Namamugi Incident
Japanese woodcut print. Charles Lennox Richardson is at the centre of the scene.
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. In Japanese the bombardment is described as a war between the United Kingdom and Satsuma Province, the so-called Anglo-Satsuma War (Satsu-Ei Senso). Four British subjects (a Shanghai merchant named Charles Lennox Richardson, two other men and a Mrs. Borrodaile) were travelling on the Tokaido road through the village of Namamugi (now part of Yokohama) en route to a shrine in present-day Kawasaki. As they passed through the village, the daimyō 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 daimyos passed by in Japan, and were attacked for disrespecting Shimazu. Richardson was killed and the two other men were seriously wounded.
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 the Captain of the British flagship). 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.
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) See also
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