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Japan Past and Present
sition within the Edo government, and men from Mito in 1860 assassinated the Prime Minister who had concluded the new commercial treaties. Other irreconcilable conservatives from Satsuma murdered an Englishman near Yokohama, and the forts of the great western Honshu fief of Choshu fired on American, French and Dutch vessels passing through the narrow Straits of Shimonoseki at the western end of the Inland Sea. The Kyoto court, rising to a new sense of authority, began to demand that Edo expel the foreigners. The emperor even took the unprecedented step of summoning the Shogun to Kyoto, and the Shogun, showing how far Edo had already gone in surrendering authority to the emperor, meekly complied.
All the dissident elements in Japan and particularly the samurai of the great “outer Daimyo” domains of western Japan, which had been forced to recognize Tokugawa supremacy for two and a half centuries, without ever becoming reconciled to it, now saw the widening cracks in the hitherto impregnable armor of the Tokugawa. Edo had been compelled by the Western powers to adopt the unpopular policy of opening the land to foreign intercourse, a policy that ran counter to the expressed wishes of the emperor. The Tokugawa were at last vulnerable to attack. Their opponents, summing up their stand in the double slogan, “honor the emperor—expel the barbarians,” pressed the attack by intrigues at Kyoto and by military preparations, which led to pitched battles between Edo and the western Honshu fief of Choshu. The great Edo regime, still the paramount military power of the land, was foundering, not because the machinery of govern-