The Tenchūgumi incident (天誅組の変, Tenchūgumi no Hen) was a military uprising of sonnō jōi (revere the Emperor and expel the barbarians) activists in Yamato Province, now Nara Prefecture, on 29 September 1863 (Bunkyū 3/8/17 in the old Japanese calendar), during the Bakumatsu period.^[1][2]

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Japanese. (January 2010) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Japanese article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 3,744 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Japanese Wikipedia article at [[:ja:天誅組の変]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|ja|天誅組の変}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Emperor Kōmei had issued a dispatch to shōgun Tokugawa Iemochi to expel the foreigners from Japan in early 1863. The shōgun answered with a visit to Kyoto in April, but he rejected the demands of the Jōi faction. On September 25 (8/13 in the old Japanese calendar) the emperor announced he would travel to Yamato province, to the grave of Emperor Jimmu, the mythical founder of Japan, to announce his dedication to the Jōi cause.

Following this, a group called Tenchūgumi consisting of 30 samurai and rōnin from Tosa and other fiefs marched into Yamato Province and took over the Magistrate office in Gojō.^[3] They were led by Yoshimura Toratarō and Fujimoto Tesseki.

The next day, shogunate loyalists from Satsuma and Aizu reacted by expelling several imperial officials of the sonnō jōi faction from the Imperial Court in Kyoto, in the Bunkyū coup.

The shogunate sent troops to quell the Tenchūgumi, and they were finally defeated in September 1864.