cause of the threat to their fleet of inclement weather. That they would return was a foregone conclusion. For the next several years Kamakura kept many of its knights from the western part of the country on guard in northern Kyushu, busy constructing a wall around Hakata Bay to contain the vaunted Mongol cavalry in the event of a second landing there.
The Mongols came again in 1281, this time on a great joint armada of Korean and Chinese ships, and again a landing was made at Hakata Bay. The invasion forces numbered some 150,000 men, the greatest overseas expedition the world had as yet seen. The Mongols were accustomed to large scale cavalry tactics which had met no match anywhere in the world, and they had superior weapons at their disposal, such as the gunpowder bomb hurled by a catapult.
Against this overwhelming force, the Japanese had a mere handful of knights, accustomed only to single combat. But the Mongols were slowed by the wall the Japanese had built and by the attacks of smaller, more mobile Japanese boats in the narrow waters of the bay. Before they could deploy their full forces ashore, a typhoon descended upon the fleet and destroyed it, bringing the invasion to a spectacular and disastrous conclusion. To the Japanese the typhoon was the kamikaze, the “Divine Wind,” protecting the land of the gods from foreign invaders. The incident has of course loomed large in Japanese historical tradition and has contributed much to the irrational conviction of most Japanese that their land was sacred and inviolate.
The danger to Japan was past, but dissatisfaction and unrest on the part of the warrior class of western Japan