Samurai

by John Man

  It was an imposing scene. A large hall with a high roof supported by dark pillars of wood. From the ceiling hung a profusion of those huge gilt lamps and ornaments peculiar to Buddhist temples. In front of the high altar, where the floor, covered with beautiful white mats, is raised some three or four inches from the ground, was laid a rug of scarlet felt. Tall candles placed at regular intervals gave out a dim mysterious light, just sufficient to let all the proceedings be seen. The seven Japanese took their places on the left of the raised floor, the seven foreigners on the right. No other person was present.

  After the interval of a few minutes of anxious suspense, Taki Zenzaburo, a stalwart man of thirty-two years of age, with a noble air, walked into the hall attired in his dress of ceremony, with the peculiar hempen-cloth wings which are worn on great occasions. He was accompanied by a kaishaku and three officers, who wore the jimbaori or war surcoat with gold tissue facings . . .

  With the kaishaku on his left hand, Taki Zenzaburo advanced slowly toward the Japanese witnesses, and the two bowed before them, then drawing near to the foreigners they saluted us in the same way . . . Slowly and with great dignity the condemned man mounted on to the raised floor, prostrated himself before the high altar twice, and seated himself [i.e. knelt, as Mitford explains in a note] on the felt carpet with his back to the high altar, the kaishaku crouching on the left-hand side. One of the three attendant officers then came forward, bearing a stand of the kind used in the temple for offerings, on which, wrapped in paper, lay the wakizashi, the short sword or dirk of the Japanese, nine inches and a half in length, with a point and edge as sharp as a razor’s. This he handed, prostrating himself, to the condemned man, who received it reverently, raising it to his head with both hands, and placed it in front of himself.

  After another profound obeisance, Taki Zenzaburo, in a voice which betrayed just so much emotion and hesitation as might be expected from a man who is making a painful confession, but with no sign of either in his face or manner, spoke as follows:

  “I, and I alone, unwarrantably gave the order to fire on the foreigners at Kobe, and again as they tried to escape. For this crime I disembowel myself, and I beg you who are present to do me the honor of witnessing the act.”

  Bowing once more, the speaker allowed his upper garments to slip down to his girdle, and remained naked to the waist. Carefully, according to custom, he tucked his sleeves under his knees to prevent himself from falling backward; for a noble Japanese gentleman should die falling forward. Deliberately, with a steady hand, he took the dirk that lay before him; he looked at it wistfully, almost affectionately; for a moment he seemed to collect his thoughts for the last time, and then stabbing himself deeply below the waist on the left-hand side, he drew the dirk slowly across to the right side, and, turning it in the wound, gave a slight cut upward. During this sickeningly painful operation he never moved a muscle of his face. When he drew out the dirk, he leaned forward and stretched out his neck; an expression of pain for the first time crossed his face, but he uttered no sound. At that moment the kaishaku, who, still crouching by his side, had been keenly watching his every movement, sprang to his feet, poised his sword for a second in the air; there was a flash, a heavy, ugly thud, a crashing fall; with one blow the head had been severed from the body.

  A dead silence followed, broken only by the hideous noise of the blood gushing out of the inert heap before us, which but a moment before had been a brave and chivalrous man. It was horrible.

  The kaishaku made a low bow, wiped his sword with a piece of rice paper which he had ready for the purpose, and retired from the raised floor; and the stained dirk was solemnly borne away, a bloody proof of the execution.

  The two representatives of the Mikado then left their places, and, crossing over to where the foreign witnesses sat, called us to witness that the sentence of death upon Taki Zenzaburo had been faithfully carried out. The ceremony being at an end, we left the temple.

  The ceremony, to which the place and the hour gave an additional solemnity, was characterized throughout by that extreme dignity and punctiliousness which are the distinctive marks of the proceedings of Japanese gentlemen of rank; and it is important to note this fact, because it carries with it the conviction that the dead man was indeed the officer who had committed the crime, and no substitute. While profoundly impressed by the terrible scene it was impossible at the same time not to be filled with admiration of the firm and manly bearing of the sufferer, and of the nerve with which the kaishaku performed his last duty to his master.

