left Tsushima undefended. The women of Sō’s mansion were already dying in a mass suicide, and
the Mongols fell upon the surviving men over the day that followed, putting all to the sword and
burning the town to the ground. Those women that did not take their own lives were raped and
taken aboard the Mongol ships as slaves and, it seems, human shields. When the armada reached
the next island, Iki, off the coast of Kyūshū, the lead ships were adorned with a necklace of female
prisoners, cruelly threaded together with wire through the palms of their hands, some already dead
from exposure or injury, others terrifyingly still alive.
In distant Kamakura, the shōgunal Regent Hōjō Tokimune approached his favourite Buddhist
priest to confess his fears of the Mongol invasion. ‘Finally,’ he said, ‘this is the most momentous
event of my life.’
The priest asked him how he planned to deal with it. Tokimune’s answer was a barely
intelligible scream of belligerence: ‘KATSU! ’ (‘Victory!’), ‘It is true,’ said the priest. ‘The son of a lion
roars as a lion.’
The story of Tokimune and his Buddhist confessor is well known in Japan, despite its
historiographical problems. When, precisely, did Tokimune confess his fears, and mull over the
approach of the Mongols? All retellings of the story, as plays, in novels or on television, can cut, as
does this book, between the first onslaught of the Mongols and the defiant scream of Tokimune,
setting him up as a quintessential samurai, facing his foes with pure fury and will for victory,
However, modern commentators have read Tokimune’s resistance differently, as the desperate,
flailing actions of a man impossibly out of his depth, who has only avoided becoming one of history’s
great failures by sheer luck and serendipity. One might note, perhaps, that among the many 1980s
management books and hagiographies that attempt to apply the samurai mind to the business
world, not one of them dares to suggest that the answer to any problem is to simply scream at it.
The narrative force is further diminished if we remember that communications were not so
swift. There was no messenger arriving in distant Kamakura to blurt the news of the Mongol arrival,
no reportage of the massacre at Tsushima. By the time Hōjō Tokimune heard the true facts of the
Mongol attack, it was already over. For all Tokimune knew, when he ‘roared like a lion’, southern
Japan could already be in Mongol hands.
The island of Iki lacked a large samurai contingent. The island’s commander, Saemonnojo
Kagetaka, was left to hold his territory with a rag-tag army of fishermen and farmers armed with
rusty weapons, hunting spears and rocks. Kagetaka sequestered the men’s wives and children within
his castle, and mounted a strong resistance against the landing invaders. He was pushed back within
his castle on the first day’s fighting, but settled down for a siege, in the hope that samurai
reinforcements were already en route from further down the coast.
However, he was entirely surrounded by a vast host of enemy soldiers, facing a sea of red
banners the choice of colour a mere coincidence, but sure to bolster the rumours that this was the
vengeful Taira reborn. At dawn the next day the attack continued, and even as Kagetaka and his men
fought Mongol troops away from a broken gate, an exploding Mongol firework set the castle ablaze.
Realizing that it was all over, Kagetaka ordered one of his retainers to run for headquarters with
news of the defeat, and to take his sole heir, his daughter Katsura, with him to continue his
line. True to samurai form, the account of Kagetaka’s last stand is taken up only partly by his spirited
defence of the castle several pages are instead devoted to the bickering among the samurai over
who should stay to die an honourable death.
Sadly for Katsura, it was all in vain. Her fleeing boat sailed perilously close to the Mongols,
and she died in a volley of arrows. Meanwhile, the Mongols advanced on Kagetaka, pushing their
human shields ahead of them. Above the Mongol drums and the roars of the invaders, the defenders
heard the pleas of the womenfolk, begging them not to hold back, but to shoot them where they
stood in order to get at the invaders. As the last bastion fell, Kagetaka retired to his inner chambers,
where he killed his wife and set fire to his mansion.
Four days later, the Mongol fleet reached Hakata Bay itself, the victims of its earlier victories
nailed to its prows and strung from its gunnels. The samurai were ready for them - Katsura’s