A French sailor grabbed the regimental banner and ran. That was the spark, though it had been building since the morning.

On March 8, 1868, roughly a hundred sailors from the French corvette Dupleix (デュプレクス, Dyupurekusu) came ashore at the port of Sakai (堺, Sakai), a prosperous trading town near Osaka on the Seto Inland Sea. They were on shore leave. The Tosa Domain's (土佐藩, Tosa-han) 6th Division had been posted there by the new imperial government, fresh from the Boshin War's (戊辰戦争, Boshin Sensō) opening engagement at Toba-Fushimi (鳥羽・伏見, Toba-Fushimi). The war that had just overthrown the Tokugawa shogunate (徳川幕府, Tokugawa Bakufu) was barely three weeks old. The Meiji Restoration (明治維新, Meiji Ishin) was, at this moment, more theory than reality.

Complaints reached the garrison: the French sailors were forcing their way into temples, entering private homes without permission, frightening women, disturbing merchants. The samurai confronted them. What happened next depends on whose account you read — the French said the samurai fired first; the Japanese said the French did. What is not in dispute is that one French sailor seized the Tosa unit's regimental banner, a symbol of collective military honor, and ran. He was chased, caught, beaten. The banner was recovered. But by then it was too late for words.

Eleven French sailors were killed in the fighting that followed.

The political disaster that landed on the new Meiji government was of a size it could barely comprehend. France was one of the most powerful nations on earth. Japan, three weeks into its new existence, had no navy worth the name, a treasury emptied by civil war, and foreign powers watching from the harbor to see if the restoration government would be any more reliable than the shogunate they had just toppled. French consul Leon Roches issued a five-point ultimatum:

First: the commanding officer and his men executed on-site, at the exact location of the clash. Second: an indemnity of 150,000 dollars. Third: a formal apology from an imperial prince, delivered aboard a French warship. Fourth: a personal apology from the Tosa daimyo (藩主, hanshu) to the French consul. Fifth: a permanent ban on Tosa samurai bearing weapons at any port open to foreigners.

The new government had no choice. War with France would end the restoration before it had begun. Senior officials Iwakura Tomomi (岩倉具視, Iwakura Tomomi) and Sanjō Sanetomi (三条実美, Sanjō Sanetomi) — the men who had spent years plotting the return of imperial rule — now found themselves ordering the very warriors who had helped them win to die by their own hands.

Negotiator Godai Tomoatsu (五代友厚, Godai Tomoatsu) managed to reduce the number of condemned from the full garrison to twenty men: four senior commanders and sixteen ordinary soldiers. The sixteen were chosen by drawing lots. Imagine holding a slip of paper in your hand, unfolding it, and reading whether you will live or die.

The twenty condemned were escorted to Myōkoku-ji temple (妙国寺, Myōkoku-ji) in Sakai. The executions were set for March 16, 1868. A French delegation would be present to witness the reparation. The word used in the diplomacy was satisfaction — the French required satisfaction.

What the samurai had done was not, in the logic of the world they had been raised in, a crime. They had defended their unit's honor. They had responded to provocation. They had fought back when foreigners treated Japanese soil and Japanese people as things to be pushed aside. The bushidō (武士道, bushidō) code they had been raised on — loyalty, duty, defense of honor above self-preservation — pointed in exactly one direction. They had followed it.

The new Japan they had helped create pointed somewhere else entirely.

The account of what happened on March 16 is not the focus here — that is another entry's story. What matters on March 8 is the moment the verdict was delivered: twenty men condemned to die not for failing, but for succeeding at what warriors had always been expected to do. The Sakai Incident (堺事件, Sakai Jiken) became, in the years that followed, a symbol of the Meiji government's fundamental wager: that Japan's survival as a sovereign nation required swallowing indignities that an earlier age would have met with swords.

On the same calendar date fourteen years earlier, Commodore Matthew Perry had come ashore at Kanagawa (神奈川, Kanagawa) to begin the negotiations that would open Japan to the world. One March 8 started the chain of events; another nearly ended everything that chain had built. Between them, the most transformative decade in Japanese history ran its course — and at the end of it, twenty samurai drew lots to see who would die for a fight their code said they had already won.