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Ii Naosuke was born in 1815 at Keyaki Goten within Hikone Castle, beside Lake Biwa in present-day Shiga. The Japanese date was Bunka 12, tenth month twenty-ninth day. He was the fourteenth son of Ii Naonaka, the former lord; descriptions of him as the nineteenth child include daughters. The Ii were fudai, hereditary Tokugawa vassals with privileged standing in the shogunate, the warrior government headed by the shogun. His mother Otomi died in his early childhood; he was first called Tetsunosuke and later Tetsusaburō. [1]
His place far down the succession gave him little expectation of ruling. Another family might adopt him, or the Ii might support him in a dependent career. Until such a placement was arranged, the household provided his residence and education. His father's death in 1831 brought no lordship for Naosuke; it began a long period of cultural study near the castle. [1][17]
In 1831 Naosuke moved to Umoreginoya, the Dwelling of Buried Wood, where he remained for fifteen years. The name expressed his obscurity within the Ii house. Martial practice accompanied Zen meditation and the cultural arts. He studied kokugaku, Japanese classical texts and traditions, and wrote waka, poems in thirty-one Japanese sound units. Noh, formal musical drama, and kyōgen, comic theater, belonged to the same broad education as calligraphy, ceramics and tea. [1]
In 1845 he wrote Nyūmonki, recording his entry into a Sekishū-derived tea lineage. His later tea writings explored the unrepeatable gathering and reflection after the guest's departure. Cultural practice gave substance to a life without expected office. A family death in 1846 changed that position and made him heir. [4]
Naosuke's position changed in 1846 when Ii Naomoto, the adopted heir of the reigning lord Ii Naoaki, died. The younger son who had spent fifteen years at Umoreginoya became heir in his thirties. He then lived for roughly four years in Edo, learning the obligations, relationships, and public conduct of a daimyo (a territorial warrior lord) in waiting. When Naoaki died in 1850, Naosuke became lord of Hikone. Records of his domain inspections from 1851 through 1857 show rule as organized travel rather than distant symbolism. [1][2]
Attendants documented routes, lodgings, audiences, gifts, and local conditions. On at least one tour he had a domain doctor examine difficult medical cases presented along the way. He also continued tea practice and writing. The collection later called Chanoyu ichie shū took shape through revisions around 1857. Lordship did not erase Umoreginoya; it changed the scale on which earlier habits operated. Three years after his accession, Perry's ships arrived. Naosuke entered that crisis not as an unknown recluse suddenly summoned to save Japan, but as a new daimyo still translating private cultivation into the administration of a large, politically important fudai domain.
Commodore Matthew Perry entered Edo Bay in July 1853 with a letter from the American president and a fleet whose steam power and guns made refusal dangerous. After Perry departed with a promise to return, the shogunate circulated documents and asked daimyo and senior officials for advice. The consultation acknowledged military difficulty, but it also enlarged participation in foreign policy and made disagreement more public. Naosuke submitted two opinions. In the second, written later in 1853, he argued against fighting the United States immediately. [5][15]
Limited trade could buy time while Japan learned navigation, trained naval forces, and strengthened its capacity. He could even imagine closing the country again after that strengthening. His position was strategic accommodation, not a modern doctrine of permanent free trade. Advisers within Hikone, including Nakagawa Rokurō, also developed arguments for avoiding war and building strength. The lord's position emerged through that retainer organization. For Naosuke it joined external coercion to an internal constitutional problem: asking many lords for counsel might help the shogunate gather knowledge, but it also created participants who would later claim a right to judge its decisions. [1][5]
Perry returned in 1854. The Convention of Kanagawa provided limited access to Shimoda and Hakodate, assistance to shipwrecked Americans and a consular foothold. Commercial relations remained unsettled. Townsend Harris arrived at Shimoda in 1856 as the first American consul general and pressed for a wider agreement governing trade, diplomatic residence and legal jurisdiction. [9][15]
Reports from the Arrow War in China strengthened his warning that refusal might invite more violent intervention by Western powers. Senior Councillor Hotta Masayoshi led the shogunate's effort to negotiate and sought wider political support. Naosuke, still lord of Hikone, favored accommodation to military realities, but he did not personally conduct the treaty talks. Officials and interpreters shaped clauses while great domains and the imperial court disputed the agreement's legitimacy. The crisis moved from whether ships could obtain limited access to who could authorize a durable commercial order. Foreign danger, daimyo participation, and the emperor's political relevance were becoming inseparable. [5][7]
Tokugawa Iesada, the shogun (head of the warrior government), had no surviving child, making succession urgent as treaty negotiations intensified. One coalition promoted Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, an adult known for political ability and the son of Mito lord Tokugawa Nariaki. Supporters included Matsudaira Yoshinaga of Fukui and Shimazu Nariakira of Satsuma. Another coalition favored the younger Tokugawa Yoshitomi, head of the Kii house and nearer to the main succession line. Naosuke backed Yoshitomi. The dispute is often retold as a choice between an able adult and an incapable child, but it also selected governing networks. [7][17]
An adult Yoshinobu would bring the Hitotsubashi coalition close to central power. A young Yoshitomi would require senior fudai officials to govern around him and preserve a more orthodox household order. Both camps used consultation, personal approaches, memorials, and connections with Kyoto. The treaty question and succession question reinforced each other: arguments about foreign policy became evidence for or against the men and networks seeking authority. It was not a democratic contest, nor was the result created by Naosuke alone. Iesada remained shogun, Kii had a hereditary claim, and institutional rules mattered. Yet the victory of Yoshitomi's faction would give Naosuke's later actions the appearance of a partisan seizure as well as a succession settlement. [17]
Hotta Masayoshi returned from Kyoto without imperial support for the commercial treaty. Iesada appointed Naosuke tairō on the twenty-third day of the fourth month of Ansei 5 in the Japanese calendar; his oath was dated two days later. This extraordinary great elder stood above the senior councillors when the office was filled. Its authority came from the shogun within the Tokugawa order, rather than from an independent permanent premiership. [3][7][14][17]
Naosuke now had unusual power to coordinate decisions, personnel, succession, and the treaty crisis. Appointment did not give him a clean policy field. Negotiations were advanced, Western military pressure was credible, imperial approval had not been secured, and the senior council was divided over timing. Iesada's health made succession still more urgent. Naosuke accepted an office designed to overcome indecision. That function also concentrated responsibility. Decisions achieved through exceptional authority could be executed faster, but opponents could identify one officer as the face of policies that had been produced through years of negotiation by many people.
