Tale.03: Khotun Khan and the Mongol Empire - Violence in the Name of Rationalism

What raged across Tsushima in the eleventh year of Bun’ei was no mere foreign storm. It was the cold wind of “Rationalism,” which fundamentally destroyed the absolute, deontological ethics known as “Honor”—a concept that medieval Japan had forged over a long period from blood and mud, and nurtured alongside prayers to the gods and Buddhas.

The greatest philosophical conflict running through the undercurrent of Ghost of Tsushima is not a simple struggle between good and evil. It is a desperate, irreconcilable collision between the public identity of the Samurai, who sacrifice themselves to the aesthetic of “how to live and how to die beautifully,” and the teleological utilitarianism of the Mongol Empire, which stops at nothing to optimize the means to achieve its ends. The very instigator who single-handedly embodied this asymmetrical war of values and transformed Tsushima into an unprecedented hell is Khotun Khan, the supreme commander of the Mongol Empire.

This article comprehensively integrates Khotun Khan’s words and actions in the main game, the military and spiritual realities of the empire revealed by the collectibles “Conversations with the Khan” and “Mongol Artifacts,” and the contrast with another invader, “The Eagle,” depicted alongside the karmic ties of Kazumasa Sakai in the DLC Iki Island. Strictly separating fact from inference, it thoroughly unravels the causality and emotional subtleties of how the “violence named Rationalism” brought by Khotun destroyed individual ethics, gouged out private trauma and guilt, and ultimately gave birth to the monster known as “The Ghost.”

1. Khotun Khan as a Plunderer of “Knowledge”—The Dismantling of Tradition and the Terror of Analytical Reason

What elevates Khotun Khan to an outstanding antagonist worthy of special mention in the context of gaming history, and by extension, period dramas, is the fact that he intentionally and completely breaks away from the stereotype of a “barbaric, mindless invader.” He speaks fluent Japanese, understands Samurai tactics, and meticulously dissects the very foundation of the Japanese psychological structure.

1.1 Those Who Sharpen Their Swords and Those Who Learn About Others

Immediately after the battle at Komoda Beach, Khotun delivers words of quiet yet decisive despair to the captured lord of Castle Shimura (the Jito).

“Do you know what I was doing to prepare for today, while you were sharpening your sword? I learned. I know your language, your traditions, your beliefs. Which villages to tame, and which to burn.”

[Fact] While the Samurai honed their martial arts day and night in pursuit of an honorable way to fight, Khotun had thoroughly “learned” the culture, language, and social structure of Tsushima prior to the invasion. With that knowledge, he granted himself the authority to select which villages to dominate through fear and which to physically obliterate.

[Analysis] This contrast illustrates a decisive rupture between the worldviews of the two factions. For the Samurai, the act of “sharpening a sword” is a highly self-contained spiritual discipline and a purification of internal ethics (Honor). In contrast, Khotun’s act of “learning” is an externally directed violence aimed at analyzing the other, exposing weaknesses, and controlling or dismantling them as a system. A sword merely slices through an individual’s physical body, but knowledge based on analytical reason corrodes the very identity of a culture and a nation from the inside out. To Khotun, traditions and beliefs were not sacred things to be respected, but merely components forming the skeleton of a society—“data” to measure where to apply pressure to cause the most efficient collapse.

1.2 The Incompatibility of the Concept of Honor Signified by the “Burning” of the Head of the Adachi Clan

Khotun Khan’s Rationalism first bares its fangs during his confrontation with Harunobu Adachi, the head of the Adachi clan, at Komoda Beach. When Adachi announced his name and challenged him to a fair and square Standoff, Khotun silently doused him in wine (or oil), threw a torch to burn him alive, and casually decapitated him immediately after.

[Fact] Lord Shimura, whose Samurai code (Bushido) was intentionally and fatally insulted by this atrocity, became enraged and ordered a reckless frontal assault by his entire army. As a result, the Samurai of Tsushima abandoned their geographical and tactical advantages, and were driven to annihilation before the Mongols’ meticulously calculated defensive formations.

