Grounds of Judgment by Cassel Par Kristoffer

Author:Cassel, Par Kristoffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2012-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

The Nagasaki Incident of 1886

In the immediate wake of the Nagasaki Affair and the release of Mine Susumu, relations between the Japanese authorities and the Chinese community soured even further. The question of house searches of Chinese would never be fully resolved at a national level.106 However, in the history of Sino-Japanese relations, these contestations over the implementation of the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Tianjin in the 1880s have been largely overshadowed by the intensifying rivalry between the Qing Empire and Japan over Korea. In 1884, pro-Japanese elements in Seoul made an unsuccessful attempt to drive out the Qing presence in Korea in what became known as the Kapshin Incident.107 A number of violent clashes between Chinese sailors and Japanese residents occurred in the Korean treaty ports.108 Only five months after Mine was released on parole, these tensions spilled over to Japan and produced a lethal incident in which both high politics and treaty port conflicts were acted out.

In August 1886, a Qing squadron under the command of Admiral Ding Ruchang made a stop in Nagasaki harbor. The squadron consisted of three German-built ships Dingyuan, Zhenyuan, and Jiyuan, and one Chinese-built man-of-war, Weiyuan, all of which anchored in the Kyushu port on their way home from a visit to Vladivostok.109 On 13 August, several hundred Chinese sailors were allowed to land in Nagasaki, the first time Chinese sailors had visited a Japanese harbor in such large numbers.110 That evening, the proprietor of a licensed brothel in the ward of Yoriai-machi called the police after an altercation with five inebriated Chinese sailors, who had reportedly vandalized some furniture in the brothel. A police officer from the Maruyama police station, Kurokawa Koshirō, soon arrived at the brothel, and the disturbance quieted down after he tried to arrest the sailors. The sailors managed to escape but soon appeared at the police station to harass Kurokawa. Wang Fa, a sailor from the Dingyuan, attacked Kurokawa with a sword and was arrested after a scuffle and handed over to Cai Xuan, the incumbent Qing consul in Nagasaki. The following day, the consul met with the governor of Nagasaki, Kusaka Yoshio, to resolve the situation.111

The fracas on Friday the thirteenth would probably have receded, like any other street brawl in a red-light district, had Admiral Ding not allowed approximately four hundred sailors to go ashore two days later. According to Japanese reports, a group of sailors brutally ambushed and killed a police officer in Hirobaba, upon which the disturbance quickly spread to other parts of town as Japanese policemen were called onto the scene and clashed with the sailors. The confrontation further escalated as Japanese and Chinese residents of Nagasaki entered the fray, aiding their compatriots. The local Chinese communities reportedly provided weapons to the Chinese sailors, who had come ashore unarmed on the advice of the Qing consul. The Chinese sailors outnumbered the Nagasaki police force two to one, so it took the police several hours to get control of the situation. By the end of

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