Chapter 9

Near the entrance to Ueno Park, only a few minutes’ walk from the smog-drenched hubbub of the Tokyo streets, is a small plateau called Sakuragaoka, the Hill of Cherry Blossoms. Here, surrounded by souvenir stalls and the ubiquitous photographers, stands a monument to the adherents of the Tokugawa shogunate who fell near this site after being decisively defeated by the loyalists in a battle that led to the Meiji Restoration. In front of the monument and totally overshadowing it rises the bronze statue of a loyalist hero who killed himself in Kyushu almost exactly one century ago. Dressed in an informal summer robe and shod in straw sandals, he clasps a sword in his left hand, while his right hand holds a hunting dog by the leash; during much of the day his head and body (and also his dog) are festooned with dingy city pigeons. In a proud yet natural pose he stands on a pedestal that bears the epitaph: the services that our beloved saigō takamori rendered to the nation require no encomium; for they have witnesses in the eyes and ears of the people....

The famous statue in Ueno Park is far from belonging to the world’s great pieces of monumental sculpture; yet it conveys much about the hero and his legend. A pair of bronze pillars supporting the sturdy edifice of a body that for sheer weight and strength of muscle overwhelms one—such are the legs of Saigō Takamori. His hands are fists, and each finger is a tool for action. He has no neck; the bomb that is his head rests squarely on a chest as solid as a launching-pad. His huge, staring eyes fly at one: two tigers burning with the power of will and demonic energy.

The hero had been dead for over twenty years when his statue was completed at the end of the nineteenth century, most of its expense having been defrayed by small contributions from devotees all over Japan. [9.1] During the next fifty years Sakuragaoka was a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of thousands of visitors, who paid their respects to Saigō Takamori and the spirit he represented and who, duly inspired by their encounter, left with photographs of themselves posed against his gargantuan bulk. In the Occupation period the American authorities decided to demolish the statue as being a symbol of Japanese nationalism, militarism, and other ideologies that were unfashionable at the time. Popular opposition, however, was sufficiently widespread to make the Supreme Command relent. [9.2] The bronze image remains intact, and the camera shutters still click away tirelessly in its vicinity.

The foreign visitor to Ueno Park may find it hard to believe that this venerated figure ended his life under official proscription as a traitor. [9.3] Yet such is the case; for Saigō the Great climaxed his career as a leader of the Meiji Restoration by heading the last and most sanguinary revolt against the very imperial government he had helped create, and challenged a force commanded by an Imperial Prince, a cousin of Emperor Meiji himself. His armed defiance was on a vastly larger scale than Ōshio’s attempt some forty years earlier—more a civil war than an insurrection—but, like the Osaka Rebellion, it ended in disaster and the hero was constrained to take his own life in acknowledgement of defeat.

Saigō Takamori’s career exemplifies the entire gamut of the national ethos, as well as the vertiginous changes that were occurring in Japan during the early Meiji period. It has the same parabolic form as the careers of Michizane and Yoshitsune; but the curve is even sharper, and the drama was enacted not in the dim past but in recent history. Until the age of twenty-seven Saigō served as a minor clan official in a remote part of Kyushu; at forty-five he bestrode Japan like a colossus, serving Emperor Meiji not only as a leading member of the national government but as Chief Counsellor of State, Commander of the Imperial Bodyguard, and Marshal; five years later he had plummeted to the status of rebel and was escaping from the imperial forces he had once led. The man who had until recently been the cynosure of both official and popular admiration was formally designated as guilty of high treason and condemned by a Counsellor of State (his erstwhile friend and supporter) as the blackest villain in Japan, “an enemy of the Court, for whom there is no place in heaven or on earth.” [9.4]

Only a few years after his defeat and decapitation, however, Saigō Takamori was rehabilitated by the same government that he had tried to topple. A Shinto shrine, dedicated to the worship of his spirit, was built near his grave and named after him. In 1890 he received a posthumous pardon from Emperor Meiji and was restored to his former rank and dignity. In 1902 his son received the title of Marquis—not in recognition of any services of his own, but as a further mark of respect for his father.

Such a series of peripeteias is rare even in Japan; if transposed to a Western context, it enters the realm of the fanciful. Saigō’s fame, popularity, and power after the Restoration were comparable to those of the Duke of Wellington when he returned to England following his victory at Waterloo. If the career of the Iron Duke had followed a course similar to Saigō’s, he might have left England a few years later in disgust with the country’s domestic corruption and liberal foreign policy, returned to his birthplace in Ireland, and led a force of young rebel hotheads in a hopeless uprising in which he would have been defeated and killed by the British army; but only a dozen years later he would have received a royal pardon for his act of treason, his dukedom would have been restored, statues would have risen to honour him in London, Dublin, and other parts of the empire, and legends would grow up that he had miraculously survived and would soon return from the continent to rescue his country. The analogy is, of course, approximate, but it certainly does not exaggerate the vicissitudes in the official standing of the Japanese hero.

The government’s rehabilitation of Saigō Takamori—an easy measure now that he was safely dead—was not simply an attempt to heal old wounds but reflected his repute among the Japanese people. It is as if the rulers of the country had realized, somewhat belatedly, that they had a full-fledged hero on their hands and must rise to the occasion by granting him the proper honours. For not only was he by far the most popular of the men who had led the Restoration movement, but he became established as the quintessential hero of modern Japanese history, a man who belonged to the same emotional tradition as Yoshitsune and Masahige and who, owing to a peculiarly Japanese combination of qualities, could be loved, not merely respected.

His close associates and followers worshipped him as a superman, and his final failure in battle certainly did nothing to diminish their enthusiasm. The following typical description was written by a lad who accompanied him on his disastrous retreat from Kumamoto when it was clear that the rebellion had miscarried:

When I was walking along a path, [someone] stopped me suddenly and said, “Wait a minute, boy.”

“What is the matter?” asked I, turning back.

“You must get out of the way, for the Master [Sensei] is coming along.”

We two got out of the way to the left-hand side. Dai-Saigō-Sensei [Saigō the Great] was walking along quietly, with a cap... on, and wearing a sword at his side. He seemed as if he were hunting at ease over a peaceful field, forgetting the presence of the enemy. When I thought that this accounted for the stately mien and magnanimity of the greatest hero the world had ever seen, I could not help revering him.

“How great a man the Master is!”

“Yes, he is a god.” [9.5]

It was not only Saigō’s supporters who were moved by the force of his personality. Even an enemy like General Yamagata, who was responsible for crushing Saigō’s rebellion, recognized his stature while deploring his poor judgement. [9.6] After the pacification a leading article in a staunchly pro-government newspaper stressed Saigō’s lack of skill and generalship, but admired his honesty and courage, and conceded that he was “in some respects a remarkable man”:

What sort of man was Saigō Takamori? In his house there was neither wealth nor a retinue of servants. But he was able to so secure the confidence of the people that he could lead a great army into rebellion against the Imperial forces, and though only three provinces joined him in the revolt, by successive battles and retreats he held out against the government for more than half a year. Finally... when surrounded by Imperial troops, he cut his way out and escaped to his native place in Kagoshima, and there he was killed in battle. If we carefully consider his course, we see that he fully sustained his fame until the last. He died without shame and closed his eyes in peace.... [9.7]

Shortly afterwards, when the time came to compile Saigō’s “Posthumous Words,” the editor was none other than the steward of a northern clan that had fiercely resisted the hero during the fighting in 1867–68. The preface to this collection ends with the threnody, “Alas, why did you leave the world so hastily, Lord Saigō?” [9.8]

In the subsequent glorification of Saigō Takamori there are two principal lines of descent, one represented by people of strong nationalist or “Japanist” persuasion, who stressed his traditional samurai ethos and his intransigent attitude towards Korea, the other by liberals, democrats, and socialists, who responded to the hero’s bold confrontation with the conservative Establishment of his day. Among Saigō’s earliest adherents were members of the “people’s rights” movement, including revolutionary opponents of the Meiji regime. [9.9] These men adulated him as a symbol of freedom and resistance (jiyū to teikō); he was their great hope who, like George Washington, would lead his people in the struggle against unjust oppression by a ruling oligarchy. [9.10]

The eminent liberal thinker, Fukuzawa Yukichi, who probably did more than any other single person in Japan to introduce political democracy and Western ideas, was profoundly impressed by Saigō Takamori despite the latter’s suspicion of foreign innovations. The difference in viewpoints between the two men never diminished their mutual admiration. Fukuzawa described Saigō as the great hero of the Meiji Restoration and as a man who stood not just for one segment of Japan but for the entire people (tenka no jimbutsu). In a book written only one month after the rebellion (but, owing to government censorship, not published until twenty years later) he expressed his resentment at the way in which Saigō had been transformed from a national idol into “the great traitor,” and reserved special indignation for those lickspittle journalists who presumed to criticise the former hero because it had now become respectable and politic to do so. [9.11] It is significant that during the period of Saigō’s official disgrace a liberal Westernizer like Fukuzawa should have been the only famous writer to defend him publicly. He went so far as to justify the rebellion itself, explaining that it was the despotism of the Ōkubo regime which had driven Saigō “into a difficult situation” and had finally killed him. The uprising was caused by the “dark, unjust policies of the government,” which had tried to take over the country from the people and to treat the populace like slaves. [9.12] Saigō’s sincerity in upholding the cause of justice must never be impugned, and to suggest that this most loyal of Japanese could actually have been a traitor to the Emperor was a travesty of the truth. [9.13] The day might well come when Saigō would again be indispensable. “Though Japan is a small country and the national law is severe, yet surely it is big enough for the one and only Saigō Takamori.” [9.14]

Another seemingly incongruous admirer was Uchimura Kanzō, Japan’s leading Christian thinker, who had been forced to resign from his academic post in 1891 for refusing to bow before a copy of the Imperial Rescript on Education, and who became a pacifist after the Sino-Japanese War. On most important questions the two men differed widely (Saigō had not the slightest interest in Christianity and could hardly be described as a pacifist); yet in a book entitled “Representative Japanese” Uchimura devotes the opening chapter to the hero from Kyushu, whom he describes as the last and greatest in Japan’s long line of eminent samurai. [9.15] He pairs him with Commodore Perry as one of the two men who did most to awaken Japan from her long slumber, and points out that, though neither knew about the other, they worked in the same direction, the Japanese hero carrying out what the Westerner had initiated. [9.16] Later in his essay Uchimura points out that many of Saigō’s most important sayings were identical, at least in spirit, with passages from the New Testament, and he comes close to representing the Kyushu samurai as a sort of unconscious Christian. [9.17]

In terms of ideological objectives it would be hard to imagine anyone more different from Saigō than the famous socialist journalist Kōtoku Shūsui, an organizer of the Social Democratic Party, who was prosecuted for his writings against the Russo-Japanese War and was finally hanged, in an apparent miscarriage of justice, for his complicity in a plot to assassinate Emperor Meiji. Yet, like many of the early Japanese socialists, Kotoku venerated Saigō Takamori—not, of course, because of his political or social ideas but as a “public-spirited man of virtue” (shishi-jinnin), a “candle that lights others and consumes itself.” [9.18] When Kotoku was sentenced to death, his fate was compared with that of Saigō Takamori, “another tragic hero who had been inveigled [into a plot] by his companions,” and pleas for clemency referred to the fact that Saigō, who was now officially recognized to be a national hero, had once been condemned as a rebel. [9.19]

At the other end of the spectrum, believers in “Japanism” and right-wing nationalism were almost unanimous in regarding Saigō Takamori as the supreme hero of modern times. The first in this influential category was the superpatriot, Tōyama Mitsuru, a founder of numerous jingoist societies, a powerful advocate of Japanese expansion on the continent, and in his later years the recognized doyen of the ultra-nationalist movement. During the entire course of his long, hectic career Tōyama was a fervent admirer of Saigō Takamori, whose life and character he commended to his followers as the ideal examples for Japanese patriots. Also in the “rightist” category was the famous revolutionary and writer Kita Ikki, who because of his advocacy of national socialism in the 1930s and of a new order in Asia under Japan’s aegis, had been dubbed the “founder of modern Japanese fascism.” [9.20] In his study of Meiji history Kita analyzed Saigō’s rebellion as an abortive nationalist revolution; with Saigō Takamori’s failure the attempt at revolution came to an end and power lapsed into the hands of “new-rich daimyos” (narikin daimyō) who were more concerned with preserving their own authority than with the national welfare. Kita, like his hero, inevitably fell afoul of the established authorities, and in 1937 he was executed by a firing squad because of his alleged influence on the “young officers” who participated in the 26th February incident. [9.21] For these “young officers,” and for many of the ultra-rightists during the chauvinist period that culminated in the defeat of 1945, Saigō was a revered figure; and army officers made a point of explaining that the struggle in China was an implementation of his policy to assert Japan’s influence on the continent. [9.22]

With the discredit of samurai ideals and other traditional values in the postwar period, Saigō’s standing became ambiguous. Yet, despite the vast change in the ideological atmosphere and the new freedom of historians to separate fact from legend and to puncture the inflated reputations of certain national heroes, he remained an immensely popular figure. A public-opinion poll taken shortly after the Pacific war among young Japanese people included Saigō as one of the ten most respected figures in Japanese history; in a poll twelve years later he was recognized as one of the eighteen “most splendid personalities” (rippa na jimbutsu) in Japan. [9.23] In order to maintain Saigō’s image in the changed atmosphere, his advocates have usually emphasized the magnanimous, liberal side of their hero and his efforts to limit the bloodshed in the civil war of 1867–68, while playing down, or even indignantly denying, any authoritarian or imperialist proclivities that seemed reminiscent of unpopular prewar values. [9.24] Thus a modern expert on Saigō Takamori, writing in 1948, represented him as Japan’s first great democrat, and identifies his famous “Revere Heaven, Love Humanity” slogan with the democratic ideals of Abraham Lincoln. [9.25]

This many-faceted popularity of Saigō Takamori has inspired a vast “Saigō literature” in which writers have used his career and legend as material for biographies, historical studies, and romantic narratives. He is also an ideal dramatic hero. The first of many plays about Saigō, produced in 1878 when he was still officially in disgrace, had such an immediate success in Tokyo that the producer was able to rebuild his theatre on the proceeds. [9.26]

In general the writers are laudatory and uncritical in their approach and make little attempt to plumb the hero’s psychological complexities; yet cumulatively they provide ample factual information about most aspects of Saigō’s life, except his early childhood and his family relations. A number of famous songs and poems reflect contemporary emotional reactions to Saigō Takamori and his disaster. The earliest, which was later set to music and used as an army marching song, was written just after the rebellion and referred to a crucial battle in which Saigō’s rebel army was defeated. Though the poet spoke from the point of view of the government forces, his sympathies were obviously divided:

We are the Imperial forces,

While our enemy is the enemy of the Court,

For whom there is no place in Heaven or on earth.

