Kamikazi Summer Nights

In my quest to bone up on Japanese culture, language and history prior to this trip the Team was to make, I remembered a conversation I had many years ago with a Chinese friend of mine, a computer programmer named Yu Tu, (Yu actually had a sister name Me but that is a whole other story, can you imagine calling them in for dinner?).

Yu told me that there was a very old Chinese myth that a scheming Buddhist Monk talked the Emperor of the day into giving him 2000 of the finest of Chinese youth to go with him and establish a colony of ethnic purity on the uninhabited islands across the Sea of Japan, which I assume was then called something else, say, the Sea of Fish, or Sea of Soy, you know, not Japan yet because this was before..., well, yu get the idea.

I digress, the clever monk took the best that China had to offer but kept them isolated and soon had his own sweet thing going on in the new digs and was cutting the old Emperor out of the action. To make Yu Tu’s long story short(er) Old Empy sent an invasion fleet across the Sea of Sweet and Sour to take back what was his but the Mystery Monk got all of the Dream Team lined up on the craggy shoreline and they chanted and summoned up the Kamikaze or “Divine Wind” (which looked a lot like a Typhoon) and sunk the fleet. The Emperor was defeated, had lots of clothes but no ships, and the myth of the Kamikaze defending Japan’s borders was born.

Now I really liked Yu and this was a neat story so I was happy to believe him. Until I came across the following little gem from some myth busting poop at a University or something who kind of fractures the time line of Yu’s childhood myth and even goes on to blame the poor bloody carpenters of the day for the disastrous invasion thus poking a stick in the eye of the KAMI and their divine wind story.

Kamikaze (神風 from kami meaning "god" and kaze meaning "wind") is a Japanese word — usually translated as divine wind — which came into being as the name of a typhoon that saved Japan from a 1281 Mongol invasion fleet led by Kublai Khan. (According to recent research, poor materials and shipbuilding may have been the real reason for the Mongol defeat, rather than weather phenomena.

Sometimes, there is such a thing as too much reality. This was one of those times.

Here is hoping for a Divine Wind to blow our girls’ way Sunday morning in this wonderful land of myth and legend. The stupid History professors can go take up Aircraft Maintenance and leave our myths alone.