Ichiki Shiro

Ichiki Shirô was a retainer to Satsuma han who operated secretly at the orders of Shimazu Nariakira to pursue certain arrangements with Western powers, including, chiefly, seeking to purchase warships and rifles from the French.

In 1858/1, Nariakira sent Ichiki to Ryûkyû to negotiate with the French in the hopes of obtaining a steamship warship and as many as 1,000 rifles. Ichiki had to be careful to keep the negotiations, and their results, secret from Beijing, and also from the Tokugawa shogunate, who had been hostile for years to the idea of Satsuma becoming any kind of commercial center to rival Nagasaki (let alone a military power engaging in its own separate foreign relations negotiations). Despite the risks, this task was important enough to Nariakira that he was willing to have Ichiki send Ryukyuan officials to purchase ships and rifles from the British or Dutch at Fuzhou, if the French were uncooperative. It did not come to that, however, and Ichiki and a group of representatives of the Ryukyuan royal government secured an agreement with the French in 1858/7. The French would sell Ryûkyû a warship, and some amount of small arms, with the possibility for a more long-term trade relationship in future.

The trade was never made, however, as Ichiki and the Ryukyuan government soon learned of Nariakira's unexpected death on 7/16, said to be from food poisoning; Nariakira's brother Shimazu Hisamitsu, acting as regent for Nariakira's successor, Shimazu Tadayoshi, canceled these plans, and went on to reverse many of Nariakira's other policies. A number of the Ryukyuan officials involved were arrested, though Ichiki himself escaped, and went into hiding for a time.

References

• Robert Hellyer, Defining Engagement, Harvard University Press (2009), 166-167.