He who leads the enemy forces

Is the bravest hero who ever lived [kokon musō no eiyū] ,

And all the men who follow him

Are intrepid, death-defying warriors,

Who can stand without shame before the fiercest gods.

Yet since ancient times those who have defied Heaven and

risen in rebellion

Have always met bad ends.

So now, until the foe is vanquished,

Charge forward, one and all,

Charge forward!

Draw out your flashing swords (with one accord),

And be prepared to die

As you rush [against the enemy] ! [9.27]

The author of the famous “autumn wind” poem imagines the hero’s state of mind as he is about to die:

With my forlorn band [of loyal fighters]

I have cleft my way through the besieging enemy

And marched a hundred leagues back to these

ramparts [of Kagoshima] .

Now my sword is broken, and my steed has fallen dead.

The autumn wind will bury my bones

Here in the hills of my native town. [9.28]

The long ballad of Shiroyama, named after the “castle hill” in Kagoshima where Saigō’s life came to an end, emphasizes the parabolic aspect of his career. It starts by describing the scene of Saigō’s death; then

The men of the government forces who had observed these [sad events]

Said, “He who until yesterday was revered as the leader

of our Imperial Army,

He who basked in His Majesty’s favour and enjoyed the world’s esteem

As the greatest hero of them all [tagui nakarishi eiyū] ­—

Today, most pitifully, has he vanished like the dew...

How full our hearts have grown

From the deep sense that naught endures in this world of ours [yo no naka no mujō wo fakaku kanji] .... [9.29]

In addition to this “Saigō literature” there is a large quantity of pictorial representation, including formal portraits, statues, popular prints, and an assortment of thermometers, toys, teapots, and other trinkets decorated with the corpulent figure of the hero from Kyushu. Perhaps the most remarkable examples are contemporary prints in which he is depicted sitting cross-legged on Mars with an afterglow emanating from the planet like a sort of heroic effluvium. [9.30] When adulation for Saigō soared to new heights a few years after his death, he was actually identified with Mars, and the planet came to be called “the Saigō star” (Saigōboshi). As part of the popular deification he was fitted into the Buddhist cosmology: in the Saigō Nirvana Painting (Saigō Nehan Zu), though still attired in army uniform, he is frankly portrayed as a Buddha. [9.31]

The cult of Saigō led to a body of survival legends, according to which the hero had not died in Kagoshima but had escaped to a foreign country and would soon return home. Theories of survival are common to many heroes in Japan and elsewhere. [9.32] What is remarkable is that fabulous legends of this type should have become attached to a recent historical figure who died a few years after Disraeli. The first theory, which circulated shortly following his downfall, is that he had fled in a ship from Kyushu and reached a certain “Indian island,” whence he would return to save his country. [9.33] In 1891 there was an upsurge of such legends connected, rather improbably, with the forthcoming state visit of the Russian crown prince. It was bruited that Saigō, having escaped from Kyushu and crossed over to Russia, would shortly be arriving in Japan on a Russian warship in the company of the crown prince. [9.34] Once back in Tokyo he would clean out the Augean stables of Meiji corruption, revise the unequal treaties with the Western powers, and lead an invasion against Korea. [9.35] One enterprising newspaper took advantage of the widespread excitement to conduct a primitive public-opinion poll:

Is He Alive or Is He Dead?

Readers, both those who believe [Saigō Takamori] is alive and those who think he actually died, are invited to fill in a ballot stating their opinions and itemizing their reasons. Ballots should be placed in a box at this office or else sent by post not later than the 15th of the month....The person whose answer is closest to the opinion given by the majority of our respondents will receive as First Prize a three months’ subscription to the Hokushin News.... [9.36]

Saigō came from Satsuma, a proud, pugnacious province, noted for its beautifully rugged nature—a province whose relation to Japan is not unlike that of Ireland to Great Britain. Though its inhabitants constituted no separate race like the Celts, they clung proudly to their native dialect, which was virtually incomprehensible to other Japanese, and in a period of rapid change they stubbornly preserved their traditional mores. This was partly because of Satsuma’s geographical isolation from the political and cultural centre of the country. Even today it takes almost twenty-four hours by the fastest express train to travel from Tokyo to the provincial capital of Kagoshima; in Saigō’s time the most rapid mode of transport was ship, and the journey to Osaka normally required about ten days. Satsuma was the second largest province in Japan and by far the most independent, closed, and clannish. The Shimazus, its hereditary rulers, descended from ancestors who had been defeated by the Tokugawas in a crucial battle in 1600, and Satsuma was traditionally one of the bitterest foes of the ruling shogunate. Though obliged to recognize the Tokugawa regime in Edo as the principal political authority in Japan, the Shimazus kept their province aloof for some two centuries; and even after the Meiji Restoration, when Satsuma was reorganized as Kagoshima Prefecture, it remained in many ways a semi-independent fief, often retaining old feudal practices and blithely ignoring such innovations as tax reform, the regulation against carrying swords, and the new Western calendar. [9.37]

The poor condition of the peasantry in Satsuma was aggravated by the fact that an unusually high proportion of the population consisted of samurai—about forty percent of the six hundred thousand inhabitants, and over seventy percent in Saigō’s native town of Kagoshima. To support this numerous and largely unproductive class, the workers in the fields suffered harsh exploitation in the form of taxes and corvée. [9.38] According to a contemporary Satsuma saying, “Peasants are expected to do thirty-five days of public service (hōkō) each month.” [9.39] To escape their crushing burden they frequently tried to abscond to neighbouring provinces but were almost invariably caught and fiercely punished.

Poverty was by no means limited to the peasant class. Most of the samurai, except those on the highest rungs, lived in Spartan conditions, their economic situation being hardly different from that of farmers in more prosperous parts of Japan. They made up for such hardship by pride in their ancient military tradition and by inculcating their sons with the values of the hayato, the ideal Satsuma samurai who combined dignified frugality with valour, agility, and independence. [9.40]

It was into such a warrior family that Saigō Takamori was born towards the end of the Tokugawa period, and throughout his life he remained keenly conscious of his status as a Satsuma samurai. He was the eldest of seven children. [9.41] His father, a minor clan official who served the Lord of Satsuma as head of the Accounts Department, was renowned for stern integrity. [9.42] The Saigō family ranked low in the samurai social hierarchy, and they were poor even by the prevalent standards of the Satsuma hayato. [9.43] As was common among petty samurai in Satsuma, the father is said to have eked out his stipend by agricultural work, being assisted by Takamori and three other sons. When Takamori was sixteen, he completed his studies at the clan school, and immediately started work as an assistant clerk in the County Magistrate’s Office, contributing his modest salary to the family budget. A keen sense of thrift and duty were inculcated into the future hero from an early age.

One of the best-known facts about Saigō Takamori is his size. [9.44] He would have been an imposing figure in any country, but in nineteenth-century Japan he was a veritable Gargantua. Many affectionate (and often spurious) anecdotes are based on his corpulence, which was said to have made it impossible for him to mount a horse; and he also became famous for his voracious appetite. Takamori’s physique was inherited from several generations in the Saigō family, his father being a burly man over six feet tall and a powerful sumō wrestler. Takamori is said to have been a huge, wide-eyed baby, and at school he was known for his bulk. As an adult he was just under six feet tall and weighed over two hundred and forty pounds. He had a bull neck (his collar size was 19 ½ inches) and immensely broad shoulders. People who met him were invariably struck by his large, piercing eyes (the British diplomat Satow described him as having “an eye that sparkled like a big black diamond”) and by the great, bushy eyebrows. [9.45] A recent biographer adds that he was endowed with huge testicles (idai naru kōgan), though the source of this particular detail is not specified. [9.46] In a country whose historical figures have tended to conform in size to a somewhat modest pattern, he stands out larger than life. This unconventional physical stature of Saigō the Great later became associated with certain inner qualities, notably a strong nonconformist nature, that are especially admired in Japan because they tend to be so rare.

During most of his life this behemoth from the west overflowed with vigour. At school, where he acquired the nicknames of udo (“huge gawk”) and ōmedama (“big eyes”), he was a powerful fighter; later he put his weight to use as a sumō wrestler, and during the final years in Kyushu he worked off his physical energy by tramping tirelessly through the hilly countryside with his dogs. One painful effect of his weight was a recurrence of filiariasis, an obscure illness associated with obesity. In his bad attacks Saigō was obliged to purge himself daily and to remain indoors. He took advantage of these periods of enforced seclusion to write letters to his associates; and the historian can therefore thank the hero’s fatness for the voluminous correspondence that has come down to us.

Concerning the personality enveloped within this vast frame, it is harder to separate fact from legend. As a child he appeared somewhat slow-witted, and at the clan school he became known as a stolid and inarticulate lad. [9.47] One day, according to a typical (and perhaps apocryphal) story, he was walking down a lane on his way to deliver a huge tray of cakes when another boy, who had decided to play a practical joke on his corpulent schoolmate, jumped out from an alley with a piercing yell; the young Saigō carefully placed the tray on the ground and turning to the boy said in his slow Satsuma accent, “Goodness, how you startled me!” Saigō Takamori’s apparent slowness, of course, concealed the overabundant energy which inspired his frenzied career; but the “provocative silences that could pass for contempt or wisdom” continued throughout his life. [9.48]

As a youth he was headstrong and disrespectful of authority; and these qualities carried over into his later years when he displayed a frankness and unorthodoxy that Japanese people are traditionally warned to avoid lest they be hammered on the head. A wild, mischievous boy, Saigō in due course won the respect of his schoolmates for his pluck and enterprise. He became the leader (nisegashira) of a group of boys from local samurai families, including Ōkubo Toshimichi, who was to have such a vital, and indeed fatal, influence on his career. Until the end of Saigō’s life, moral intrepidity and disdain for physical danger were salient in his personality, and even contemporaries who regarded his objectives as confused and his methods as unwise never questioned the man’s courage. [9.49] Beneath his reticence and silences lurked an enthusiastic, passionate nature, which sometimes erupted in outbursts of violence. The following incident occurred in 1860 during his first period of exile. One day news reached the island where he lived that the chief shogunal Minister, whom he had himself intended to kill as an enemy of the Court, had been assassinated in Edo:

“They have done it at last,” said Saigō to himself. He could not keep still. Taking his wooden sword from the alcove, he rushed out of the house to the garden and began to strike an innocent old tree, shouting at the top of his voice, as if he were taking the tree for a man upon whom to wreak his furious passion. His shouts echoed through the stillness of the night. The sound of his blows on the tree was heard too. People wondered what had happened, but he did not mind, for he was quite beside himself with fury.

It was not until this nocturnal fencing exercise with the old tree had refreshed him that he took off his sandals, washed his feet, and entered the house.

He had already regained his usual calm.... [9.50]

But the rage remained, and was soon to explode in more momentous ways.

From his youth he possessed a fundamental moral fastidiousness, marked by forthright honesty, modesty of speech and taste, a repugnance for display, and a total lack of avarice. He was unique among the Meiji leaders in appearing almost entirely uninterested in honours and awards. According to one of his eminent admirers, this is because he did only what he believed to be right in the national interest. [9.51] Perhaps so; but it would be naïve to overlook the possibility that desire for a noble reputation played its part and that, consciously or not, he pursued this goal throughout his life.

About Saigō’s personal magnetism there can be no question. The man’s charisma was evident to all who met him, from the young camp-follower who recognized him as a god to the shrewd English diplomat who was instantly struck by the power of his character. [9.52] Saigō’s peculiar charm depended on the combination of a mighty physique with an apparently open, radiant, human quality (so different from the cold, self-centered fanaticism of an Ōshio Heihachirō), a simple, almost childlike enjoyment of the moment, and an immediate, earthy humour. Unlike most grand men of his time, he was direct and natural with his equals, gentle, considerate, and forbearing towards inferiors. Above all it was the dynamism of his will and energy that made him, as a modern historian has put it, “the most potent personality in Japanese history.” [9.53]

Yet between the lines of contemporary panegyrics and later hero-worshipping biographies are hints of a darker side to the hero’s nature. One of the few striking details in Saigō’s early life was his reaction to the disembowelment of a Satsuma samurai, who was closely associated with the Saigō family and who, in his efforts to ensure the succession of Shimazu Nariakira as lord of the clan, had become involved in an abortive plot and was condemned to commit ritual suicide. According to one version of the story, Saigō witnessed the gory scene himself. At the moment when the samurai was about to plunge the sword into his stomach, he turned to the young man and explained that he was offering his life for his lord and his province. This dramatic experience is said to have first awakened the hero to a sense of duty and self-sacrifice. In a more probable version Saigō was not actually present at the suicide but later received a blood-stained under-kimono, which the samurai had worn while disembowelling himself and which he bequeathed to the young man as a parting gift. “ [9.54] As he gazed at this sad and gruesome memento of his friend,” speculates one biographer, “Saigō vowed vengeance upon those who were corrupting Clan affairs and swore that Nariakira should succeed to his just and proper position as their Lord.” Whatever lofty resolutions this event inspired in the young man, it may well have aroused a fascination with the image of noble self-destruction and have contributed to a deathwish—a wish that he first acted out in his attempt to drown himself at the age of thirty, that later influenced his decision to go to Korea “in order to be killed,” and that finally led him into a rebellion which was, quite literally, suicidal. [9.55]

Intimations of the darker side of the hero’s personality—the side which was largely obscured by his serene, radiant impression—can be found in much of his poetry. Frequently he expresses uneasiness about living fellow humans, as in this poem written on the anniversary of the death of one of the samurai plotters who were sentenced to commit suicide: [9.56]

I do not mind the bitter cold of winter;

What fills my heart with fear is the cold hearts of men....

