more than 1000 warships, are recorded from the 12th century. The decisive battle of the Genpei War, and one of the most famous and important naval battles in pre-modern Japanese history, was the 1185 battle of Dan-no-ura, which was fought between the fleets of the Minamoto and Taira clans. These battles consisted first of long-range archery exchanges, then giving way to hand-to-hand combat with swords and daggers. Ships were used largely as floating platforms for what were largely land-based melee tactics. Mongol invasions (1274–1281) The first major references to Japanese naval actions against other Asian powers occur in the accounts of the Mongol invasions of Japan by Kublai Khan in 1281. Japan had no navy which could seriously challenge the Mongol navy, so most of the action took place on Japanese land. Groups of samurai, transported on small coastal boats, are recorded to have boarded, taken over and burned several ships of the Mongol navy. Wakō piracy (13th–16th century) During the following centuries, wakō pirates actively plundered the coast of the Chinese Empire. Though the term wakō translates directly to "Japanese pirates", Japanese were far from the only sailors to harass shipping and ports in China and other parts of Asia in this period, and the term thus more accurately includes non-Japanese pirates as well. The first raid by wakō on record occurred in the summer of 1223, on the south coast of Goryeo. At the peak of wakō activity around the end of the 14th century, fleets of 300 to 500 ships, transporting several hundred horsemen and several thousand soldiers, would raid the coast of China. For the next half-century, sailing principally from Iki Island and Tsushima, they engulfed coastal regions of the southern half of Goryeo. Between 1376 and 1385, no fewer than 174 instances of pirate raids were recorded in Korea. However, when Joseon dynasty was founded in Korea, wakō took a massive hit in one of their main homeland of Tsushima during the Ōei Invasion. The peak of wakō activity was during the 1550s, when tens of thousands of pirates raided the Chinese coast in what is called the Jiajing wakō raids, but the wakō at this time were mostly Chinese. Wakō piracy ended for the most part in the 1580s with its interdiction by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Official trading missions, such as the Tenryūji-bune, were also sent to China around 1341. Sengoku period (15th–16th century) Various