SHIBUSAWA EIICHI WAS thirteen when Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry led his fleet of steam-powered warships into the port at Uraga in 1853. The reaction within Japan to the aggressive approaches of unknown “invaders” was violent and convulsive. Just as we would react if aliens from outer space were to land a powerful spaceship on earth, people had no idea what these visitors were thinking. The strangers seemed to be saying they were there on a mission of friendship and amity, but that was hardly to be taken at face value. Japan knew well what was happening not far away in China. Only recently, their giant neighbor had been cleverly conned and humiliated by the British in the Opium Wars, and forced into handing over various territories and concessions. The United States was unlikely to be different; there was no knowing what the Americans were scheming. Anti-foreign sentiment seethed all over the country.

Like Japan itself, Eiichi was just beginning to be aware of the wider world. He had begun to help with his father's indigo business from boyhood, and in 1858 at the age of 18 he had married a cousin, Odaka Chiyo. Their daughter Utako was born in 1863. And that was the very year, when he was 23, that he was swept up in the reaction against the foreign incursions.

The zeal to protect the country against the outside world was widespread in Japan, and was felt even in the Musashino countryside north of Edo, the capital of Japan. Eiichi, together with a group of other young hot-blooded rural men of high aspirations (shishi) centered in his hometown of Chiaraijima in what is now Saitama prefecture, formulated a plot to attack and burn the foreign settlement in Yokohama. In the autumn of that year he and his co-conspirators collected weapons, clothing, and equipment and stored them discreetly, waiting for the right time to carry out the mission. From their base in northern Saitama, where the cold, dry winds sweep across the plains from the heights of Mt. Akagi, their plan was this: one night in early winter a group of about 60 comrades would take up arms and march on and seize the local castle at Takasaki. They would then travel swiftly southward down the Kamakura highway to attack the foreign settlement in Yokohama.