Ansei cleansing

The Sakurada Gate of Edo Castle . Here Ii Naosuke was killed in an assassination attempt.

The Ansei purges ( Japanese 安 Sh の大 Han , Ansei no taigoku ) are the political persecution of over 100 people in the shogunate , individual Han and nobles of the imperial court in Kyoto in Japan in 1858 and 1859. Ansei refers to the Ansei era of the Japanese calendar .

The driving force behind the purges was the Tairō (regent of the Shogun ) Ii Naosuke , who thus eliminated his political opponents. Ii Naosuke led the so-called Kishū faction, who wanted to use the young daimyō of Kishū , Tokugawa Iemochi , from the Tokugawa Kishū line as the successor to the late Tokugawa Iesada , which they succeeded in doing. His opponents, the Hitotsubashi faction, supported Tokugawa Yoshinobu , who then succeeded Iemochi's death eight years later (1866).

In the background, however, it was about more: Ii wanted to strengthen and maintain the Tokugawa shogunate, while his opponents foresaw the end of the Tokugawa, which then came under Yoshinobu ten years later.

There was also the foreign policy question of whether Japan should give up its lockdown and open itself to trade with the Western powers, as Ii Naosuke made possible with the Harris Treaty , or whether the "barbarians" should be driven out, as the Sonnō- jōi faction demanded.

With the purges, Naosuke made many enemies, so that on March 24, 1860 he was finally assassinated while leaving Edo Castle at the Sakurada Gate.

The persons concerned included a .:

Most of the "purged" were forced to give up their posts and placed under house arrest. Eight of them were executed.

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Kusunoki Seiichirō: Nihon shi omoshiro suiri: Nazo no satsujin jiken o oe . Futami Bunko, Tokyo 1991

Web links

Parliamentary Library of Japan, Photograph of the Sakurada Gate from 1900