructed just for this purpose

to protect the regional capital from an invading enemy, or more than likely act as a speed bump and possibly slow them down. Things were looking bad for Japan. The Mongols had set up a beachhead where they could send in the rest of their men, and they could also unload supplies and continue their invasion of Kyushu. However, the Mongol expedition commander, Holdan, wasn't the stereotypical hyper-aggressive Mongol military general. He told everyone to hold on. Boo! You're fired! Get fucked! Fuck you! fucked fuck you he was worried about camping overnight on the japanese beach as like you know this there must be thousands more samurai waiting in the distance they're just gonna pounce on us in the night when there absolutely was not he was worried about the amount of men he was losing

because he was also worried that he didn't have enough men to complete the invasion so he ordered everybody to pack their shit up and he went back to korea seemingly the only commander within the mongol force that pushed back on this idea was actually korean and he was promptly ignored on their way back i now i think a lot of this had to be because the Korean general knew the hazards of the water crossing. And he knew turning around at that point of time was like, that's kind of fucking dangerous. But he was ignored. And virtually the entire Mongol invasion force was lost to a sunstorm, which is sometimes called a typhoon. But we actually can't be sure if it was or not.

It could have just been rough seas. Thousands were killed, but hold on survived he held on fuck you i was right and made it all the way back to korea now japanese sources on this invasion often say the mongols sent running due to the tenaciousness of the samurai defenders. But in reality, from what anybody could tell, this is a little more than a scouting mission. This wasn't an actual Mongol attempt at taking Kyushu. This is evidenced by the fact that Ho Don wasn't immediately executed for his failure when he got back to Korea, which is usually what would happen to a Mongol general who fucked up. The main game in town for the Khan

was still the Song Dynasty in southern China. They were still holding on. Hey! And this Japanese side quest, whatever, could have been like a scouting mission. It could have also been like, look what we can do. We will come back. Something like that.

Now, for the Japanese, they were completely baffled. Showing back up on the beach and seeing that the Mongols had just left. As confusing as it was, the shogunate was smart enough to know these guys would probably come back someday. Nobody just invades for a single day and never returns. Orders were passed down to better organize the Kyushu samurai, and they began building forts, stone walls, castles, anywhere they thought the Mongols would be able to land more boats in the future. more boats in the future. At the site of the last battle, Hakata Bay, they quickly built a six-foot

wall and drove massive spikes into the beaches and rivers to make sure they couldn't land there again. But by 1275, the Song dynasty had all but fallen, ending in a dramatic sea battle when the Song naval commander saw all was lost.

So he hugged the Song emperor and jumped overboard with him in his arms rather than allow him to fall into the hands of the Mongols. Honestly, it's something of like the climactic ending of an action movie of fucking rules. We'll do an episode on that one.

But with that little hurdle out of the way, the Khan once again turned his attention towards Japan. With the Song gone, the Khan could begin putting his attention towards Japan. With the song gone, the Khan could begin putting together the largest invasion force that would ever be pointed towards a Japanese home island, which was almost broken,

but then, you know, nukes happened. Though building this would take years, and in the meantime, he again began sending emissaries to Japan. One went to Kyoto, the capital and the place of residence for the emperor. The emissary once again insisted on calling

him a king rather than emperor. As the Mongols insisted, the only emperor on Earth was the Khan. He also gave the emperor orders to report to the Khan's court and explain why he had resisted the Khan's last invasion. The emissary was promptly taken out back and had his head

cut off with a sword. Yeah, I was a much more fan of his earlier work in the court of the Crimson King. I'm not as big a fan of in the court of the Golden Horde, you know. Robert Fripp was gone. Five more emissaries from

the Khan were sent to Japan. All five got the sword treatment, which, you know, literal killing the messenger. Not great for diplomacy. And, you know, Japan already thought they won once, so maybe they thought they could win again. Meanwhile, the Khan was amassing a huge army and massive navy, scraping together so many soldiers, he actually ran out. So he emptied his prisons of men who had been sentenced to death

with offers that if they returned alive, they would be freed. He had invented Mongol Wagner. I was literally about to say the same thing. You've got any precaution in the Golden Horde? That just sounds like a sequel to The Golden Compass. Get on that.

This time, the invasion would be a two-pronged assault. One from Korea, called the Eastern Route Army, which would aim for the same islands of Tsushima and Iki, and one from southern China, called the Southern Route Army, that would aim for the home island of Honshu. Between them, they had a combined force of 140,000 men.