On 29 July 1858, Iwase Tadanari and Inoue Kiyonao signed the United States–Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce. They had been appointed under Hotta as plenipotentiaries, officials empowered to negotiate and sign and had conducted the detailed negotiations. Naosuke did not draft every clause or place his own signature on the document. Naosuke took part in the decision as tairō. Councillors favored immediate signing while he sought further imperial communication; the government's acceptance went ahead without prior sanction. [5][9]
The treaty expanded commerce while limiting Japanese legal and tariff control. Agreements with four other Western powers followed. Older accounts make Naosuke the solitary decisive officer. Mori Yoshikazu's 2014 comparison of a Hikone record with an earlier copy instead stresses council deliberation and Iesada's approval. That reading gives a larger part to collective government than the solitary-opener portrait. The government nevertheless proceeded without prior imperial sanction, and Naosuke held its highest extraordinary office. [9]
Emperor Kōmei had not authorized the commercial treaty before it was signed. His hostility to expanded foreign contact gave opponents of the shogunate a powerful language of loyalty. Yet the crisis was also about channels: who could communicate imperial commands, and whether the court could address a domain directly over the shogunate. On the eighth day of the eighth Japanese calendar month in 1858, a secret imperial rescript was sent first to Mito. It criticized the government's conduct and ordered consultation and circulation among domains. [13]
The direct delivery challenged Edo's control of political instructions. Senior Councillor Manabe Akikatsu went to Kyoto to repair court relations. On the last day of Ansei 5's twelfth Japanese calendar month, a court communication acknowledged the circumstances of signing and deferred restoring the old restrictions. This was a later accommodation, not prior approval. Naosuke sought the return of the Mito rescript, turning conflict over channels of authority into investigation of the people who had used them. [8]
In autumn 1858, Naosuke's government began the repression known as the Ansei Purge. Investigations concerned the succession struggle, unauthorized court-domain communications, opposition to treaty policy, and, in some cases, plans for violence. Nagano Shuzen, Naosuke's trusted retainer and political agent, and Senior Councillor Manabe Akikatsu became important investigators and intermediaries. More than one hundred lords, retainers, court nobles, scholars, and activists were questioned, removed, confined, or otherwise punished; exact totals depend on how cases are counted. Tokugawa Nariaki and Yoshinobu, Matsudaira Yoshinaga, and other high figures received political penalties. [8][15]
Hashimoto Sanai of Fukui and Yoshida Shōin of Chōshū were among those executed. The existence of radical plans does not prove that every target belonged to one conspiracy. A broad coercive campaign joined genuine security concerns to factional discipline. It reduced the defeated coalition's capacity to act through official channels while convincing many opponents that lawful disagreement had become dangerous. The shogunate faced irregular communications and some revolutionary intent. Naosuke's administration chose punishments whose breadth, severity, and political concentration made the tairō personally responsible for a major escalation. In early 1859 Naosuke also pressed to remove officials who favored ending the inquiry; the government dismissed them. The scope of punishment involved choices within his administration, not only external military pressure. [8][15]
The demand that Mito return the secret imperial rescript divided the domain. Officials had to reconcile obedience to the shogunate with a document received in the emperor's name. Retainers and activists did not agree on whether to return it, preserve it, appeal, or resist. Assemblies and petitions could mobilize men without producing one stable Mito policy. The Ansei Purge narrowed the space for compromise. Some activists left their formal status and prepared direct action. A small group of former Mito samurai, joined by a former Satsuma samurai, eventually organized an attack on Naosuke. [15]
The attack was the choice of a small activist group, not an order established as coming from Mito, Satsuma or the emperor. Accounts of particular warnings to Naosuke and his refusal to alter the procession are less secure than the surrounding danger. Customary public conduct displayed authority, but it also exposed a predictable route outside Edo Castle. [1][12]
On the third day of the third month of Ansei 7, corresponding to 24 March 1860, Naosuke's procession approached Edo Castle for a seasonal castle audience. Snow reduced visibility and covered the area outside Sakuradamon. Seventeen former Mito samurai and Arimura Jizaemon, a former Satsuma samurai, attacked. The assailants used firearms and swords against the Hikone escort. Naosuke was killed before the procession could reach the gate. Later illustrated scrolls make the scene vivid, but at least one important Hikone Castle Museum scroll is catalogued as Meiji-period work, although its description also suggests an early reconstruction. It is not secure eyewitness testimony. Letters written shortly after the attack provide closer testimony while still relying on reports gathered through several routes. The evidence establishes date, place, participants, weapons, and death. It does not recover Naosuke's final thoughts or an exact second-by-second experience. [10][12][15]
The government did not immediately announce that Naosuke had been killed. Official communications treated him as ill long enough for Hikone to complete succession procedures. The fiction protected the domain from the consequences that could follow a lord's violent death and allowed Ii Naonori to inherit without an uncontrolled vacancy. Authority at the center shifted away from an exceptional tairō toward senior councillors including Andō Nobumasa and Kuze Hirochika. Within Hikone, house elders and the new lord displaced the political line associated with Naosuke and Nagano Shuzen. [11]
