Icarus affair

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Icarus affair was an incident involving the murder of two British sailors in Nagasaki, Japan in 1867, leading to increased diplomatic tensions between Britain and the Tokugawa shogunate.

On August 5 Robert Foad and John Hutchings, from the British warship HMS Icarus, were killed by a swordsman in the Marayuma precinct. The men, both aged 23, had been drinking, and were sleeping near the entrance to a "tea house".^[1]^[2] The British Consul in Nagasaki, Marcus Flowers, blamed the Tokugawa bakufu for failing to protect the men and believed that the Kaientai led by Sakamoto Ryoma was behind the killings.^[3] This belief was based on rumours that the men had been seen in the area, combined with the departure of a Tosa steamer from Nagasaki soon after the incident. Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu was pressured by Sir Harry Parkes, head of the British Legation in Edo to find the culprit. An agreement was reached that the governor of Nagasaki would be dismissed and 500 men would be sent to police the foreign quarter. Subsequently, Parkes sailed to Tosa, arriving on September 3, 1867. There he was met by the bakufu commissioners who had arrived earlier. ^[4] No evidence was found that the Kaientai were involved and the charges were dropped on October 4.^[1]

It was revealed one year later by the Tosa samurai that a samurai of the Chikuzen clan had murdered the men, and shortly after committed ritual suicide. The Chizuzen subsequently paid compensation to the sailors' families in England.^[3]

The affair diminished British trust and confidence in the bakufu and their control over Kyūshū, a factor leading to the Meiji Restoration the following year.^[3]