1754 Horeki River Improvement Incident
| 1754 Horeki River Improvement Incident | |
|---|---|
| Location | Nobi Plain, Gifu Prefecture, Japan |
| Date | 1754 - 1755 |
| Target | Satsuma samurais |
|
Attack type
|
Harassment in forced river improvement order by the bakufu |
| Deaths | 85 persons were considered Satsuma samurais dead |
| Victim | 85 died with disease, some with seppuku during construction |
The 1754 Horeki River Improvement Incident was an incident in which the Tokugawa Shogunate maliciously ordered the Satsuma han to carry out difficult river improvement works. Rivers which caused frequent floods included the Kiso, Nagara and Ibi Rivers near Nagoya in the Horeki age. This order ultimately resulted in 51 Satsuma samurai committing suicide, 33 persons dying from disease and the responsible karō, Hirata Yukie, committing seppuku. The river improvement project was finally completed in the Meiji era. The incident is also called the Horeki Age River Improvement Incident and the Nobi Plain River Improvement Incident.
The Shimazu family in the present Kagoshima Prefecture controlled the Satsuma province for roughly four centuries prior to the beginning of the Edo period, and the establishment of the han. Towards the end of the 16th century, the Shimazu controlled nearly all of Kyushu. Despite being defeated by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in his 1587 Kyushu Campaign, and forced back to Satsuma, they remained one of the most powerful clans in Japan. In the Edo period, the Tokugawa Shogunate felt that the power of Satsuma han should be weakened.
The plain of Obi had a number of big rivers with complicated geographical features, resulting in many floods. There was a strict rule that the levee or dike of the river should be lower than the levee of the Owari han, which was one of the family of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The division of the rivers into three was originally planned by Izawa Sobei, the government head of Mino gun in 1735, but his plan was not accepted. Tokugawa Ieshige, the 9th Edo Shogun ordered the river engineering project to be done by the Satsuma han, in order to weaken them.
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