The shogunate continued to exist, but the concentration of power around one man did not. The commercial treaties remained in force. Policy did not return to the world before 1858. The government sought a different domestic settlement through closer court–shogunate cooperation, most visibly the marriage of imperial princess Kazunomiya to Shogun Iemochi. That conciliation was not invented from nothing after the assassination. Ii-house documents indicate that planning had begun during the late Naosuke administration. His successors continued and softened the approach. They also warned Naonori against revenge on Mito, seeking to prevent further violence within the Tokugawa network. The aftermath was therefore both continuity and change: external commitments endured, while their domestic political management moved toward broader accommodation. [11][16]
After the Meiji Restoration, the victorious political order honored imperial loyalists and often cast Naosuke as the officer who had defied the court and repressed reformers. Hikone communities, Ii descendants, and former retainers preserved a different memory: a lord and statesman who had recognized international danger and accepted responsibility for opening relations. In 1909, the fiftieth anniversary of Yokohama's opening was marked by a statue of Naosuke at Kamonyama. Former Hikone retainers were central to the project. [6][18]
Ōkuma Shigenobu, a former prime minister, praised Naosuke as a patriot whose decision helped prevent colonization. A library review cites contemporary reporting that Itō Hirobumi, Inoue Kaoru and Matsukata Masayoshi objected and stayed away. Honor in Yokohama coexisted with continued opposition. His tea writings sustained another legacy that should not be collapsed into treaty commemoration. Tea practitioners could transmit ideas of singular encounter and reflection without endorsing every political act of the tairō. The 1909 statue did not erase objections to the treaty procedure and executions. [4][6][18]
Classic
Ii Naosuke was born at Keyaki Goten in the Hikone Castle complex in 1815, on the twenty-ninth day of the tenth month of Bunka 12 in the Japanese calendar. His father, Ii Naonaka, had already transferred the lordship to an older son. Naosuke was Naonaka's fourteenth son; descriptions of him as the nineteenth child count daughters as well. The prestigious family name placed him inside a great warrior household, far from its ordinary line of succession. His mother Otomi was a concubine, a lower-ranking partner of Naonaka. She died during his early childhood. His childhood names were Tetsunosuke and, later, Tetsusaburō. [1]
Hikone lay beside Lake Biwa in present-day Shiga Prefecture, on important routes between eastern and western Japan. The Ii were fudai, hereditary Tokugawa vassals whose service gave them privileged standing in the shogunate, the warrior government headed by the shogun. Naosuke received the education and support of that household without an expected governing office. Adoption into another family or a dependent career within the Ii establishment remained possible futures for a younger son. [1][17]
Such placements depended on family negotiations and available vacancies. Until one was arranged, Naosuke remained dependent on the Ii for his residence, income and position. Most sons in his circumstances never became daimyo, or territorial warrior lords. The household's resources protected him from ordinary poverty, but its hierarchy limited what he could do with them. [1][17]
Keyaki Goten was one residence within a castle complex that also housed the lord's administration and retainers, warriors and officers serving the household. Being born there did not give Naosuke a role in national government. His place belonged to the extended household, below the active succession. The gap between the house's public importance and his own uncertain destination would remain through his early adulthood. [1][17]
His father's death in 1831 brought no succession for him. It led instead to a long residence near the castle, where he built a life around study and cultural practice.
After Naonaka's death in 1831, Naosuke moved to the residence known as Umoreginoya, the Dwelling of Buried Wood. He remained there until 1846. The name evoked wood buried in the ground and unavailable for use, a fitting image for a younger son without expected office. The house stood outside the inner castle precinct, still within reach of the Ii establishment that supported him. [1]
Naosuke combined martial training with sustained cultural study. Zen Buddhism supplied a discipline of meditation. He practiced waka, classical poems in thirty-one Japanese sound units, and kokugaku, the study of Japanese classical texts and traditions. His interests extended to Noh, formal musical drama, and kyōgen, its comic theatrical counterpart, as well as calligraphy, ceramics and tea. In 1845 he wrote Nyūmonki, recording his entry into a Sekishū-related tea lineage and declaring a branch of practice. Later writings developed ichigo ichie, the singularity of an encounter, and dokuza kannen, the host's reflection after a guest has departed. Their mature collection took shape in the late 1850s, after he had become lord. [1][4]
The tea writings attended to the gathering itself: preparation, hospitality and the recognition that the same meeting could never recur. They gave Naosuke an identity as a practitioner and author before national office arrived. His study of Japanese classics also coexisted with loyalty to the Tokugawa order. Cultural attachment to imperial traditions did not yet require him to choose between Kyoto and the shogunate. [4]
The work continued under the protection of the Ii house, without a campaign against the family's leadership or an expected national appointment. Naosuke could set demanding standards for his practice even while others controlled his institutional future. The interruption came from the family succession: the death of an heir in 1846 made the apparently settled life at Umoreginoya suddenly provisional.
