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The story
An investigation of a ship that sank during the 1281 Mongol invasion off Takashima, in Matsuura City, Nagasaki Prefecture, has for the first time turned up dice and gaming pieces believed to be the origin of mahjong, found at a depth of 17 meters. Attention has focused on the fact that most of the recovered items were everyday living goods rather than weapons, and JNN cameras captured footage of the survey. On 5ch, the thread buzzed with surprise at the discovery alongside debate over just how far back mahjong’s history goes, the credibility of the ‘divine wind’ legend, and the tactics used at the time — with some exchanges spilling over into broader arguments about historical perceptions of the Mongol invasions and the wokou pirates.
This is a first-ever discovery. Off the coast of Takashima in Matsuura City, Nagasaki Prefecture, an investigation has been carried out into a ship that sank nearly 750 years ago during the Mongol invasions. Dice and gaming pieces believed to be the origin of mahjong were found for the first time, and JNN’s cameras captured the moment.
The survey of the Mongol invasion ship off the coast of Takashima in Matsuura City, Nagasaki Prefecture, has been underway for a month starting on the 2nd of this month. JNN’s cameras filmed the survey being conducted at a depth of roughly 17 meters.
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Source: newsdig.tbs.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Well, the invasion force was stuck waiting out storms anyway, so they probably needed something to kill the time. Without mahjong tiles they might've packed up and retreated even sooner.
It wasn't the Kamakura samurai — the Kyushu locals did the heavy lifting. The rewards they got were so pathetic that the Kanto Deputy later got attacked, beaten down, and burned out by the furious Kikuchi clan of Kumamoto. Kanto folks are cheapskates.
No, it hasn't actually been around in its popular form for that long. Before the war it was mainly Japanese people who took a game that existed in Manchuria and brought it down to southern China and elsewhere. So nobody really knows how far back it originally goes, but I don't think Chinese people played it all that much either.
This is what I saw 30 years ago — over there, mahjong tables were set up outdoors in what looked like a public park, and tons of old folks were playing away in broad daylight.
They made it to shore and ended up as place names scattered all over the area.
New theory just dropped!
You mean the ones who kidnapped women on Tsushima, punched holes through their hands, strung them together like beads, and hung them off the ship's rail?
I think sanankou and sanshoku doujun (two mahjong hand types: three concealed triplets, and a same-sequence-in-three-suits hand) deserve higher scores.
Mongols: "Hey Japan, let's play some mahjong!"
Japan: "Uh, there's a huge fleet headed straight for us! Drive them off!"
If it had come down to an actual mahjong match, Japan would've lost — the rules weren't exactly widespread yet.
It's not the deep sea — of course bones wouldn't survive down there. Eaten by fish and crustaceans, literally turned to seaweed.
Well, Japan's edge was its heavily armored mounted archers — longbows with a 200m range that could pierce heavy armor — while the Mongols relied on rapid-fire shooting at an effective range of just 30m. Once the stone walls went up and they couldn't close the distance, they'd already lost.
That's the wokou of the Sengoku era you're thinking of. By then it was mainly Ming Chinese, plus some Koreans, Portuguese, and Japanese. But since their bases were places like Tsushima, there were still a fair number of Japanese among them.
The 15th-century wokou, though, were almost entirely Japanese — that's what the Ming, Korean, and Japanese records all say.
People who fish, trade, intimidate with force, and plunder — those kinds of seafaring groups have existed on every sea throughout history, everywhere. It's like asking whether bandits showing up on the China-Korea border counts as a 'Chinese invasion.'
Bone. Apparently 'dragon bone' (fossilized bone used in traditional Chinese medicine) sold for especially high prices.
I wonder if they were even calling out points like "F-15" back in that era?
The original mahjong demon: Takezaki Suenaga (the samurai famous for commissioning the illustrated scrolls depicting the Mongol invasions).
I'm Japanese, but you guys are always the ones saying modern Chinese people and the ancient Chinese of the Tang-embassy era are a completely different ethnicity, aren't you?
That confusing 'they got swapped out' theory — people bring it up all over the place, but honestly it makes no sense whatsoever.
The Mongols had plenty of problems of their own. Even if they'd landed at Hakata, there wasn't enough flat land to encircle it with a large army, and rerouting toward the Kinki or Kanto regions would've meant massing a huge number of sailing ships — risking getting picked off piecemeal. With so little intel on the terrain, it was reckless from the start. The Viet Cong repelling an invasion through guerrilla warfare is far more impressive, honestly.
Mongol strength was cavalry to begin with, and horses just don't mix well with an amphibious invasion.
Has Mongolia ever even apologized once? Unbelievable 😡
Background and Talking Points
The Mongol invasions of Japan (Genkō) consisted of two attacks — the Battle of Bun’ei in 1274 and the Battle of Kōan in 1281 — in which forces from the Mongol Empire, Goryeo, and the Southern Song assaulted Japan. The underwater site off Takashima has been designated a national historic site, and underwater archaeological surveys there have continued for years. Mahjong itself is generally thought to have taken shape in the late Qing dynasty (19th century) and is believed not to have existed yet during the 13th-century Yuan dynasty, so the headline’s reference to the ‘origins of mahjong’ is more accurately understood as pointing to the lineage of tile-based games such as tianjiu pai (tien gow) rather than mahjong itself. On the thread, opinions were divided over the credibility of the ‘divine wind’ legend and the tactics used during the invasions, and the discussion occasionally spilled over into broader perceptions of history surrounding the wokou pirates and neighboring countries. The fact that the recovered game pieces were everyday items rather than weapons — something the news coverage emphasized as a clue to the real lives of the crew — was a point that got relatively little attention in the thread itself.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Flash+) thread ‘Mahjong’s origins, ‘tianjiu pai’ tiles, found on sunken Mongol invasion ship.’
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