[Analysis] Inferring from a historical context and the perspective of Mongol culture, this gruesome scene conceals a profound disconnect that goes beyond mere provocation. “Honor” in Japanese society possessed an intrinsic and bloodline-based nature; Adachi reciting his prestigious lineage in a voice that echoed across the battlefield was in itself a ritual to prove his honor to the gods, Buddhas, and his ancestors. However, in the Mongol Empire—a nomadic equestrian people who valued meritocracy and equality of results—honor was “something acquired a posteriori through one’s own physical actions and military achievements.” From Khotun’s point of view, the act of demanding a one-on-one duel using the relic of a “legendary ancestor’s name” as a shield, without even measuring the strength of the enemy before him, must have appeared as the height of arrogant and utterly feeble self-satisfaction. It is extremely significant that Khotun later accepted a “Standoff” on the bridge only with Jin Sakai, who had single-handedly cut down an overwhelming number of Mongol soldiers and proven his strength as a threat to the empire. Khotun is not a chaotic barbarian; he acts strictly in accordance with his own “honor based on Mongol law (meritocracy).” The fire that burned Adachi was none other than the flame of Rationalism burning away the hollow formalism of the Samurai.

2. The Abyss of the “Empire” Revealed by the Notes of the Translator Monk Daizo—The Duality of Ambition and Madness

The documents found throughout Tsushima, “Conversations with the Khan,” are notes recorded by a Japanese monk named Daizo. By unraveling the progression of these records, the intelligence, ruthlessness, and sometimes uncontrollable emotional subtleties of the man Khotun Khan emerge vividly through the filter of a single Japanese man’s collapsing psyche.

2.1 The Zenith of Teleology: Rebellion Against Kublai Khan

The true purpose behind Khotun’s extraordinary obsession with invading Japan goes beyond the mere subjugation of a remote island nation or the execution of the historical event known as the Mongol invasions. Daizo’s records expose the massive ambition he harbored.

[Fact] In the third record, it is revealed that Khotun was preparing an extraordinarily unconventional proposal for the captive Lord Shimura. It was a grand secret pact: “If Shimura defects to the Mongol side, he will be installed as the ‘Shogun’ of Japan, and as Khotun’s right hand, they will involve Goryeo and overthrow his cousin, Kublai Khan.”

[Analysis] Through his spies, Khotun had completely grasped Shimura’s private trauma and craving—that he had tragically lost his wife and sons in the past and strongly desired an heir to carry on his bloodline. By pouring the ultimate power of the “Shogun’s position” into the gap of the private passion for “the survival of the clan,” which lay deep within Shimura’s psyche fortified by his public “Honor” as a Samurai, Khotun attempted to control him from the inside. Furthermore, in the fourth record, Khotun mocks Kublai’s political enemies for clinging too tightly to the “old laws of the steppe,” criticizing this by equating it with Shimura’s “excessive reliance on Samurai tradition.” To him, tradition was merely a tool to be used; if it hindered his own goal (ascending to the position of Great Khan), whether it was Mongol law or Bushido, it was an irrationality that should be equally eliminated.

2.2 The True Legacy of Genghis Khan and the Philosophy of “Division”

The depth of Khotun’s insight into humanity is most strongly reflected in his reference to his grandfather, Genghis Khan, in the eighth record.

“People say my grandfather conquered the world because his armies were stronger, faster, and more ruthless than anyone else’s. Ridiculous. Ruthless men are everywhere. My grandfather knew how to turn enemies into allies, and how to make enemies fight each other. Shimura and his nephew do not understand this yet. But I will teach them.” (Record 8)

These words perfectly predicted the subsequent fate of Tsushima. Khotun intended to exploit the situation where Jin Sakai’s “The Ghost” tactics—which stopped at nothing—were enthusiastically supported and deified by the populace, not as a crisis for the empire, but as a “perfect opportunity to divide the Samurai ruling class (Lord Shimura) and the people” (Record 7). Lord Shimura, who sought to adhere to the strict public identity of Samurai “Honor,” and Jin, who discarded ethics for his personal sense of justice to save the people. The love and conflict between the two ultimately leading to an irreparable rupture was an inevitable causality already calculated on Khotun’s cold-blooded chessboard.

