Ōtsu incident

Tsarevich Nicholas had travelled by sea to Vladivostok in Far Eastern Russia for ceremonies marking the start of construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

From Kobe, the Tsarevich journeyed overland to Kyoto, where he was personally met by a high-level delegation spearheaded by Japanese Prince Arisugawa Taruhito.

The quick action of Nicholas's cousin, Prince George of Greece and Denmark, who parried the second blow with his cane, saved his life.

When Nicholas cut his trip to Japan short in spite of Emperor Meiji's apology, a young seamstress, Yuko Hatakeyama (畠山勇子) [ja], slit her throat with a razor in front of the Kyoto Prefectural Office as an act of public contrition, and soon died in a hospital.

[1] The government applied pressure to the Court to try Tsuda under Article 116 of the Criminal Code, which demanded the death penalty for acts against the emperor, empress or crown prince of Japan.

However, Chief Justice Kojima Korekata ruled that Article 116 did not apply in this case, and sentenced Tsuda to life imprisonment instead.

[3] The Russian government officially expressed full satisfaction in the outcome of Japan's actions, and indeed formally stated that had Tsuda been sentenced to death, they would have pushed for clemency; however, later historians[4] have often speculated on how the incident, which left the Tsarevich Nicholas permanently scarred and also gave him painful headaches, may have later influenced Nicholas's opinion of Japan and the Japanese, as well as how that may have influenced his decisions in the process up to and during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.