Samurai

by John Man

  I can see much of this episode as vividly as a film, but some scenes remain maddeningly obscure—not surprisingly, given that most of the details are taken from an account by one of Saigo’s future friends, Shingeno Yasutsugu, and Shingeno had them from Saigo—who was, of course, unconscious or semiconscious for the return journey.2 This house, for instance—why choose it? Perhaps because it was the only one? Was there someone living there, a couple perhaps, astonished at this disturbance so late at night? Did the three rescuers tell the truth, or make up some story to explain Saigo’s state? Was there a fire still going? Were the two peasants—I am beginning to see them in my mind’s eye, shuffling around in their simple little shack—able and willing to keep him warm and get some food into him? We shall never know. Anyway, the three companions then reloaded both bodies, one alive, the other dead, into the boat, and rowed or sailed back to Kagoshima.

  About the only thing that is clear in this part of the story is the spot where he was saved, which is now a site sacred to the Great Saigo. You take the coast road away from Kagoshima to the north, following the railway for four kilometers as it winds past steep hills. You come to a crossing over the railway, which leads to a shrine—an altar of square stones, an engraved pillar, a couple of little sake cups to keep the memory alive—and beyond, crowded between railway line and rising forests, a thatched hut of dark wooden planks, restored, with a notice in the shape of a stele announcing “House Where Saigo Takamori Recovered.”

  “Recovered” is an overstatement. He was quickly taken back to his home, where he remained delirious for three days from a combination of near-suffocation and despair, a despair deeper than that which drove him to attempt suicide. His bid for death had been like that of a “woman,” without a sword; it had failed; he had accomplished nothing but the death of his closest friend. The guilt would remain with him for the rest of his life, recalled on every anniversary of his failure. Seventeen years later he wrote a poem to Gessho imagining himself “standing before your grave, separated by death’s great wall, while my tears still flow in vain.” Seppuku with his short sword would have been a welcome release. But his family—his younger brothers and sisters—wisely refused to allow him to have it, and asked him a question, repeating it over and over: “Is your survival really a matter of luck? Could it be that heaven has a purpose in mind for you?”

  Saigo, steeped in Buddhist traditions, did not believe in random events. The Buddha had said: “As a net is made up by a series of knots, so everything in this world is connected by a series of knots. If anyone thinks that the mesh of a net is an independent, isolated thing, he is mistaken.” His survival must somehow be connected to his potential future. His life was not yet run, its purpose not yet fulfilled. But what, he wondered, might this unfulfilled purpose be? He had no idea. One thing was for certain: he could not discover it by committing suicide. If he was to make sense of what had just happened, he had to embrace life, wherever it might lead.

  Very quickly, it led in a new and surprising direction. The shogun’s police were still looking for him and Gessho. They probed the new daimyo’s officials, who wriggled out of the difficulty with a half-truth: they said that both Saigo and Gessho had drowned, and showed them Gessho’s corpse as evidence. What had happened to Saigo’s body? The answer was a metaphorical shrug: lost forever in the waters of Kinko Bay.

  But that left Satsuma’s officials and the daimyo himself with an embarrassing problem, in that Saigo was very much alive. So it was decided to send him far away, into exile, where shogunal officials would be unlikely to pry. Anywhere on Satsuma’s main island would be risky. But there were several possible places in the chain of islands leading south to Okinawa, the islands that formed the semi-independent kingdom of Ryukyu that had paid tribute to Satsuma for the past two centuries and more. The island chosen was the largest one, Amami Oshima, a semitropical place of steep, forested hills; sharp inlets; and a local population regarded as utterly primitive by those from Japan proper.

  He had already been ordered to change his name. He chose a new one with two parts: Kikuchi Gengo, the first element recalling his supposed samurai forebears who had fought against the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the second element meaning simply “myself.” (This was not a big deal, except for historians trying to work out what to call him. It was common to have alternative names, and apart from “Saigo” he had had half a dozen as he grew up, some of which he used simultaneously for work, among friends or as pen names. “Takamori” was the name he took upon reaching adulthood. He would soon take one more.)

  It was as if he had become one of the living dead, or worse. In letters to his friend Okubo just before his departure, he wrote of how he had “become dead bones in the earth, obliged to endure the unendurable”; yet somehow he would summon up the strength built into him from childhood, somehow he would stay true to the agenda of his dead lord Nariakira: “Somehow I shall bear the unbearable for the sake of Emperor and Court.”

  Early in 1859 he boarded the sailing boat that would take him on the ten-day, four-hundred-kilometer journey into an exile that he fully expected to last the rest of his miserable life.

  9

  EXILE, AND A NEW LIFE

  TODAY, IT’S AN EASY TRIP TO AMAMI OSHIMA. THE PLANE compresses Saigo’s two-day journey into a pretty half hour, past Sakurajima’s smoking crater, along the great peaceful inlet from the China Sea, over an ocean broken by another smoldering volcano and tiny unpeopled islands and the occasional boat trailing a wake like a comet’s tail. Then it’s down into a different world of twisting coastlines and steep semitropical forests, where boar still run wild and you can hear the crowlike call of a rare species of jay,1 and the habu, a local pit viper, lies in wait. Also, it rains a lot.