Ii Naomoto, the adopted heir of the reigning lord Ii Naoaki, died on the thirteenth day of the first month of 1846 in the Japanese calendar. Naosuke became heir in his thirties. During the next four years in Edo, present-day Tokyo, he learned the obligations of representing Hikone at the political center. A daimyo house maintained residences and retainers there, arranged audiences and met financial duties to the shogunate. When Naoaki died in 1850, Naosuke inherited the lordship. [1]
Hikone's position on major communications routes and its long Tokugawa service joined local rule to shogunal politics. Naosuke inspected the domain in person. Nine surviving diary volumes cover journeys from 1851 to 1857; the first tour's records identify lodgings, audiences and exchanges of gifts. Retainers organized and recorded the visits. Local officers and petitioners consequently met the lord within an encounter prepared by his entourage. [2]
On a tour, Naosuke directed a domain physician to examine difficult medical cases presented along the route. The visit brought household medicine within reach of some local residents, although the records do not measure access across the whole domain. Tea practice continued. He revised the writings later grouped as Chanoyu ichie shū, probably completing them around 1857. Their concern with the unrepeatable encounter and the host's reflection remained an ethic of practice alongside his new duties as lord. [2]
Elevation changed the people around Naosuke as well as his duties. Retainers who had not expected to serve this particular heir now depended on his decisions. In Edo he represented the Ii house, with its residences and financial obligations. His years of study could accompany the work, but local government required authority over people whose circumstances differed greatly from those of an invited tea guest.
By 1853 Naosuke had ruled Hikone for three years, after several years of training as heir. Perry's arrival brought his domain responsibilities into a national emergency. The shogunate's invitation for opinions would allow him to speak for a great house on a question previously confined more tightly to central officers.
In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry brought an armed American expedition into Edo Bay with a demand for relations. Japanese officials already received foreign information through Nagasaki and had debated coastal defense, but the fleet's proximity to the political center made the danger immediate. Refusal by force risked war; negotiation would expose longstanding maritime controls to revision. Perry announced that he would return. The shogunate circulated the American documents among daimyo and invited opinions, seeking both information and support for its response. [15]
Daimyo could compare positions, prepare memoranda, and understand that central authority itself recognized uncertainty. Consultation was therefore a resource and an admission. Naosuke's reply is often reduced to “open the country.” His later opinion in 1853 was more conditional. He judged immediate combat dangerous, proposed using trade to gain access to foreign techniques, and emphasized navigation and naval preparation. Stronger capacity might later permit Japan to restrict relations again. That argument was neither isolationism nor nineteenth-century liberal commerce. Trade was valued instrumentally. Foreign relations remained a danger to be managed, and the aim was state capacity rather than an abstract right of individuals to exchange goods. Calling Naosuke a timeless champion of openness erases the defensive horizon within which he reasoned. [5]
The memorandum was also not produced by one mind detached from domain government. Hikone retainers studied the crisis. Nakagawa Rokurō, one significant adviser, likewise argued that war should be avoided while controlled exchange and military preparation improved Japan's position. The lord authorized and represented policy, but his reasoning emerged through a retainer organization. The proposal's realism can be acknowledged without assuming that it solved the problem. Naval construction required funding and expertise, with coordination between domains and the shogunate. Trade could transfer knowledge while creating new dependencies. Once treaties granted rights to foreign powers, later reclosure would not be Japan's decision alone. Consultation generated another consequence. Lords who had been asked for advice could view a different final policy as rejection of legitimate counsel. [1][5]
Retainers circulated arguments beyond the official channel, and foreign policy began to reorganize domestic alignments. Naosuke's entrance into national debate depended on the wider invitation from Edo. That consultation created an expectation the government would later struggle to contain: lords asked for advice could regard their participation as a continuing claim on policy. In 1853 Naosuke sought time to strengthen Japan. He would later be asked to end delay in a government whose consultation had made disagreement more politically potent.
The Convention of Kanagawa in 1854 ended Perry's immediate mission without establishing the full trade system later associated with the “opening of Japan.” It provided access to Shimoda and Hakodate, assistance and supplies, humane treatment of castaways, and an American consular presence. Its limited character mattered. The government had conceded contact while postponing broader commercial and legal arrangements. That distinction created political space. Supporters could present the convention as a defensive response to necessity rather than a complete abandonment of maritime controls. Opponents could continue arguing about the boundary of permissible relations. Foreign governments, meanwhile, could treat access and a consul as a platform for further demands. Townsend Harris, the American consul general, arrived in 1856 and worked from Shimoda, a port south of Edo. His goal was a commercial treaty, not another version of temporary provisioning. [9][15]
Negotiators had to decide where foreigners could live and trade, what duties they would pay and which courts would judge them. The international setting intensified pressure. British and French operations against Qing China during the Arrow War demonstrated that Western states would combine commercial demands with naval and military violence. Harris used news of that conflict to argue that an American agreement might forestall harsher terms imposed by others. The warning contained strategic reasoning and diplomatic leverage; it was not a neutral forecast offered for Japan's benefit. Hotta Masayoshi, a senior councillor, directed the shogunate's negotiating effort. Officials such as Iwase Tadanari and Inoue Kiyonao would become indispensable in shaping and signing the eventual text. [5][7]
Interpreters mediated legal terms across languages, while Hotta's officials developed the agreement. Naosuke was not yet tairō, the extraordinary great elder who could stand above the senior councillors. His earlier willingness to use limited trade for learning did not settle his response to permanent treaty rights. Foreign residence and consular jurisdiction presented more durable concessions. Meanwhile opponents increasingly appealed to the imperial court, whose authority offered a way to challenge decisions made in Edo. [5][7]
Emperor Kōmei opposed the expansion of foreign relations. The court in Kyoto did not yet have an established procedure for controlling treaties, but its authority gave opponents a means of challenging Edo. Hotta sought approval in the hope of strengthening the agreement. Failure would make signing appear disobedient. As Hikone lord, Naosuke could advise and organize domain analysis; he was not yet in command of the senior council. His willingness to use limited trade for military learning did not make permanent foreign residence and consular jurisdiction insignificant concessions.