  Such was the tradition that Saigo absorbed from his earliest years. This was the end to which he would aspire, if things went wrong.

  6

  NEW WORLD, NEW LIFE

  FOR A PROVINCIAL IN TOWN FOR THE FIRST TIME, EDO BAFFLED, challenged and dazzled. This was no imperial city—the emperor was four hundred kilometers away in Kyoto, in semi-divine remoteness—but Edo, the seat of the shogun, was the center of real power, wealth, entertainment, fashion and trouble.

  Around the shogun’s great castle and palace pressed everything that Japan’s élite needed and wanted in an economy fueled by the needs and wants of the daimyos, the provincial lords whose regular presence was required by law. The palace-castle had spawned 18 great palaces and 270 or so smaller ones, each of which was a little universe of officials, servants and men-at-arms who had to be fed and serviced and entertained. Often, a street would be filled by a procession, its lordly palanquin accompanied by ranks of scowling samurai ready to whip out their swords. The economy was fueled by rice, which flowed from the domains into the hands of merchants who acted as bankers and suppliers. By the mid-nineteenth century, Edo was one of the world’s great cities with a population of over a million, bigger than fast-growing New York, on a par with Beijing and Paris (though still only one third the size of London, the world’s biggest city). Visually, its charms were limited: apart from its grand palaces, it consisted of single-story buildings and narrow streets. “A bird’s eye view of Edo,” wrote Mitford, “is exactly like the view one gets when some Lowland cattle farmer takes one to a small eminence and shows one his cattle sheds in an interminable parallel line.” But everything was to hand, from high to low. In theater-and-restaurant districts, merchants bought the attention of exquisite geishas and patronized fashionable kabuki plays, with their elaborate scenery, bravura male-only performances and lively music. To the south were the back-alley prostitution dens of Shinagawa. Mitford had vivid memories of the Shinagawa district, on the main highway into the city, where poor samurai strutted and died as vengeful street fighters, with no master but their violent ways:

  The great straggling city swarmed with men-at-arms, some of them retainers of the different nobles, others ronin, desperadoes who had cast off their clanship . . . ready to draw blood on any or no provocation. Clan feuds, broils in which much blood was shed, were of common occurrence in that City of the Sword. Kataki-uchi [enemy slaying], a Japanese version of the Corsican vendetta, was one of the sacred duties of the samurai. “You killed my brother—I must kill you; and, cutting off your head, I must lay it upon my brother’s grave, leaving the small knife of my dirk in your ear, as a gallant gentleman should, in order that your brother may recognize the murderer and come and kill me—if he can.” The teahouses of Shinagawa, the suburb of Edo nearest to Yokohama, could tell many a story of deadly encounters. More than once, riding through that sinister and ill-famed quarter at early dawn, we would come upon bloody traces of the night’s debauch. Under the heady fumes of the hot sake men’s blood would boil to fever point . . . An angry word, a fierce dispute, a cry of hatred, a flash of cold steel—and a headless body would be spouting blood upon the mats.

  (Engraved view of Edo, 1863–4, from Zhivopisnaia Iaponiia, 1870, a Russian translation of Le Japon illustré, 1870, by Aimé Humbert)

  (“View of Yedo,” lithograph by Hanhart, from Japan, the Amoor, and the Pacific by H. A. Tilley, 1861: both SSPL via Getty Images)

  Away
from the shogun’s castle, Edo (today’s Tokyo) in the 1860s was a mass of single-story buildings and narrow streets.

