by John Man
Nariakira, the brilliant and open-minded heir apparent, had enemies. One was his father’s mistress, who was determined that her child, Nariakira’s half-brother, would inherit. Another was a senior minister, Zusho Hirosato, who had turned around Satsuma’s finances and was suspicious of Nariakira’s interest in foreign things and people. He supported the ambitions of concubine and half-brother. In the hothouse atmosphere of Edo, rivalry and mistrust turned to mutual antagonism, mainly because Nariakira’s five children—all his heirs—died. He suspected witchcraft. An aide reported the casting of spells. Nariakira responded by leaking secrets about illegal trade through the Ryukyu Islands to undermine both the minister and his father. Zusho suddenly died, probably either committing seppuku (ritual suicide by “cutting the belly,” on which more later) or taking poison to shield his master. The father, Narioki, sought to preempt a suspected coup by accusing his son’s supporters of treachery. Six committed seppuku that same day. In a fury that they had escaped their due punishment, Narioki had two of the corpses displayed on crosses and a third cut up with a saw. According to an undocumented story, one of the victims was a friend of Saigo’s father, who witnessed the seppuku and brought home the bloodstained shirt, intensifying Saigo’s sympathy for Nariakira. Over the next eighteen months, another fifty were fired, eight more committed seppuku, seventeen were exiled and twenty more were jailed, several of whom died.
Satsuma’s lord, Shimazu Nariakira, in a much-degraded daguerreotype.
(Daguerreotype of Shimazu Nariakira in formal attire by Ichiki Shiro, September 17, 1857: Shoko Shukeisan, Kagoshima)
Nariakira’s industrial area, Shuseikan.
(Shuseikan, Kagoshima, 1872: National Science Museum, Tokyo)
This purge turned out to be counterproductive. Other lords, including a senior shogunal official, turned against Narioki in support of his son. In 1850 he accepted the inevitable, and retired. Nariakira became Satsuma’s new lord.
At once, he moved to prepare his backward estate for the changes he had seen coming from his childhood visit to Nagasaki, and from the humiliation inflicted on China by the First Opium War (Kagoshima’s Museum of the Meiji Restoration displays an entry in Nariakira’s diary written after news came of the war, with its conclusion that Japan should not follow China, but be prepared to resist). He had seen the foreigners’ ships and weapons. He was determined to have both, to fend off the economic and military threat to both Satsuma and Japan, for he believed that wealth could be created to the benefit of all and that strength could come only from unification. A fine oceangoing three-master would replace the little coastal vessels that locals had used for centuries. And industry would thrust province and nation into the modern world, with results that today’s tourist board proudly shows to visitors.
Alan Booth, a British travel writer who in 1986 followed Saigo’s footsteps on his last journey, quotes a villager who praised Nariakira as the reason why Kagoshima produced so much and so many great men:
My goodness, there was a lord all right! Talk about work, he didn’t know how to stop! He built the steam-powered warships in Japan, the biggest glass factory, a munitions foundry, and the first textile mill to use Western-style looms. He was the first man to set up gas lights in Japanese streets and the first to send messages in Morse code. He spoke Dutch and developed his own photographs. And on top of all that he found time to design the national flag. No wonder they were all workaholics down there, with a lord like Nariakira to kick their asses.
The remains of Nariakira’s industrial complex—blast furnace, glassware factory, research institute—lie just beside his very un-industrial Sengan’en gardens, backed by the same forested hills. Saigo would have seen some one thousand two hundred men at work here, struggling to reproduce forging techniques of which no one had any experience. There were no foreign advisers. Everything had to be done from scratch, on the basis of Dutch manuals. It took over five years to produce the impressive cannon that guards the complex—not in time for Nariakira, whose days were numbered, but (as we shall see in due course) in time to contribute to a significant exchange with British warships.
The local people hero-worship him, literally. In a broad open space at the bottom of Shiroyama, a statue of him stands on a high plinth. It is as if he is a star performer at center stage, the wave of green rearing up behind him like a backcloth. A few meters to the left stands a Shinto temple dedicated to him, its entrance protected by a tree encouraged over decades to grow ten-meter wings and a beak: a crane, a bird that mates for life and is a traditional symbol of loyalty. Behind is the shrine, up four broad steps to three doors.
