Shimazu Hisamitsu

Statue of Shimazu Hisamitsu at Tanshôen in Kagoshima

Shimazu Hisamitsu's grave at the Shimazu clan cemetery at Fukushô-ji, in Kagoshima

• Japanese: 島津久光 (Shimazu Hisamitsu)

Shimazu Hisamitsu was the father of the last daimyo of Satsuma han, the young Shimazu Tadayoshi, who ruled the domain from 1858 until 1871. Despite not being the domain's lord himself, as regent for his son, Hisamitsu governed the domain, and acted prominently on the national level, as if he were.

In regards to the Ryûkyû Kingdom, which was something of a vassal state under Satsuma's suzerainty, Hisamitsu reversed many of the policies of the previous daimyô, his brother, Shimazu Nariakira. Among his first actions as regent were to reverse Nariakira's policies aiming to expand trade with Westerners in Ryûkyû. For the next several years, the domain avoided seeking out any new or additional involvements with Westerners, but continued to support Ryûkyû's tribute trade with China, and worked to expand connections between Satsuma and Chôshû, a domain in Western Honshû with whom Satsuma had no particular history of close relationship. Hisamitsu pursued this aggressively, establishing a trading office in Shimonoseki and sending two merchant ships laden with Satsuma goods in 1859; the following year, Chôshû sent representatives to Satsuma to negotiate a trade relationship. A lively trade in Satsuma sugar for Chôshû salt and whalebones, among other goods on both sides, quickly developed. Later that same year (1860), with the aid of the Nagasaki bugyô, Hisamitsu managed to purchase a steamship, the England..

Prior to the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Hisamitsu vacillated between supporting and opposing the shogunate, while certain of his prominent retainers, Saigô Takamori chief among them, were staunch in their opposition to the shogunate. Still, Hisamitsu took steps to encourage an alliance between the shogunate and the Imperial Court, uniting the two in order to restore order; to those same ends, he also pressured Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi to travel to Kyoto. Doing so in 1863, he became the first shogun since Tokugawa Iemitsu in 1634 to enter the Imperial city.

Meanwhile, the previous year (1862), in accordance with orders from Emperor Kômei that he aid in eliminating the problem of anti-shogunate rebels meeting and plotting in Kyoto, Hisamitsu dispatched a team of samurai from Satsuma to retrieve rebels originating from Satsuma and to bring them back to the domain, resulting in the famous Teradaya Incident. A fight broke out at an inn in Fushimi between rebels who had met there to plot against the shogunate, and these samurai dispatched by Hisamitsu to suppress their activities; several were killed before the remaining rebels surrendered.

Hisamitsu was also involved in the famous Namamugi Incident that same year, when a British merchant, Charles Richardson, either refused or was unable to properly make way for Hisamitsu's entourage as it traveled down the road; Richardson was killed, and in response the British Royal Navy bombarded Kagoshima, the chief Satsuma castle town.

In the early Meiji period, he remained a staunch pro-samurai conservative, leaving Tokyo and returning to Kagoshima in anger and frustration in the early or mid-1870s, after submitting memorials to the Emperor expressing his distaste for reforms and innovations that had been undertaken which undermined the samurai as a privileged class of warriors, as well as reforms to the calendar, the wearing of Western dress at formal state occasions, the employment of foreigners as special advisors to the government, the adoption of foreign modes of military training, the adoption of commoner/citizen military conscription, and the like.

References

• Kerr, George. Okinawa: The History of an Island People. Revised Edition. Tuttle Publishing, 2000.
• Norman, E.H. Soldier and Peasant in Japan: The Origins of Conscription. New York: Institute for Pacific Relations, 1945. pp43-44.