Or again,

... Such joys as [then] I knew came not from living men,

But from those who had long since died.

In a letter from his island of exile Saigō wrote, “Now I have finally discovered that human beings cannot be trusted. They are as changeable as the rolling eyes of a cat. To my amazement some people on whom I had relied as kindred spirits have made unfounded accusations against me.” [9.57]

In a later poem Saigō remarks that he would not be scared by even a million devils, but that the sight of “that pack of wild beasts called human beings” (ningen-korō no gun) makes him want to escape from the world. [9.58] At other times, and more significantly, Saigō’s painful doubts are directed towards his own nature:

I sit and study far into the bitter night.

My face is cold, my stomach empty.

Again and again I stir the embers to give light.

One’s selfish thoughts [shii] should melt away like snow before

[this] lighted lamp.

Yet, when I gaze deep within my heart,

I am humbled by abundant shame [hazuru koto ōshi] .

Beneath the hero’s bluff, ebullient exterior there appears to have lurked a deep sense of personal unworthiness; but, lacking details about his early years, we are unlikely ever to be in a position to probe its origins and full implications.

Little is known about Saigō’s years as a Magistrate’s assistant. He was trained as a scribe-copyist, and it may well have been during this period that he developed his skill in calligraphy, the supreme art for the Japanese gentleman. His job also brought him into close contact with the indigent Satsuma peasantry. On one occasion the Magistrate despatched him to the countryside on a tour of inspection for tax assessment. The clan authorities had just refused an appeal by the peasants that levies be reduced owing to a recent crop failure. During his tour Saigō came across a farmer sadly taking leave of his cow, which he had been obliged to sell in order to pay his taxes. The young official was moved by the man’s plight and, having gone to some trouble to examine his case, managed to reduce the assessment. The anecdote fits nicely into the Saigō legend as an illustration of his benevolence and of his typically heroic sense of nasake. [9.59]

In 1849, when Saigō was twenty-one, the Shimazu clan was split by an involved succession dispute of the type that has always plagued Japanese politics. The crisis had an important influence on Saigō’s career, for he sided wholeheartedly with the “progressive,” anti-Bakufu candidate, Shimazu Nariakira, who wished to modernize and reform the fief. In cooperation with his old school companion, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Saigō helped to secure victory for the “progressive” faction, and in 1851 Shimazu Nariakira was appointed the twenty-sixth Lord of Satsuma at the age of forty-two. In the long, secret manoeuvres that led to the final decision, Saigō forged an alliance with Ōkubo (the man who would later compass his ruin); the negotiations also brought him close to his great hero, Nariakira. [9.60]

A few years later, Saigō had the honour of being included in Nariakira’s suite on the occasion of the daimyo’s annual procession to Edo, a journey of several months. This experience intensified Saigō’s adulation for his overlord. Nariakira for his part appears to have been impressed by his energetic young vassal, and a few months later he appointed him to be head gardener in the magnificent grounds of his residence outside Kagoshima. It was a modest position in the hierarchy, but afforded frequent opportunities for private meetings, during which the daimyo and his retainer are said to have exchanged views on the future of Japan. In the same year Nariakira introduced Saigō to a famous Confucian nationalist scholar, who made a great impression by inveighing openly against the Bakufu’s weak-kneed policy towards the foreign powers and the lack of a proper patriotic spirit in high places. [9.61]

As Nariakira developed increasing confidence in his retainer’s talents, he began using Saigō for confidential political missions, including manoeuvres against the Bakufu and complex negotiations concerning the shogunal succession. Officially Saigō held the somewhat incongruous post of birdkeeper at the Shimazu mansion in Edo, but his actual functions were considerably more impressive. [9.62] During Saigō’s late twenties, one of the most active and apparently happy periods in his life, he travelled frequently to the imperial capital in Kyoto and to the shogunal headquarters in Edo, covering these huge distances with his usual indefatigable vigour. On one of his journeys, when he happened to be in Kyoto during an outbreak of cholera, his energy extended to organizing a successful campaign against the epidemic, thus making him a sort of samurai equivalent to the contemporary Western heroine, Florence Nightingale. [9.63]

Saigō’s thirtieth year, a turning point in his life, started auspiciously with his employment in Edo as the daimyo’s confidential agent. Only a few months later, however, Nariakira suddenly fell ill and died. At one stroke Saigō was bereft, not only of his main political support, but of an adored friend. This disaster plunged him into a state of acute misery and was one of the direct reasons for his attempted suicide. In traditional accounts Saigō is said to have reacted to the news by immediately deciding to follow Nariakira to the grave according to the ancient Japanese practice of junshi (self-immolation of an attendant on the death of his lord) but was dissuaded by a friend in Kyoto, the loyalist priest called Gesshō, who insisted that the young man stay alive for his country’s sake. [9.64]

A few months later, when Gesshō reached Kagoshima as a fugitive from the Bakufu police, Saigō arranged that they would escape at night by boat and end their lives together in the sea. When the boat was about a mile into Kagoshima Bay, the two friends went to the prow. The other men on board supposed that they had gone to admire the magnificent moonlight scenery, but in fact they were exchanging farewells and writing their obligatory death-poems. These preliminaries completed, Saigō and his friend leapt off the gunwale. A contemporary print shows the white-robed priest and his young samurai companion as they are about to hit the water; their grim, determined faces are brightly illuminated by the full moon, while further back in the boat a companion sits playing the flute, serenely unaware of the tragedy that is being enacted a few feet away. Shortly after the loud splash was heard, the crew sighted the two bodies and, having hauled them out of the water, brought them to a but near the shore. The priest did not respond to attempts at artificial respiration; the burly young samurai, however, was still alive, and the little straw-thatched hut, which has been carefully preserved and now stands by a main road opposite the coastal railway line, remains a place of pilgrimage for Saigō’s admirers. The two tanka poems which were found on Gesshō’s body and which, rather incongruously, had been indited on toilet paper, referred to the “cloudless moon of his heart” which would soon sink into the waters of Kagoshima Bay, and ended by affirming his joy at dying for the Emperor (Ōgimi). [9.65]

Saigō’s biographers have suggested various motives for his frantic deed. Nariakira’s recent demise was almost certainly a proximate cause. This was probably combined with a desire to die with his loyalist friend, Gesshō, who was doomed for execution within a matter of days unless he forestalled the authorities by taking his own life. [9.66] According to Uchimura Kanzō, Saigō’s famous Christian admirer, the hero decided to kill himself as a “mark of friendship and hospitality to his friend” (yūjin ni taisuru jōgi to kantai no shirushi), and the act was inspired by his “excessive compassion” (amari tsuyosugiru nasake). Such explanations may all contain an element of truth (though “hospitality” seems a rather feeble motive); but the pent-up fury and violence revealed in Saigō’s attempt at self-destruction must certainly have come from deep wellsprings in his personality that actuated his irrational and erratic behaviour during later crises. [9.67] [9.68]

Long after he had become recognized as the grand hero of the Meiji Restoration, Saigō often harked back to the climactic moment when he had tried to die with his friend and regretted that the attempt had failed. He solemnly celebrated each anniversary of the drowning, and seventeen years after the event addressed this Chinese poem to the spirit of the dead priest: [9.69]

Clasped in each other’s arms we leapt into the abyss of the sea.

Though we both jumped together, Fate foiled my expectations and brought me back alive above the waves [ani hakaramu ya hajō saisei no en] .

Now more than ten years have followed like a trail of dreams,

And I stand here before your grave, separated by death’s great wall,

While my tears still flow in vain. [9.70]

This desperate attempt to die at the age of thirty must have profoundly influenced Saigō’s psychological development and outlook on life. The fact that, however unintentionally, he had outlived the suicide pact, while his friend had drowned, was bound to stimulate the sense of guilt that classically haunts survivors and may have led to subsequent attempts to bring his life to an end in a violent manner. [9.71] The crisis in Kagoshima Bay is undoubtedly connected with those later writings in which Saigō stressed that one must free oneself from all fear of death and be constantly prepared for its advent as an indispensable condition for that selflessness (jiko-fuchūshin-shugi) which is essential for the cultivation of a true heart (shinjō). As he absorbed the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Wang Yang-ming Confucianism, his attitude towards his own death became increasingly mystical, and in one of his last works he stated that he had already died with Gesshō twenty years earlier. [9.72]

Saigō had hardly recovered from the shock of his attempted drowning when the new ruler of Satsuma issued an order for his indefinite banishment to an island some two hundred and fifty miles south of Kagoshima. This was part of a purge which was being directed against anti-Bakufu elements and included a number of Nariakira’s close associates. [9.73] The next five years of Saigō’s life—years during which the Tokugawa regime was hastening towards its final crisis—were spent almost entirely in exile. In 1862 he was pardoned and allowed to return to Kagoshima where he was briefly restored to his old post of birdkeeper. [9.74] But soon by his blunt, undiplomatic ways he managed to irk Lord Hisamitsu (the conservative who had succeeded Nariakira as ruler of the clan) and only six months after his release he was banished once again—this time to a small island further south where the conditions were harsher; later he was moved to a still grimmer islet near Okinawa. [9.75] Traditional accounts all refer to Saigō’s patience and dignity in misfortune. When the ship set sail on a tropical August day to take him to the last island of his exile, he calmly entered the little cage that had been built for him, and when informed by a kindly official that he need not remain in the cage once they were at sea, he is said to have replied, “Thank you, but whatever happens I have to obey the Lord [of Satsuma] . I am a convict, and I must be where a convict should be....” [9.76] During the stormy journey through the East China Sea he composed a poem defying the winds to blow their hardest and the waves to rise like mountains, since he, being dedicated to the Imperial Cause, would always remain imperturbable. He showed the same sangfroid when he reached the bleak island where he was to spend the next several years. [9.77] Far from complaining about his treatment, he used his imprisonment as an exercise in self-discipline and forced himself to sit immobile and bolt upright in his prison cell for hours at a time.

The island of Saigō’s first exile was a centre of the Satsuma sugar industry, and he soon witnessed the sufferings of the slave-workers, who lived in a sort of Nacht und Nebel condition, being subject to fierce punishment for any infraction of the rules. These unfortunates were literally unable to taste the fruit of their own labours; for, with a severity reminiscent of conditions in the gold mines of South Africa, workers who presumed merely to lick the sugar were shackled and punished by flogging or even by execution. Poor harvests were never taken into consideration when it came to assessing taxes. [9.78] The zealous local officials frequently arrested islanders and put them to the torture so that they would reveal whether they had any hidden produce. Some suspects actually tried to kill themselves by biting out their tongues rather than undergo further torment. Horrified by these conditions, Saigō (though himself a convict) remonstrated with the chief inspector, pointing out that such rapacious and pitiless folly was a disgrace to the name of Satsuma, and that, if the officials refused to lower taxes in years of bad harvest, they might as well murder the islanders outright. [9.79] When the inspector, in the usual manner of officials dealing with meddlesome reformers, ordered him to mind his own business, Saigō insisted that matters affecting the honour of the clan were his business and threatened to make a detailed report to Kagoshima. [9.80] As a result of his intervention the treatment of prisoners was somewhat mollified and a number of island-slaves (hisa) were set free.

Apart from his humanitarian activities, Saigō used the years in exile to read voluminously and to further his skill in calligraphy and Chinese poetry. [9.81] Many of his most famous poems were written during this long period of seclusion; these include “New Year’s Day in Exile” (Takkyo toshi wo mukauru) and “Feelings in Prison” (Gokuchū kan ari), in which he points out that, although good fortune may continue to elude him, this will only confirm the sincerity of his intentions. [9.82]

With the permission of the island authorities Saigō used some of his ebullient physical energy to indulge in his favourite sport of sumō wrestling. It was also during this exile that he took the daughter of a humble islander as his mistress, and she soon gave birth to his first son. His new family, however, was not allowed to accompany him in his subsequent exiles. [9.83] After Saigō had been banished for five years, Ōkubo and other friends interceded with the ruler of Satsuma to permit his release. Ōkubo himself (somewhat ironically in view of his later role in Saigō’s career) threatened to commit harakiri unless a full pardon were granted. Lord Hisamitsu signed the order, but he is said to have been so vexed by this evidence of Saigō’s popularity that he gnawed his silver tobacco pipe and left a permanent mark on the stem. [9.84]

Despite the querulous tone of some of the poems from this period, Saigō appears to have come through his long exile in surprisingly good spirits. On one occasion he even declared that he intended to stay in the islands permanently. For all the physical hardships of these years, they may well have been the most restful and spiritually invigorating period in the hero’s turbulent life. Before leaving the island near Okinawa and returning to the hurly-burly of national politics, he wrote a tearful poem to his chief gaoler, thanking him for his kindness and saying that the pain of this parting would remain with him throughout his life. [9.85] Whatever inner effect Saigō’s banishment may have had—and it is surely significant that in subsequent years he periodically retired from public activity in a sort of self-exile—there is no doubt that it helped establish him among dissenting samurai as the great loyalist, the man who had suffered for the Imperial Cause in a way that more practical politicians managed to avoid. In Saigō’s career, as in those of Gandhi, Nehru, Kenyatta, and other national heroes, unjust imprisonment served as invaluable testimony to the fortitude of his character and the sincerity of his beliefs.

