Kaei

Change of era

• February 28, 1848 Kaei gannen: The era name of Kaei was created to mark the beginning of the reign of the Emperor Kōmei.

Events of the ''Kaei'' Era

• July 1848 : , left the whaler Plymouth in a small boat and landed on Rishiri Island. He was arrested and sent from Rishiri to Nagasaki where he was incarcerated; MacDonald began teaching English to 14 scholars, including Einosuke Moriyama, who later became an interpreter for the Japanese government when Com. Perry entered Japan in 1854.
• 1849 : Medical practice of vaccination introduced by Dutch physician, Dr. Mohnike, at Dejima.
• July 1853 : Commodore Matthew Perry, commanding the United States Navy's East Indies fleet, arrives in Japanese waters with four ships.
• 1854 : Commodore Perry returns to Edo Bay to force Japanese agreement to the Treaty of Kanagawa; and the chief Japanese negotiator was Daigaku-no kami Hayashi Akira, who was head of the Tokugawa bakufu's neo-Confucian academy in Edo, the Shōhei-kō.
• May 2, 1854 : Fire broke out in the Sentō, and the conflagration spread to the Imperial palace. Both were destroyed. The emperor took refuge at Shimokam and afterwards went to Shōgon-in.
• November 4–7, 1854 : Great Nankaidō earthquakes and tsunamis kill 80,000 people. An earthquake and tsunami struck Shimoda on the Izu peninsula; and because the port had just been designated as the prospective location for a U.S. consulate, some construed the natural disasters as demonstration of the displeasure of the kami.
• 1854 : The era name was changed to Ansei, which was meant to herald the beginning of a peaceful period. The impetus and explanation for this change of era names was said to have been the burning of the Palace in Kyoto in the preceding summer.

  Gallery