This statement of the case is wrong throughout. Mr. Longford goes on to imply that the punishment of the officer in command of the Bizen men was unjustifiable. Mr. Longford’s account is, as I can aver, absolutely misleading and contrary to the evidence. He was not at Kōbé at the time.[5] I was. But lest my version of the story should be deemed one-sided, let me call into court a witness whose testimony is beyond reproach. In his “Drei und Dreissig Jahre in Ost Asien” Herr von Brandt, who was Prussian Minister in Japan at the time, puts a very different complexion upon the episode. “As we—that is to say, Count de la Tour, the Italian Minister, the commanders of the U.S. warships _Iroquois_ and _Oneida_, and myself—left the Custom House and stepped on to the open sandy space which surrounded it we saw there a great number of foreigners, who had probably been attracted by the sight of Japanese troops that were marching through. There appeared to be several hundred men, who were marching towards Ōsaka in regular order along the road which bounded the wide open space on the north. “We were about three or four hundred paces away from the troops, though many of the foreigners were far nearer. All of a sudden I saw the soldiers halt, front, and immediately I heard the rattle of a volley of musketry and the whistling of bullets mostly over our heads. At first I thought that it was a fight between the Mikado’s troops and the Tycoon’s men, and was about to give expression to my indignation that such an occurrence should be possible in the foreign settlement when a second volley, and the flight of the Europeans who were between us and the Japanese, told another tale. The Japanese troops had opened fire upon the whole crowd of promenaders, among whom was Sir Harry Parkes.... I must confess that I expected nothing else than that we should have to fight for our lives, for I could not but think that the Japanese would follow us up. “I was not a little astonished when I saw that after they had fired six or seven volleys—they were armed with repeating rifles—they quietly marched off.” (Here follows an account of the landing of bluejackets and marines and the fruitless pursuit of the Japanese soldiers.) “Only one ship’s boy and another foreigner had been slightly wounded, a piece of luck which I attribute to the Japanese having fired too high; they must have fired many times at the flags of the treaty Powers which were flying over the Custom House, at any rate the building was riddled with bullets.... In the meanwhile, we had had further information as to the Bizen troops, and had been able to ascertain (_feststellen können_) that during their whole march through Hiōgo and Kōbé they had behaved shamefully to all the foreigners whom they met, threatening many of them and wounding two with their spears.”