The four years that followed Saigō’s return from exile represent the steep upward curve of his parabolic career and correspond to the periods of Yoshi-tsune’s victories over the Tairas and of Masashige’s early battles against the forces of Kamakura. These years culminated in the downfall of the Bakufu and the establishment of a new regime under the nominal authority of Emperor Meiji. In 1864 at the age of thirty-six, Saigō was appointed to be the Satsuma War Secretary as well as the clan’s principal emissary in Kyoto, and thus he became a central figure in the last feverish manoeuvres to topple the Edo regime. Much of his energy was devoted to negotiations with other “outside” clans, notably the militantly anti-Bakufu fief of Chōshū at the extreme west of the main island. Though his first actual military experience was as commander of the Satsuma troops in a successful engagement against the insurgent Chōshū, Saigō was always reluctant to fight this staunchly loyalist clan. He insisted on sparing the lives of the principal captives, a rare act of clemency in Japanese warfare, and finally helped arrange a Satsuma-Chōshū coalition that, with the support of the Tosa domain in Shikoku, succeeded in overthrowing the enfeebled Bakufu. [9.86] It is typical of the ironies that studded Saigō’s career that representatives of these powerful fiefs, whose alliance he had worked so hard to establish, should later have become the very clique that dominated the Meiji government and pursued policies which he detested. Saigō was also engaged in foreign diplomatic negotiations, particularly with England. In 1866 he arranged the reception in Kagoshima of the first British Minister, Sir Harry Parkes, and persuaded him that the future of Japan lay in the hands of an imperial government and that the Bakufu was no longer competent to carry out the treaties with foreign powers. [9.87] Subsequently he met the brilliant young English secretary-interpreter, Ernest Satow, at an inn in Kobe, and politely parried his offers of British aid, which he feared might involve Satsuma in unwelcome obligations. [9.88]

The climax came at the beginning of 1868 in a decisive battle when some four thousand loyalist troops, mainly from Satsuma and Chōshū, engaged a Bakufu army of twenty thousand. Their resounding victory led to the official surrender of Bakufu headquarters in Edo Castle—the famous akewatashi that was pictured in all primary school textbooks before the war as a scene to inspire nationalist fervour in young minds. Saigō followed up these triumphs a few months later by mopping up remaining Bakufu supporters in the north and east.

Traditional panegyrics, apart from glorifying Saigō’s military genius and representing him as the only indispensable figure in the Restoration movement (both rather questionable propositions), stress his magnanimity in victory. [9.89] This admits no cavil. Saigō not only demanded amnesty for his enemies, the defeated Shogun and high Bakufu officials, but took every possible step to spare the innocent population from the type of carnage that had followed similar upheavals in the past. Though large forces took part in the fighting in Edo (almost the same number of men as in the Sino-Japanese War), the actual loss of life was small. Indeed, there can be few violent transformations in history that were accomplished with so little actual bloodshed, and even Saigō’s detractors are bound to admit that he was at least partly responsible for this benign outcome. [9.90]

The most obvious effect of the Restoration was to terminate the military government, which had persisted in one form or another during almost the entire time since Yoritomo’s victory some seven centuries earlier. The insurrection of 1867–68 was the first all-out effort to “restore” the Emperor since the time of Kusunoki Masashige in the fourteenth century. The system of Bakufu rule in the Emperor’s name had been durable and, especially during the Tokugawa centuries, remarkably effective. Simply because we know that the Bakufu did finally collapse in 1868 we must not underestimate its apparent power of survival in the 1850s and ’60s nor the risks incurred by the loyalists who presumed to defy it. What was their official objective? One of the clearest statements is contained in an agreement signed by representatives of the Satsuma and Tosa domains (including Saigō Takamori) in July 1867:

Our purpose] is to restore Imperial Rule and to deal with affairs, taking the situation of the world into consideration, in so reasonable a manner as to leave nothing to be desired by posterity. The main point of the reform is that the powers of administration and judicature shall pass into the hands of the Emperor. Though our country has had an unbroken line of Emperors, it happened a long time ago that, the feudal system once adopted, the reins of government fell into the hands of the Shogunal Government. The presence of the Sovereignty that ought to rule the land has been ignored, a state of affairs which cannot be found in any other country in the world. We must, therefore, reform our political system, restore the reins of government to the Imperial Court, hold a conference of the Daimyos, and in concert with one another work for the purpose of lifting the prestige of the nation among the Powers of the world. Thus we shall be able to establish the fundamental character of our Empire.... [9.91]

The real objective, in fact, was not to restore power to the person of the sovereign (in 1867 Emperor Meiji was a youth of fifteen who was hardly in a position to assert his country’s prestige in the world) or even to the imperial family and Court nobility, but to bring about certain reforms that seemed urgently necessary if Japan was to avoid the fate inflicted by Western powers on India and, more recently, on China. For this purpose actual authority in the new government was not given to the Emperor but assumed largely by a group of young samurai who represented a balance of leadership from four “outside” clans, including Satsuma, and who were determined to carry out policies necessary for Japan’s national survival and emergence as a modern power. In the process they brought about many reforms that were not necessarily part of their original aims. Japan opened its doors to the Western world; the domains into which the country had been divided all disappeared; the warrior class lost its traditional privileges; a predominantly feudal society was largely replaced by industrial capitalism; and a powerful national army was created—an army manned not by samurai but by peasant conscripts and supported by a new system of national taxation. These momentous changes and the fact of popular participation have led many writers to describe the Meiji Restoration as a “revolution.” [9.92] It is largely a question of how we define the term; but, since the Restoration did not fundamentally alter the system of property-holding, we can hardly regard it as revolutionary in the full modern sense of the word. [9.93]

After the loyalist triumphs of 1868 Saigō insisted on returning to his native province, and the next three months were spent in peaceful, semimonastic retreat in the countryside near Kagoshima. His prestige and popularity were now at a high point, not only in Satsuma, but in Edo and Kyoto. In recognition of his services to the Imperial Court he was offered a generous financial reward and, far more important, the First Grade of the Third Court Rank. Saigō startled the government by declining these honours, an act at least as remarkable as if an English general turned down the sovereign’s offer of a country seat and a peerage. In his letter of refusal Saigō implied that it was inappropriate for him to receive a distinction of this kind which was beyond the authority of the clan that he served. With conventional humility he added that, while such ranks were obviously important for courtiers in the capital, they could have no meaning for a rustic boor like himself. Saigō was asked to reconsider, but in the end the government had to accept his refusal—a refusal that redounded to his popularity but hardly endeared him to officialdom in Tokyo. [9.94]

A few years later Ōkubo and other high officials visited Kagoshima in a concerted effort to induce Saigō to join the central government. Saigō’s younger brother, Tsugumichi, who had now become a successful Establishment figure and had recently returned from a mission to Europe, tearfully pleaded with him to accept the offer, and finally he agreed. [9.95] Before leaving Satsuma, he wrote a poem predicting his own sacrificial death. He returned to Tokyo in 1871 and a few months later became a leading member of the government with the post of Counsellor (Sangi), a sort of Minister without Portfolio. [9.96] Real power in the new regime was now held mainly by a small group of able and energetic men belonging to the lower strata of the samurai class from Satsuma and other “outside” clans. [9.97]

For a country where age was traditionally regarded as a criterion of wisdom these leaders were amazingly young, the oldest among them (Saigō Takamori) being only forty-three. In addition to his civilian duties, Saigō exercised supreme military power in the new government: in 1872 he became Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces and in 1873 was appointed to the unique rank of Field Marshal, a rank corresponding to that held by the Duke of Marlborough after his victories. On this auspicious occasion Saigō, as if embarrassed by the plethora of worldly success, stated once again that he knew he was destined to be killed. [9.98]

Towards the end of 1871 some fifty high government officials, including Ōkubo, left Japan for a lengthy tour of Europe and America, the so-called Iwakura Mission. Saigō and two other leaders remained in Tokyo to head an unofficial caretaker government. By this time Saigō’s dissatisfaction with the regime and its leaders had crystallized. The caretaker government had virtually no authority to make important decisions during the absence of the Iwakura Mission. Saigō evidently resented the idea that the politicians travelling to the West were leaving him as a sort of cipher, and when seeing off his colleagues at Yokohama he is said to have remarked, in his typically blunt style, that he wished their boat might sink on the way. [9.99]

The main causes for Saigō’s disaffection with the regime he had helped put in power and for his break with the Meiji government and his final rebellion were of a moral nature. Though an avid reader and student, he never thought of himself as a scholar. He wrote a wealth of poems, essays, and letters, but his only complete book is a posthumous collection of miscellaneous sayings. [9.100] The main intellectual influence in his life was undoubtedly the neo-Confucianism of Wang Yang-ming, which he admired from an early age. [9.101] After Saigō left the clan school and was serving as an assistant clerk, he and some of the other young samurai met regularly to study the writings of Wang Yang-ming and his followers. [9.102] Particularly relevant was Ōshio Heihachirō, the sage-hero of Osaka who had killed himself about a decade earlier; and until the end of his life Saigō invigorated himself by rereading Ōshio’s philosophical lectures. The influence of Wang Yang-ming and of Ōshio pervades Saigō’s own scattered writings. Mishima Yukio stresses the effect of their philosophy on Saigō’s career and suggests that the Absolute Spirit (taikyo) which he envisaged may have been the motive for his rebellion. [9.103]

Like Ōshio, Saigō vigorously indoctrinated his young disciples with the notion that deeds were more important than any amount of knowledge acquired by study or observation, and the word “sincerity” (shisei, makoto) recurs with plangent regularity in his writings.

However seriously systems and measures may be discussed, they cannot be put into practice unless there is the right man to do it. There is no deed without a doer. To have the right man is the greatest blessing. One must aim at being that man. [9.104]

His philosophical poems stress the importance of cultivating a “pure heart”; and in a famous saying he points out that instead of finding fault with others we should forever be looking for flaws in ourselves. “What is achieved by depending on one’s ability,” he writes, “is so uncertain that we cannot regard it with any satisfaction. [9.105] Only sincerity can accomplish an enterprise.” [9.106] To show that mere physical force is useless unless backed by moral power he cites an example from the recent Franco-Prussian War when three hundred thousand French soldiers, who still held a vast supply of provisions, surrendered to the enemy “simply because they had too mercenary a spirit.”

Saigō frequently expressed his disdain for “worldly wisdom” (ningenteki no chie), which is concerned simply with practical achievement; and while true wisdom is likely to produce present misfortunes it assures success in another, more important way: [9.107]

A man of true sincerity will be an example to the world even after his death....When an insincere man is spoken well of, he has, so to speak, got a windfall; but a man of deep sincerity will, even if he is unknown in his lifetime, have a lasting reward: the esteem of posterity. [9.108]

Clearly it was this form of success—a success born of worldly failure—to which Saigō aspired during his life and which he reaped so abundantly after his death.

The greatest of all dangers to sincerity is love of self, and the overriding rule in personal life, family relations, and official dealings must be to slough off one’s natural selfishness. [9.109] One of Saigō’s best-known passages gives his prescription for the national saviour:

He who cares neither about his life, not about his fame, nor about rank or money—such a man is hard to deal with [shimatsu ni komaru] . Yet it is only such a man who will undergo every hardship with his companions in order to carry out great work for the country. [9.110]

And in a late poem, written “to be shown to my pupils,” he returns to the theme of self-sacrifice:

Those things that common men all shun

Are not feared by the hero but held most precious [eiyū kaette

kōshin su] .

When confronted with difficulties, never escape them;

When faced with worldly gain, never pursue it.... [9.111]

He who would conquer himself and attain sincerity must exercise extreme control. The first requisite, according to Saigō, is “self-watchfulness”: “To attain the holy state of sincerity, you must begin with shindoku, which means care of your own conduct or behaviour when alone, out of the sight and hearing of others.” [9.112] Here he was referring to a Confucian precept; but in his efforts to master himself, and in particular to curb his “excessive compassion,” [9.113] Saigō also had recourse to Buddhist discipline, and he took advantage of his periodic retreats from active life to study and practise Zen. [9.114]

Saigō’s main philosophical slogan—the slogan that he indited again and again in his powerful calligraphy, presenting copies to the various private schools that had been established under his aegis—was Confucian through and through. Its four characters, “Revere Heaven, Love Mankind” (Keiten Aijin), occupied the same place in his campaign for righteousness as did “Save the People” (Kyūmin) in that of Ōshio Heihachirō. Here Saigō’s thinking may impress some readers as fuzzy. The Way, he writes, is the way of Heaven and Earth, and it is our duty to follow it with all our efforts. In so doing we should not make man our partner but Heaven, and it must be the object of our life to revere Heaven. [9.115] Yet, since Heaven loves everyone in the world equally, we too must love others as we love ourselves. These are no doubt fine and unexceptionable sentiments, but they are sufficiently vague so that writers like Uchimura and Nitobe were able to associate them with “the law and the prophets” and with the Christian rule to love one’s neighbour as oneself. [9.116]

How were Saigō’s ideas about “loving others” (hito wo aisuru) translated into practice? During much of his life he exhibited to a remarkable degree the “warrior’s compassion” (bushi no nasake), a genuine sympathy with the weak and unfortunate people of the world; and this is one reason for his continued popularity as a national hero, since it showed that he had the human talent, prized in Japan since ancient times, of entering into the feelings of others. [9.117] While serving as a Magistrate’s assistant, Saigō learnt at first hand about the poverty of the toiling masses in Satsuma, who often lived little better than animals; he saw how the situation was exacerbated by grasping officials and tried to alleviate it. [9.118] During his exile he showed a genuine concern for the workers in the sugar plantations, and gave most of his own rice ration to the poverty-stricken inhabitants of the island. [9.119] Later, as a military commander, Saigō did his best to minimize the sufferings of the common people who were caught in the cross-fire of war.

