Remoteness and secure borders made fora greater degree of auton-
omy and of self-consciousness. “Han nationalism,” to use Albert
Craig’s term, guaranteed that strong competitive urges operated to
drive men on and to exacerbate fears of being left behind or out of
whatever new political order might eventuate. Remoteness also made
for a smaller role and presence in Edo, for higher costs and greater
inconvenience attached to the central bakufu control mechanism of
sonkitt-kdtai, and for reliance upon the Osaka market over that of the
shogunal capital. Distance and size made possible relatively autono-
mous responses to bakufu and imperialist demands, as when Satsuma .
refused to make amends for the murder by its retainers of an English
trader who happened along its line of march on horseback (the Rich-
ardson, or Namamugi incident), and when Choshu tried to expel the
foreigners by shelling ships along its shores without bakufu authoriza-
tion. These incidents brought both domains face to face with the
superiority of Western military technology, demonstrated by the Brit-
ish fleet against Kagoshima in 1863 and a foreign flotilla against the
Chosht't Shimonoseki batteries the following year.
Remoteness had other consequences. At a time when money econ-
omy, economic change, and social dissolution were making the domains
along the main-traveled parts of the Osaka and Edo plains, most of them
held by Tokugawa houses, less feudal, social and economic relation-
ships in southwestern Japan were still backward and traditional. The
higher ratio of samurai to commoners in southwestern Japan could also
be used to inhibit commoner complaint or participation; this was par-
ticularly so in Satsuma. Traditional authority structures provided an
effective base for efforts to bolster the domain economy, tap more of its
surplus for the regime, and speed military reforms. The Tempo reforms
failed in bakufu territory, but Tempo fiscal and economic reforms in
Satsuma and Choshir left those domains in much stronger position for
the competition that lay ahead. In Saga, too, the mid-century decades
witnessed a successful campaign to redistribute land equally once again
on the lines of the old Heian kindett system, a “landreform” program
that spoke volumes for the ability of the feudal administration to control
its most important resource.