Shimonoseki: Who Could Close the Strait?

Before the international fleet attacked Shimonoseki in 1864, the defenders at Maeda had already rebuilt. Their first, lower battery dated from 1863. After French gunfire and a landing force destroyed and occupied it, they added a higher position. The ground records a sequence: construction, defeat, another attempt at defence.^[1]

That sequence complicates the familiar account in which Chōshū's warriors discovered foreign military superiority in one devastating encounter and immediately changed their minds. They had suffered a foreign attack before. They had responded with more fortification. Learning had begun, but what to do with it was still contested.

Between 1863 and 1866, the Shimonoseki shore became a place to test more than guns. It tested whether the authority to order foreigners expelled came with the ability to repel their fleets; whether an agreement made after a defeat could bind the people ashore; and whether new fighting units would obey the government that had helped bring them into existence. The channel connected those questions long before anyone could know the final political outcome.

At Shimonoseki, Honshū faces Kyūshū across the Kanmon Strait. The Maeda position lay near the eastern entrance, with a prospect toward the channel in one direction and the waters of Suō-nada in the other. Here coastal artillery could threaten vessels travelling through a route they had not come to dispute. A ship's journey could become a confrontation with the government controlling part of its shoreline.^[1]

In 1863 that government belonged to Chōshū, also called the Hagi domain, ruled by the Mōri family. A domain was a territory governed by a hereditary lord within the larger Tokugawa order, headed by the shogun. The shogunate had made treaties with foreign powers. Meanwhile, the imperial court at Kyoto had become a centre of demands to expel foreigners. Chōshū took up that policy and attacked foreign shipping through the strait.^[2]

The slogan jōi, expelling foreigners, sounded like a direction in which a country could move together. At Shimonoseki, it exposed the distance between authorities. The emperor's court, the shogunate, and a domain were not interchangeable branches of one administrative office. A domain could act against shipping while invoking imperial policy, even though the shogunate's foreign commitments pointed in another direction.

For a foreign captain, those distinctions did not stop a projectile. For a diplomat seeking redress, they were unavoidable. Should a demand go to the lord whose men had fired, the government that had signed the treaties, or the court whose sanction had made expulsion politically powerful?

The batteries made the problem urgent. They also made their operators reachable. Foreign retaliation could return through the same sea route that Chōshū sought to obstruct. The commanding position of the shore was consequently a source of exposure as well as leverage: fixed works had to survive ships able to bring fire against them and troops able to land.

The first year's fighting produced a response elsewhere in the town. In 1863, after foreign retaliation had exposed the weakness of Shimonoseki's defences, Takasugi Shinsaku established the Kiheitai at the home of Shiraishi Shōichirō. Takasugi was a Chōshū samurai; Shiraishi was a merchant who supported political activists. The force began under domain authority for the defence of Shimonoseki.^[3]

The address is worth keeping in the story. This was not a fully formed national army emerging from a government ministry. A new military undertaking began through a relationship between a warrior and a civilian supporter in a port town. Its beginnings connect defence to resources and hospitality outside the normal image of a samurai barracks.

The house itself should not be imagined as an intact headquarters. The former site is marked; a surviving gate from the property was moved to Chōfu. These are different forms of survival, neither of which gives us a preserved interior in which to stage an undocumented planning meeting.^[4]

The Kiheitai admitted men from different social backgrounds, including lower-ranking warriors, farmers, and townspeople. A municipal museum exhibition on the force stresses ability and also an awkward fact for a founder-centred account: the unit sometimes disagreed with Takasugi and with the domain. His own tenure as its first commander was brief.^[5]

Wider recruitment did not establish political equality throughout Chōshū. It changed who could participate in this fighting organisation. That was consequential enough. Men organized for defence could acquire a collective position in arguments over the domain's future. A commander could found a unit without permanently owning its loyalties.

Above all, the date prevents a misleading sequence. The Kiheitai existed before the four-power attack of 1864. Its formation and Maeda's higher battery were responses already under way. They did not guarantee success, and they did not settle whether expulsion remained possible. They show a community attempting to increase its military capacity while the political purpose of that capacity remained unstable.