Yet Saigō’s humanitarian sentiments were limited by his social attitudes. For one thing, they were directed almost entirely to the peasantry, and his slogan of Aijin (“Love Mankind”) was really equivalent to “Love the Peasants.” In his view of society the population was divided into two immutable categories: those who worked with their bodies (chikara wo rōsuru mono) and those who used their minds or hearts (kokoro wo rōsuru mono)—that is, the farmers and their samurai masters. Though the new national leaders were increasingly aware that Japan must be industrialized if she was to survive, and though Saigō himself recognized the importance of industry and trade, he continued to regard agriculture as the country’s economic base and the peasantry as its mainstay. It was the duty of the samurai officials to provide benevolent social leadership: they should love and protect the peasants as a lord cherishes his vassals and a father his children. There was, however, no question of changing society so that the peasants might become the equals or partners of the officials and, in the end, class barriers disappear entirely. Saigō’s paternalism was rooted in a traditional Confucian outlook which was essentially the same as that of Ōshio when he spoke of “saving the people.” Later admirers who represented Saigō as a radical reformer or believer in egalitarianism were blinding themselves to the staunchly conservative nature of his social ideas. [9.120]

Beyond his constant protestations about the importance of the peasantry, Saigō generally exemplified the traditional rural ethos of Japan. He loved the land and country life and people who spent their time close to nature; conversely he distrusted and despised cities and all they represented. In a typical poem he complained about life in the capital, where the clamour of the traffic alarms one’s soul (mukon odoroku) and where one’s clothes are soiled by the dust and grime of the streets, and extolled life in the country, which allows one to regain purity and innocence. [9.121]

A major aspect of the rural samurai ethos was an emphasis on frugality and a dislike of luxury and ostentation. The traditional samurai respected thrift, not as a means of economy but as an exercise in abstinence and a sign that his life was devoted to more important values than the acquisition and enjoyment of material commodities. Saigō’s lack of personal greed and acquisitiveness became proverbial; and the contrast between his Spartan approach and the opulent style of many of the Meiji Establishment leaders, who used connexions with business tycoons to indulge their taste for newfangled Western luxuries, was a further reason for his popularity. [9.122] Coming from a strict samurai family, Saigō had been brought up with a seignorial disregard for money, and throughout his career, during a period when finance was becoming more and more important in the country’s life, he remained magnificently uncontaminated. [9.123] His material needs were minimal, and even when he had become a high government functionary in Tokyo he managed to live on fifteen yen a month, a modest sum by any standards. [9.124] For months at a time he did not bother to collect the salary that was due to him as Counsellor of State, and when an anxious official reminded him about this oversight he replied that he still had money from previous payments and needed no more. He loathed the idea of accumulating funds for himself or his family, and whenever he had a surplus he gave it away to friends or to his private Academy in Kagoshima. [9.125]

While his colleagues in the Meiji government were luxuriating in the perquisites that attend political success, Saigō inhabited a humble dwelling for which he paid three yen a month in rent. On one occasion when he heard that his old schoolmate Ōkubo, who was now serving as Minister of Finance, had ordered a splendid jewelled sabre, he managed to obtain the valuable weapon and gave it away to a young student; Saigō’s aim, of course, was to admonish his colleague for unseemly extravagance, but it is doubtful whether Ōkubo appreciated the lesson. [9.126]

He was especially revolted by the intimate relationship that government leaders had formed with the rapidly growing Mitsui and other zaibatsu. When invited to a party given for Prince Iwakura by the famous Chōshū loyalist, Inoue Kaoru, who was serving the Meiji government as Vice-Minister of Finance, he expressed his sentiments with characteristic brusqueness: “Pouring a cup of sake, he offered it to his host, saying loudly: ‘This is for you, Inoue, the bantō [clerk] of Mitsui.’ Inoue seemed not to be offended, but the remark alarmed others....” [9.127]

After reaching the summit of power, Saigō still dressed in simple country clothes, disdaining the frock coats and top hats that were favoured by many of his colleagues. Even when he visited the Imperial Palace he wore the typical Satsuma robe of cotton woven with mottled thread (Satsumagasuri) and encased his huge feet in a pair of sandals or clogs. Once on leaving the Palace grounds in the rain he removed his clogs and walked barefoot; this unprecedented lack of decorum incited the suspicion of a guard, who detained him until Prince Iwakura happened to pass in his carriage and was able to identify the apparent intruder as Field Marshal and Counsellor of State. [9.128]

His taste in food was equally plain. Rather than attend elaborate Western-style banquets or elegant entertainments with geisha, he preferred eating in the company of his secretaries and military retainers, with whom he would share noodles and other simple fare from a large earthenware pot. [9.129] Altogether he eschewed fuss and formality, and in his dealings with servants and other social inferiors he showed none of the haughtiness that was common among his colleagues. “There was an innocent, easygoing quality about him,” wrote one of his close associates, “that reminded one of a child.” Saigō had pride in abundant measure; but it was the inner pride of an idealist. [9.130]

This summary of Saigō’s philosophy and style of life will suggest why, sooner or later, he was bound to fall afoul of the Meiji oligarchy. Much of his opposition to the new regime was nebulous and unformulated, being based more on psychological incompatibility than on objective political issues, but there were also several specific grievances. The most important concerned its treatment of the warriors. During the post-Restoration years the samurai, Japan’s traditional rulers, were systematically stripped of their exclusive rights to office. The stipends on which the rank-and-file samurai had depended were all cancelled by government decrees, and the daimyos received bonds in exchange for the fiefs that they and their ancestors had ruled for centuries. They were not removed from political power, for the new Meiji regime was controlled largely by ex-samurai; but as a class they no longer enjoyed the hereditary right to govern. [9.131] In 1872 a universal military conscription law deprived the samurai of their monopoly of military function, and a few years later, as if to symbolize all these deprivations, the government issued an edict cancelling their age-old privilege of carrying swords. [9.132]

These measures dealt a painful blow to the samurai class and resulted in widespread poverty. The conscription law and the creation of a new national army recruited from the general population robbed the samurai of their justification for special status; and the antisword edict seemed a crowning indignity that emasculated the very “spirit of the warrior” (bushi no tamashii)—evoking, in a far more virulent form, the type of instinctive suspicion and hostility that efforts at gun control have produced among traditionally minded elements in the United States. [9.133] [9.134]

Powerless to stem the wave of the future, the former samurai looked to some powerful figure who might represent their multiple grievances and frustrations, and in many ways Saigō Takamori appeared to answer their needs. Though he had agreed to become a member of the new government, it was clear from his writings and statements that he believed the ideals of the civil war were being vitiated. He was opposed to the excessively rapid changes in Japanese society and was particularly disturbed by the shabby treatment of the warrior class. Suspicious of the new bureaucratic-capitalist structure and of the values it represented, he wanted power to remain in the hands of responsible, patriotic, benevolent warrior-administrators who would rule the country under the Emperor. [9.135] It was for this purpose and not to preside at the official disbandment of the samurai class that he had joined the central government. Edicts like the interdiction against carrying swords and wearing the traditional topknot seemed like a series of gratuitous provocations; and, though Saigō realized that Japan needed an effective standing army to resist pressure from the West, he could not countenance the social implications of the military reforms. For this reason Saigō, although participating in the Ōkubo government, continued to exercise a powerful appeal among disgruntled ex-samurai in Satsuma and elsewhere. [9.136] [9.137]

Apart from his objections to the downgrading of the samurai class, Saigō had grave doubts about the way in which the government was implementing its crucial policies of centralization and Westernization. Concerning the decision to disestablish the fiefs and to replace them by prefectures under the administrations of Governors and other officials directly appointed by the central government (a policy that was put into effect only one month after he became Counsellor of State), Saigō’s feelings were bound to be ambiguous. By temperament he always remained the most provincial of Japan’s national leaders. In his younger days his emotional attachment had, like that of most samurai, been to his clan and daimyo, rather than to the somewhat abstract entity known as Japan or to that remote, shadowy figure, the Emperor, who was its theoretical ruler. [9.138] During the hectic years that led to the Restoration many of the strongest anti-Bakufu elements looked forward to replacing Tokugawa rule with a new form of feudalism that would preserve local autonomy under a federal samurai council, which would be directly responsible to the Emperor, and where all the clans would be represented; and Saigō himself probably envisaged government by some such council of great lords from the clans (in which Satsuma, of course, would play a dominant role) rather than a centralized bureaucracy in Tokyo that would abolish the clans entirely. [9.139]

In the event, Ōkubo and other members of the new oligarchy came to the conclusion that antidomanial policy of centralization must be carried out thoroughly. Realizing that Saigō was the main focus of the widespread samurai opposition and a natural rallying point for any possible uprising, Ōkubo was at pains to convince him that in the national interest it was essential to abolish the domains; and with characteristic political acumen, he used Saigō himself to implement the controversial measures. Since the domain of Satsuma was a hotbed of resistance to the Meiji policy of centralization, it was logical that Saigō, who retained such strong provincial ties, should be induced to take the lead in persuading his clansmen to give up the struggle and bear the unbearable. When he made his triumphal tour of Satsuma in 1872 as a representative of the central government he was therefore trying to reconcile the clan leaders to the loss of their limited autonomy—an autonomy that he himself had favoured only a few years before. The role was incongruous but the mission successful, and when he returned to Tokyo the main territorial centre of opposition had been neutralized. [9.140]

Saigō’s views on Westernization were equally ambiguous, but ultimately contributed to his disaffection with the new regime. During his early years the most urgent question in the country was whether to open Japan to the West and, if so, under what conditions. The failure to solve this problem in any satisfactory fashion was the most immediate reason for the downfall of the Tokugawa regime. As one of the leading members of the anti-Bakufu movement, Saigō started his career as a convinced xenophobe, who rarely missed an opportunity to chide the government for its weak-kneed attitude to “foreign barbarians.” Observing the depredations of Western imperialist nations, he impugned their claim to be the champions of civilization:

Civilization is the upholding of justice; it has nothing to do with outward grandeur, palatial magnificence or gorgeous clothing or general ostentation of superficial appearances.... Once I got into an argument with a man. He refuted my argument that the Westerners were uncivilized [and] ... asked me to give him reasons for my belief. I explained to him that truly civilized countries would have led the uncivilized ones to enlightenment by adopting a policy of benevolent and well-meant teaching, but that, far from this being the case, they have been barbarous enough to benefit themselves by conquering weaker countries by force of arms and treating them with a ruthlessness which becomes the more intense the greater the ignorance of the conquered. [9.141]

Ironically enough, it was the punitive bombardment of Saigō’s home town by the English navy in 1863 that convinced him to change his position. [9.142] [9.143] For all his idealism and adherence to traditional ways, he was enough of a pragmatist to know that there were times when Japan must use Western methods to combat the West. Thus he grudgingly accepted the idea that, if his country was to survive the foreign onslaughts, it would be obliged to adopt modern industrial technology. The outmoded Bakufu regime, which was obviously unable to deal with the challenge, must be swept away in order that the necessary changes might be implemented under the aegis of samurai from Satsuma and other loyalist clans.

And so it happened. The new imperial government took over the necessary technology with a speed and ruthless efficiency reminiscent of Japan’s “miraculous” economic resurgence in the 1950s and 1960s. For Saigō and many fellow samurai, however, the process of Westernization was too rapid and indiscriminate. Though fully recognizing the need for foreign techniques, Saigō remained resolutely Japanese, and in the context of this quickly changing period he came to seem old-fashioned to the point of eccentricity.

Of the dozen leading figures in the Meiji government, Saigō was one of the only two who neither visited the West nor evinced any interest in doing so; indeed, apart from his exile, he never once left the main islands. Until the end of his life, Saigō’s cultural orientation was totally Asian. He doggedly resisted Western innovations unless they were essential for the nation’s survival. Not only were such innovations connected with the commercial, urban values that he conspued, but they involved an undignified aping of foreigners and, above all, a corruption of the Japanese spirit. His growing distrust of what he regarded as the government’s surrender to foreign influences is summarized in his “posthumous words”:

As to adopting the system of every other country to improve our own way of life, it is necessary first to base our country on a firm foundation, develop public morals and after that consider the merits of foreign countries. If, on the other hand, we blindly follow the foreign, our national policy will decline and our public morals decay beyond rescue—and in the end we shall be under their control....