By 1857 Harris was seeking an agreement with lasting commercial and legal provisions. Hotta's officials continued negotiating while great domains and the court disputed its acceptability. Before the foreign powers could receive an answer, the shogunate had to settle who within Japan could authorize it.
Tokugawa succession was a household matter with public consequences. Tokugawa Iesada, the shogun, had no surviving child. This required adoption from one of the collateral Tokugawa lines, but lineage did not mechanically identify a single candidate. Age, proximity to the main house, political reputation, and the interests of powerful sponsors all entered the choice. Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu was already an adult and had experience as head of a Tokugawa branch. His admirers described intelligence and capacity suited to an international emergency. His father, Tokugawa Nariaki, former lord of Mito, had become a prominent voice on coastal defense and foreign policy. Matsudaira Yoshinaga, lord of Fukui, and Shimazu Nariakira, lord of Satsuma, supported the coalition. Yoshitomi, head of the Kii Tokugawa house, was much younger. His supporters emphasized his place within the established hereditary order. [7][17]
Yoshitomi's youth gave senior officials and household elders a large role in governing around him. Naosuke supported his hereditary claim and the continuation of fudai leadership. Yoshinobu's accession would instead bring the rival coalition closer to central office. The choice therefore concerned governing networks as well as the candidates' abilities. For Naosuke, succession principle and the Ii house's institutional interests pointed in the same direction. [7][17]
Yoshinobu's adulthood promised initiative to supporters and an independent power base to opponents. The conflict also changed the political use of the imperial court. Lords and court figures communicated about succession and foreign relations, making Kyoto relevant to decisions once managed principally within the shogunal house. Court approval could be invoked to strengthen Yoshinobu's cause even though there was no settled constitutional procedure for an emperor to choose a Tokugawa successor. Succession and treaty policy therefore became mutually amplifying tests. A lord who opposed the commercial agreement might support Yoshinobu as the leader capable of revising it. Positions did not align perfectly, but the contests increasingly shared personnel and language. Iesada's illness limited his work, but the selection still needed to be made in his name. [17]
Available accounts indicate that the decision was discussed with him and that Yoshitomi's selection could be presented as his will. The limitations of surviving factional narratives make his private reasoning harder to recover than the formal outcome. The event was also larger than personal rivalry between two candidates. Neither Yoshinobu nor Yoshitomi conducted the entire campaign in his own name. Senior lords, retainers, women and elders within households, court nobles, and shogunal officers mediated claims. For Naosuke, the stakes joined order to capacity. A government facing foreign coercion needed to decide, but the means of securing decision could narrow the circle whose cooperation it required. Supporting Yoshitomi would soon place him in a position to enforce the outcome. Victory would settle the name of the successor without settling whether the defeated coalition accepted the authority of the process. [17]
Iesada appointed Naosuke tairō on the twenty-third day of the fourth month of Ansei 5 in the Japanese calendar, in 1858. His oath followed two days later. Hotta Masayoshi had returned without imperial approval for the commercial treaty, Harris pressed for an answer, and the succession remained contested. Naosuke's Ii lineage suited the extraordinary office above the senior councillors. The appointment brought these intertwined disputes within his immediate duties. [3]
The office was neither continuously filled nor responsible to an elected legislature. It did not separate government from the shogun's household. Its authority existed inside hereditary Tokugawa arrangements and depended upon access to the shogun, council deliberation and enforcement through officials. Hotta had proposed Matsudaira Yoshinaga, a leader aligned with the Yoshinobu cause. Choosing Naosuke instead strengthened the Kii succession position and placed a leading fudai lord over the council. Whatever Iesada's health limitations, the formal act belonged to the shogun and altered the factional balance. Naosuke entered office with an established foreign-policy view but without sole authorship of the negotiations. Hotta, the senior councillors, negotiators, interpreters, and domain advisers had already shaped the proposed treaty. [3][7][14][17]
The oath bound Naosuke to an office within the shogun's hierarchy. Duty to the Tokugawa house and public order could now conflict with demands for wider agreement. The appointment increased pressure to decide: continued postponement threatened succession and foreign negotiations together. Yet imperial approval remained absent, and the domains whose cooperation Edo needed did not share one view of the emergency.
The appointment strengthened the Kii succession camp and gave opponents a single prominent officer to challenge. Naosuke could direct personnel and investigations, but using that authority did not make it broadly acceptable. The office concentrated the power to act at the same time that treaty and succession disputes exposed the limits of Tokugawa agreement.
