The Sakuradamon incident (桜田門外の変 Sakuradamongai no hen) on 24 March 1860 was the assassination of Japanese Chief Minister (Tairō) Ii Naosuke (1815-1860), by rōnin samurai of the Mito Domain, outside the Sakuradamon gate of Edo Castle.
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Ii Naosuke, already a leading figure of the Bakumatsu period and a proponent of the reopening of Japan after more than 200 years of Seclusion, was widely criticized for having signed the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States Consul Townsend Harris and, soon afterwards, similar treaties with other Western countries.[1] From 1859, the ports of Nagasaki, Hakodate and Yokohama became open to foreign traders as a consequence of the Treaties.[2]
Ii Naosuke was also criticized for having reinforced the authority of the Shogunate against regional Daimyos through the Ansei Purge.[1] Naosuke made strong enemies in the dispute for the succession of Shogun Tokugawa Iesada, and because he forced retirement on his opponents, specifically the retainers of Mito, Hizen, Owari, Tosa, Satsuma and Uwajima.[3]
These policies generated extremely strong sentiment against the Shogunate, especially among proponents of the Mito school.[4]
Accounts of the violent event were sent via ship across the Pacific to San Francisco and then sped by pony express across the American West. On June 12, the New York Times reported that Japan's first diplomatic mission to the West received the news about what had happened in Edo.[5]
The assassination took place outside the Shogun's Edo Castle in Edo (modern Tokyo), just as Ii Naosuke was reaching the premises.[1] Ii Naosuke had already been warned about his safety, and many encouraged him to retire from office, but he refused, replying that "My own safety is nothing when I see the danger threatening the future of the country".[6]
Altogether 17 Mito rōnin ambushed Ii Naosuke, together with one samurai from Satsuma Domain, Arimura Jisaemon (有村次左衛門).[7] Arimura cut Ii Naosuke's neck, and then committed seppuku.
The conspirators carried a manifesto on themselves, outlining the reason for their act:
While fully aware of the necessity for some change in policy since the coming of the Americans at Uraga, it is entirely against the interest of the country and a stain on the national honour to open up commercial relations with foreigners, to admit foreigners into the Castle, to conclude treaties with them, to abolish the established practice of trampling on the picture of Christ, to allow foreigners to build places of worship for the evil religion, and to allow the three Foreign Ministers to reside in the land (...) Therefore, we have consecrated ourselves to be the instruments of Heaven to punish this wicked man, and we have taken on ourselves the duty of ending a serious evil, by killing this atrocious autocrat.
— Manifesto of the Sakuradamon conspirators.[8]
The popular upheaval against foreign encroachment and assassination of Ii Naosuke forced the Bakufu to soften its stance, and to adopt a compromise policy of Kōbu Gattai ("Union of the Emperor and the Shogun") suggested by Satsuma Domain and Mito Domain, in which both parties would vie for political supremacy in the years to follow.[4] This had soon amplified into the violent Sonnō Jōi ("Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians") movement.[9][10]
For the following years until the fall of Bakufu in 1868, Edo, and more generally the streets of Japan, would remain notably hazardous for Bakufu officials (see attack on Andō Nobumasa) and foreigners alike (Richardson murder), as the Sonno Joi movement continued to expand. According to Sir Ernest Satow: "A bloody revenge was taken on the individual [Ii Naosuke], but the hostility to the system only increased with time, and in the end brought about its complete ruin".[11]
The conflict would reach its resolution with the military defeat of the Shogunate in the Boshin war, and the installation of the Meiji restoration in 1868.