Samurai

by John Man

  I went forward to examine the cage, to touch the wood that Saigo had touched, and found that it was not wood at all, but concrete disguised as wood.

  “That’s because there are typhoons every year,” said Michiko. She was a model of politeness, but I can imagine what I would have thought in her shoes: wood and thatch surviving for a century and a half, in the tropics? What was I, dumb or something?

  And another thing. This reconstruction was on the edge of the riverbank, now safely encased with concrete to funnel the daily tides and occasional storm surges. But there was a drainage hole in the wall. This whole area was still liable to flood.

  Ah, well, this was not where the prison was originally, said Mr. Saoda. The mayor’s office used to be in the middle of this space, well away from the riverbank, and the prison was built beside it. And the police office was over there, and two storehouses there . . . And—as I discovered later from the book written by Messrs. Saoda and Oyama—the prisoner was not quite as deprived as I had imagined. He had a servant with him, Kanaka Kuboichi, a lower-class samurai from Kagoshima; what he was doing before he joined Saigo is not recorded. Anyway, there he was, keeping an eye on his master. All of which put things in a different light. Saigo’s prison had been in the heart of a little community.

  But it was still a prison, still an earlier version of the one you see today. Mr. Take, the cubic tennis player, appeared with a key. Stooping through the half door gave a feel for what Saigo was supposed to endure day in, day out. It was little more than an animal cage. A bamboo floor, with a single mat made of rice straw, a toilet box of sand in one corner, a fire pit in another, all now modeled in concrete. There sat a plaster Saigo, meditating, eyes closed, legs crossed, feet turned up, fingers interlocked, thumbs together. It looked extremely uncomfortable.

  “He was used to it,” said Michiko from outside. “Remember you saw where he practiced meditation with Okubo at the Meditation Stone in Kagoshima?”

  Actually, now that I came to look more closely, this figure was nothing like him. It was emaciated, haggard even, and bearded. If this was Saigo, it was more in spirit than in flesh, because for a while he did indeed suffer. Mr. Saoda clambered in with me. There were flies, he said, and mosquitoes, and summers are hot and sticky here, and there was the smell of the toilet, and there were typhoons, which blasted him with spray and small stones, because the whole open area was covered with pebbles. The stones hit with enough force to draw blood. Yet he bore the conditions as a stoic and as a samurai loyal to his lord’s orders. That meant he regarded himself as a criminal, and his punishment as just. There was nothing for it but to endure.

  “When in prison, he sat all the time like this, eating just what was brought to him: rice, water, a little greenery. He had two sticks which he could use to bang on the side of the prison to get attention, but he never used them. He used to say, ‘Even if people pay no attention to me, heaven looks after me.’”

  The picture was changing, becoming richer, like an old-fashioned black-and-white photograph in a tank of developing fluid. Saigo was no longer a mere victim of a sadistic system, but an ascetic at the heart of a group of sympathizers and admirers, who did not like what they saw: a good man fading away.

  Back in Japan proper, matters took a dramatic turn. One month after Saigo’s arrival in Okinoerabu, an Englishman was murdered in Yokohama. Most Japanese at the time, certainly most samurai, would have shrugged. A foreigner killed: so what? His fault for being foreign. It happened far away, and Saigo never mentioned it, but it would turn out to have been one of the first gusts of wind driving Japan toward the maelstrom that Saigo would help create, and which would eventually drag him down.

  On September 14, 1862, three English men and one woman set off on horseback from Yokohama, intending to take a boat to see a temple. One of the men was Charles Richardson, a merchant from Shanghai on his way back to London. The woman was Margaret Borradaile, wife of a Hong Kong merchant. They had gone twelve kilometers along the busy Tokaido road, which Saigo had traveled on his way to Edo, when at the village of Namamugi, now a Tokyo suburb, they came upon a column of samurai marching toward them at the head of a procession. They edged past between the wood-and-thatch houses and the surly two-sworded men, and were approaching the lord’s palanquin when his retainers waved for them to turn back. They were in the process of doing just that when several samurai, apparently taking offense at the foreigners’ lack of respect, attacked with drawn swords. One struck at Mrs. Borradaile’s head. She ducked, and the sword cut away her hat and a lock of hair. Others went for the men, cutting down Richardson, who fell, fatally hurt, and wounding the other two—one of them receiving a cut halfway through his left arm—who shouted to Mrs. Borradaile to ride on. She broke free, so panic-stricken that she galloped into the sea before regaining the road. Her horse fell twice, but somehow, she couldn’t remember how, she regained her seat and arrived in Yokohama’s foreign settlement “in a fearful state,” according to a letter in the English-language Japan Herald, “her hands, face and clothes bespattered with blood.”

