Normanton incident: As the British merchant vessel Normanton sinks off the coast of Japan, her European officers appear to commandeer the ship’s lifeboats for themselves, leaving her Asian crew and passengers to die and conjuring significant political outrage in Japan.

The Normanton incident was a set of reactions and events surrounding the sinking of a British merchant vessel named Normanton off the coast of what is now Japan's Wakayama Prefecture on October 24, 1886. When the Normanton ran aground, the ship's officers appear to have seized the lifeboats for the Europeans alone. Among the Asians aboard there were no survivors. Uproar in Japan obliged the British Consular Court to revisit its initial exoneration of the captain and to accept there had been criminal misconduct. But no compensation was offered. In Japan, the incident was widely interpreted as a further illustration of the humiliations visited upon the country since her forced opening to the West in the 1850s, and it led to new and persistent calls for the revision of the "unequal treaties".

The Empire of Japan, also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was the Japanese nation state that existed from the Meiji Restoration on January 3, 1868, until the Constitution of Japan took effect on May 3, 1947. From 1910 to 1945, it included the Japanese archipelago, the Kurils, Karafuto, Korea, and Taiwan. The South Seas Mandate and concessions such as the Kwantung Leased Territory were de jure not internal parts of the empire but dependent territories. In the closing stages of World War II, with Japan defeated alongside the rest of the Axis powers, the formalized surrender was issued on September 2, 1945, in compliance with the Potsdam Declaration of the Allies, and the empire's territory subsequently shrunk to cover only the Japanese archipelago resembling modern Japan.

October 24 is the 297th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 68 days remain until the end of the year.