  Locals downplay the habu, but locals always downplay dangers they know. Not many people get bitten, they say. For outsiders who step off the road to admire a distant beach and rolling breakers, it’s unnerving to stand in lush long grasses beneath a shady tree and then suddenly see a notice attached to the trunk reading—in English—“There are many poisonous snakes around here.” This outsider lost interest in the view and retreated, very carefully, to the road. Back home, I wondered if I was overreacting. “Relatively small, not usually getting longer than five feet,” said one Web site. “Rarely aggressive. Bites only if provoked. Not as deadly as cobras or mambas.” Well, that’s reassuring. I’m not surprised not many locals get bitten. Only idiots would risk meeting a habu.

  Of course, they know all about Saigo on the island. Michiko and I were met by a group of middle-aged, smartly dressed ladies with careful makeup who were the leading members of a society dedicated to him—though the chief spokesperson was a slim, gray-haired man, Mr. Yasuda, who owned the van which carried us all. I wondered why Saigo was so popular with the island’s women. But as we proceeded in a convoy to the place where Saigo landed that day in January 1859, it emerged that he was not quite as much of a local hero as I had assumed.

  On clear days Tatsugo Bay is postcard gorgeous, with twisting inlets and forests plunging to the shore. The view is not unspoiled, because there’s a coast road and vast piles of concrete caissons lying about, as if tossed at random, to take the force of breakers rolling inland from typhoons. Back then, there was only the shallow blue water, the beach of gray pebbles and a fishing boat or two. Saigo’s ship, used to transport the island’s only product, sugarcane, moored out in the bay, and he was rowed ashore, stepping up to a beachside track and the first line of steeply rising pines. One is of particular interest: it’s called the “Saigo Pine,” because as the sign says, this tree was the one around which his mooring rope was wound. A portrait shows him as the countryman, with fishing rod and dog. He liked dogs: so much, indeed, that in portraits a dog is his prime attribute, like Zeus’s thunderbolt or Cupid’s bow.

  He scared them, this giant of a man with protruding eyes and grim expression. Though an exile, he was still a Satsuma samurai, exuding prestige and power like a
n aura. A local photographer painted a portrait of him that hangs in the island’s museum, a weird and powerful image of a heavy-jawed man with vast eyes and eyebrows like mountain ranges. If this was how he seemed to the islanders, no wonder they were afraid of him: who knew what this mighty samurai might do to strengthen Satsuma’s rule here?

  For this was Satsuma territory, had been for 250 years, and officials came here to ensure that taxes were paid and sugarcane delivered. Otherwise, the place was virtually untouched. If any Chinese made it this far north from Okinawa, no one recorded their visits. An American commander named Glynn claimed to have “discovered” the island in 1846, apparently oblivious to its long-standing occupation by the islanders and the occasional official visits from Okinawa and Satsuma. No one tried to turn the islanders from their traditional ways, which included the Neolithic habit of unearthing the dead after three years and reburying them in caves. Buddhism and Shintoism were unknown here. Life was basic and primitive beyond anything Saigo had ever seen, not least in consequence of Satsuma imperialism. In the mid-eighteenth century, the daimyo realized the possibilities of sugarcane and forced the islanders to cut back on their poor-quality—but vital—rice and start growing sugarcane instead, imposing his will by granting estates to overlords. They quickly became slave owners, with dire consequences, because the locals were not allowed to eat the sugar they grew. A Satsuma official had reported: “There isn’t a home on the island where I would even want to sit and wash my feet. The people worry about their next meal day and night and they eat broken bits of seaweed from the beach . . . Today I suddenly understood the depth of human anguish.”

  Saigo was a guest of the island’s top family, the Ryu, living in a thatched house that was part of the little family community crowded between the hills and the bay. The village was called Obama (a meaningless coincidence, nothing to do with a Luo family of the same name whose menfolk were at this time herding goats on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya). The Ryu were well to do, with a household staff of over seventy—products of the island’s appalling slave system, according to which locals who could not produce enough sugarcane from their small farms had to offer themselves as house slaves.

  Saigo, who had after all been raised in poverty and was used to simple living, insisted on gathering his own firewood, and doing his own cooking and cleaning (so the ladies told me). He was a forbidding figure, depressed, taciturn and angry at the contrasts between what he had been, what he had hoped for and what he had become. He referred to himself as a despicable person, or a hog. He could look forward to nothing in a place he regarded as a dump. He was appalled by what he saw. “It is painful to see the extent of the tyranny here,” he wrote to two friends. “The daily life of the islanders seems honestly unendurable . . . I am astonished by the bitterness of their lives: I did not think there could be such hardship.”2 At first, he despised the primitiveness of the locals, referring to them as ketojin, which means literally “hairy Chinese person” and had come to be a rude word for foreigners. For someone who for several years had been close to top people, he wrote, “it is difficult to mingle with these ketojin.” They still haven’t forgiven him for it.