Iwase Tadanari and Inoue Kiyonao signed the United States–Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce on 29 July 1858, corresponding to the nineteenth day of the sixth month of Ansei 5. Hotta's administration had appointed them as plenipotentiaries, officials empowered to negotiate and sign on the government's behalf. Years of negotiation had produced the text; the final decision passed through the senior council and the shogun's government. Naosuke was the highest extraordinary officer within that process, rather than the man whose signature appeared on the treaty. [5][9]
Historical disagreement · Did Naosuke decide alone to sign the treaty?
Accounts disagree about how independent his decision was. The older picture of a lone, decisive Naosuke drew partly on Kōyōkata hiroku, a Hikone record subsequently altered in the Meiji era. Comparing it with an earlier copy, historian Mori Yoshikazu in a 2014 article emphasizes council deliberation and Iesada's approval; Naosuke favored waiting for imperial sanction and could not reverse a shogunal decision on his own.
This challenges the solitary-opener portrait. It does not remove his responsibility as a senior officer in a government proceeding without prior imperial approval.
Naosuke remained the senior officer who then had to defend and administer the government's policy.
The treaty established commercial exchange and residence under specified rules. Americans in Japan came under consular rather than ordinary Japanese criminal jurisdiction. Tariffs were set by treaty, limiting unilateral Japanese fiscal control. Together with extraterritorial jurisdiction, this placed Japan in an unequal legal structure characteristic of Western treaty relations in East Asia. Agreements soon followed with the Netherlands, Russia, Britain, and France. The resulting Ansei Five-Power Treaties made the policy multilateral and harder to reverse. Naosuke did not control the rival powers, but the shogunate's American agreement supplied a framework they could demand as well. Hotta's administration and the plenipotentiaries had shaped provisions that Naosuke would now have to carry into effect. [9]
The absence of prior imperial sanction gave the agreement a second political life inside Japan. Officials could accept the need for negotiation while objecting to the way the government had proceeded. Opponents of Yoshitomi's succession joined treaty objections to their factional defeat. The agreement created durable obligations abroad while widening the domestic contest over who could authorize them.
The immediate dilemma remained severe. A government facing Western naval power had accepted unequal terms, without securing the domestic agreement it had sought. Naosuke now had to manage opposition to a settlement whose external counterparties expected it to be carried out.
The treaty controversy is often arranged as emperor against shogunate, with each institution speaking in one voice. In practice, messages moved through court nobles, shogunal envoys, domain officials, and personal networks. Authority depended not only on what a document said but on who received it first, who copied it, and who was entitled to act upon it. Kōmei's refusal to grant advance sanction mattered because the shogunate had asked. Seeking approval had raised the court's role in a field where governing practice had left treaty decisions to Tokugawa officials. When Naosuke's government proceeded without that approval, opponents could call the procedure disobedient even if they disagreed about how to answer foreign pressure. The rescript of the eighth day of the eighth Japanese calendar month—later known through the cyclical year as the Bogo secret rescript—deepened the challenge. [13]
Rather than moving exclusively through the shogunate, it went first to Mito. It condemned failures in policy, urged cooperation, and was to be circulated among domains. The exact politics of composition involved court and domain intermediaries; the emperor's authority did not make the document administratively self-executing. Mito was a particularly charged recipient. Tokugawa Nariaki had opposed the treaty policy and promoted his son Yoshinobu. A direct imperial communication could turn a defeated faction into a bearer of court purpose. It also bypassed the normal hierarchy in which domains received political direction through the shogunate. From Naosuke's position, the route threatened more than personal reputation. If individual domains could obtain and circulate imperial instructions against central policy, the Tokugawa government might retain offices while losing the ability to define lawful command. [13]
Senior Councillor Manabe Akikatsu went to Kyoto to explain the government's position and repair court relations. On the last day of the twelfth Japanese calendar month of Ansei 5, a court communication acknowledged the circumstances of signing and deferred a return to the old restrictions. That was acceptance of an explanation after the event, not prior authorization or an endorsement of unrestricted foreign relations. The court and Edo remained divided over policy even as they tried to preserve cooperation. [8]
Naosuke demanded that Mito return the rescript. Compliance would restore Edo's control of imperial communications; resistance could be claimed as obedience to the emperor. Neither side accepted a neutral authority above the competing institutions. Copies and routes of transmission had made the document a means of political coordination. Naosuke treated that unauthorized channel as a threat to government and widened investigation around the people who had used it.