  At once, though with some confusion about who was in command, half a dozen English and French officers tore back to the scene, to find the two wounded men in the American consulate in Kanagawa. But where was Richardson? Everyone they asked denied all knowledge, until a little boy directed them to the side of a cottage off the road. There they saw a mound covered over with a couple of old mats,

  which on being removed revealed a most ghastly and horrible spectacle. The whole body was one mass of blood; one wound, from which the bowels extruded, extended from the abdomen to the back; another, on the left shoulder had severed all the bones into the chest; there was a gaping spear wound over the region of the heart; the right wrist was completely detached, and the hand was hanging merely by a strip of flesh . . . and on moving the head the neck was found to be entirely cut through on the left side.

  Clearly, some of the damage had been inflicted after death.

  Why might this have anything to do with Saigo? Because the lord in the palanquin, the commander of the samurai and therefore the man responsible for the attack, was Hisamitsu. He was on his way home, having demanded a new power-sharing arrangement in which the most important daimyo would share decision making with the shogun, and in which the emperor’s authority would be boosted by giving him the power of approval.

  The news of Richardson’s murder put the community of foreign traders into a ferment of anxiety and anger. In meeting after meeting, many were for whipping up a military force to seize Hisamitsu, until the chief British representative, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Neale, pointed out that this would be tantamount to a declaration of war. As another diplomat, Ernest Satow, later wrote, it might also have unleashed a whirlwind of violence, leading to the mass murder of foreigners, the collapse of the shogunate, the dispatch of armies and navies by Britain, France and the Netherlands, and the dismemberment of Japan. Best let diplomacy take its course.

  Which it did, with the usual delays. Six months later, the British Foreign Office took action that would devastate Saigo’s hometown.

  The one who was most sympathetic to Saigo was his main guard, a man named Tsuchimochi Masateru. For four months, he brought Saigo’s rations. He saw what happened when a typhoon struck, which it did perhaps two or three times in those four months. The two became friends. Tsuchimochi’s admiration for his charge grew into hero worship. That much is a matter of record, to which Mr. Saoda added color. At home, the guard’s mother cooked extra food for Saigo. No, no, he said, I am a police officer, I cannot break the law by giving him extra food. “You must be a man!” said his mother. “You have to help him!” So he tried; but Saigo refused. To accept would be disloyal to the orders of his lord.

  “The guard thought, ‘We shouldn’t let him die. We have to keep him alive.’” This was Mr. Oyama speaking, the younger of the two floppy-hatted Saigo experts. It was perhaps Hisamitsu’s intention that Saigo should die, but there was nothing about death
in the order. He could hardly be kept in an enclosure if he were dead. “So he took another look at the orders. There was this word—”

  “Kakoi,” put in Michiko. “It means”—she checked her dictionary—“yes, a fence, or an enclosure.”

  “But it did not say where it had to be. It did not have to be outside. It could be inside.”

  Tsuchimochi pointed this out to the superintendent, who agreed that it was ambiguous. So Tsuchimochi built another simple wood-and-thatch house, with a prison room inside it. The work took about twenty days, and for that time he let Saigo go free so that he could regain his health.

  Saigo wanted to express his gratitude to Tsuchimochi, but, having been declared a criminal, he had no stipend and nothing to give, so he told the guard he would teach his children sumo wrestling. That was how a new life started: first the wrestling, which attracted a crowd of up to twenty children, and then, when he was inside his new “prison,” which was not so much a prison as a study with a lock, he was free to teach and talk and read and—

  To read?

  Oh, yes. He had his books.