  If you had to go carefully in the streets of Edo, you had to go equally carefully through the byways of the capital’s politics. Saigo, in his late twenties, was a young man of intuition and action who did not seem at first cut out for diplomatic delicacy. One of Nariakira’s aides introduced him to a new ideology that had seized the minds of many Edo intellectuals, all the more since Perry’s arrival. It was the form of loyalism developed in Mito, one hundred kilometers northeast of Edo, that wished to reject all dealings with foreigners. The lords of Mito were descended from a side branch of the Tokugawas, which inspired in them an inordinate, almost religious love of the emperor and the status quo. This they had long justified by supporting an immense work that involved writing the biographies of all emperors back to the sun goddess Amaterasu, a fairy-tale project that had already taken two hundred years, and would take another fifty yet: the results would not be published until 1906. Its basic proposition was short, simple and very traditional: the emperor was divine and reverence for him would protect Japan. His task was to reign in glory, while the mundane job of ruling was to be done by the shogun and the domain lords. Foreigners were anathema. Sonno joi! was their slogan. Revere the emperor! Expel the barbarians—traders, diplomats, Christians, all of them!

  This was the nationalistic ideology that seized Saigo’s imagination soon after his arrival in Edo. He wrote that listening to Fujita Toko, one of the senior exponents of “Mito learning,” was like “bathing in the pure spring water: all unrest and confusion disappear.” If Fujita’s lord were to crack his whip and “lead the way against the foreigners, I would rush in without hesitation.” Mark Ravina, in his superb biography, argues that Saigo’s introduction to “Mito learning” was a turning point. Before, the emperor had not seemed all that important. Now, emperor worship became a passion that resolved all contradictions and conflicts. Did this passion threaten his commitment to Satsuma and Nariakira? Not at all, because they were earthly, while the emperor, with no army, navy, treasury, law courts or currency, was divine.

  So when his lord’s only surviving son died of dysentery in mid-1854, Saigo was free to stoke his passionate devotion to Nariakira to greater intensity. As when earlier children had died, people spoke of witchcraft by Nariakira’s mistress, Yura, on behalf of her son, who was now a probable successor. Again, as if living out what he had learned in school, Saigo was aflame for action: intuition plus action would solve this and all life’s problems. He longed to slay Yura, he wrote, expecting to be executed himself and thereby to “achieve the great peace of death and leap to the heavens.” Was he serious? Not enough to take action on his own account; but if Nariakira had given him the go-ahead then yes, probably.

  Such loyalty soon won him a political role, and involvement in affairs that were complicated, to say the least. This is a condensed version:

  The shogunate was in disarray. The thirteenth shogun, Iesada, successor to the one who died during Perry’s visit, was in poor health, probably suffering from epilepsy. At the age of thirty, he had already had two wives, both of whom had died childless, and was now due to marry Nariakira’s own daughter, Atsuhime; however, there had been numerous delays, and it seemed unlikely that he would father any children, so he needed to nominate an heir, a choice that would be rubber-stamped by the imperial court in Kyoto. One possible successor was the seventh son of the isolationist lord of Mito, Keiki. Adopted into a branch of the Tokugawa family with close links to the shogunate, Keiki had several names. As the head of his adoptive family, he became Yoshinobu. We shall hear more of him later, when he becomes the last shogun, in ten years’ time. At this time, in the mid-1850s, he had a wide range of supporters, including Nariakira, and therefore the loyal Saigo. It all depended on how much influence could be brought to bear on the court. Nariakira had high hopes, because of his daughter’s planned marriage to the shogun. Saigo would naturally do what he could. When Nariakira returned to Kagoshima in early 1857 Saigo went with him, only to be sent back to Edo to look after Nariakira’s interests. Because it took weeks to send messages back and forth, he had to decide what to do on his own, which meant trying to pull the strings—in particular, to get Atsuhime married to the shogun—that would bar Yura’s son from becoming heir to Nariakira and confirm Keiki as heir to Iesada. Like a lobbyist in Washington today, he had little formal clout and had to seek influence by cultivating friendships.

  Nariakira made sure he had help, in the form of Hashimoto Sanai, a doctor, who backed reform and the acquisition of Western technology. Hashimoto talked avidly about the way Nariakira wanted Japan to develop, providing a balance to the more extreme views of “Mito learning.” Total rejection of foreign entanglements would not work, he said. There should be treaties, to acquire Western technology—but only as a means of strengthening Japan enough to keep the foreigners out. What was needed was a Japanese commitment to the old-fashioned virtues—benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, filial piety—combined with the machinery, the weapons and the other products of industrialization that would save Japan from the dreaded Westerners.