Under a rope hung with twists of paper to ensure the protection of the spirits was a banner displaying the Shimazu sign, a cross in a circle. Inside, the altar bore a mirror, a sword and beads, traditional symbols of holiness.
“But is it in use, this temple?” I asked Michiko.
“Oh, yes. If we want to get a blessing, the priest will come. And Shinto maidens assist.” She pointed into the shadows to two girls in white kimono tops and orange skirts.
This was intriguing. What did they do? How long did they stay? Why?
The Shinto maidens were fairy-tale creatures, hardly more than teenagers, demure, perfect as works of art, hair held by intricate cloth clasps, and happy to talk. Their answers run together in my memory, as if they spoke as one. “There are five of us, serving eleven priests. When there is a blessing, we play the drum and dance and handle amulets. There is also clerical work. It’s full time for us, until we get married.” They glanced up. “He will tell you more.”
We turned, to see a small man in a similar big-sleeved kimono, with a dark, patterned skirt. He was a priest, one of the eleven. This was his third shrine in forty years of service. He had been here twenty years, happy ones, “because it is for Nariakira, and everyone admires him. It is the most popular shrine in Kagoshima. People bring their new-born children to be blessed here, and bring them back when they turn three, and five, and seven, and when they come of age. At certain times, this place is packed with hundreds of thousands.”
I wondered about the status of Shintoism, which was, after all, an ancient animistic religion, and should have declined in competition with Buddhism and today’s agnostic tendencies. Not at all.
“Under the Meiji in the late nineteenth century, there was an edict to abolish Buddhism and favor Shintoism. I myself am a graduate of Kokugakuin [set up in the late nineteenth century as the only university which trains Shinto priests]. At the time there was a Buddhist temple right here, so it’s a powerful place in religious terms. When Nariakira died, they wanted to make a shrine to him and decided this would be the place. So the Buddhist temple was abolished, and the Shinto shrine took its place.”
Shinto would always be with us, because in Shinto everything in nature is sacred, is spiritual, is kami.
“While there is nature,” he finished, “there is Shinto.”
And this shrine. And the memory of Nariakira.
After his father’s purge, Nariakira needed to move fast to fill his decimated ranks with loyal, bright, well-educated officials, preferably local, and not senior enough to be connected with the terrible events surrounding his succession. These were still dangerous times. Indeed, Nariakira followed his great-grandfather in keeping a diary in Roman script, so no spy would understand his thinking. He needed eyes and ears, honest ones, discreet ones; men he could brief without formality, who would speak truth to power.
How Nariakira heard of Saigo we have no idea. Perhaps it was his size. He was literally outstanding, a giant when compared to his contemporaries, 1.8 meters tall and 110 kilos, with slablike shoulders and a vast belly, yet athletic enough to wrestle and hunt and walk long distances. In any event, he was right for the job. Mr. Fukuda at the Museum of the Meiji Restoration explained why, putting words into Nariakira’s mouth:
“Saigo does not fear authority, nor does he fear evil. He is honest, never telling anything but the truth. He
is trustworthy. Therefore he is the kind of man who cannot be manipulated. He is a treasure of Satsuma. No one else can use him. But perhaps I can.”
What position could such a low-ranking samurai be given so that he would have immediate access to his lord without arousing the suspicions and jealousy of long-established officials wedded to the old ways? Nariakira had the answer. Saigo was given the job of looking after his lord’s magnificent gardens. As Mr. Fukuda explained, being “allowed to be inside the garden, that meant close to his lord.” Suddenly there he was, at twenty-six, plucked from obscurity to become part of Nariakira’s entourage. It’s one of the many ironies about Saigo’s life that he acquired a reputation as a conservative, eager to turn the clock back, yet here he was being given the job of turning it forward, helping to make the industries and political contacts that would build a new Japan.
