1754 Hōreki River incident

The 1754 Horeki River incident (宝暦治水事件, Hōreki Chisui Jiken) was an incident in which the Tokugawa shogunate ordered Satsuma Domain to carry out difficult flood control works in Mino Province near its border with Owari Province in the Chūbu region of Japan during the Hōreki era.

Due to the difficulty of the project and due to malicious interference by shogunal authorities to make completion of the project more difficult, this order ultimately resulted in 51 Satsuma samurai committing seppuku, 33 samurai dying from disease and the responsible karō, Hirata Yukie, also committing seppuku.

The Shimazu clan of Satsuma Domain (present Kagoshima Prefecture) were once virtually independent rulers, and during the Sengoku period controlled nearly all of Kyushu.

The shogunate often called upon various of its feudal domains to construct public works projects, partly because the expense would help weaken their power and influence The plain of Nobi had a number of big rivers with complicated geographical features, resulting in many floods.

Hirata Yukie sent a formal acceptance note on January 21, 1754 and borrowed 70,000 ryō from bankers in Osaka using sugar cane from Amami-Oshima as collateral, and reached Mino on February 9.

The project was re-engineered with modern technology in the Meiji period under the direction of Johannis de Rijke (1842–1913), a Dutch civil engineer and an advisor to Japanese government.

[1] In the city of Kaizu there is a Horeki Chisui Historic Spot Preservation Society which has planted Kaikozu trees (Erythrina crista-galli), native to the Kagoshima Prefecture.

Satsuma Gishiden (1977–1982), a gekiga drawn and written by Hiroshi Hirata, is a collection of fictional anecdotes revolving around the incident.