Here is another hand-coloured albumen print by Felice Beato. It was taken in 1864 and shows four samurai envoys sent by the Satsuma daimyo, a powerful feudal lord from the southern island of Kyushu, to Edo (Tokyo) to negotiate a settlement with the British government over the Namamugi Incident. In 1862, a British subject by the name of Charles Lenox Richardson, while on a visit from Shanghai, had failed to dismount from his horse before a one thousand man-strong precession of the daimyo on its way back from Edo. This precession, known as a daimyo gyoretsu, was a particularly important occasion because, in an attempt to ensure that daimyo did not foment rebellion against the Tokagawa Shogunate in their home provinces, each daimyo was required to leave their families as hostage in Edo and themselves spend every alternate year in the capital. Richardson, either through arrogance or ignorance, had failed to dismount before the ceremonial return of the daimyo to his home province and, as a result, suitably enraged troops attacked him and cut him down on the spot. A year later this led to British warships being sent to pound Satsuma city of Kagoshima and displacing about 180,000 people.

As can be plainly seen from the stern faces in Beato's picture, the Satsuma samurai were not men to be trifled with. The defeat that they had suffered at the hands of the British led them to switch away from their previous policy of isolationism to one of calling for the rapid modernisation of Japan. This set in train a sequence of events that led to destruction of the shogunate and to the reestablishment of the direct rule of the Emperor in 1867.

The Meiji Restoration was like a tsunami and it swept away all the old power structures in Japan and, ironically, the power and privileges of the daimyos and the samurais that had created it. Unhappy with this new turn of events, the Satsuma samurai once again rose up in 1877 only this time to be cut down by the powerful weaponry of a modern peasant-based Japanese army.