Site of the Namamugi Incident

Today, the website of the murder that altered Japan is commemorated with an easy pen on a street in Yokohama, not much to see however a significant historical website. Close by, a memorial stele and the gravesite of Richardson in the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery.

The samurai attacked the disrespectful British guys, eliminating one (Charles Lenox Richardson) and injuring two others. While the Japanese regarded it as a warranted act, the event sparked outrage among Europeans for breaking their extraterritoriality in Japan, and the Satsuma Domain name’s rejection to compensate for the damage caused the Barrage of Kagoshima, understood in Japan as the Anglo-Satsuma War.

The problem in fact aided Britain and Satsuma form a pleasant connection, with the Empire providing the Domain with contemporary weaponry and warships. It remains in no small part due to this that the samurai from Satsuma were the ones who contributed the most to the Tōbaku motion, a disobedience against the shogunate that ended the feudal duration and westernized Japan.

The Namamugi event of September 14, 1862, is a political situation pointed out by every history textbook in Japan. It happened during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate and transformed the program of Japanese history afterwards, advertising the arrival of the modernization.

In addition, the British brought the Berkshire pig to Satsuma (contemporary Kagoshima), where it continues to be a prominent fruit and vegetables; in turn, Satsuma introduced Britain to a sort of mandarin orange, which happened known as the satsuma chinese.

Shimazu Hisamitsu, the regent of the Satsuma Domain name, was leading his retinue through the Namamugi village in Yokohama when he ran into four Britishers on horseback. According to the Japanese customized, citizens were supposed to give way for the lord, yet the unenlightened foreigners maintained going through the ceremony, prompting the anger of Shimazu’s bodyguards.

The so-called “war” was fought for two days and triggered the deaths of 63 British policemans, while only one was eliminated on the Satsuma side. In its after-effects, Satsuma borrowed ₤ 25,000 from the shogunate to pay to the British, yet never ever settled as the shogunate dropped in 1869 and was changed by a new government. Richardson’s awesomes were not recognized neither prosecuted, but the reparation was enough for Britain to authorize a treaty with Satsuma.