  No one had mentioned the books. He had brought three trunk loads of them, said my experts; so we should revise the image of the procession from the landing site to include first the servant Kanaka and now a handcart or two to carry his books.

  “Three trunks,” Mr. Saoda said, “containing twelve hundred Chinese and Japanese classics.”

  Quite a library. Saigo quickly became the center of a study group, with classes for the children on history and literature, backed by long conversations with local scholars. These included one Misao Tankei, whose father had left an extensive book collection, and a calligraphy teacher named Kawaguchi Seppo, a Shimazu retainer who had been exiled ten years before with his family. This was a mini-university in the making. “I am undisturbed by daily affairs,” Saigo wrote, “so I can devote myself without distraction to learning and it seems as though, at this rate, I will become a scholar.” His calligraphy improved. He returned to his old passion, classical Chinese poetry, with its strict rules on the number of syllables per line and lines per verse.

  A sunflower turns towards the sun

  as though the light were unchanged,

  So I will remain loyal,

  even if my fortunes are unchanged.

  Saigo’s talents and interests triggered something latent in the islanders—a love of learning; and also something new—a love of good government: new because local autonomy was not part of their history under Satsuma’s oppressive rule.

  Near the prison is another open space where in 1911 they opened a library named after him, the first library in any of the Ryukyu Islands. Now the library is gone, replaced by a shrine—a temple, an altar a few steps up—funded by a corporate boss who admires Saigo. We all made ritual bows to Saigo’s memory. Alongside is a statue, a copy of the most famous statue of all, in Tokyo’s Ueno Park, showing him striding along, kimono flowing in the wind, leading his little dog. It had been made in 1977 to commemorate the centenary of his death, displayed in Kagoshima, and then brought here. Mr. Saoda became quite lyrical about the scene before us, his eighty years seeming to fall away as he spoke.

  “He read seventeen hundred books [the number, I noticed, was increasing] while he was in prison, so we thought he was a very wonderful man. We paid our respects to him by calling him Great Nanshu [“of the South,” the name he used when he arrived], or Teacher Saigo. Everyone remembers how hard he studied. We thought we should study as hard as he did, so we built the Nanshu Library here. I remember it from when I was a child. We used to come here on Sunday mornings to play and listen to talks from our seniors, as part of goju education. They still say, “Let’s go to the Nanshu Library,” meaning this place, although it’s long gone. Now it’s been replaced by a better one. You will see.”

  The new library is indeed a fine one, with a room devoted to Saigo. Our little group treated it as another shrine, everyone falling silent as they browsed through the collection of historical texts and secondary works. They really are a community of book lovers, all (they say) thanks to Saigo.

  There was more. Mr. Saoda and Mr. Oyama invited me to sit and listen, to make sure I understood the nature of the change brought about by Saigo. Amami Oshima had brought him back from the dead; but it was on Okinoerabu that he rediscovered his passion for life.

  As indeed anyone would, when presented with a culture so proud of its dialect and its traditions—this was after all a separate nation before Satsuma took it over—including its music and its dances, displayed to us one evening by two ladies in patterned kimonos and vast red-and-white hats, as wide as the women and half a meter high, in the form of flowers. Their stately performance was followed by a storming, stomping drum dance by Mr. Take’s exuberant teenage son and daughter in black warrior costumes. If Saigo saw a tenth of what I saw that evening I’m not surprised he fell in love with the place.

  Cut off from his old world and then connected to a new one, surrounded by his books and the intense interest of the islanders, with nothing much else to distract his attention, Saigo used his time to refine his philosophy of life. His thinking was rooted in his childhood reading of the Confucian classics and their interpreters, Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, and their nineteenth-century exponent Sato Issai. In fact, as a student Saigo had copied out 101 of Sato’s pithy aphorisms in a little handbook, which he kept with him to study. From his studies, he came to the conclusion that heaven was the key to morality (as Charles Yates sets out in his superb biography). “In all one does, one must have a heart that follows heaven,” reads one entry, and another: “One must accept that one’s flesh is the property of heaven.”

