While the Korea debate dragged on, Japan faced another foreign policy problem in Taiwan--events preceded the Korea issue, but had taken many months to percolate. On a stormy night in November 1871, a ship from the Ryukyu Islands had capsized off Taiwan's south-east coast. Sixty-six survivors struggled ashore, where local Chinese warned them of "savage" tribesmen in the forest, and under the pretext of helping them, relieved them of all their valuables. Distrusting their erstwhile saviors, the Ryukyuans left them behind and marched into the forbidden forest, where they met local villagers, who made a ritual friendship offer of water and food. The story, as told back in Japan, was that the sailors were massacred by head-hunters. The story back in Taiwan, was that they had met local villagers, and inadvertently insulted them by dining and dashing. Possibly, the villagers had expected a ôrewardö that was not forthcoming; possibly their extraction of this ransom from their charges was regarded by the Ryukyuans as robbery. Whatever happened, fifty-four of the fleeing Ryukyuans were tracked down the following day and slaughtered.

There were multiple chances to settle the incident at a local level. But the Ryuku islands were in a territorially unclear position, and deliberately so. Ever since 1655, the "kings" of the Ryuku islands had only existed in order to keep up the pretense of Ryuku being a Chinese vassal state--such a performance thereby avoided antagonizing the Chinese and provoking military action. Now, however, the Japanese state wanted Ryuku officially acknowledged as part of its own territory, and the deaths of the fishermen on Taiwan were a priceless opportunity to enforce this idea. The Japanese were encouraged in this by Charles Le Gendre (1830 - 99), the former American consul in Amoy, China, who pushed himself on the Japanese as an adviser in Taiwanese aboriginal matters, and urged them to use the incident as a political lever. A Civil War veteran and a fearsome sight, having lost an eye and part of his nose to a bullet in Virginia, the French-born Le Gendre had advanced as far as he could in his diplomatic career. He was calling in on Japan on his way home to the United States, having been reprimanded for over-stepping his authority, and refused promotion to a higher position. Le Gendre regarded his main achievement to have been a successful resolution of an earlier situation on Taiwan, where he had secured an agreement from aborigines to never attack men on ships that flew the American flag.

He had done so by inviting himself along as an "observer" on a Chinese expedition, seizing command from the hapless Chinese general, and marching into the hinterland to parley with the local chieftain Toketok.Le Gendre regarded Taiwan as a microcosm of all China, and hence that his limited knowledge of the island made him an expert on the entire country. In 1871, he summarized his ideas in a "letter" to a colleague, to which he subsequently appended 160 pages of memoranda and essays, and self-published in Amoy under the title How to Deal With China. Now couched as learned advice to the US Secretary of State, who had openly rejected such counsel, the book's one hundred copies were liberally strewn around the diplomatic community, where its title page cunningly alluded to Le Gendre as both a general and a consul, neither of which was really true at the time it was printed. It would be, however, the perfect calling card in Japan.