2.3 The Kashmiri Table and the Collapse of the Translator Monk’s Psyche

What is most literary and melancholic in this collection of documents is the psychological transformation of the recorder himself, the monk Daizo.

[Fact] In the early records (Records 1-2), Daizo is fascinated by the Khan’s unfathomable intelligence, historical perspective, and voracious appetite for learning about Japanese culture. He writes, “Could there be a more fascinating man?” and even dreams of elegant days after the conflict ends, taking up residence near the Imperial Palace in Kyoto and lecturing the Khan on Japanese art and intellectual property. However, in the fifth record, that romanticism flips into terror. Upon learning that Lord Shimura stubbornly rejected his proposal for an alliance, Khotun became enraged and smashed an exquisitely crafted and beautiful foreign table brought all the way from “Kashmir.”

[Analysis] At this moment, Daizo remembers the fundamental violence that “they are a people who drink the blood of horses,” and faces the fear of death. Despite possessing high education and intelligence, when the world does not move according to his calculations, an unhideable primitive passion and destructive urge erupt from the depths of Khotun’s being. In the final stages, in the eleventh record, witnessing the empire’s invasion crumbling due to the resistance of The Ghost and the peasants, Daizo feels deep shame for his arrogance as an intellectual. Realizing that his dream of discussing art with the Khan in Kyoto was an illusion, he returns to the traditional Japanese Buddhist view of impermanence: “The proud do not endure; even the mightiest perish like dust before the wind.” Khotun Khan, who seemed to be the perfect fusion of intellect and violence, was also merely a mortal being unable to escape the truth that all worldly things are transient.

3. Material Rationalism—Logistics and the Industrialization of War Revealed by “Mongol Artifacts”

In the game, Khotun Khan’s philosophy is eloquently spoken in silence not only through his words but also through the equipment and supplies of the Mongol army deployed throughout Tsushima—namely, the “Mongol Artifacts.” These are not merely collectible elements, but historical evidence demonstrating a paradigm shift from “battles of personal honor” to “dehumanized, systematized warfare.”

The following table summarizes the philosophical and tactical significance inherent in the major Mongol Artifacts.

[The Narrative Effect Brought by Anachronisms (Ooparts)] Strictly comparing against the historical timeline, the presence of the Hwacha and the deployment of such sophisticated gunpowder bombing tactics in Japan during the Bun’ei invasion (1274) contain chronological discrepancies (ooparts). However, considering the philosophical background of the story, the development team intentionally placed this over-technology in Tsushima. Against Tsushima’s social structure, which relied on agriculture and had been fixed for hundreds of years within the Shinto concepts of “purity and defilement,” the Mongol Empire led by Khotun had to emerge as a “fluid monster of Rationalism” that unhesitatingly absorbed the technologies of every conquered nation (China, the Middle East, and the peripheries of Europe) and continuously updated itself.

4. The Weaponization of Trauma—The Fall of Ryuzo and the Devastation of the Psyche

Khotun Khan’s rationalistic violence destroys not only physical entities like castles and villages but also dismantles the individual psyche, pride, and the dignity of the soul. The prime victim of this, and a symbolic figure demonstrating how ruthlessly war destroys individual ethics, is “Ryuzo,” the leader of the Straw Hat Ronin and Jin’s childhood friend.

4.1 The Primal Fear of Starvation and the Ritual of “Burning”

Ryuzo’s initial motive for betraying Jin Sakai and the Samurai was an inferiority complex from having his path to success as a Samurai cut off, and above all, a desperate, human desire for survival—to provide food for his starving subordinates (the Straw Hat Ronin) and save them from death.

[Fact] However, Khotun did not treat Ryuzo merely as a “convenient mercenary bought with food.” During the siege at Castle Shimura, as the price for past failures, Khotun ordered Ryuzo to “burn alive the captured innocent people of Tsushima (peasants and monks) with a torch.” After much conflict, Ryuzo committed this act, immediately breaking down in tears from intense guilt and suffering deep trauma.