In September 1864, a coalition of British, French, Dutch, and American forces attacked the batteries. Its components were not equal national copies. The American contribution included the chartered steamer Takiang, commanded by an officer from the Jamestown; it carried British wounded as well as participating in the operation. Diplomatic solidarity was assembled from different practical contributions.^[6]

Naval gunfire was followed by landings and the dismantling of the positions. At Maeda, the evidence includes prepared gun platforms, earthworks, burned ground, and recovered projectiles. The official archaeological account identifies the occupying force as predominantly British. Those material traces bring the operation down from the level of national flags to damaged installations on a particular hillside.^[1]

Robert H. Pruyn, the American minister, reported that nearly seventy guns had been taken away, magazines destroyed, and ammunition disposed of. His dispatch is the report of a participating power, with an interest in presenting the expedition as effective and justified. Nevertheless, the acts it describes explain the form of the victory. Silencing a battery for an afternoon would not ensure that the next vessel could pass. Removing weapons and destroying stores reduced the means of reopening the attack.^[6]

The difference between military defeat and a lasting settlement lay on this shore. Defenders who could repair a position might use it again, as Maeda's earlier reconstruction had already demonstrated. The coalition therefore sought both physical disarmament and a commitment about future conduct.

No claim about inevitable Western victory is needed to understand that combination. The result here depended on forces and operations brought to this place. Nor does acknowledging the batteries' defeat require describing every Japanese weapon as useless. The excavated landscape records an attempt to fortify, fight, and alter the defences; its destruction records the failure of those preparations against this assault.

The people living behind the batteries had not all made the decisions that exposed them to bombardment. Yet their houses became part of the settlement's bargaining power.

Ernest Satow, a young British interpreter during the operation, later recalled that the eastern end of Shimonoseki caught fire. He called the number of houses burned small, and repeated—but did not verify—a claim that French forces had acted because soldiers fired from them. His account cannot support a precise civilian casualty total or an assured assignment of responsibility for each fire. It does place inhabited streets within the consequences of the fighting.^[7]

Satow also recorded the terms discussed aboard the British flagship. Admiral Augustus Küper sought unobstructed passage, restrictions on rebuilding batteries, and permission for passing foreign vessels to buy coal, water, and provisions. He demanded a ransom for the town on the ground that it had been spared. Satow's account additionally records a threat to burn the town if a European were harmed.^[7]

A promise of peaceful trade was being made under the possibility of further destruction. The town was not merely the beneficiary of reopened navigation. Its survival had been used to support a demand for payment, while its supplies became part of what the victors required the passage to provide.

Satow wrote his published account decades later. Its reported exchanges should not be mistaken for a verbatim transcript. Even read with that caution, the demands disclose the scope of the undertaking. The coalition wanted a coast through which ships could move and from which they could obtain necessities, without renewed attack. Such an arrangement required people ashore to cooperate after the fleet had departed.

For residents, therefore, the end of firing did not simply restore the situation before the war. Their town now stood behind commitments negotiated by officials under armed pressure. They could be affected by both a renewed attack from their own batteries and the foreign punishment that might follow it, without having determined either policy.

The negotiations then moved beyond Shimonoseki. In the convention signed at Yokohama on 22 October 1864, the four powers fixed a payment of three million dollars. It covered claims for earlier attacks, the expedition's expenses, and the ransom for the town. The undertaking was made with the shogunate, not simply left as a promise by Chōshū.^[8]

This was a political allocation of liability. The convention treated Chōshū's lord as a rebellious subordinate and held the shogun's government responsible for the damage and the cost of suppressing him. Local action had become an obligation of the government whose treaties the powers wanted enforced.

The document offered another possibility. Instead of money, the shogunate could propose opening Shimonoseki or another suitable Inland Sea port, but the foreign governments retained the choice of accepting the offer or insisting on payment. Navigation through a strait and the opening of a port were separate concessions. The former allowed passage; the latter could create a further place for foreign commerce.^[8]

Pruyn's correspondence explains why the alternative was difficult for the Japanese negotiators. They preferred payment while attempting to persuade the emperor to withdraw the demand to close ports already opened. Promising yet another port would intensify the conflict they were trying to resolve. Money could be an onerous answer without being the politically hardest answer available.^[9]

Pruyn believed that Chōshū's humiliation had strengthened the shogunate. That was his assessment in October 1864, not a guarantee of what would follow. It is particularly useful because later events make it easy to imagine that foreign intervention was straightforwardly preparing the shogunate's overthrow. Here a foreign minister saw the defeat of a resistant domain as a way to support the existing treaty-making government.^[9]

The contrast with the shore is sharp. Chōshū had possessed the guns that could interrupt passage. The shogunate supplied the signature the foreign powers could turn into a wider obligation. Neither kind of authority had, by itself, controlled the entire situation.