To develop human understanding is to open the heart to patriotism, loyalty and filial piety. When the way of serving one’s country and working for one’s own family is clearly understood, then from this all kinds of enterprise are developed accordingly. For the purpose of developing human intercourse, a telegraph service is established, a railway is laid and a steam engine is constructed, things startling enough to create a sensation. But if the people, without asking themselves why a telegraph service or a railway service is indispensable, instead squander national funds by indulging in luxury, by imitating European styles from building a house to selecting toys without considering their merits and demerits, merely envying the prosperity of foreign countries, then surely will come a decline in national power, a frivolity in public feeling and at last the inevitable bankruptcy of Japan. [9.144]

His doubts about excessive Westernization were related to his ire at the mercenary politicians who, as he believed, were betraying the cause for which so many brave men had sacrificed themselves. On one occasion he declared with tears in his eyes (the Western platitude according to which the Japanese never show their emotions is particularly untrue in the case of Saigō) that “[the struggle against the Bakufu] seems to have been fought in the selfish interests of government officials, a thing which will undermine our dignity not only in the presence of the people but also of the departed spirits of those who lost their lives in the war.” [9.145]

With his traditional samurai scorn for finance, Saigō loathed the new emphasis on commerce and other forms of business. Above all he was incensed by the corruption and moral degeneracy, which he regarded as an inevitable result of the close ties between government officials and businessmen, and he attacked the “meeting-place of robbers” (as he dubbed the Meiji regime) with all the moral fury that Ōshio Heihachirō had directed against the municipal administration in Osaka forty years earlier. [9.146] In 1870 a patriotic samurai from Satsuma committed harakiri in front of the National Council Building as a protest against the corruption of the central government, having publicly posted a letter of remonstrance with ten points that included “Evil practices which prevailed in the Tokugawa Government remain unchanged in the new Government, discriminating right from wrong not in accordance with reason and justice but with personal feelings and interests” and “Sensual pleasures are thought much of, while a sense of duty is ignored.” [9.147] Saigō, much moved by this “sincere” deed of his fellow clansman, wrote an epitaph which started in typical Confucian style with the words,

Many of the Government officials, addicted to dissipation and debauchery, are living in such extravagance that they fall into error and public opinion is in turmoil. [9.148]

Saigō’s suspicion of bureaucrats in the central government—a suspicion that probably had its origins in his youthful resentment against grasping local officials in Satsuma—grew stronger with the years, and when he referred to “that pack of wild beasts called human beings,” he was thinking primarily of those ambitious civil servants and politicians who (in his view) had unjustly gained control of the Meiji government. [9.149] In a long letter to some northern clansmen he compared the present government to a wheel that had become stuck with rust. It is not enough to oil the wheel; first it must be hit with an iron hammer to start it moving—and Saigō made it clear that when the time came he would be ready to apply the blow. Certainly his own career was entirely untainted, and in death he became a symbol of that human purity for which people looked in vain among their actual leaders. [9.150]

Saigō’s ideas contain many ambivalences, of which he himself was no doubt unconscious. Though emotionally attached to his clan and to its tradition of autonomy, he was adamant in his insistence that Satsuma must accept the new policy of centralization. Though a firm believer in the old type of military forces that were based on domanial samurai armed with traditional weapons, he resolutely modernized the army in Satsuma and elsewhere so that Japan need not kowtow to the foreigner. Though convinced that agriculture was the only worthy foundation of the national economy, he came to support the official policy of “enriching the country and strengthening the army” (fukoku kyōhei), which depended on rapid industrial development. Above all, this ardent loyalist, who devoted the first part of his career to “restoring” the Emperor, became the outstanding critic of the new imperial government and eventually led the greatest rebellion against it. One of Saigō’s most eminent admirers described him as “a stupid hero” (muchi no eiyū), and this comment is no doubt justified if logic, foresight, and sensible planning are the criteria of wisdom. [9.151] But Saigō, like all Japan’s failed heroes, lived in a different emotional climate, where sincerity takes precedence over logical consistency, and where men are guided by intelligence of another kind. [9.152]

The year 1873 was a second turning point in Saigō’s life. While the other leaders of the government were still abroad with the Iwakura Mission, relations with the kingdom of Korea began to deteriorate rapidly. The Koreans issued an edict forbidding trade with Japan, and compounded the insult by refusing to accept the new forms of address contained in official Japanese documents. Saigō and certain other members of the caretaker government chose to regard this as an intolerable provocation that demanded forceful action. [9.153] The militants favoured immediate invasion of the peninsula, but Saigō insisted that first a high ranking envoy be sent from Japan to bring the recalcitrant Koreans to heel, and that only if this miscarried should there be an invasion. In fact, he was well aware that the diplomatic approach would fail and that an invasion was therefore inevitable. The army high command was opposed to attacking Korea for the present; but this did not deter Saigō since, according to his plan, the invading force would comprise the Imperial Guards and battalions of loyal samurai from Satsuma. Nor did the choice of an envoy present any difficulty, for this was the sacrificial role that he had ascribed to himself. Not only would he cross the Japan Sea to remonstrate with the Korean government but he was determined to undertake this dangerous mission without a single soldier to escort him. [9.154]

Historians have given many reasons to explain why Saigō should have favoured a tough policy towards Korea. It is frequently suggested that he regarded an invasion of Korea as a last resource for the dispossessed and frustrated military class. [9.155] Fighting on the continent would turn the energies of the unemployed samurai in Satsuma and other domains away from intractable domestic issues and provide them with honourable employment and a new raison d’être. In addition a foreign war would help unify the country, stop the moral decline as represented by rampant materialism and loss of traditional values, and lead to the fundamental reforms that the present government was unable or unwilling to put into effect. [9.156]

Saigō has also been represented as an ultra-patriot who, chagrined by the failure of the Iwakura Mission to revise the unequal treaties with the Western powers, was determined to assert Japan’s national pride by a glorious victory. [9.157] His bellicose attitude in 1873 was based (according to this argument) on his belief that the time had come for the military class to show its mettle and to chastise the insolent peninsulars by direct action. In addition an expansionist Japanese policy would help curb the steady encroachment of the Western powers on the Asian continent. [9.158] In fact, though many of Saigō’s later admirers were out-and-out jingoists, there is not the slightest evidence in his writings or statements that he himself had any such inclination. On at least two earlier occasions he had resolutely opposed plans to invade Korea; and, if he now favoured a strong policy, it was not from any chauvinist tendencies but from concern with the deteriorating domestic situation. In addition—and this point has been generally overlooked—there appears to have been a strong psychological motive: his wish to compass in Korea the death he had missed in the waters of Kagoshima Bay fifteen years earlier.

Saigō’s writings make it clear that, rightly or wrongly, he was convinced the envoy to Korea would be killed. Thus in July 1873 he ended a letter to one of his influential colleagues whom he had asked to intercede on behalf of his proposed mission:

If it is decided to send an envoy officially, I feel sure that he will be murdered. I therefore beseech you to send me. I cannot claim to make as splendid an envoy as [the Prime Minister] , but if it is a question of dying, that, I assure you, I am prepared to do. [9.159]

Quite apart from any practical value the proposed mission may have had, it is clear that Saigō aspired to a martyr’s death. As he wrote in one of his early poems,

I am a boat cast on the rough water [suteobune]

For my country’s sake.

If the winds blow, let them blow!

If the waves rise, let them rise! [9.160]

Once again Saigō’s attempt was foiled. The Korean issue threatened a major governmental crisis, and the members of the Iwakura Mission were urgently summoned back from Europe. [9.161] They turned out to be unanimous in rejecting Saigō’s policy, the most vehement opposition coming from his old friend Ōkubo. He and his colleagues who had recently observed the technological strength of the Western powers at first hand were now thoroughly convinced that Japan must press ahead with the policy of “enriching the country and strengthening the army” before she could possibly risk a foreign war. [9.162] It was not that the Meiji leaders opposed aggression in principle—twenty years later, when Japan was properly armed, they and their successors in the oligarchy were only too ready to strike out—but in 1873 they knew that their country was not yet equipped for a major military operation of this kind. With characteristic sagacity Ōkubo argued that an invasion would be premature, since even a successful occupation of the peninsula would not make up for the vast expense of the venture or for the risks that Japan would incur vis-à-vis Russia and the other great powers. Prince Iwakura summed up the opposition views in a judicious letter to the Emperor which stressed that the time was not ripe for an invasion since the army was unprepared and the most urgent need was to consolidate the domestic reforms. [9.163]

These cool-headed arguments made no impression upon Saigō, whose determination to go to Korea and “meet his death situation” (shisho wo uru) had now become obsessive. [9.164] In August, a few weeks before Prince Iwakura’s return from Russia, Saigō’s efforts succeeded: an Assembly of Counsellors decided that he should shortly proceed to Korea with the title of Ambassador. On hearing the news he was transported with joy and wrote to a colleague that the decision had instantly cured him of the painful illness from which he had been suffering. [9.165]

Though the plan to send Saigō to Korea had been approved by the young Emperor, the government made no official announcement until Prince Iwakura’s return. Meanwhile Ōkubo and the other members of the anti-Saigō faction, who were exerting all their political expertise to reverse the decisions of the caretaker government, succeeded in delaying the mission. The long-smouldering antagonism between Saigō and Ōkubo had now burst into flames, and years of accumulated resentment became focused on the Korean issue. Ōkubo openly berated his former friend for having decided a major matter of foreign policy during the absence of the Iwakura Mission; Saigō defended himself by replying that certain urgent issues brooked no delay; and in his fury he went so far as to call Ōkubo a coward, the supreme insult in the samurai vocabulary. After the return of Prince Iwakura the balance of power swung decisively in favour of Ōkubo. [9.166] Realizing that he was being outmanoeuvred, Saigō sent the Prime Minister a frantic letter, which ended with the following ultimatum:

As for my dispatch as an envoy, which was already approved by you, if such treachery should ensue as to cause the instructions already issued to be altered, it would be tantamount to making light of an Imperial Command. Though I am given to understand that you are sure to remain firm in your attitude concerning the matter, I am obliged to mention my fear in order to call your attention to my humble request, as I hear such a rumour is current in some quarters. It is with great awe that I should say such rude things beforehand, but if the decision should be vetoed, I should profoundly regret it and should have no alternative but to apologize to the country for my failure to do my duty, at the cost of my life. Such being the case, I beg you to understand me. [9.167]

At this crucial moment the Prime Minister resigned on the grounds of ill health and was succeeded by Prince Iwakura, a resolute opponent of Saigō’s policy. Whether or not this was (as some of Saigō’s devotees suggest) part of a master plan by Ōkubo, it promptly clinched the matter: on 14th October the decision to despatch an envoy to Korea was rescinded.

Ōkubo had succeeded to perfection and Saigō had suffered an unmitigated political defeat. Ten days later he gave up all his official posts, except that of army general, and returned to Kagoshima in dudgeon, informing the Emperor that he would never resume public service. As a face-saver the government “allowed” Saigō to resign on the grounds of ill health. [9.168]

Saigō’s impetuous departure from Tokyo not only marked the end of his career in the government but signified a final break with the Meiji oligarchs, whom he now regarded as hopelessly corrupt and misguided and with whom he could no longer possibly cooperate in good conscience. Following Saigō’s resignation all his main supporters left the government. The outcome of the Korean crisis was therefore a total victory for the Ōkubo faction and for the principle of central bureaucratic power that it represented. In a manner typical for the Japanese failed hero, Saigō’s long struggle in the corridors of power had produced the opposite effect of what he had intended. Such an outcome was no doubt inevitable considering Saigō’s personality and ideas. [9.169] In the political atmosphere of the 1870s this hero of the Restoration had become an anachronistic misfit, and if the Korean crisis had not arisen some other issue would soon have impelled him to break with the regime in Tokyo.

In psychological terms Saigō’s return to a simple, bucolic existence in Satsu­ma marked one of his periodic retreats from the turmoil of public life and from the harsh modern world of ambitious men, political chicanery, and noisome city streets. Back in his birthplace of Kagoshima, he shed all the trappings of worldly success and resumed the existence of a gentleman farmer, working in the fields and tramping through the countryside. Saigō’s poems written at this time express his joy at returning to country life. The following was composed shortly after his retirement:

... Since ancient times misfortune has been the usual price

of worldly fame.

Far better then to trudge home through the woods, carrying a

spade upon my shoulder. [9.170]

A few months later and in a similar vein he wrote:

I have shaken off the dust of the world,

I have taken leave of rank and fame.

Now I can give myself wholeheartedly to joy in Nature,

The great creator [of all things] . [9.171]

For all his apparent conviviality there was a solitary streak in Saigō’s nature, and his recent embroilment with the politicians of Tokyo aggravated this to the point of misanthropy. After the babble of the city he relished nature’s silence:

Here deep in the hills near the ancient pond it is, quieter than in

the middle of the night.

Instead of listening to people’s voices, I gaze towards the sky. [9.172]

He spent more and more time with his dogs, happily sharing his loneliness with these guileless, affectionate creatures. [9.173] In a country where politicians were (and are) none too squeamish about receiving expensive presents Saigō had made a point of refusing all douceurs except dogs. In his house he kept a large box with pictures and lithographs of these animals whom he chose as his lifelong companions. There is no poem from this period that mentions his family, but there are many references to his canine friends. Here is one of his famous Chinese verses:

Through these steep hills that soar towards the clouds

I wander with my dogs,

Whose lusty barking echoes now from peak to peak.

Look, I pray you, at the craggy hearts of men,

Harder to follow than these crooked mountain paths! [9.174]

One of Saigō’s companions describes a day spent walking with him and his dogs across the fields and hills near Kagoshima. In the evening they stop at a farmer’s cottage; after his bath Saigō settles down comfortably and remarks that his present feeling of serenity must be close to that of a sage (seijin). [9.175]

Saigō’s new life in Kagoshima was not devoted exclusively to rustic pleasures. He also organized a number of independent private schools, where he trained Satsuma boys in the military arts, agriculture, and moral principles. For this purpose he used the government stipends that he and his associates had accumulated and also the annuity he still received for past services. The schools varied in size and nature, with the total number of pupils eventually reaching several thousand. Some concentrated on artillery and military techniques; others were more in the nature of rural communes whose members (often assisted by Saigō himself) did farm work during the day and spent their evenings reading or listening to lectures.

At one point the Ōkubo regime, possibly hoping to keep their unpredictable ex-colleague under closer watch, invited him back to Tokyo and suggested that he might make an official visit to Europe. Saigō, still thoroughly disgusted with the ruling oligarchy, declined the offer, preferring to continue a simple life in Satsuma and to prepare his young men for future developments. When a special envoy from Prince Sanjō arrived in Kagoshima to request that Saigō return and work with the central government, he is said to have sent the brusque message, “You are really a fool, aren’t you, Prince Sanjō?” The envoy remonstrated with Saigō, pointing out that he could not possibly deliver such a disrespectful answer to his master, but Saigō insisted that it was his function to transmit the message as given.