[Analysis] This series of events demonstrates Khotun’s unfathomable malice and the precision of his psychological manipulation. What he sought was not Ryuzo’s martial prowess, but Ryuzo’s “irreversible fall.” By instilling an indelible personal guilt of having burned helpless compatriots to death with his own hands, he inflicted an unhealable wound on Ryuzo’s psyche, completely cutting off his psychological avenue of retreat so that he could never again defect back to the Samurai side (the world of Honor and ethics). While the Samurai valued an “honorable death,” Khotun was intimately familiar with human “attachment to life” and “domination through guilt.” “Invisible, noble values” such as Samurai pride and friendship crumbled all too fragilely before the physical agony of starvation and the psychological restraint of complicity. Ryuzo’s fall is a ruthless consequence of teleology, showing how easily individual ethics can be rewritten by environment and malice.

5. The Bloodline of Kazumasa Sakai and the Poison of The Eagle—The Terror of Inner Rationalism

To understand the essence of Khotun Khan’s violence even more deeply, we must refer to another form of violence told in the DLC Iki Island—the past of Jin Sakai’s biological father, “Kazumasa Sakai,” and the philosophy of another Mongol who ruled Iki, “Ankhsar Khatun (commonly known as: The Eagle).“

5.1 The Inner Rationalism Brought by the “Vulture of Tsushima,” Kazumasa Sakai

Dispatched in the past to suppress a rebellion by Raiders on Iki Island, Kazumasa Sakai was feared as the “Vulture of Tsushima” or “The Butcher of Iki.”

[Integration of Causality and Analysis]

What Kazumasa conducted was no honorable Samurai battle. It was brutal slaughter as a warning, domination through fear, and the thorough suppression of the islanders. At the root of Kazumasa’s behavioral principles was also a cold-blooded [Rationalism] that dictated, “To swiftly restore order to the island, any atrocious means are justified.”

In other words, for Jin Sakai, the “violence named Rationalism” was not brought for the first time by a foreign invader (Khotun) who crossed the sea. It was a primal experience etched into his own bloodline since childhood alongside his father’s back, and the greatest trauma he never wanted to face directly. The unreasonable violence that Khotun Khan brought to Tsushima from the outside was, to Jin, nothing but a mirror image of the suppression his father, Kazumasa, had inflicted upon the people of Iki.

5.2 The Eagle’s Shamanism and Her Evaluation of Khotun

The Eagle, who invaded Iki, is also part of the empire, but her approach to domination is fundamentally different from Khotun’s.

[Fact and Analysis] While Khotun attempted to subjugate the surface of society with “macro geopolitical rationality” such as military power, logistics, and political appeasement, The Eagle, as a shaman, used Sacred medicine (drugs) to amplify an individual’s “inner darkness, guilt, and sorrow” as hallucinations, employing a method to collapse the psyche from the inside. Through the Sacred medicine, she intervened in Jin’s consciousness, relentlessly gouging out his guilt over the death of his father, Kazumasa, and his remorse over the deaths of his comrades (Taka, Ryuzo).

In the game, The Eagle coldly dismisses Khotun Khan’s failure to invade Japan as “inevitable.” This is likely because she believed Khotun was fixated solely on physically and politically destroying the superficial social system of Samurai “Honor,” overlooking the muddy, incalculable power of passion—“personal karma, guilt, and attachment”—lurking deep within the Japanese psyche. Interestingly, when captured by The Eagle on Iki, Jin declares as a psychological shake-up (a bluff) that “Khotun Khan is already dead.” This is also proof that Jin himself, through his desperate battle with Khotun, had completely internalized the Mongol-style rational off-board tactics of “shaking the enemy’s psychology and instilling fear by mixing truth and falsehood.”

6. The Final Battle at Port Izumi—The Nihility of the Nomadic People and the Singularity of “The Ghost”

In the final stages of the story, during the final battle at Port Izumi located at the northern tip of Tsushima, Khotun Khan speaks of his own fundamental view of life and death and the philosophy of the empire to Jin Sakai as they face each other on a massive ship. This dialogue on the bloodstained deck is the ultimate culmination of the ethical conflict in this work.

