On the third day of the second month of 1861 the Russian warship Posadnik anchored in the bay of Imozaki on the west coast of Tsushima. Her captain was Birilev. The pretext was repairs to the ship, but her hull showed no damage, and the Russian crew landed, built barracks on the shore and began surveying the neighbourhood. The era name changed to Bunkyū sixteen days later, on the nineteenth day of the second month.
Officials of the Tsushima domain asked them to leave, and the Russians would not. Instead they proposed that they wished to present fifty cannon to the lord of Tsushima and, in return, to lease the whole coast around Imozaki as a Russian naval base. On the twenty-ninth day of the second month her consort, the Oprichnik, appeared, supplied provisions and the like and soon departed; but the cannon they were to present were never seen landed.
Why Russia wanted Tsushima
Japan and Russia had the treaty of amity of 1854 between them, and the illegal landing came in the seventh year after it. Russia had only just gained the Maritime Province from Qing China by the Treaty of Aigun of 1858, and wanted an outlet to the southern seas badly. The British minister Alcock's report to his government analysed Russia's reasons for wanting Tsushima under two heads: securing a free passage from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea, and holding a base from which, in the event of war, the trade between Europe, China and Japan could be interfered with.
Russia was not the only power with an eye on Tsushima. By Sakamoto Fujiyoshi's account, two years before this affair Britain had demanded the loan of Tsushima from the shogunate and, refused, had high-handedly surveyed the island's coasts and left. Learning of it, the Russian consul at Hakodate, Goshkevich, hurried to Nagasaki, protested to the shogunate at Edo, and offered to lend his strength to protect the island from British aggression. The shogunate refused. Birilev came soon afterwards.
The islanders' resistance, and a lord on the back foot
On the twelfth day of the fourth month the Russian troops tried to force their way across Ōfunakoshi, the narrow point that joins the eastern and western coasts; they shot dead an official of the Tsushima domain and carried off two local samurai to their warship as prisoners. They attacked the guard post, seized weapons, and took seven head of cattle from the farmhouses as they went. One of the samurai shut up aboard the ship, his two swords having been taken from him, tried to kill himself by biting through his tongue. The next day, the thirteenth, they seized an officer of the guard post, stripped him and beat him half to death.
The islanders took up whatever weapons they had and came as far as the Russian barracks. Unable to leave this resistance to itself, the lord of the domain, Sō Yoshiyori, at last issued the following proclamation.
The Western barbarians now lying in our waters have behaved with more and more contempt, and our anger has been hard to bear; but as it is a grave matter for this house to open hostilities, we have borne with it until now. Since, however, they have gone so far as to kill one of our guards at Ōfunakoshi, it is they who have broken the peace, and as nothing will now serve but to strike them down, we have resolved upon battle.
Printed in Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai
The Russians, for their part, pressed insistently for an interview with the lord of the domain, hoping to get the domain's consent to a lease before the shogunate came on the scene. They went so far as to say that Britain was looking to drive out the Sō and occupy Tsushima, and that if the right to lease the area around Imozaki were granted, Russian forces would send troops to the Korean peninsula and give the Sō the territory they occupied. It sounds preposterous, but Sakamoto points out that this is what the lord's own report to the shogunate says.
Oguri sent as commissioner of foreign affairs
The shogunate sent Oguri Tadamasa, its commissioner of foreign affairs, to Tsushima. He left Shinagawa on the sixth day of the fourth month of 1861, with the inspector Mizoguchi Yasogorō. Troubled by head winds, he reached Shimonoseki on the fifth day of the fifth month and sailed again the same day, grudging even one night ashore. His arrival at Tsushima is given as the seventh day of the fifth month, or as the tenth. Oguri was thirty-four. Abe Dōzan writes: “As young as a secretary in the foreign ministry today. And this was the plenipotentiary.”
What passed in the three sets of talks held aboard the Posadnik from the tenth day of the fifth month is taken up separately (The exchanges with the Russians at Tsushima). As to the result: nothing done on the spot would move a party that sat there by force. Oguri impressed on the house of Sō that however the other side might act, their own attitude must be moderate throughout, and that on no account were they to resort to force; and then, on the nineteenth day of the fifth month, he broke off the talks on the spot and withdrew to Edo. His stay on Tsushima was less than two weeks.
Direct rule and formal channels — a recommendation that was not accepted
Back in Edo, Oguri submitted his opinion at once. It rested on two points.
Bring Tsushima under direct shogunal rule Oguri thought it dangerous in the extreme that a place of such consequence should be under the control of a small domain, which might negotiate with a foreign power without the shogunate's knowledge
Deal with Russia through formal diplomatic channels Talks on the spot would not settle it. The matter should be taken up with the Russian consul and turned to advantage by appeal to international justice
Tanabe Taichi, then an acting officer of arrangements under the commissioners of foreign affairs, said in later years that there must be a reason why a man of Oguri's calibre came back having achieved next to nothing, and that Oguri “must have judged that unless Tsushima were made a directly ruled territory, the same situation would plainly arise again even if this one were settled”. In fact the Tsushima domain soon petitioned the shogunate to make Tsushima a directly ruled territory and to grant them land elsewhere in exchange, and Tanabe conjectured that this was at Oguri's suggestion.
The shogunate's councillors, however — with Andō Tsushima-no-kami Nobumasa and Kuze Yamato-no-kami Hirochika among the senior councillors — would not accept the recommendation. The shogunate ordered Oguri to go to Hakodate and negotiate with the Russian consul Goshkevich; Oguri refused, on the ground that there was a commissioner at Hakodate already, Muragaki Awaji-no-kami, and that he need not go himself, and he would not withdraw his resignation. Oguri resigned as commissioner of foreign affairs on the twenty-sixth day of the seventh month of 1861.
The matter was settled by a British squadron
Back in Edo, Oguri met the British minister Alcock, told him the situation on Tsushima in full and asked for his help. Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki's Oguri Kōzukenosuke records that Oguri said on this occasion: “At this rate the whole of that sea will become a pond in Russia's garden.” The senior councillor Andō Nobumasa also consulted Alcock about the Russian ship. The response was quick: two ships of the British squadron in Far Eastern waters hurried to Tsushima, with shogunal officials and interpreters, Shinagawa Tōjūrō among them, aboard.
The British ships entered Imozaki in the last part of the seventh month. They protested strongly to Birilev and demanded that he leave, and the Russian ship left Tsushima on the twenty-fifth day of the eighth month. It was settled exactly as Katsu Kaishū put it in Hikawa Seiwa: use the one to check the other. At the same time, though, Alcock was recommending to his own government, in a report dated the twenty-sixth day of the sixth month of 1861, that “if the Russian ship refuses, Britain should occupy the place herself”. Setting poison against poison had its own result: driving the tiger from the front gate might call the wolf to the back.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941; Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975; Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957
→ The exchanges with the Russians at Tsushima → How the Tsushima incident changed Oguri's thinking