Namamugi Incident
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The Namamugi Incident (生麦事件 Namamugi Jiken?) (also known sometimes as the Kanagawa Incident, and archaically as the Richardson Affair) was a samurai attack on foreign nationals in Japan on September 14, 1862, which resulted in the bombardment of Kagoshima in 1863, during the Late Tokugawa shogunate. In Japanese the bombardment is described as a war between the United Kingdom and the Satsuma domain, the so-called Anglo-Satsuma War (Satsu-Ei Senso).
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[edit] Course of events
Four British subjects (a Shanghai merchant named Charles Lennox Richardson, two other men named Clark and Marshall, and Mrs. Borrodaile) were travelling on the Tōkaidō road through the village of Namamugi (now part of Tsurumi ward, Yokohama) en route to the Daishi temple in present-day Kawasaki. As they passed through the village, the father of the Daimyo of Satsuma, Shimazu Hisamitsu, passed through in the other direction with a thousand-man contingent of guards. The Britons did not dismount when ordered to do so, as was the Japanese custom when a daimyo passed by, and were attacked for disrespecting Shimazu. Richardson was killed and the two other men were seriously wounded (Mrs Borrodaile was not physically harmed). Richardson's grave is in Yokohama at The Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery, between the later graves of Marshall and Clarke. The case of Eugene Van Reed, who had notoriously dismounted and prostrated himself before a daimyo's train, was instanced by Shimazu's supporters who later said that the insolent attitude of the Britons (who did not dismount) caused the incident. Van Reed's conduct appalled the Western community, who believed that westerners should hold themselves with dignity, being at least equal to any Japanese person. There is no evidence to support later suggestions that Richardson whipped Chinese while horseback riding in China, though he had been heard to say just prior to the incident, "I know how to deal with these people".
[edit] Consequences of the Namamugi Incident
The incident sparked a scare in Japan's foreign community, which was based in the Kannai district of Yokohama. Many traders appealed to their governments to take punitive action against Japan. Britain eventually engaged Satsuma a year later in the Anglo-Satsuma War. A squadron went to Kagoshima, capital of the Satsuma domain to demand reparation for the Namamugi Incident. They were met with obduracy, seized several Satsuma vessels as hostage against payment, and were fired on by Satsuma forts. The squadron retaliated, and the so-called naval bombardment of Kagoshima ensued. This claimed 5 lives among the people of Satsuma, 11 lives among the British (including, with a single cannon shot, the Captain and the Commander of the British flagship HMS Euryalus).[1] Material losses were important, with around 500 houses burnt in Kagoshima, and three Satsuma steamships destroyed. The conflict caused much controversy in the British House of Commons, but Admiral Sir Augustus Leopold Kuper's conduct was eventually commended by the House. Satsuma admired the actions of the Royal Navy and sought a trading relationship with Britain as a result. Later that year, they paid the huge reparations demanded, borrowing (and never repaying) the money from the bakufu - the shogun's government that had only five years to run before being replaced by the restored government of Emperor Meiji.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ The British victims were caused by Satsuma cannonry as well as accidents due to the usage of Breech-loading guns developed by the English engineer William George Armstrong.
[edit] Further reading
- See the account of the incident in Chapter V, A Diplomat in Japan by Sir Ernest Satow, London, 1921. (Tuttle paperback reprint, ISBN 4-925080-28-8)
- The incident was the basis of James Clavell's novel Gai-Jin.
