阿彌陀佛

Comments such as “you deserved to get your ass kicked” is not typical of a follower of Lord Buddha. Not is the comment in #27 regarding women an example of the kind of speech encouraged by those who take seriously the teachings of the Buddha and the grace of Amida Buddha.

Please, “Siddhartha”, do not use the name of Amida Buddha on posts that are not a reflection of the ethical teaching and wonderful Light and Life of Pure Land Buddhism. Thank you.

Namu Amita Bul,

Marcus

Ummm… not if you are a non-Mongol that’s actually on the boat w/the Mongols…

Look, modern economic migrants/immigrants are far removed from colonists in the past. A modern economic migrant is a “defector” who ditched his home country for economic gain and, where possible, elevate himself like some social climber in the new country.

The men work to obtain trappings of higher socio-economic class (house/yard, BMW), and the women readily use their “assets” to marry up. Rather than staying and improving the community, they follow “white flight” and move from one hit-and-run housing development to another, leaving behind ghettos. No sense of community, just temporary pride of ownership until the next bling bling.

If the US were to relax its immigration rules to East Asians, we’re going to need more BMW/Mercedes dealers and Coach outlets.

http://books.google.com/books?.....8Mc2aGBguA

So out of 4,400 boats 900 were of Koryo manufacture and there was very little damage to them. Of course Turnbull doesn’t have the Texas A & M archeological data with him when he wrote the book, so he interprets the Koryo vessels better rate of survival as “much stronger contstruction” which is only partially true.

I used the link to the history forum because I was lazy…

“Science has dealt a blow to a Japanese legend which says the country was twice saved from a Mongolian fleet thanks to a “divine wind,” or kamikaze, that destroyed the invaders’ ships. A 900-ship fleet, sent by the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan in 1274, met resistance from Japanese samurai before being forced into retreat by bad weather and was then ripped to pieces by the kamikaze. Kublai Khan tried again eight years later, amassing a vast fleet of 4,400 ships from China and Korea, most of which were sunk by strong winds off the island of Takashima, in southern Japan. New evidence, though, suggests that poor design and shoddy workmanship may have been the principal cause of the Mongols’ defeat, the British weekly New Scientist says in its next issue, out on Saturday. Randall Sasaki, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University, has pored over fragmented remains of the 1281 fleet that were found in 1981. Of about 700 pieces of ship hauled up from the seabed off Takashima, none was larger than 3m, and most are between 10cm and 1m. Sasaki has studied around 500 of the fragments and says many of the timbers have nails placed very close together, sometimes with five or six in the same location. “This suggests the timbers were recycled to construct these ships,” he told New Scientist. “Also, some of the timbers were themselves of poor quality.” As for the design of the ship, Chinese documents suggest that many of the vessels in the 1281 fleet were flat-bottomed river boats, which would have been unstable in the open sea.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) ©”

Link to New Scientist article: http://nautarch.tamu.edu/shipl.....entist.htm

It was also subject of a Discovery Channel documentary: http://star-ecentral.com/news/.....c=tvnradio

Excerpt:

“The theory is that a “kamikaze” (divine wind) destroyed the fleet and saved Japan from invasion. A less supernatural theory derived from the archaeological surveys at Takashima would be that Kublai Khan’s ships were relatively old river boats that were constructed poorly. Also, iron nails with high sulphur content were used and thus not suitable for ocean voyages.”

According to Stephen Turnbull, the Koryo ships faced very few losses during the second invasion, meaning it was likely they were proper ocean faring boats.

Yes, there was quite a bit of Mongol fighting in the first wave in Japan. It actually changed Japanese perspectives on warfare drastically. What I’m curious about though, is that I’ve heard a good portion of the Mongolian invaders ended up bartering a deal and ended up living in Japan…any truth or info on this?