There was no single morning on which Naosuke announced that every opponent would be silenced. The Ansei Purge developed through investigations, reports from Kyoto and domains, personnel decisions, and individual judgments. Its cumulative effect was nevertheless clear: the coalition defeated over treaty and succession lost offices, freedom, and, in several cases, life. The first context was not imaginary. The secret rescript had bypassed normal channels. Activists sought to coordinate court nobles and domain factions. Some evidence concerned plans for armed action against the shogunate. A government charged with maintaining order could not treat every such development as protected debate. The problem lay in aggregation. Opposition to Yoshitomi's succession, criticism of the treaty, handling of an imperial document, association with reform networks, and preparation for violence were related but not identical. [8][15]
Investigators could make the relationships look like a single design by moving from one person's contacts to another's beliefs. Nagano Shuzen, a retainer and trusted political agent of Naosuke, worked in Kyoto networks. Manabe Akikatsu carried shogunal authority in the court mission and ensuing inquiry. Their information allowed Edo to act across institutional boundaries, but it also meant that accusations were filtered through agents committed to the government's interpretation. Punishments varied. Great lords could be ordered into retirement or confinement; retainers and intellectuals had less protection. Tokugawa Nariaki, Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, and Matsudaira Yoshinaga were disciplined in ways that removed them from active politics. Court nobles suffered sanctions. The campaign extended well beyond a small cell preparing immediate attack. Hashimoto Sanai illustrates the partisan dimension. [8][15]
A Fukui reformer and adviser to Yoshinaga, he had worked for Yoshinobu's succession and advocated state strengthening. He was executed in 1859. Yoshida Shōin, whose radical proposals included direct action, was also executed. Placing the two in one list of deaths does not make their evidence or activities identical. Counts require care. Reference works commonly describe more than a hundred people as punished, while exact totals and the number of executions vary according to whether arrest, questioning, confinement, dismissal, or domain-imposed sanction is included. A false precision would imply an agreed master list where classifications differ. Naosuke did not personally conduct every interrogation. Domain authorities, magistrates, councillors, and investigators carried out the campaign. He nevertheless occupied the office that authorized its direction. [8][15]
A disagreement among investigators in the first Japanese calendar month of 1859 shows Naosuke's intervention more directly. Itakura Katsukiyo, an official overseeing temples and shrines, and Sasaki Akinori, a finance magistrate, favored ending the inquiry. Naosuke urged two senior councillors to dismiss them and another official whom he regarded as obstructing its progress. The three were removed in the second month. The government could have curtailed the inquiry at that point; he pressed to continue it. [8][15]
The purge achieved immediate results. It confirmed Yoshitomi—now Iemochi—as successor, restricted powerful adversaries, and reasserted control over Kyoto channels. The state demonstrated that exceptional authority could reach both elite lords and lower-ranking activists. It also damaged the political function of consultation. Men who had been invited into foreign-policy debate in 1853 could now see dissent associated with disloyalty. Moderate reformers had reason to conceal ties or withdraw. More radical opponents could conclude that legal memorials and court lobbying would end in confinement or execution. This does not mean repression mechanically “caused” every later assassination. Mito had its own internal divisions, economic strains, ideologies, and traditions of activism. [8][15]
The purge strengthened the government's ability to punish while weakening its claim to impartial order among the defeated networks. Its targets included men involved in radical plans and men whose principal activity had been reform advocacy or succession lobbying. Joining them within one severe campaign made Naosuke a personal focus of opposition and reduced the space in which adversaries could bargain through official channels. [8][15]
By 1859, Naosuke's government had secured the succession, concluded the treaties, disciplined leading opponents, and reasserted influence in Kyoto. Measured as a sequence of official decisions, it had prevailed. Yet implementation revealed the difference between commanding institutions and obtaining durable acceptance. The Mito rescript remained a material problem. The shogunate demanded its return because the document had traveled through an irregular channel and could authorize continued domain coordination. Within Mito, compliance was not simple. Returning an imperial command might be denounced as disloyal; retaining it could invite punishment from the Tokugawa government to which the domain belonged. Mito officials and activist groups differed over how to protect the domain and honor imperial commands. Domain officials sought to protect the house; activists invoked principles of reverence for the emperor and expulsion of foreigners; some advocated force, while others attempted petition and assembly. [15]
The large gathering often associated with Nagaoka displayed mobilization but did not turn all participants into members of the later assassination party. The purge affected these choices. Confinement of Nariaki and punishment of allies weakened intermediaries who might have bargained with Edo. Executions demonstrated that intellectual advocacy and political networking could receive the most severe penalty. For radicals, official procedures appeared closed; for the government, the same radicalization confirmed that severe control had been necessary. This feedback did not erase individual agency. The men who planned an assassination chose a method rejected by many other opponents. They resigned or were separated from domain status, gathered intelligence, obtained weapons, and prepared an attack. A chain from policy to resentment helps explain them but does not make violence impersonal. [12][15]
Some accounts describe warnings delivered to Naosuke and his refusal to alter the procession; their particulars are less secure than the general danger surrounding his office. Ceremonial routine had a political purpose. An officer who changed his public conduct under threat could appear to yield to men the government called criminals. Keeping the customary route preserved the display of rank while exposing movement outside the castle to an attack. [1]
Edo's controls worked most readily through known households and offices. A small cell whose members abandoned domain status could evade some of those restraints. Naosuke had become the prominent face of treaty and succession decisions, while the purge had narrowed the channels through which his adversaries might bargain with the government.
Naosuke did not travel to Edo Castle as a private person. A daimyo procession displayed household rank through order, clothing, arms, attendants, and an expected route. On the third day of the third month, lords attended the castle in connection with a seasonal observance. The regularity that made hierarchy visible also made movement predictable. The morning's snow disrupted that display. It affected sight, footing, clothing, and the handling of weapons. Modern retellings often use the weather to create tragedy before the attackers appear, but snow is not merely atmosphere. It was a physical condition under which a formal escort confronted an assault designed for close range. The group consisted of seventeen former Mito samurai and one former Satsuma samurai, Arimura Jizaemon. [12][15]
Their separation from formal domain status was politically significant. It helped protect their houses from a direct charge of official war while allowing men formed within domain networks to act. Their declarations and preparations linked the deed to treaty opposition, the purge, and loyalty claims, but no single slogan exhausts their motives. The attack began outside Sakuradamon, one of the gates of Edo Castle. Firearms disrupted the procession, and swordsmen closed on the palanquin and escort. Hikone retainers fought and suffered casualties. Naosuke was killed. Accounts differ in fine choreography, including the effects of the initial shot and the order of blows. Later images and popular narratives have supplied a coherent sequence that surviving near-contemporary reports cannot establish at every second. [12][15]
Naosuke died outside the gate of the government's own castle. The escort's regular route had made the interval between residence and entrance predictable. The assailants killed one officer rather than defeating the shogunate militarily. The treaties remained binding, and the succession they had opposed remained settled.