During the years of Saigō’s retirement in Satsuma there was a series of violent outbreaks in different parts of the country, many of them organized by groups of ex-samurai who had been driven to fury by governmental measures such as the antisword edict and the commutation of stipends. The first major rising, which took place in 1874 in the northern Kyushu province of Saga, was directed specifically against the government’s “weak” policy towards Korea, the leader being Etō Shimpei, a fiery young official who had resigned at the same time as Saigō. A force of some two thousand samurai rebels succeeded in capturing the former domanial capital, but were rapidly suppressed by the government’s firm military action. Etō himself fled to Kagoshima, hoping that Saigō would help him resume the revolt. Though their views were similar in many ways, Saigō tried to dissuade Etō from continuing. Shortly afterwards the Saga leader was captured by government forces and, at the special insistence of Ōkubo, was condemned to the ignominious punishment of being decapitated and having his head publicly exposed on a pillory as a deterrent to other potential rebels. [9.176]

This gruesome warning had little effect. A couple of years later one of the most dramatic rebellions occurred in the castle town of Kumamoto in central Kyushu, where about two hundred former samurai, enraged by the policy of abolishing Japanese customs and encouraging foreign ideas at the expense of the native Shinto religion, formed a League of the Divine Wind and attacked the imperial garrison, killing the commander and many of his men. They were quickly crushed by an imperial force of some two thousand, and almost every survivor committed harakiri rather than risk the indignity of capture. [9.177] In conjunction with the uprising by the League of the Divine Wind a similar revolt took place in the old Chōshū castle town of Hagi in the western part of the main island. This effort had even less success: the leader (also a former high official) was seized and executed, and most of his main followers committed suicide.

This series of samurai uprisings, combined with numerous peasant revolts, alarmed the central government and made them keep a close watch on Kagoshima, which they feared might become the centre of a major rebellion. [9.178] They had good reason for suspicion. At the time of the uprising in Hagi some of Saigō’s militant supporters tried to persuade him that this was the ideal time to strike against the government. Indignantly he turned down the suggestion as being foolish and irresponsible, but the atmosphere in Kagoshima was obviously becoming explosive. [9.179]

At this stage the Tokyo government, on the urging of Ōkubo and General Yamagata, sent police spies to Kagoshima to observe whether Saigō’s followers were in fact fomenting an armed uprising. Members of the Academy soon discovered the identity of the agents and managed to elicit the sensational information (which may well have been correct) that the central authorities intended not only to dissolve the Academy but to assassinate Saigō and his main advisers. [9.180] Appalled by this discovery, some of the pupils started keeping watch over their master. For a time Saigō was unaware of this, but before long he realized that he was being guarded. The following incident has a prophetic ring:

One day . . . the pupils [who were keeping watch over their master] went to Saigō’s lodging, where one of them, playing with a double-barrelled gun, carelessly pulled the trigger, thinking it unloaded, when, all of a sudden, the gun went off and a shot which had remained in the barrel pierced the ceiling. The frightened pupil told his master that he wanted to atone for his fault by committing harakiri. Saigō roared with laughter saying that he would find cutting his belly a most painful process. [9.181]

Later Saigō informed his pupils, who had decided to execute the government spies, that he did not mind in the slightest if he himself was assassinated and that it was “meaningless to kill the policemen from Tokyo,” since the real culprits were the leaders of the central government. As tension mounted among Saigō’s followers, the government decided (in January 1877) to forestall trouble by chartering a ship of the Mitsubishi Company to transport arms and ammunitions from Kagoshima under cover of darkness. [9.182] This crucial decision, far from solving any difficulties, triggered the disaster. While Saigō was away on a hunting expedition with his dogs, the pupils in his Academy got wind of the plan. The news confirmed their worst fears about the government’s intentions, and in a wild fury a group of young hotheads attacked imperial arsenals in the suburbs of Kagoshima and removed the gunpowder and other supplies. This was an open act of rebellion, and now there could be no turning back.

When Saigō was told what had happened, he reacted with the laconic exclamation, Shimatta, which means something like “That does it!” or “Damnation!” He instantly returned to Kagoshima for a meeting with representatives from the Academy. After listening to their report in silence, he suddenly exploded with a roar of fury. Fifty years later Saigō’s son, who was seventeen years old at the time, recalled that he had never in his life heard anyone shout so loudly as his father did on that day when he berated the students for their irresponsibility and bellowed at them, “What a monstrous thing you have done!” [9.183] Once his first anger had abated, however, he reconciled himself to the inevitable and declared to his lieutenants that they should proceed with the necessary military operations, since he was now prepared to offer his life for them. It is as if he had realized that once again he was being given the opportunity to compass a noble death. [9.184]

Saigō was now the leader of a major rebellion whose outbreak he had profoundly influenced though never actually condoned. He knew that the final prospects were hopeless; but once the die was cast he threw himself into the enterprise with characteristic verve, no doubt welcoming the opportunity for an open military confrontation with Ōkubo, Iwakura, and the other politicians who had thwarted him for so long. [9.185] At no time did he regard himself as a rebel against Emperor Meiji; rather, like the ultra-rightist rebels in the 1930s, he was a loyal subject who was trying to save his master from “evil counsellors.” In a letter to Prince Arisugawa he pointed out that His Majesty must be protected from the ruling politicians, whom he described as the “great criminals of the universe.” [9.186]

Though relieved that things had finally come to a head, Ōkubo and his government knew that they now faced their most dangerous challenge since the Meiji Restoration. [9.187] They reacted by stripping their former colleague of all his military ranks and other remaining honours, and declaring him to be an enemy of the Court. Emperor Meiji, who was on a visit to Kyoto when the fateful news came, issued a rescript ordering that the rebellion be crushed promptly. Prince Arisugawa and General Yamagata were appointed to lead the imperial forces, and they immediately proceeded to headquarters in northern Kyushu. There is a typical irony in the fact that the army which now had the duty to crush Saigō, the former loyalist hero, should be commanded by a Prince who only ten years earlier had fought by his side in the campaign against the Tokugawa Bakufu.

The government, which had obviously been prepared for the military crisis, promptly mobilized an army of some forty thousand men, which was later increased to sixty thousand. This was backed by the national police force, the Imperial Guards (formerly under the direct command of Saigō himself), and a naval force consisting of eleven warships. About eighty percent of the army consisted of peasant conscripts, who had been organized by General Yamagata after the passing of the national conscription law five years earlier. Saigō and his generals made the great mistake of underestimating these peasant conscripts, whom they regarded as incapable of standing up in battle against professional samurai with centuries of military tradition. The rebel army, despite its initially high morale and the advantage of fighting near home territory, was always far inferior in numbers and at its very height did not exceed twenty-five thousand men; in addition it was handicapped by an immense discrepancy in ammunitions, money, and supplies. Though at first the outcome may have seemed in doubt, the sheer physical power of the imperial forces was bound to tell.

Saigō started his operations with a major strategic blunder. This was the decision to attack the town of Kumamoto, a key point in central Kyushu, and to capture the castle before the main government forces had time to arrive from the main island. On 17th February he and his men marched out of Kagoshima in a heavy snowstorm. In Japan snow is symbolically associated with pure, heroic enterprises (the “forty-seven rōnin” carried out their climactic vendetta in a snowstorm, and in more recent times the mutiny of the young officers in February 1936 was heralded by a heavy fall of snow), and the fact that the Sa­tsuma army set forth under a snowy sky must have seemed a sort of heavenly confirmation that their cause was just. The banner carried by the pupils from his Academy was inscribed with the proud device, “Respect Virtue! Reform the Government!” As Saigō advanced the hundred miles north to Kumamoto, disaffected samurai from various parts of Kyushu flocked to his side, and he was also joined by supporters from many distant regions in Japan. [9.188]

Kumamoto Castle, the object of their initial assault, had been built in the early part of the seventeenth century and ranked as one of the three mightiest fortresses in Japan. It was a sturdy edifice, solemnly dominating the town and its environs. The design of the castle and the steep slope on which it stood made it ideal for repelling invaders. When first invested by Saigō’s army, it was guarded by some four thousand men of the local garrison, who managed to hold out against wave after wave of frantic attack. “Arrow letters,” of the type used two and a half centuries earlier at the time of the Shimabara Rebellion, were fired into the castle urging the defenders to surrender, since they were overwhelmingly outnumbered, but the imperial troops were determined to resist.

Finally the main government forces reached Kumamoto. This was the turning point. The siege of the castle was raised, and after twenty days of bitter fighting, during which Saigō lost many of his best officers, the Satsuma army was obliged to withdraw from Kumamoto Castle and retreat to the south. [9.189] The costly, drawn-out siege had been disastrous for the rebels and deprived Saigō of the remotest possibility of success. [9.190]

By concentrating all his strength on the assault against Kumamoto, Saigō had left his home base of Kagoshima undefended. This was another serious miscalculation, for in due course the town was attacked by imperial troops and warships, and fell into the government’s hands. The Satsuma forces continued to fight fiercely after their withdrawal from Kumamoto, moving south to Kobayashi and up the eastern coast of Kyushu, and there was a series of sanguinary engagements, but the government’s overwhelming superiority in manpower, weapons, and transport was now obvious. Saigō’s remaining troops were soon surrounded at Nabeoka. With a small contingent of followers he managed to break through the encircling lines, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy. On 1st September he and his men forced their way back into the town of Kagoshima, where they were welcomed by a scared and somewhat bewildered population. [9.191]

Saigō’s army had now dwindled to a pathetic band of a few hundred men, of whom only about a third were properly armed. As in most civil wars, the casualties had been terrible on both sides. In his seven-month struggle against the Imperial Army, Saigō had lost approximately half his men, including almost every pupil from his Academy. The government’s rate of casualties was about twenty-five percent, including sixty-three hundred killed and ninety-five hundred wounded. Altogether some thirty thousand men had fallen as a result of the rebellion.

Though Saigō and the remnants of his force had finally succeeded in returning to Kagoshima, their material situation could hardly have been worse. They were devoid of munitions and supplies, and thirty thousand government troops surrounded the town. Ineluctably the trap began to close. After the siege had continued for a couple of weeks, Saigō moved his headquarters to a little cave behind Shiroyama, a hill in the north of the town. From here he and his men could enjoy the resplendent view of Kagoshima Bay and its famous volcanic island of Sakurajima. With the imperial forces poised for the coup de grace, Saigō and his closest followers spent their last five days in the cave preparing for their end. After all the exhaustion and disappointments of the previous months, this was a serene period for Saigō Takamori. He appears to have been in high spirits, content no doubt in the knowledge that the death which had eluded him so often was now imminent; and he spent much of his time playing go, exchanging poems, and joking with his companions.

On the last day, 23rd September, a messenger arrived in the cave with a missive from Yamagata, the commanding general of the imperial forces and Saigō’s former colleague in Tokyo. This moving and intensely Japanese document used to be quoted in school textbooks, both for its fine prose style and as an example of “sincerity.” The letter starts by addressing the rebel leader with the term kun, a form used only between close friends: “Yamagata Aritomo, your intimate friend, has the honour of writing to you, Saigō Takamori Kun.” [9.192] The burden of Yamagata’s message was to stress his understanding of Saigō’s position, to recall the futility of the drawn-out struggle, and (though the shameful word “surrender” is never actually used) to suggest that he prevent further needless carnage by ending his resistance forthwith:

... How worthy of compassion your position is! I grieve over your misfortune all the more intensely because I have a sympathetic understanding of you....

Several months have already passed since hostilities began. There have been many hundred casualties every day. Kinsmen are killing one another. Friends are fighting against one another. Never has there been fought a more bloody internecine war that is against all humanity. And no soldier on either side has any grudge against the other. His Majesty’s soldiers say that they are fighting in order to fulfill their military duties, while your Satsuma men are, in their own words, fighting for the sake of Saigō....

But it is evident that the Satsuma men cannot hope to accomplish their purpose, for almost all the bravest of your officers have been killed or wounded....I earnestly entreat you to make the best of the sad situation yourself as early as you can, so as, on the one hand, to prove that the present disturbance is not of your original intention and, on the other, to see to it that you may put an end to the casualties on both sides immediately. If you can successfully work out remedial measures, hostilities will soon come to an end.

The letter closes with a typically Japanese appeal for reciprocal understanding: “I shall be very happy if you would enter a little into my feelings. I have written this, repressing my tears, though writing cannot express all that is in my mind.” It is doubtful whether General Yamagata, knowing his old colleague as he did, expected his letter to have the slightest practical effect. The drama had to be played to its emotional conclusion. Saigō, having read the long document in silence, informed the messenger that he would send no reply.

There was a bright moon on the night of the twenty-third. Saigō’s companions took advantage of its light to make music on the Satsuma lute, perform the kenbu (an ancient sword dance), and compose some final poetry. Typical of their verses, which have all, of course, been carefully preserved, are the two following:

If I were a drop of dew, I could take shelter on a leaftip,

But, being a man, I have no place in this whole world

[waga mi no okidokoro nashi] .

And, in a more patriotic vein:

Having fought in the Emperor’s cause,

[I know my end is near.]

What joy to die like the tinted leaves that fall in Tatsuta

Before they have been spoiled by autumn rains! [9.193]

Finally Saigō exchanged farewell cups of sake with his chief officers and other followers.

The general attack by government forces started at four o’clock on the morning of the twenty-fourth. Under heavy fire from all sides, Saigō and his companions began descending Shiroyama. Before long Saigō was hit in the groin by a stray bullet and could walk no further. Beppu Shinsuke, one of his most devoted retainers, had the honour of lifting his master’s weighty bulk onto his shoulders, and carrying him down the hill. [9.194] When they stopped for a rest outside the gate of a Shimazu mansion, Saigō uttered his last words, “My dear Shinsuke, I think this place will do.” He then bowed in the direction of the Imperial Palace and cut open his stomach, whereupon Beppu, who was standing behind him, drew out his sword and slashed off his head with one clean stroke. [9.195] The rest of the little band continued down the path. Most of them were killed, but a few managed to reach the bottom. Among them was Beppu, who, having cried out in a loud voice that their master was dead and that the time had now come for those who wished to die with him, rushed towards the enemy’s line and was mown down by rifle fire.

