look closer

Four written characters stand in a column beside the burst. They spell the name of the weapon: te-tsu-ha-u. It is a ceramic shell of gunpowder and iron scrap, and the painter drew it coming apart in red.

Takezaki Suenaga was a minor samurai from Higo province with about five followers, no powerful patron, and a problem. He had fought the Mongols in 1274 and again in 1281, and in the system he lived under that was supposed to mean land. Kamakura rewarded service with estates confiscated from the losers, and the difficulty with repelling a foreign invasion is that there are no confiscated estates afterward: the enemy simply drowns and goes home. Thousands of men who had fought got nothing, and the resentment worked on the shogunate's foundations until it collapsed half a century later. Suenaga did not accept that outcome. He rode to Kamakura at his own expense, waited, argued his way in front of the official responsible for rewards, and made his case in person, presenting the wounds and the witnesses. He got a horse and an estate. Then, around 1293, he commissioned a set of illustrated scrolls recording what he had done. It is the single most important visual record of the invasions, because it was made as evidence rather than as art. The scene here is Hakata bay in 1274. Suenaga is on the right, in armour of small laced plates, on a rearing horse that is going down under him. Blood is on the animal and on the sand. A column of characters in the air beside him gives his name and his age, 29. In front of him a line of Mongol foot soldiers shoots back with composite bows. The object that made the scrolls famous hangs above their line: a round black bomb bursting in the air with red streaks. It is one of the earliest depictions anywhere of an exploding shell, and for a long time historians assumed the painter had invented it. In 2001 a Japanese team diving off Takashima brought up 2 intact ceramic casings from the wreck of the invasion fleet. X-rays found gunpowder in both, and in one of them more than 12 square scraps of iron. The scrolls carry inscriptions in what is probably Suenaga's own hand, naming the men who were with him and where they stood. The whole production is an old soldier's expense claim, filed in ink, and it is the reason we know what a thirteenth-century battle in Japan actually looked like from inside it.