CAEA - Center for the Art of East Asia

Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture—Part 2

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Myth, Memory and The Mongol Invasions of Japan
Thomas D. Conlan
Bowdoin College

A Japanese warrior named Takezaki Suenaga fought against Mongols in 1274 and 1281 and commissioned illustrated scrolls to record his actions, to commemorate the benevolence of his commanders, and to offer thanks to the gods for his success. Commonly known as “The Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan” (Mōko shūrai ekotoba), this source provides a powerful and gripping narrative of unsurpassed historical value. As an interest in accuracy was paramount, someone, perhaps Suenaga himself, complained about small errors, writing for example in the scrolls: “The artist is mistaken. Such a door does not exist here.”

Takezaki Suenaga’s descendants did not fare well, and his family was most likely annihilated during the civil wars of the fourteenth century. His scrolls were also badly damaged: who kept the scrolls or how they were stored remains unknown for the next three centuries.

The Mōko shūrai ekotoba can be documented as being viewed in 1709 and 1793, when they were seen by Arai Hakuseki and Matsudaira Sadanobu, two high-ranking officials of the Tokugawa regime who were concurrently influential advisors and noted Confucian scholars. The written traces left by these two viewings vary considerably. Arai Hakuseki described a scene of the scrolls and used it as a source for a treatise on the history of weaponry in Japan. A few illustrations of difficult-to-describe arms or armor appear in an appendix of this work, but Hakuseki has little interest in the images per se. By contrast, after Matsudaira Sadanobu saw the scrolls, he and others repeatedly copied them in their entirety.

Recent scholarship, most notably the path-breaking work of Matsumoto Aya, has conclusively revealed that the scrolls were altered over time. These changes transformed the scrolls' most famous scene, where Takezaki Suenaga falls from his wounded horse in front of three ferocious Mongols, while an exploding projectile (teppō) breaks into pieces overhead. According to Matsumoto, the three Mongol warriors depicted in front of the falling Suenaga were added later.[*1] Matsumoto believes that the exploding projectile was drawn in the late thirteenth or early in the fourteenth century, but close inspection reveals that it too represents a later addition.[*2]

Numerous copies survive of the scrolls after 1793 allow for a reconstruction of their appearance from that time onward. The oldest copies reveal that initially few fully comprehended Suenaga’s narrative, for they depicted the images in haphazard order, with textual passages omitted or copied separately. Horimoto Kazushige has shown as well how one scene had been stored separately, and was only discovered in 1823.[*3] Nevertheless, even the oldest copies of the scrolls contain images of the three ferocious Mongols and the exploding projectile, revealing that this scene had been retouched before 1793.

Arai Hakuseki, in his 1709 text, relies on the Mongol Scrolls as a source for sword scabbards. In another passage of this work, Hakuseki recounts the history of teppō and states that no images of them exist.[*4] Thus, one can know that the teppō and several bearded black-booted Mongols were added to the scrolls sometime over the course of the eighteenth century.[*5]

Exploration of how people viewed the Mongol scrolls reveals changing attitudes toward written and visual sources. When faced with a disparity between a written text and a previously unknown visual source, early viewers preferred to revise the images instead of questioning the textual narratives. To early viewers, the scrolls did not depict the Mongols in a sufficiently ‘barbaric’ manner nor did they portray exploding projectiles and were thus retouched. Images nevertheless have become more influential than written sources over time. Perhaps epitomizing this trend, when archeologists discovered projectiles off the coast of Takashima, they described them as being “just like those depicted in the Mongol Scrolls.”[*6]

From the late eighteenth century onward, people strove to preserve the scrolls rather than to retouch them. This suggests a greater reverence toward these images, which were not to be redrawn according to whim. Once observers no longer felt comfortable about altering the scrolls, they made copies that depicted how the scrolls must have appeared in their ‘original’ form. The scrolls themselves became perceived as distant and immutable artifacts of an ancient past.

1. Matsumoto Aya, “Mōko shūrai ekotoba no seiritsu to denrai ni tsuite–sono saikō,” Sannomaru Shōzōkan nenpyō kiyō, vol. 1 (1996), 61–76.
2. Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention (Cornell East Asia Series, 2001), pp. 12, 73. Satō Tetsutarō also postulates that the teppō image added later in his Mōko shūrai ekotoba to Takezaki Suenaga no kenkyū (Kinseisha, 2005), pp. 22-24, 31-34, 449.
3. Horimoto Kazushige, “Mōko shūrai ekotoba no genjō seiritsu katei ni tsuite–Aoyanagi Tanenobu hon no kentō to shōkai,” Fukuokashi hakubutsukan kenkyū kiyō no. 8 (Fukuoka, 1998), pp. 15–57.
4. See Hakuseki’s Honchō gunki kō, located most conveniently in Arai Hakuseki zenshū vol. 6 (Ichishima Kenkichi, ed., 1907): 282-453), pp. 281, for reference to the “Mōko shūrai emakimono,” and, for this direct quote, p. 352.
5. Three of these figures appear near the exploding projectile while two more appear interspersed in other later scenes.
6. Nagasaki-Ken Takashima-Chō Kyōiku Iinkai, comp. Takashima kaitei iseki, vol. 7 (Takashima-Chō 2002), pp. 19-20, 42-55 for analysis and X-rays of these shells. See also vol. 8 (2003), particularly pp. 12-13 for these teppō resembling those depicted in the Mongol scrolls.