Namamugi Incident

Charles Lennox Richardson, a British merchant, was killed by the armed retinue of Shimazu Hisamitsu, the regent of the Satsuma Domain, on a road in Namamugi near Kawasaki.

On 14 September 1862, four British subjects – the Shanghai-based merchant Charles Lennox Richardson, two Yokohama-based merchants, Woodthorpe Charles Clark and William Marshall, and Marshall's sister-in-law Margaret Watson Borradaile – were travelling on the Tōkaidō road in Japan en route to visit the Kawasaki Daishi temple near Kawasaki, though they were warned by officials to not travel along the Tokaido that day as the procession of a lord was going to pass through that day.

[4] A post-mortem examination of Richardson's body showed ten mortal wounds, and he was buried in the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery, between the later graves of Marshall and Clark.

In Japan, the samurai had a legal right known as kiri-sute gomen which allowed them to strike anyone of a lower class for perceived disrespect, which could have justified the killing by Shimazu's retinue.

The Japanese instanced Eugene Van Reed, an American who had dismounted and bowed before a daimyō's train, as evidence that the insolent attitude of Lennox and his party had caused the incident.

Westerners argued that Lennox was protected in Japan by extraterritoriality under the Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty and were exempt from Japanese cultural requirements, meaning Richardson's death under kiri-sute gomen was illegal.

In July, the Bakufu reluctantly paid the British the sum of £100,000 (one-third of their annual revenue) in compensation, though this was mainly due to fear of naval bombardment against the Tokugawa capital city of Edo.

On 15 August, a Royal Navy squadron entered the waters of Kagoshima, the capital city of the Satsuma Domain, to extract the demanded reparations for the Namamugi Incident by force.

The Satsuma never repaid the £25,000 to the Bakufu because the Tokugawa Shogunate would be overthrown in the Meiji Restoration five years later, and British demands for the Shimazu's bodyguards that had killed Richardson to be brought to trial were unfulfilled.