“I have always led the charge, and I have never fallen behind on the battlefield. In seven years, I have achieved great deeds and united the whole world into one empire. I abhor luxury, I exercise moderation. Surrounded by beautiful clothes, fast horses, and beautiful women, it is easy to forget one’s ideals and purpose. If that happens, you are no different from a slave. And you will inevitably lose everything.” (“I abhor luxury, I exercise moderation…”)

[Analysis of the Reversal Phenomenon of Climate and Ethics]

Here, I would like to offer an analysis borrowing the perspective of “climate” (fudo) in the history of Japanese thought. The Samurai of Tsushima are the defenders of an agrarian, settled people who, while receiving the blessings of abundant nature, have formed a unique aesthetic (Mono no aware, the aesthetics of a graceful end, Honor) by enduring absolute natural violence such as irresistible typhoons and earthquakes. For them, a beautiful death based on ritual was the very means to attain eternal life.

In contrast, for Khotun, a commander of a nomadic people who have survived in the harsh, windswept steppe climate (the great plains) and constantly repeated migration, plunder, and adaptation, the cultural richness (beautiful clothes and rituals) brought by settlement is nothing more than a “poison” that dulls human survival skills and the will to conquer.

In Khotun’s eyes, the Samurai of Tsushima appeared as “slaves” bound by “hollowed-out tradition” and “vanity named honor.” He accurately saw through the fact that the “Honor” the Samurai relied upon as their identity was a self-destructive curse that made them rigid, halted their thinking, and drove them to a miserable death. The “moderation” he boasts of does not mean moral purity. It is the ultimate [Nihilistic Rationalism] that strips away all the waste of emotion and tradition in favor of the absolute purpose of “survival and conquest,” pursuing only functional beauty.

Conclusion: The Demon Birthed by Rationalism—The Death of “Honor” and Eternal Causality

Ironically, just as Khotun Khan coldly analyzed, Lord Shimura and the majority of Tsushima’s Samurai became slaves to tradition and vanished into the sands of Komoda Beach, or suffered the humiliation of captivity. The only entity who stood before Khotun’s overwhelming violence and resourcefulness, and finally thrust a blade at his throat, was Jin Sakai, who cast aside all prayers to the gods and Buddhas and Samurai Honor, utilized the enemy’s poison, lurked in the darkness, and crept up from behind, becoming “The Ghost.”

The existence of Khotun Khan in the world of Ghost of Tsushima cannot be confined to the framework of a mere villain to be defeated. He played the role of a “historical inevitability,” forcibly enlightening and dismantling the Samurai society of Tsushima—which was bound by old values and rotting from the inside—with the drastic medicine of violence.

He learned, adapted, and accurately struck at his opponents’ most vulnerable parts—namely, the rigidity of Samurai pride and the peasants’ attachment to life. The “violence named Rationalism” he brought ultimately stripped a kind-hearted Samurai of all his public identity, giving birth to an incarnation of pure survival and vengeance who would stop at nothing.

“The Ghost” was not born from the beautiful nature or traditions of Tsushima. It is the “crystallization of private conflict and murderous intent” born as an autoimmune reflex response to Khotun Khan’s thorough Rationalism and chain of violence.

Khotun’s defeat in the final battle was absolutely not because the “Honor” of Japanese Bushido was superior. It was none other than because a single man, Jin Sakai, even going against the teachings of his master Lord Shimura, [learned] more deeply than anyone else the cold-blooded utilitarian law that Khotun himself brought to this island—“justify any means to win”—and resolved to let his own soul fall into the dark path.

Khotun Khan, the incarnation of Rationalism and teleology, scattered into the waves at the end of an all too perfect and cruel causality: having his head reaped by “The Ghost,” raised from the very seed named “destruction of ethics” that he himself had sown in the land of Tsushima. After the fires of war subsided, all that remained in Tsushima was the lonely back of a single demon who, while removing the threat of the Mongols, had eternally lost his “Honor” and was destined to wander in the shadows.