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Several earnest Daimyos and Samurais now advised the Tokugawa Government to wind up the affair by ceding to Russia the part of Sakhalin lying north of 50° of latitude, and when the mission had to be sent out to Europe in 1861–62 for obtaining the agreement of the Powers to the postponement of the opening of treaty ports, it was empowered to negotiate with the Russian Government on the line of the 50° delimitation. General Ignatieff was now the negotiator on the Russian side, and after some unworthy, if not fraudulent, attempts at proving the whole island to be Russian, he proposed to make 48° as the boundary, on the ground of its being in better conformity with the geographical features of the land. This our plenipotentiary refused, and Ignatieff finally agreed to the 50° boundary in principle, on the condition of appointing a mixed Commission from the two Governments in order to determine the appropriate natural boundary by the examination of local conditions. In 1863 the Russian Commissioner came to Hakodate, but the Tokugawa Government, being already hard-pressed by the political events soon leading to its downfall, neglected to appoint the Japanese Commissioner for several months, and when it decided to make good the neglect by consenting to the 48° boundary, the Russian Commissioner had already departed.
In 1866 the Tokugawa Government sent Koide Yamatonokami to St. Petersburg with instructions to make Kushunrai the boundary line; but as the Russian Government did not agree, he signed with Stremogoff, chief of the Asiatic Section of the Russian Foreign Office, a modus vivendi placing Sakhalin under a sort of joint rule between Japan and Russia. When Koide returned to Japan, the Tokugawa Government was no more!
The new Imperial Government instituted the Board of Exploration of Yeso in 1869, and that of Sakhalin in 1870. Kiyotaka Kuroda, the most influential Satsuma man after Saigo and Okubo, was appointed Vice-Director of the two Boards. But with regard to the important question of territorial right, nothing could be effected as long as there was no Russian Minister in Tokyo or Japanese Minister in St. Petersburg during the first years of the new Imperial Government.
The Liukiu Islands are situated between Japan and Formosa, and were originally called Okinawa. In 1185 Tadahiro Shimazu, ancestor of the Daimyo of Satsuma, was made the lord of ‘the twelve islands of the South Sea,’ including Okinawa; but during the feudal wars of the fourteenth century the islands