Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/286

 of Affairs in Japan, drawn up at two conferences of the Foreign Representatives held in Yedo on the nineteenth and twenty-first of January, 1861.  —British State Papers 1855–70.  —The lady was not purposely spared. A sword-stroke aimed at her neck shore off a feather in her hat. This attempt to kill a woman excited much indignation among foreigners. But the writer of these pages has been assured by two of the samurai directly concerned in the affair, that the idea of a female being among the party of foreigners did not present itself for a moment to the men of the Satsuma escort. A foreign woman in a riding habit and a foreign man in a coat offered no points for discrimination to Japanese soldiers entirely without knowledge of aliens and their costumes.  —The foreign public knew nothing of these things. They imagined that the Shōgun had gone to Kyōtō to receive investiture at the Emperor's hands.  —The principal objection urged against it is that as the Straits of Shimo-no-seki are Japanese inland waters, foreign ships had no right to be there, and consequently could not justly complain of the treatment they received. But even if it be admitted that to open fire on a vessel flying a friendly flag is a legitimate method of remonstrating against her illegal presence, the reader will have seen, from what has been recorded above, that the act of the Chōshiu gunners was not a simple protest against trespass, but the deliberate inauguration of an attempt to terminate foreign intercourse.  —Now Marquis Ito and Count Inouye, two of the leading statesmen of Japan.  —Afterwards Count Goto and Count Fukuoka, prominent statesmen of the Meiji era.  —The most prominent among these seven nobles was Prince Sanjō, afterwards prime minister under the Meiji Government. <section end="Note 46" /> <section begin="Note 47" />—France had always shown herself particularly friendly to the Tokugawa, and was therefore regarded with some distrust by the founders of the new system. <section end="Note 47" />