a tozama daimyō over a 60,000 koku Sōma Nakamura Domain which encompassed their traditional holdings. Edo period Sōma Toshitane married an adopted daughter of Shōgun Tokugawa Hidetada to further cement his position, and relocated his seat from Odaka Castle to Sōma Nakamura Castle, building a castle town designed on a grid-pattern in imitation of Kyoto. He also sponsored the development of Sōma ware ceramics, which remains a local specialty to the present day. The subsequent history of the domain was largely uneventful, and the Sōma clan retained its holdings for the entirety of the Edo period, surviving until the Meiji Restoration. The official kokudaka of the domain was officially 60,000 koku, but the actual kokudaka was almost 100,000 koku. Boshin War During the Boshin War of 1868–69, the Sōma clan initially attempted to remain neutral as under Sōma Toshitane the domain was relatively small and had negligible military forces. However, following the defeat of the Tokugawa forces at the Battle of Toba–Fushimi in February 1868, he was pressured by his more powerful neighbors (including Iwakitaira Domain and Sendai Domain) into joining the Ōuetsu Reppan Dōmei. The Satchō Alliance forces advanced through the Hamadōri region and captured Nakamura Castle with only token resistance a few months later. His predecessor, Sōma Michitane, formally surrendered to the Meiji government; however, the domain was not punished, and Toshitane was restored as domain governor by the new government until the abolition of the han system in 1871. Meiji era and beyond In the early years of the Meiji era, the Sōma Incident became a major political scandal. On April 14, 1879, the former daimyō of Nakamura Sōma Domain, Sōma Toshitane, was placed under house arrest by the government, after family members filed a petition accusing him of mental instability. On December 10, 1885, one of his former retainers, Nishigori Takekiyo, filed a lawsuit accusing these relatives, led by Toshitane’s younger brother, Sōma Aritane, of having made false charges leading to Toshitane's incarceration, for the purposes of embezzling the monies of the former domain. The Sōma clan hired the famous lawyer Hoshi Tōru to defend their case, which went on for years, as the legal definition of insanity and the qualifications necessary for a doctor to declare a person mentally incompetent were not yet defined in Japanese jurisprudence. On Toshitane's death in 1892, Nishigori accused the defendants of having murdered him by poison. However, after an