The one-sided engagement was over by nine o’clock in the morning. Government soldiers soon discovered Saigō’s body, but his head was nowhere to be found. Since the identification of the enemy general’s head had a traditional importance in Japanese battles, there was a careful search and eventually it was dug up in the place where Beppu had ordered that it be buried after the decapitation. [9.196] The remains of the rebel leader were treated with unusual deference. One of the government generals roared out an order to his troops that no disrespect must be shown to Saigō’s body, and this was scrupulously obeyed. [9.197] The large head was washed clean in pure water from a spring and brought to the commander, General Yamagata, for his inspection. Holding the enemy’s head in his hands and bowing respectfully, Yamagata murmured, “Ah what a gentle look you have upon your face!” [9.198] It is said that the soldiers who had been posted in the place from where the fatal shot was fired went into mourning and that they all wept profusely when the time came for Saigō’s burial.

The famous Saigō Cemetery (Nanshū Bochi) in Kagoshima, one of the most poignant necropoles in the world, was completed long before the official rehabilitation of the rebel leader. Seven hundred and forty-nine tombstones of many sizes and shapes are clustered about the plain, oblong monuments erected in Saigō’s honour shortly after his death. The remains of two thousand and twenty-three of his followers are buried with him. Among the names commemorated on the stones, the visitor can read those of Beppu Shinsuke and Saigō’s brother, Kōhei; of men who had journeyed all the way from distant provinces in the northeast to join his campaign; and of his two youngest adherents, both thirteen years old when they were killed in the rebellion.

The government had won a total victory: almost every single rebel was killed or committed suicide, and after the fighting many others were imprisoned and executed. A leading article published in a Japanese newspaper one week after the fall of Shiroyama starts with the following paean:

Saigō Takamori is dead, and the war in the southwest is ended. The time for the return of the soldiers with songs of triumph has come. The clouds of trouble that have so long hung over the west have all been dispelled by the wise and energetic measures of the government and the courage and zeal of the army. [9.199]

Later the article stresses the futility of the entire rebellion: “... the only consequence... has been a vast destruction of life and property and large expenditures of money on both sides. Excepting these sad ends, nothing has been attained.”

In fact Saigō’s effort had many significant consequences—all of them diametrically opposed to what he had intended. For one thing it made rebellion against the ruling oligarchy virtually impossible. In future no group opposing the Meiji government could resort to arms in the name of the Emperor or of traditional values. “If, hereafter, new demonstrations against the supreme authority are attempted,” writes a contemporary Japanese observer, “they must be started upon other grounds, for this old spirit of the rule of the sword over constitutions and laws must now be regarded as defunct.” Subsequent confrontation took the form of individual action, mainly the assassination of “iniquitous politicians,” or of efforts to organize opposition political parties on a Western model, which Saigō would certainly have disliked. [9.200] [9.201]

The Satsuma coup was, in fact, the last organized attempt until the 1930s to oppose the government by force. One reason was that the struggle of 1877 had demonstrated the strength of a conscript army. In battle after battle the new imperial force, manned largely by peasants, had defeated an elite army of gentleman-warriors; and their victory symbolized the end of the long age of the samurai. Saigō’s rebellion was drowned in the blood of his samurai followers, and he himself has been described as the last true samurai in Japanese history. There is a further symbolism in the fact that Satsuma, the final bastion of domanial resistance to the new national order, should have been decisively crushed by a central army of peasant recruits. [9.202]

The Satsuma Rebellion destroyed the class of ex-samurai as a potential source of organized resistance, and thereafter the Meiji oligarchy was free to pursue its policy of “enriching the country and strengthening the army” without any threat of internal resistance from conservative diehards. After Saigō’s defeat the oligarchy in Tokyo, working in close concert with the zaibatsu and other big-business interests, could proceed apace with heavy industrialization and other Westernizing efforts that men like Saigō had regarded with misgivings. [9.203] The uprising in Satsuma, like the Shimabara Rebellion two and a half centuries earlier, had played perfectly into the government’s hands by making it possible to identify, concentrate, and finally crush a major source of opposition.

Of all the politicians in Tokyo to welcome the defeat of Saigō’s cause, none can have been more jubilant than Count Ōkubo Toshimichi, now the effective head of government. Ōkubo has figured frequently in the course of this chapter, first as a childhood companion and schoolmate of Saigō’s, later as a fellow official in the domanial government of Satsuma and as a staunch supporter who actually threatened to commit harakiri unless his friend was freed from exile; then came the confrontation between the two men, and they ended their careers as implacable enemies. Their complex relationship and respective reputations throw considerable light on what makes a hero in Japan. Ōkubo was born three years after Saigō into a similar lower-samurai family in a nearby part of Kagoshima. Though closely linked throughout their youth (both of them, for instance, belonged to the group of young samurai who met to study the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming) and though their careers ran parallel in many ways, Ōkubo usually stayed on the winning side; thus he managed to avoid the exile and other hardships that Saigō underwent when he fell afoul of the new daimyo.

The two boyhood friends had been closely bound by their common determination to overthrow the Tokugawa Bakufu; but the initial success of the Meiji Restoration soon altered their relationship. The intrinsic differences in their characters and points of view were bound to lead to disagreement and, given Saigō’s uncompromising nature, to a final break. Ōkubo looked realistically to the future in a way that his former ally could only regard as unworthy and insincere. [9.204]

When the emotional logic that determined Saigō’s career eventually brought him to lead the greatest of all uprisings against the Meiji regime, it was his old colleague Ōkubo, who, from special headquarters in Kyoto, directed the war against the rebel army. In this enterprise he demonstrated his customary skill and efficiency, and as usual he was successful.

Count Ōkubo’s career came to a sudden end less than six months after the suicide of Saigō. Travelling in his carriage one spring morning in 1878 he was attacked and murdered by a small group of fanatic ex-samurai, who, among other things, were determined to avenge Saigō’s death. Owing to this unexpected setback, Ōkubo was unable to complete the great tasks that he had set himself. [9.205] Yet in almost every practical sense his career was a triumph. He had been the driving force in the policy of abolishing the domains and other feudal institutions and of consolidating an efficient central government under a modern bureaucracy. He had striven for technological modernization so that Japan might rapidly transform herself from a backward conglomeration of agricultural fiefs into an industrial nation capable of confronting the great powers on their own tough terms. He had pursued a rigid policy of law and order to combat the anarchic trends of the Restoration period; in 1875 he promulgated a crucial censorship law, and he was draconian in suppressing opposition to the Meiji regime. That these general policies were pursued by his survivors and that Japan’s fantastic accomplishments culminated in the victory over Russia in 1905 can be regarded as posthumous testimony to his brilliance and foresight.

Yet for all his far-reaching attainments in helping Japan to modernize and survive as a nation, Ōkubo never achieved real popularity. He inspired awe but not affection. One important reason was his personality and style. Attired in fashionable Western clothes, with carefully groomed hair and neat sidewhiskers, adorned with medals, cordons, sashes, and other impressive insignia of worldly success, he presented a formal, cosmopolitan, somewhat chilling image to his fellow Japanese and entirely lacked the ebullience and rustic simplicity that made Saigō so attractive. [9.206] We can hardly imagine him visiting the Imperial Palace in wooden clogs, still less leaving barefoot in the rain. [9.207]

More important disqualifications for heroic stature were his pragmatism and his judicious accomplishment of political goals. At school he was articulate and skilled in argument, in contrast to the slow, silent Saigō. In later years he developed into a shrewd, pragmatic politician, more concerned with practical results than with means, and always ready to compromise in order to achieve his ambitions. [9.208] As Ōkubo advanced from strength to strength, he became the personification of Meiji bureaucratic virtues, and represented the very antithesis of Saigō’s wild, impractical “sincerity.” Though the careers of both men were cut short by violent deaths, Ōkubo’s role in the legend is inevitably that of the foil, whose practical success serves to enhance the beauty of the hero’s debacle.

There are times in the history of many countries when growing internal discord and fear of dangers from the outside create a special need for some unifying symbol in the form of a national hero who will give the people a sense of pride and cohesion and help them confront their common difficulties. Such a need became paramount in Japan during the early 1890s, a time of acute domestic and international tension, and it was recognized by leaders of the government and by others who had the power to influence public opinion. As one newspaper writer in 1891 expressed it rather bluntly, “We are all becoming fed up with ‘clever people.’ What we need now is some brave, vigorous figure...” [9.209] Since the epic events leading to the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate and the “restoration” of the Emperor were still fresh in the national memory, and since the present imperial government in Tokyo was a historical consequence of these events, it was logical that the figure to emerge as a supreme symbol of national self-esteem and unity should be one of the Restoration heroes who had fought to make the new order possible.

The need to establish one particular historical figure as a unifying symbol leads to the creation of a body of legend surrounding that figure and to a sloughing away of facts that seem inappropriate, so that the fallible human being who actually lived in this world may become a fit object of unquestioning respect or even of worship. This process is similar in every part of the world and in every period, applying equally to Mohammed in seventh-century Arabia, to El Cid in eleventh-century Spain, to Jeanne d’Arc in fifteenth-century France, and to Saigō Takamori in nineteenth-century Japan. In the course of time the historical personage is moulded to fit the requirements of the legend; and the resultant factual distortions are all the more effective in that they are usually performed unconsciously in response to a special national ethos.

Saigō the Great became an object of popular veneration less than fifteen years after his death, but the authorities were faced with the awkward fact that he was still officially a traitor. This necessitated his formal rehabilitation, which as we have seen took place in 1891 when he was posthumously pardoned by Emperor Meiji and appointed to the Third Court Rank, a position in the hierarchy that was normally reserved for high nobles. Legendary accretions about Saigō developed apace during the half century after his suicide, and in my account of his life I have frequently had to make the qualification that what is widely believed about the hero may result from the distorting process of legend-making. [9.210]

Since the hero is created in the image of a people’s ideals, he tends to be all things to all men. This is particularly striking in the case of Saigō, who immediately became an ideal for Japanese belonging to both extremes of the political spectrum, as well as for the moderates in between. Created in response to deep popular needs, the legendary hero survives long after his death; in fact, his full heroic existence does not begin until his historical career has terminated. As if to dramatize this need to keep the hero alive after the physical man is dead, people frequently come to believe, against all concrete evidence to the contrary, that he is not dead but has temporarily departed and will return in due course to save his own people or all mankind. Thus we have the fantastic survival legend according to which Saigō would reappear in Japan in 1891 on a Russian warship in order to rescue his country from foreign danger. It has the same psychological basis as the idea in the later Middle Ages that Charlemagne would return from the dead to participate in the Crusades and also the central Christian belief in the second coming of Him who would “stand at the latter day upon the earth.”

While the positive aspects of the hero’s life and character come to be emphasized (or even created out of whole cloth), less attractive features are passed over in silence and remain forgotten until they are eventually exhumed by debunking historians of later generations. Thus in the legend of Martin Luther, nothing is said about his vicious opposition to the Peasants’ Revolt that he himself had so greatly influenced; and in the case of Saigō Takamori, we hear about his pleas for the wretched workers in the sugar plantations, but not about his failure to help them when he actually had the power to do so. One result of legend-making, with its complicated process of accretions and excisions, is to produce a psychologically incomplete and unbelievable personality. Thus the “darker side” in Saigō’s nature, which involved feelings of guilt, a need for self-exile, much pent-up rage, and an inclination to direct this rage, not only against “corrupt” enemies but against himself by willing his own destruction, has been overlooked in legend and history alike. Yet the evidence is cogent.

Granted that a unifying national hero was required at a particular point in Japanese history, and that this hero soon became the stuff of legend, the central question remains: Why, among all the possible great men of the Restoration years, should a defeated rebel most appropriately have filled the need, and how could a man like Saigō Takamori, who came to represent pre-modern, “feudal” values and who was admired by old-fashioned Japanists and chauvinists, have remained popular despite the total change in the Zeitgeist during the past decades? The reasons, of course are not primarily his practical talents. Saigō had none of the political and economic acumen of an Ōkubo or a Kido, nor the military skill of generals like Yamagata or Nogi. In the successful fight against the Bakufu he was only one among many impressive leaders, and his forceful personality was matched by those of several colleagues in the Meiji government. When finally he broke away from these colleagues and struck out on his own, the result was a catastrophe, which produced the exact opposite of what he intended. Yet it was he, and not any of the successful founders of the modern Japanese state, who became the idol of the period, the very symbol of resistance to unjust power. [9.211]

Perhaps the life of Kusunoki Masashige provides the most telling analogy. According to the legends, both Masashige and Saigō led the fights to overthrow the wicked Bakufu and succeeded in “restoring” the respective emperors (Godaigo and Meiji) to their rightful power; later, however, both men fell afoul of their former allies (Takauji and Ōkubo) and suffered conclusive defeat at their villainous hands. Significantly enough, the password used by Saigō and his followers was Kikusui, the floating chrysanthemum that had been Masashige’s crest half a millennium earlier. And the legendary parting scene between Saigō and his son at the time when the hero set out on his last fatal venture is clearly analogous to the farewell between Masashige and Masatsura as immortalized in the Sakurai song:

The streets swarmed with people when Saigō set out. Most of them were confident of his victory. Toratarō, Saigō’s son of twelve, was brought to see his father off. On seeing him there, Saigō said, “Oh, you are here.” Toratarō had followed him a few hundred yards when he said, “Go home, my good boy,” and Toratarō had to obey. Prepared for death, Saigō seemed undisturbed by the most touching scene of life. [9.212]

It has been said that the Satsuma Rebellion was the final war with a purely national image, marking the end of the heroic phase of Japanese history; and Saigō Takamori himself has been described as the last true hero of Japan. [9.213] There have certainly been changes in the modern world that make the traditional form of Japanese heroic failure an anachronism, and it is hard to imagine any significant revival of the earlier pattern. Yet many of the psychological fundamentals have continued into the twentieth century: during the Pacific war the kamikaze suicide pilots were given the name Kikusui, and these young men revered the “death-defying Saigō” as their spiritual ancestor. [9.214]