And the invasion would begin on June 14th, 1281. The Eastern Route Army landed on the islands and pretty much did the same thing they had done the first time. There wasn't much resistance. Anybody who had the misfortune of moving back into those islands got the same treatment as the last ones. Everyone was murdered. Anything that was put in their place was burnt down. The Eastern

Army was supposed to finish their island base slaughter and then wait for the Southern Army, which was supposed to get to the area around July 2nd however the eastern army decided fuck waiting we're going to invade the rest of Japan right now on our own

then we're doing so well up until this part then they split their forces in half sending one group to invade Honshu and the other one to once again invade Kyushu which was never a part of their plan i love how everyone on hokkaido was just chilling during this yeah no better place to have a you know a time share yeah man things look awfully smoky and full of corpses over in that

direction we should stay here is that ship screaming what the fuck yeah it's just like sailing past hokkaido and they're like yeah that doesn't look good uh okay it's just like sailing past a Kaido and they're like, yeah, that doesn't look good. Okay, let's just chill out and not get involved. The Honshu force landed at Nagato and ran directly into one of the Japanese walls that had been constructed in such a way that samurai archers could simply sit behind them and rain arrows down on the invading Mongols. Then something the Mongols didn't have to worry about during their last invasion appeared a Japanese Navy. Oh, hell yeah.

Small Japanese boats swarm the larger Mongol ones, hooking onto them with grappling hooks and samurai climbed aboard. Soon the Mongol Navy found themselves fighting samurai and hand to hand combat. Granted that the Japanese Navy was very small, and the samurai on those tiny boats were very few in number, and the Mongol Navy was fucking huge, but that didn't seem to slow them down.

Every time they batted away a dozen or so Japanese boats, like another swarm would appear. And then after the Japanese did this a few times, the Mongols tied all of their boats together and created wooden walkways between them. So if one boat was boarded by a small fishing boat full of angry samurai, Mongol sailors from other boats could rush over and help them. That is how they decided to combat this. And this will become important later. The fighting in Nagato lasted just about a day

before the Mongols had to give up and pull back to Iki Island. Then, the landing attempt at Hagata Bay ended in complete and total failure. The wall built there to stop them turned out to work pretty goddamn well. The Mongols pulled up, saw the beach completely filled with spikes and walls and samurai on top raining arrows down on them, that they just kind of bobbed around a bit in the bay until they realized, well, this sucks.

And they pulled back to the islands of Shika and Noco to wait for the rest of their army. Like they were originally fucking supposed to. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, following orders is a good idea. Sometimes,

especially if your boss is the con, I feel like disobeying orders. If your boss is Kublai Khan is the worst thing you could do. I mean, he'll kill you in very inventive ways, as we've discovered. The two armies landed another force at Hakata Bay, which devolved into a two-week-long stalemate as swarms of Japanese boats did their thing and the Mongol fleet could find nowhere to land. According to the Hachiman Gurukon, the same source I used before, one samurai led a single man assault against a Mongol boat in a paddle boat of his own, killed 21 people, took all of their heads and set fire to a boat before escaping.

My man's putting Eugene Bullard's numbers on the board. I don't even know how... How do you handle all those heads on the way back? Yeah. Thank God they have braids. You can carry them all by a handle. Now, during the stalemate, the weather had begun to turn on the Mongols.

The Korean seamen, who were manning all the boats, repeatedly warned their Mongol leaders like, uh, guys, we need to get the fuck out of here. A storm is coming and this is not the place you want to get caught. Yeah, they're looking at them

and they're like, it's getting fucking windy. It's not a good time to be bobbing up and down in a rickety wooden ship in Hakata Bay at this point in time. I mean, and if anybody was to be listened to, it would be the Koreans. They were literally brought there

just to sail the fucking boats. And the Mongols completely ignored them, deciding fuck these guys. Many Korean sailors cut their boats free from the Mongol boats and set sail back towards Korea. That, for the Mongols, should have been a goddamn hint.

