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Concept
Tōgō Heihachirō
Summary
Marshal-Admiral Marquis Tōgō Heihachirō, served as a gensui or admiral of the fleet in the Imperial Japanese Navy and became one of Japan's greatest naval heroes. As Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, he successfully confined the Russian Pacific naval forces to Port Arthur before winning a decisive victory over a relieving fleet at Tsushima in May 1905. Western journalists called Tōgō "the Nelson of the East". He remains deeply revered as a national hero in Japan, with shrines and streets named in his honour.
Tōgō was born as Tōgō Nakagorō (仲五郎) on 27 January 1848 in the Kajiya-chō (加治屋町) district of the city of Kagoshima in Satsuma domain (modern-day Kagoshima Prefecture), to a noble family in feudal Japan, the third of four sons of Togo Kichizaemon, a samurai serving the Shimazu daimyō as comptroller of the revenue, master of the wardrobe, and district governor, and Hori Masuko (1812–1901), a noblewoman from the same clan as her husband.
Kajiya-chō was one of Kagoshima's samurai housing-districts, in which many other influential figures of the Meiji period were born, such as Saigō Takamori and Ōkubo Toshimichi. They rose to prominent positions under the Meiji Emperor partly because the Shimazu clan had been a decisive military and political factor in the Boshin War against the Tokugawa shogunate during the Meiji Restoration.
As a youth, Tōgō was educated to become a samurai warrior. He changed his name to Heihachirō (meaning "peaceful son") in a religious and patriotic ceremony held when he turned 13, in which samurai tradition called for youth to adopt a change in name (genpuku).
Tōgō's first experience at war was during the Bombardment of Kagoshima in August 1863, in which Kagoshima was shelled by the Royal Navy to punish the Satsuma daimyō for the death of Charles Lennox Richardson on the Tōkaidō highway the previous year (the Namamugi Incident), and the Japanese refusal to pay an indemnity in compensation. Tōgō, who was aged 15 at the time, was part of a gun crew manning one of the cannons defending the port.
Official source
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