A letter written twelve days after the attack records names and casualties from information passed among correspondents. The Hikone picture scroll was made in the Meiji era, although the museum's description also suggests that its scenes were drawn not many years after the incident. Its dating therefore requires caution. Neither this later reconstruction nor the letter supplies every movement inside the palanquin. They preserve different kinds of information about the assault and the escort's conduct. [10][12]
Officials temporarily reported Naosuke as ill while Hikone arranged Ii Naonori's succession. A lord's violent death could expose his house to penalties and an unsettled inheritance. Formal communications created time for documents to be submitted and an heir recognized. Participants who knew he had been killed could still use the prescribed forms to stabilize the domain. [11]
Delay protected Hikone while Ii Naonori's succession was secured. At the center, authority shifted from the extraordinary tairō to the rōjū, the council of senior shogunal officials. Andō Nobumasa and Kuze Hirochika became leading figures. In Hikone, the new lord and house elders displaced the network associated with Naosuke and Nagano Shuzen. Preserving the Ii house did not preserve its former national command. [11]
Foreign commitments survived. The ports opened on treaty schedules, foreign residents and diplomats arrived, and the Ansei agreements continued to govern relations. The assassination did not void texts concluded with five powers. A policy created under coercion had acquired international counterparties who were indifferent to the death of one Japanese authorizing officer. Domestic legitimacy required adjustment. The succeeding government pursued kōbu gattai, cooperation between court and shogunate, symbolized by the proposed marriage of Kazunomiya, sister of Emperor Kōmei, to Iemochi. This was not a democratic widening. It sought to bind two elite institutions and isolate more radical challengers. A simple reversal narrative says that Naosuke ruled by repression and his successors answered with conciliation. Recent work with Ii-house documents complicates the division. [11][16]
Planning for the imperial marriage had begun in the late Naosuke administration. His successors pursued it under different political conditions and could present closer court relations as a new beginning. Ii-house documents also show Kuze trying to prevent Hikone retainers from retaliating against Mito. At Naonori's first castle audience in the sixth Japanese calendar month of 1860, the shogun required loyalty and senior councillors specifically warned against creating further conflict through revenge. Conciliation had to operate within Tokugawa households as well as between Edo and Kyoto. Andō's government continued facing foreign pressure and political violence; he himself was attacked in 1862. [11][16]
The imperial marriage did not create a shared foreign policy or settle the competing claims of court and shogunate. Successors adjusted the domestic approach while maintaining agreements that the government could no longer cancel simply by changing its leading officer. [11][16]
The Meiji state was built by coalitions whose political ancestry included men punished under Naosuke. Its public narratives elevated imperial restoration and condemned officers seen as obstructing the court's will. In that framework, the treaty signed without prior sanction and the executions of reformers joined into an indictment of the tairō. Hikone remembered through a different institutional lineage. The Ii house had lost national dominance, but local collections, family records, retainers' descendants, and sites such as Umoreginoya preserved materials unavailable to a simple victor's narrative. Rehabilitation could appeal to loyalty, administrative competence, and the foresight to avoid a ruinous foreign war. These memories were not merely arguments over personality. They expressed different relations to the transformation of political order. For Restoration leaders, Naosuke represented coercive Tokugawa authority.
For former Hikone retainers, attacks on him could make their own service appear shameful or historically blind. Defending the lord was also a defense of inherited identity. Yokohama supplied a third setting. The port created under the treaty system had become a major center of international commerce. A monument there could treat Naosuke as an origin figure for the city's modern importance. In 1909, at the fiftieth anniversary, a statue was erected in what became Kamonyama Park on land connected with the Ii family. Former Hikone retainers and their networks drove the project. This provenance matters. The monument was not a neutral national commission declaring that scholarship had reached a final verdict. It was an organized intervention into public memory by people with a historical stake in rehabilitation. [6][18]
Ōkuma Shigenobu, a former prime minister, gave a commemorative speech that praised Naosuke as a patriot and framed the opening decision as helping Japan avoid the colonial fate suffered elsewhere. The argument reflected a Meiji world in which Japan had built a modern state, revised some unequal arrangements, and become an imperial power. It read 1858 through achievements and anxieties visible in 1909. The ceremony also registered limits. A Kanagawa Prefectural Library review of the ceremony cites contemporary reporting that Itō Hirobumi, Inoue Kaoru and Matsukata Masayoshi opposed the commemoration and stayed away. Public honor in Yokohama therefore coexisted with continuing institutional reserve. Rehabilitation was substantial enough to place Naosuke in bronze, but not complete enough to erase the political genealogy of the Meiji government. The statue gave the port's opening a single recognizable founder, emphasizing Naosuke rather than the officials who had negotiated and signed the treaty. [4][6][18]
Tea writings preserved another part of his life. Ideas of the singular encounter and reflection after a gathering continued in cultural practice, alongside a political memory divided over treaties and repression. Yokohama's statue, Hikone's collections and the tea texts carried different parts of that record into the Meiji era. The 1909 ceremony honored him without settling the dispute over how his government had used exceptional authority. [4][6][18]