Then, on August 14th, a massive typhoon slammed into the Mongol fleet, and because the Mongols were all tied together, none of them could get away. Huge groups of the ships were thrown into the rocks of the bay, while others were ripped apart and overturned by the sheer force of the wind and waves 90 of the entire fleet and everyone on it were destroyed overnight jesus christ thousands of mongol survivors washed ashore only to be greeted by samurai who then cut their heads off and chuck them back into into the sea. It's like the... It's kind of like, you know, that shipping container full of Garfield phones. And that, like, one beach where, like, Garfield phones

keep, like, washing up just, like, years after just Mongol heads, like, washing up on the shore like a message in a bottle. Yeah. Or a Garfield phone. I mean, who's to say which one is worse, honestly? You know, both of them hate Mondays. I assume the Mongols love lasagna.

Yeah. Now the jet... Wait, wait, wait. I want to see what day was 15th of August 1281. Oh, it was a Friday.

Fuck. That joke doesn't work now. God damn it. The Japanese defenders credit this massive storm, this typhoon, to the kami, or the gods, for their victory, and the typhoon was sent to them for their protection, hence creating the term kamikaze, or

the divine wind. The aftermath of the invasion was, well, bad. Most of the entire Mongol fleet was gone, and Korea, the ship The aftermath of the invasion was, well, bad. Most of the entire Mongol fleet was gone, and Korea, the shipbuilding capital of the Mongol Empire, Chinese Empire, was left without the ability to build more. They had built so many ships in preparation for this invasion. They had stripped Korea bare of trees. There was not enough trees left to build replacements. It also marked the limit of Mongol expansion and the peak of the Khan's power. He wanted to launch another invasion of Japan, but the lack of boats made it impossible,

so he chose to campaign south of China into Vietnam, which also ended in failure. Kublai Khan died in 1294, morbidly obese and riddled with gout from living that good life of an emperor. Meanwhile, in Japan, you would think this triumph victory would lead to great things, but it didn't.

All of the construction that the government, the Kamakura Shogunate, ordered to prepare for the Mongols had exploded their goddamn budget. Because remember, the Shogunate ordered to prepare for the Mongols had exploded their goddamn budget. Because remember, the shogunate is a military dictatorship, but the day-to-day running of Japan at the time was left to daimyos, like regional warlords, feudal warlords of domains, including the vast majority of taxation. So the concept of a strong spending central government wasn't really a thing.

So like that, that could have unified Japan to the level of like, say, the Meiji Restoration would. But, you know, instead you got a military dictator in the Bakufu. So, you know, he just detonates the budget and things get worse because the shogun, you knowun rightly insisted that the projects continue because these motherfuckers are going to come back. So he's dumping more and more money into this defensive budget. I won't call it a military budget because there is no army of Japan,

but a defensive structure budget as well as having to give money to the local daimyos to keep soldiers on a payroll effectively and samurais on retainer and stipend and fed and all this other shit. Like super expensive. And even worse, samurai and their daimyos were normally rewarded for their service in war by being given land. However, it was a defensive war.

The first one Japan ever had to fight against an outsider. The shogun had nothing to give them. So it was like, uh, well, thanks for defending your country. Like, bitch, where's my money? Like, I want my farm. Like, well, we can't give you anything. You didn't conquer

another daimyo or whatever. Like, there's nothing to give. This led to like, the daimyo or whatever like there's nothing to give this led to like the daimyo and the feudal lords and the retainers and the samurai slowly began to turn against the kamakura shogunate which led to a quick succession of emperors until one emperor go daigo took the throne in 1318 after years of unhappiness with the Shogun military government owing to unhappy lords, samurai, a budget that's been imploded with the concept of building a couple walls,

the emperor eventually overthrew the Kamakura Shogunate, attempting to institute direct rule from the imperial throne, which only succeeded for a couple years before he failed. The next generation of a shogunate took back over the Ashikaga shogunate, which would last for hundreds of years. Though there is one last footnote that this entire episode kind of creates, like one thing that's completely off topic, but it's very interesting. Obviously, we talked about samurai.

We talked about their swords a little bit, but they did not have the ubiquitous katana that everybody knows them as being armed with. They still vaguely look the same. The curve of the blade was much harsher. And they were much more brittle. Hence why when they hit an armored soldier, an armored Mongol soldier, they bend too much and they would break. So Japanese swordsmiths began working on a new forging process, something that has since become

legendary. This combination of soft and hard steel to optimize the temperature and timing of the heating and the cooling of the blade made the swords much lighter, but also much stronger, and they're able to hold a sharper edge. They also made the curve much more gentle and lengthened

the tip making it better at stabbing armored opponents and creating what we all know now as the legendary a bit like overwrought katana so thanks Kublai Khan I guess weebs