As Nariakira planned, Saigo came aboard just in time to join his first 1,700-kilometer trek back to Edo.
3
THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR: A SHORT HISTORY OF SWORDS
SEVERAL WEAPONS HAVE MADE HISTORY—THE ENGLISH LONGBOW, the Zulu assegai, the Colt .45, the Kalashnikov—but for artistry, effectiveness, length of service and symbolic significance there’s nothing to touch the gorgeous curved samurai sword, the katana. By Saigo’s time it had been around in much the same form for some six hundred years, and today it is with us still, made in much the same way, and granted an equivalent degree of reverence.
The samurai’s sword was his greatest treasure, one that occupied—occupies still—a multidimensional world of magic, spirituality, chemistry, artistry and skill, each aspect with its own arcane vocabulary and traditions, and all focused by the mind and body of the swordsman, ideally at least, into one or two or three lightning blows. Armor, however exotic and all-encompassing, was no guarantee of protection—and anyway, it slowed you down. The true samurai swordsman wore nothing but his kimono. There was no shield but the sword itself, which was strong enough to deflect a blade that was its equal in resilience and suppleness.
No one man could invent such a weapon. It evolved over centuries, starting with ordinary straight iron swords imported from China in the eighth century. Some of these had one edge, some two; they were good for thrusting and stabbing, Roman style, by infantry, but not so good for slashing, especially with one hand, which was what a horseman needed to do. In the early days, too, the samurai found that their own swords tended to chip when they struck armor. Much harder blades were needed. Horsemen preferred a curved, single-edged, one-handed sword, for the same reasons that the saber found favor in the Muslim and western worlds in the early nineteenth century—effectiveness and fashion. Japanese smiths, many of a renown reserved in the West for the greatest artists, were inspired to innovate. They created several major schools or traditions, each with several subgroups, all of which developed their own variations of the basic sword styles. Lengths varied: some were not much more than half a meter, for quick use on horseback; others, used by infantry against cavalry, were almost two meters long (though not many of these survive because they were cut shorter by later owners). The result, honed over four hundred years, was the unique combination of practicality and beauty so admired by warrior monks, warlords and their samurai enforcers.
If you take the bullet train through the steep green hills north of Kagoshima, you come to Kumamoto, which we shall be doing in due course, because it was Kumamoto’s great castle that halted Saigo in his tracks in 1877. Thirty-five kilometers farther up the coast lies the little town of Arao, once famous for its coal mine, now struggling for a place in the sun with a theme park famous for roller coasters. In a back street, where the modern world falls away, is a workshop that could, in most respects, be medieval. This is where Matsunaga Genrokuro makes swords on which any medieval samurai, and Saigo himself, would have gazed with awe, as modern collectors do. He is one of the 210 smiths who form the All-Japan Swordsmith Association, each of whom has a “smith’s name” as well as his own (Matsunaga’s is Kiyotsugu), rather as Chinese emperors had reign names, and all of whom submit to regulations that limit their production to twenty-four swords a year each, to guarantee the high quality that has defined the samurai sword for centuries.
Matsunaga is a latter-day alchemist, collecting his own raw iron—he harvests it from the beach, dragging a heavy magnet through the iron-rich sand—and then turning it into steel by heating it in his oven, then hammering, folding and quenching it with water, many times, until the impurities and air pockets and carbon molecules—all the microscopic elements that weaken iron—have been beaten out. This is the process that smiths have been following since the thirteenth century, the only difference being that Matsunaga uses a mechanical hammer to avoid having to employ two assistants.
