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A bursting shell with red streaks, long assumed to be invented. Divers off Takashima later recovered ceramic bomb casings with powder still inside.

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, and it is the single most important visual document of the invasions because it was made as evidence rather than as art. The scene here is Hakata bay. Suenaga is on the right, on a rearing horse in lamellar armour with arrows in his shoulder-guard, and his horse is going down; blood is on the animal and on the sand. In front of him a line of Mongol infantry shoots back with composite bows, and above their line hangs the object that made the scrolls famous, 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 the 1980s a Japanese underwater survey off Takashima recovered ceramic bomb casings from the wreck of the invasion fleet, some still holding gunpowder and iron shrapnel. 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.