everywhere owe a debt of gratitude to the Khan yep yep and that is the divine wind uh you know that the time that the Mongols got bitch left by a breeze laughing

laughing oh this shit rules like you know I love when nature gets involved. It's not often you upset nature. You get smacked twice. And honestly, a lot of this is apocryphal. I do have to end this with a bit of an asterisk

that the number of 140,000 Mongol soldiers is thought to be pretty inflated. It could be anywhere from 50 to 100, but even as little as 20,000 Mongol soldiers is thought to be pretty inflated. It could be anywhere from 50 to 100, but even as little as 20,000, nobody's entirely sure. And the Japanese obviously this turned into a mythological story

for the Kamakura Shogunate, the Empire, sorry, the Emperor, and then the Ashikaga Shogunate, and then it just worked its way into mythos and the number just grew and grew and grew and grew but what is 100% known is that

they got the shit kicked out of them by storms twice hence why this concept of the divine wind being barely trained teenagers flying their planes into aircraft carriers became a thing and yeah they got a cool name to go with it at least Wind being barely trained teenagers flying their planes into aircraft carriers became a thing.

They got a cool name to go with it at least. They got that for them. They didn't do anything except kill themselves. They didn't get a sick name and that's all we can hope for. Tom, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, donate to the show.

You can ask us a question on our Discord, on Patreon. You can write a letter, throw it into a typhoon, and it will land in London, and Tom will answer it. I'm just raining destruction on London with every single one of these. Now, this question comes to us

via the Patreon, and it says, Everybody has heard of a crazy cat lady. What is the man equivalent of a cat lady? Ooh. I got one immediately. Snake guy. Oh yeah. Weird snake guy. There's something unnerving about a snake guy.

Like, any guy who's kind of into reptiles kind of gives me the wig a little bit. I will say there could absolutely be a crazy cat guy as well. But for the sake of the answer, I'm going to say sword guy, knife guy, snake guy. Most of the time, that's the same guy. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, I think if it's going to be like guys who are too into something, like, I think if it's going to be like guys who are too into something, like I think the general thing I will agree with with you is like, you know, that like I studied the blade meme, like any guy who's kind of like that. know like super into the romans is like you know what is like will you know i was like oh that's not accurate blah blah blah and i'm like yeah you're a little bit weird if it were to go on animals i would say if it's a guy who's like super into his dog like i'm not talking about being attacked here no no i'm not talking about like i'm being attacked here no no i'm not talking about like guys that like really love their dogs and we're not we're not creating a binary here of like cats are for women dogs are for men it's more so like i don't know it's like dudes who are like super like and i'm not talking like having a normal dog i'm talking like if you were a dude with an xl bully who was like super into owning an XL bully

and like Fred Perry and a flat cap. Yeah. Like if you were the type of dude to buy a chain for your dog. Yeah. That's fair. Yeah. All right. In closing, I offer a concession. Okay. Something we can both agree on. Okay. Ferret guy. the thing about ferrets that people don't realize is ferrets smell really bad actually no yeah everybody knows about ferrets no on this note on this note anyone and this goes for men women non-binary people whatever if you own an animal that has is not generally domesticated if you own that as a pet not generally domesticated, if you own that as a pet, you are a freak. How dare you talk

about my Komodo dragon that way? No, look, if you can domesticate a Komodo dragon and not die of necrotitis, cool. That's impressive. But if you have a raccoon as a pet, or if you have a fox as a pet... They are always weirdos.

Or like the people I see on like TikTok who have like Bengal cats as pets. I'm like, you were just begging to die. I will say the ferret person from my experience normally tends to be a guy. Okay. I don't know why. Don't get me wrong. I have no idea why which is why which is why i said crazy snake guy because every weird person i've ever met that owned a snake was a guy and

they normally also had a ponytail like i like my thing is just like just get a normal animal that has been domesticated as a pet don't get a Bengal cat don't get a Serval just get a normal cat please most animals don't probably need to live in your apartment Tom, plug

your show listen to the beneath skin, the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. By the time this comes out, I will have interviewed a family of artists from Jerusalem who have been tattooing for 800 years. That sounds interesting to you.

Check it out. Listen to his show. This is the only show that I do. But thank you for listening. If you like what we do here consider supporting us on patreon get years of bonus content discord access stickers ebooks

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any of the shit we talked about the Mongols doing it's generally frowned upon