Steel comes in a range of varieties, from relatively soft and malleable to hard and brittle, depending on the number of times it has been heated, folded, hammered and quenched. This variability allowed smiths to solve the fundamental contradiction of sword making: if it is sharp, it is brittle; if it is resilient and flexible, it can’t be sharp. The answer was to combine in each sword two different types of steel, hard for the cutting edge, softer, more resilient and more pliable for the body. A good sword, folded and hammered and tempered many times, may have tens or hundreds of thousands of laminations (2 to the power of 10 is 1,024; 2 to the power of 20 is over a million) or layers. The cutting edge is targeted for focused treatment by protecting the body with a mixture of clay and ashes, leaving the edge exposed. This creates a transition zone marked by a hamon or temper line of crystals, which smiths modify into wavy patterns by varying the application of the clay and ash. The different ways in which the blade and body are treated also create the curve that is so much a part of the sword’s beauty, a curve that also confers a practical advantage: a curved blade is not only better for slashing, but also easier to draw, since the drawing arm sweeps in a curve across the body.
The result, when finally sharpened and polished—polishing being a subspecialty of its own—was a thing of both technical wizardry and glittering beauty, simultaneously a tool and a work of abstract art. Experts obsess about points, ridges, temper lines, notches, edges and grooves, with results that are a fog of swordspeak: “The hamon is overall notare, with gunome midare and some choji,” runs one description of a blade by the fourteenth-century smith Masamune, “and contains bright varied lines of kinsuji, sunagashi and deep ashi.” For nonspecialists, truth is better served by poetry and simile. Each blade’s grain is like that of wood, the flow depending on whether the smith folds the metal vertically across the width of the blade, or horizontally along its length, or both, making a grain of sea-surface complexity known as “pear skin.” Large irregular bands of bright and dark steel are known as “pine bark.” The blade is heated until its color becomes “that of the moon in February.” The fine frost of crystals that forms the wave-shaped temper line is compared to smoke, or the Milky Way, or flowing sand, or distant cherry-tree blossoms as seen in the morning sun.
The best blades—sharp as razors, heavy as hand axes, fast as a whip in the right hands—could sever iron helmets, and cut through skin and bone like a kitchen knife through asparagus. In the early seventeenth century there were specialists who tested for cutting efficiency, the results being inscribed on the swords. Tests were made using condemned criminals—a practice known as tameshigiri—or their corpses, on which young swordsmen also built up their experience. Tests specified ten different cuts across the body between hips and shoulders, and a particularly demanding diagonal cut, known as kesagiri, in which the sword enters at the left shoulder, slices down through the chest and exits at the right hip; some museums have skeletons that have been almost cut in two. There’s a story of a criminal condemned to death with this cut who joked with his executioner: “If I had known I would have swallowed a couple of big stones to spoil your sword!” Cuts of comparable length were performed on piled-up corpses. There are swords engraved with an attestatio
n reading “cut three bodies through the trunk,” which added greatly to their value. A sword tester named Yamano Kauemon once (it was said) used a sword made by the master smith Yamato no Kami Yasusada to sever five bodies at once, and a blade by the sixteenth-century smith Kanefusa was supposedly used to cut through seven bodies.
What of today’s swords? One of Britain’s leading katana exponents is Colin Young, who studied and trained with Matsunaga sensei (master). Surely, I wondered, a steel blade is a steel blade. Why worry so much about handmade ones? It was a question of shocking naiveté. Without the folding of the steel, there is no grain; without the grain, no real beauty. And each sword is different, each is chosen to suit—is often made to suit—the owner’s height, weight, strength and fitness. Some swords may be lightened by the removal of a gram or two of metal along the blade, making a so-called “blood line.” Machine made versus handmade? “It’s the difference,” Colin said, “between a Ford Mondeo and the latest Ferrari.” You can pick up a so-called samurai sword on the Internet for a few hundred dollars or pounds. But you should know that one of Matsunaga’s takes him six months to make, and will set you back something like 3 million yen (about $30,000). For historic ones, collectors and museums will pay several hundred thousand.
Can modern swords cut as well as old ones? Colin has no doubt he could cut off a limb, “maybe even through a pig, which is what some people practice on.” But cutting flesh is passé: these days swords are tested on plastic hoses or rolled-up tatami mats soaked in water. Matsunaga the smith is also a master of Shodai Ryu, a technique derived from samurai swordplay that involves drawing the sword, approaching the plastic or tatami-mat target, cutting through it, resheathing the sword and retreating, all with the correct attitude, formalities and actions.