  Yet it was precisely the degraded quality of the local people’s lives that began to lift his spirits. His natural sympathy for the poor and suffering led him to make friends. It so happened that Ryu’s second son had a house in Obama, and he had a daughter named Aikana (or Aigana). It was inevitable the two would meet. A portrait of her shows quite a beauty, a dignified girl with delicate features and dark hair piled up into a bun with a peg to hold it in place. Undoubtedly, though, Saigo’s first impression of her would not have been good, because she, like most local women, had retained the ancient, “primitive” habit of tattooing the backs of her hands, the intricacy of the designs—arrow points going up the fingers, with dots and swirls and crosses on the flat parts—reflecting her status. The designs are on show in the local museum, where the gray-haired Mr. Yasuda explained them.

  “Island girls started with the left hand when they got their first periods,” he said. “When they were of a marriageable age, they did the right hand.”

  The practice died out in the late nineteenth century, because girls discovered that outsiders thought it looked tribal, primitive, even barbaric. It didn’t bother Saigo for long, though, if at all, because within a year of his arrival they were together—some sources say “married,” for which there is no evidence, others that she was a local mistress—and within another year or so (in February 1861) Aikana gave birth to a son, Kikujiro. For someone who was famously uninterested in sex, nothing could have better expressed Saigo’s urge to reconnect with people and put behind him the depression with which he had arrived.

  Saigo as seen by a local artist in Amami Oshima.

  Saigo’s “island wife” Aikana.

  The tattoos with which local women marked their hands.

  In addition, he was by no means completely isolated from events back in Kagoshima and Edo. His childhood friend Okubo had arranged for another official they had both known as boys, Koba Dennai, to be posted to the island as an inspector. Information about the shogun and his opponents came in with the sugarcane boats. Ii, the shogun who had destroyed the advocates of more imperial authority and approved the Harris Treaty allowing foreign powers greater freedom, seemed supreme. The pro-emperor party despaired, and spoke of killing him. Letters went back and forth, bearing information and advice. To Okubo, the leading Satsuma loyalist in Saigo’s absence, Saigo urged caution: better to plan carefully than risk all too soon. It seemed to work. Satsuma’s lords, Tadayoshi and his father Hisamitsu—those who had exiled Saigo—promoted a few who had supported the radical Nariakira. The loyalists began to refer to themselves as the Band of Loyal Retainers, working to form alliances and get Saigo back to Satsuma.

  In March 1860, just over a year after Saigo had been sent into exile, their cause received a dramatic boost. A band of eighteen samurai assassins, almost all from Mito domain, attacked Ii’s cortege just outside one of Edo Castle’s main gates, and cut off his head. One of the assassins—the only one from Satsuma, the younger brother of one of Saigo’s friends—ran off with the head before dying of his wounds. The crime was a dire blow to the shogunate, which tried, ludicrously, to claim Ii was still alive, undermining its authority still further. When Saigo heard the news, he ran outside barefoot and with his sword hacked at an old tree to express his joy. He had hopes of a pardon, and of rejoining the movement to reform a society which was becoming ungovernable. But no pardon came, and his hopes died.

  Not that this cast him into a new depression. He had with him not only his childhood friend Koba but also a local man named Toku, a constable who shared with Saigo a total lack of interest in wealth. The two loved fishing together. If only he could just serve his country loyally and go on living quietly, fishing with friends, then—Saigo told Toku—he would be happy.

  And he had Aikana, and a baby boy, and then another child, a girl called Kikuko. The family lived together happily, by all accounts, even building a new house for themselves close to the village, a few dozen meters back from the bay. It was a simple place, just two rooms, raised half a meter on a platform, with sliding panels for doors: a perfect base from which the children could play and the master of the house go off into the hills to hunt boar or down to the shore to take a boat out fishing. It, or something like it, is still there today, being run as a historic site and tourist attraction by one of Aikana’s descendants, Ryu Masako, who lives in a modern house alongside.

  With Koba to help him keep abreast of affairs on the mainland and Toku to help keep local officials in check, he was becoming a respected member of the local community, teaching children and doing his best to redress wrongs, of which there were plenty. Officials would arrest islanders and torture them to make them reveal hidden produce. There were cases of prisoners becoming so desperate they tried to bite off their own tongues. Saigo complained to the island’s boss that
this brutality, and the high level of taxation, disgraced the name of Satsuma. He said they might as well murder the islanders then and there. When told to mind his own business, he said anything that touched on the honor of Satsuma was his business, and unless these practices stopped he would make a detailed report of the offenses. They did not stop, but they did diminish.

  As the ladies talked, I realized why the members of this Saigo society were mostly women. It was actually an Aikana society. She was a local woman, as they were, and Saigo was the outsider. It was the illiterate Aikana who had turned him from a forbidding samurai-scholar-official into a human being. She used to sit on his lap in a display of relaxed domesticity. Not that all was sweetness and light, because they fought sometimes. Of course she knew that he was an important person and would one day go back to the mainland, so when she was combing his hair she would gather some of it up and keep it. Did I know that after his death, when his head was retrieved, the hair gathered by Aikana was used to establish his blood group, and that the head was really his? I didn’t. It’s a great story, but doubtful. If there’s truth here, it’s well hidden, because blood groups were not discovered until 1900 and his head was very obviously his, in death as in life.