  Sometime after his survival in Kinko Bay, he came to believe himself to be in heaven’s hands. Perhaps this notion grew in him while he was on Amami Oshima. Perhaps, as some have suggested, for him to believe that his rescue was heaven’s will was a way of absolving himself from shame at his own incompetence and guilt at his survival. Perhaps there was in him not only a drive to live morally, but also a drive to die morally, as he had tried to do with Gessho.

  While he lived, however, Saigo felt himself bound by a chain of morality to heaven. Heaven is embodied in the emperor, and the emperor delegates his authority to the daimyos, and the daimyos delegate authority to their officials, who must never forget that they owe their authority, ultimately, to heaven. Since it was axiomatic that the emperor was descended from the sun goddess, the imperial dynasty was eternal. The officials under him, however, were not. While the emperor reigned immutably, it was his ministers, including the shogun, who did the actual ruling, and they could be removed if found wanting. So the duty of any official, however lowly, is to reflect heaven’s will and administer well, eliminating selfish desires. An official position is not a possession, but a sacred trust. The proof of an official’s success is the happiness of those at the bottom of the chain of command. If the people are content, heaven is content; if they are not, it’s the fault of those who rule in heaven’s name.

  With this in mind, Saigo coined a simple four-word mission statement, which deserves capital letters, because it was the key to his beliefs and actions:

  REVERE HEAVEN, LOVE MANKIND

  Keiten aijin: you see it everywhere on Saigo memorabilia. But this was not just a private motto. People quote it as the principle that underlay his lasting gift to Okinoerabu. Those twenty children who studied under him on the island became leading officials, the heart of this little society, and carried his principles down through the years, putting into practice Saigo’s main moral rule: the duty of government is to serve the people. They had it in writing, because Saigo spelled out the proper tasks of the village leader to his guard, Tsuchimochi, and his words were taken down at the time in classical Japanese (now translated into modern Japanese by Saoda and Oyama). So after he left, local officials worked out how they could best serve their people, and came up with an original self-help scheme. Saoda and Oyama spelled it out for
me, speaking in turns.

  “Every year, this island had been hit by typhoons, which ruined crops and threatened starvation. So we realized we had to cooperate. Some years we had good harvests, and in those years everyone donated rice.”

  “We were then prepared for the bad years, and we could draw on our reserves. Thanks to this, Japan’s first insurance system, the people did not suffer any longer from starvation.”

  The system came into effect only thirty years after Saigo left, but Saoda and Oyama had no doubt it arose out of Saigo’s moral code.

  In March 1863, seeking satisfaction at last in the matter of Richardson’s murder, the Foreign Office sent its man in Yokohama, Lieutenant Colonel Neale, to Edo with a demand for $150,000 for allowing the murder of a foreigner and making no attempt to find and punish the murderers. In addition, if necessary, a ship would go to Kagoshima and demand that the daimyo arrange the trial and execution of the murderers and the payment of $12,500 to Richardson’s family and the three other victims. The shogun had twenty days to reply, or else.

  Word got around that war was coming, and/or civil war, for there were many factions dividing the emperor, the shogun, the many lords and the free-booting, masterless ronin. The shogun’s people ducked, weaved, delayed, prevaricated and negotiated new deadlines. Japanese staff vanished from the foreigners’ enclaves—in the case of the British diplomat Ernest Satow, along with a revolver, a Japanese sword, several spoons and forks “and the remains of last night’s dinner.” Violence was just below the surface, and occasionally above it. A Frenchman shot a merchant who tried to claim payment of a debt with force. Two Americans were assaulted.

  The shogun’s council agreed to pay in seven installments, then missed the first. The emperor instructed the shogun to close all foreign ports and expel all foreigners at once, an edict ludicrously out of touch with reality, particularly as there had also been hints that the shogun might perhaps call on foreign ships to help put down any uprising being fomented in Satsuma, among other places. As Neale put it in his reply, it was an order “unparalleled in the history of all nations, civilized or uncivilized.” It was, in effect, a declaration of war, calling for the “severest and most merited chastisement.” “A pageful of notes of exclamation,” wrote Satow, “would not be sufficient to express the astonishment of the foreign public of Yokohama.” But squadrons of English and French ships in the harbor reassured them of the order’s unreality.1