Namamugi Incident

The Namamugi Incident, as depicted in a 19th century Japanese woodcut print. Charles Lennox Richardson is at the centre of the scene.

The (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. 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).

Course of events

Four British subjects (a Shanghai merchant named Charles Lennox Richardson, two other men (Clark and Marshall) and Mrs. Borrodaile) were travelling on the Tokaido road through the village of Namamugi (now part of Tsurumi ward, Yokohama) en route to a shrine in present-day Kawasaki. As they passed through the village, 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 custom when a daimyo passed by in Japan, and were attacked for disrespecting Shimazu. Richardson was killed and the two other men were seriously wounded (Mrs Borrodaile was not harmed). Richardson's grave is entombed in Yokohama at The Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery.

Consequences of the Namamugi Incident

Entrance to the village of Namamugi, circa 1862.

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 engaged Satsuma a year later in the Anglo-Satsuma War, a naval bombardment of Kagoshima which claimed 5 lives among the people of Satsuma, 13 lives among the British (including, with a single cannon shot, the Captain and the Commander of the British flagship HMS Euryalus).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 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.

Notes

References

* See the account of the incident in Chapter V, A Diplomat in Japan by Sir Ernest Satow, London, 1921. (Tuttle paperback reprint, ISBN 4925080288)
* The incident was the basis of James Clavell's novel Gai-Jin.

See also

*Anglo-Japanese relations
*Anglo-Satsuma War

External links

*A historical account