The Namamugi Incident: The Murder that Sparked a War

On 14 September 1862, four Brits encountered the procession of the nobleman Shimazu Hisamitsu at a village called Namamugi along Japan's ancient Tōkaidō highroad. One of them, the Shanghai trader Charles Lenox Richardson, would not survive to tell the tale. Richardson's death eventually led to the Anglo-Satsuma War.

The Namamugi Incident, as it has come to be known in Japan and the West, seems to sum up perfectly the clash of cultures that attended Japan's involuntary opening up to the West....