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Battles, incidents, and historical events related to Japanese swords
2 events
September 14, 1862 (Bunkyū 2, 8th month, 21st day)
The incident in which Charles Lennox Richardson, a British merchant who rode his horse into the procession of Shimazu Hisamitsu, father of the Satsuma domain lord, was slain by Satsuma samurai on the 21st day of the 8th month of Bunkyū 2 (1862). Known as a representative case of foreigners being killed with Japanese swords, it was the direct cause of the Anglo-Satsuma War the following year. It was one of the greatest diplomatic crises of the late Edo period, in which the blade of jōi provoked an international problem.
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May 21, 1862 (Bunkyū 2/4/23)
In the 4th month of Bunkyū 2 (1862), the Satsuma domain carried out a sword fight between its own samurai at the Teradaya inn in Fushimi, Kyoto. Shimazu Hisamitsu, the kokufu (the lord's father), sent his own samurai to suppress and purge the radical samurai of the sonnō jōi faction. This was a separate incident from the Teradaya Incident of 1866 (Keiō 2), in which Sakamoto Ryōma was attacked.