1865: Okada Izo, barbarian-expeller
July 3rd, 2015 Headsman
On this date in 1865, the Japanese samurai Okada Izo was dispatched by crucifixion.
He was one of* the “Four Hitokiri“ — manslayers — whose legendary blades coruscated in the Bakumatsu era that marked Japan’s pivot from an isolationist feudal state, one where samurai were big men on prefectures, to a burgeoning modern power ruled by industry and mass conscription.
The irony was that dinosaurs like the Hitokiri helped bring the asteroid down on their own heads.
During the chaotic Bakumatsu period, triggered by Japan’s becoming involuntarily opened to the outside world, the emperor — long a figurehead marginalized by the shogun — entered the political fray under the xenophobic banner “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians.”
Warriors/assassins like the Hitokiri were wooed by the imperial camp and the promise of a policy that would maintain the purpose and privilege of elite swordsmen. But once power was conquered, the Meiji emperor repaid those knights’ exertions by doing the modernization thing that Hitokiri types had hoped to avoid.
Okada Izo was among the first barbarian-expellers to be caught up by the policy swing. After a couple of years running amok in Kyoto, the anti-foreigner movement was suppressed and its leader forced to commit seppuku, which was still more deference than Izo received.
The execution, usually conceived as the end, is the jumping-off point for the surreal time-and-space-hopping 2004 Takasha Miike bloodbath Izo, “one of the most difficult works of art to be made in recent times.”
* Along with fellow-execution victim Kawakami Gensai, and two other guys who met violent deaths that were not (more’s the pity for this site) executions.
On this day..
- 1936: Saburo Aizawa, incidentally - 2020
- 1623: Claes Michielsz Bontebal, Maurice murder moneybags - 2019
- 1941: 3,500 Jews at the Khotyn Fortress ... but not Adolph Sternschuss - 2018
- 1939: Ramiro Artieda, Bolivian serial killer - 2017
- 1741: Prince, Tony, Cato, Harry and York - 2016
- 1817: Two-fifths of the condemned in Valenciennes - 2014
- 1969: Lee Soogeun, North Korean defector - 2013
- 1945: Dr. Achmad Mochtar, quiet hero - 2012
- 1648: The leaders of the Salt Riot - 2011
- 1972: Three Somali officers for an attempted coup - 2010
- 1931: Ernesto Opisso - 2009
- 1570: Aonio Paleario, Italian religious reformer - 2008
Entry Filed under: 19th Century,Arts and Literature,Assassins,Capital Punishment,Crucifixion,Death Penalty,Execution,Gibbeted,Gruesome Methods,History,Japan,Power,Public Executions,Soldiers,The Worm Turns,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1860s, 1865, cinema, civil war, july 3, kyoto, meiji restoration, okada izo