  For Saigo, then, modernization and xenophobia went hand in hand. Once he got into an argument with a man who asked him to justify his attitude. He explained

  that truly civilized countries would have led the uncivilized ones to enlightenment by adopting a policy of benevolent and well-meant teaching, and 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.1

  All seemed to be going Nariakira’s way when Iesada at last married Atsuhime, apparently putting Satsuma’s lord on track to influence the choice of the next shogun. But it was not easy: the shogun’s mother rejected any hint of outside interference, and rather dramatically threatened to commit suicide if she heard any more on the matter. Her son the shogun and his new wife were helpless. That left the only other source of influence: the imperial court in Kyoto. By tradition, the court never opposed the shogun’s decision. But tradition was not what it had been. A new treaty with the Americans had been negotiated with the American consul, Townsend Harris. The shogun’s top advisers, the Council of Elders, didn’t want to approve it, and asked the court to reject it—an unprecedented step because it gave the court a primary role for the first time in Japanese history. This was the opening Hashimoto and Saigo needed. They would go to Kyoto and lobby the court directly to support Keiki, Nariakira’s candidate, as heir.

  By early 1858 Hashimoto and Saigo were in Kyoto, a very different place from Edo. The city was, in effect, a prison for an emperor whose sole task was to act as mediator between heaven and earth, and between his divine ancestors and his subjects. Government was beneath him. He had no power at all, could initiate no policy, could deny the bakufu nothing, could not escape from the necessity—called, of course, a right—to confirm every new shogun.

  But it was a prison of exquisite comfort and beauty. It had long been a place of the greatest artistic achievements.

  Here they refine copper, coin money, print books, weave the richest stuffs with gold and silver flowers. The best and scarcest dyes, the most artful carvings, all sorts of musical instruments, pictures, japan’d cabinets, all sort of things wrought in gold and other metals, particularly in steel, as the best-tempered blades, and other arms are made here in the utmost perfection, as also the richest dresses, and after the best fashion, all sorts of toys, puppets, moving their heads of themselves, and numberless other things too many to be mention’d.

  That was in 1691, as described by a visiting German, the naturalist and traveler Engelbert Kaempfer. Little changed in Kyoto over the next 150 years, except that Osaka and Edo overtook it in population and commerce. Today, new buildings have replaced the old in many areas, but it is still a place of palaces and gardens and great wo
oden temples set against steep forested hills famed for their gorgeous autumnal colors.

  All this was as new to Saigo as Edo had been; but once again he had help, this time from Prince Konoe Tadahiro, a court noble related by marriage to the Shimazus. Attempting to influence the imperial court was a delicate, occasionally dangerous business, rather like being a CIA agent trying to plant some new policy inside the government of a foreign power: if things went wrong one might be assassinated or receive an order to commit seppuku. There had to be discreet—if possible, secret—contacts, in very private meeting places.

  Konoe knew just the man, a priest named Gessho, attached to one of Kyoto’s great temples. Gessho was a good choice: well known as a monk, in his midforties, a fine poet, but never until now involved in politics. The decision to put Gessho and Saigo in touch was one of two events that would, in a few months, change the course of Saigo’s life.

  This was a relationship that went way beyond the bounds of politics. The two quickly became devoted to each other, so devoted that we would today call them partners.

  The relationship raises the question of whether Saigo and Gessho were “gay,” in the modern sense, a question to which many Japanese scholars would answer, “Yes—and why not?” There are two other answers: “possibly” and “no.” “Possibly,” because homosexuality—male/male intercourse—was common; and “no,” because it did not exist in the modern sense, but in a completely different context, in which sex between men had none of the connotations of controversy, disapproval or assertion of difference that it has in the modern West. It was considered no more immoral than drinking. In some circumstances—between warriors—it was seen as a virtue, bonding two men in a web of support. In Satsuma’s militaristic goju school, sex between boys was considered normal. It became problematic only when taken to excess, when lovers quarreled or when love involved a clash of loyalties.