The Richardson Incident and Satsuma Domain's Diplomatic Standoff

This week on the Revised Introduction to Japanese History: the sudden assassination of the tairo Ii Naosuke sparks the rapid ascension of imperial loyalism, an ideology devoted to the undoing of the unequal treaties and the overthrow of the shogunate. How did loyalism come to be a dominant force in the politics of the early 1860s, and how did its following collapse in just a few years?

Show notes here.