Chōshū's internal crisis did not originate solely in the bombardment. In 1864 its forces also failed in fighting around the imperial palace at Kyoto, and the shogunate organized a punitive expedition. The domain submitted; a government seeking accommodation took action against those held responsible. An order to dissolve the Kiheitai appears in the prefectural chronology for the tenth lunar month.^[10]

This chronology gives a sharper meaning to disagreement within the domain. There were different answers to how it might survive. Submission could appear to preserve the lord's position by satisfying the authorities arrayed against him. For armed opponents of that policy, submission could threaten the organisations and people on which further resistance depended.

At Kōzanji in Chōfu, in the twelfth lunar month of 1864—early 1865 in the Western calendar—Takasugi launched an uprising against the domain government. The temple long predated these events. Its subsequent association with Takasugi does not turn its older religious buildings into purpose-built revolutionary headquarters.^[11]

From the temple, the story leads to an administrative target. Takasugi's party attacked and occupied the Hagi domain's Shinchikaisho, an outlying office in Shimonoseki. The location makes the action more specific than a declaration of resolve: to change the domain's course, the insurgents confronted an institution through which its government operated locally.^[12]

Fighting widened within Chōshū. In 1865 Takasugi and his allies secured control of the domain government, and military reorganisation followed. That outcome should not make the opposition disappear into a story of one hero uniting everyone. The same prefectural chronology records an internal war before the settlement.^[10]

The organisation founded to strengthen the coast had become part of a struggle over who could direct the domain. This was a second kind of learning, different from improving artillery. Military capacity depended on organised people, and organised people could disagree about the government they were supposed to defend. A stronger force did not automatically mean a more obedient one.

In 1866 the renewed conflict with the shogunate reached several fronts. Shimonoseki became a base for operations across the strait toward Kokura. The passage that had carried foreign warships to Chōshū's batteries now carried Chōshū forces to another domain's shore.^[13]

The practical requirements had changed. Stopping a passing vessel was not the same task as moving fighting units across the channel and maintaining a campaign beyond it. The Shimonoseki City History Museum's catalogue includes a document concerning the Hōkokutai's crossing at the opening of the Kokura-front fighting. Its title records an administrative concern with getting a particular formation over the water. It is not evidence of an effortless leap from one shore to the other.^[14]

Hagi Museum's account of the campaign describes forces from several Kyūshū domains opposing Chōshū. As their position deteriorated, Kokura's own side burned its castle and withdrew inland to Kawara. Chōshū occupied the Kiku district and undertook civilian administration there. The consequence was not confined to the retreat of soldiers: the power governing a populated district changed.^[13]

A drum preserved at Itsukushima Shrine in Shimonoseki is identified in the city's account as a trophy brought from Kokura Castle by the Kiheitai. This is the shrine in Shimonoseki, not the famous sanctuary on Miyajima. The provenance belongs to the object's local account; it does not establish which individual carried it or how it was played during the campaign.^[15]

The drum connects two unequal memories of the same victory. On the Chōshū shore it can stand for military success. Across the water, that success involved a burned castle, withdrawal, and occupation. Neither account cancels the other, but they cannot be collapsed into a celebratory statement that the country simply advanced. People experienced the change from different sides of the channel.

The historic area cannot be contained within a single surviving fort. Maeda's ground holds evidence of construction and destruction. The former Shiraishi residence marks an organisational beginning. Kōzanji and the Shinchikaisho connect military force to a struggle over government. Museum records and the Kokura drum extend the story across the strait.

The cannon at Mimosusogawa Park belong to another category: they are replicas used to explain the shore's history, not an original battery left armed in its wartime position. Their clarity is useful, but it can also make the problem look simpler than it was. A row of guns readily represents the decision to shoot. It does not represent who could keep a promise after the shooting ended.^[16]

That question gives the scattered places their common subject. Control of Shimonoseki required more than possessing a vantage point or acquiring a better weapon. It required troops, provisions, agreements, administrative offices, and people willing—or compelled—to act on decisions made in those offices.

Between 1863 and 1866, these relationships were repeatedly rearranged. The foreign fleet could dismantle the batteries; its governments could make the shogunate answer financially for Chōshū; Chōshū's armed groups could help replace their own leadership; and the reconstituted domain could carry war toward Kokura. The tide did not prescribe that sequence. Nor did one moment of military enlightenment. The strait made claims to authority collide, and each settlement revealed how much remained beyond the control of the people who had made it.