Samurai

by John Man

  There was still the little problem of wringing reparations from Satsuma. Clearly the central government was powerless, so Neale took the task upon himself, with the help of seven British warships under Vice Admiral Augustus Kuper. After a six-day voyage, the little fleet anchored off Kagoshima on August 12, well clear of the shore-based guns. Sakurajima loomed across the bay to the east, with the village at its base and, moored close by, three foreign-built steamers. To the west lay the town: a line of forts, the castle a kilometer inland backed by the green hill of Shiroyama, and to the right, where the hills crowded the coast, the royal gardens and the ironworks and factories constructed by Nariakira.

  (Detail of “The Bombardment of Kagoshima,” engraving from The Illustrated London News, November 7, 1863)

  (Map of the bombardment of Kagoshima, 1863: Print Collector/HIP/TopFoto)

  The seven storm-tossed British ships bombarding Kagoshima on August 15, 1863, their maneuvers between Sakurajima and the town marked in the chart above.

  Hisamitsu dispatched a delegation of forty to see Neale, intending apparently to seize his ship, a scheme foiled by the crowd of marines onboard. Neale sent a letter to Hisamitsu, demanding the reparations and the murderers. Back came the reply: Richardson’s death was his own fault for “impeding” the daimyo’s progress, and there could be no talk of reparations until the murderers were found, which they could not be.

  That was that. Reprisals had to be taken.

  The morning of August 15 dawned under gathering clouds and the rising wind of an approaching typhoon. Four ships steamed the two kilometers to Sakurajima, seized the three foreign-built steamers, lashed them alongside, hauled them back to the anchorage and awaited developments. At noon the shore-based batteries opened up, including two big cannons made by Nariakira’s new furnaces. Their 4.5-meter barrels could lob 70-kilo shells 3 kilometers, which meant that the British ships were within their range. Kuper ordered the captured ships to be set on fire and scuttled, giving just enough time for certain officers, sailors and diplomats, among them Satow, to snatch some plunder.

  Then, with the Japanese ships ablaze and cut adrift, came the British reply to the bombardment. All seven vessels set off on a curving course that took them parallel to the town, some four hundred meters offshore. Both shore and ships were firing. A round-shot struck Neale’s flagship, the Euryalus, and by an extraordinary stroke of luck, considering the atrocious conditions, took off the heads of two senior officers who happened to be standing one behind the other, talking to the vice admiral. A shell also exploded on deck, killing seven other men. Another ship ran aground but was successfully towed off, under constant but inaccurate fire from a nearby fort. Satow, on the Argus, described his amazement at the sight of cannonballs flying harmlessly overhead, his ship receiving just three insubstantial hits. By 5:00 P.M. the fleet was back at anchor, with the loss of nine or thirteen lives (sources vary).

  This was what is now known as the Anglo-Satsuma War, surely one of the shortest and least satisfactory wars on record. On shore, the British guns and rockets had killed five people, flattened a temple they thought was the daimyo’s residence, set the factories ablaze and burned some five hundred wood-and-paper houses—the fire being whipped up by the high winds to form “an awful and magnificent sight,” in Satow’s words. There had been no landing, no taking of prisoners, no seizure of guns. It was hardly a victory, more of a draw, but enough to make a point. The British buried their dead and sailed back to Yokohama, where relations between foreigners and Japanese settled into precisely the same pattern of bitterness, fear and occasional violence as had existed before.

  Rather oddly, however, Satsuma did pay the indemnity and apologize for Richardson’s murder, also making promises to catch and execute the killers. No one believed this, because the person most to blame was Hisamitsu himself. In the end, the gesture cost Satsuma nothing: they borrowed the cash from the shogun, and never repaid it because events soon spiraled out of control.

  Richardson’s murderers were never found, not surprisingly, given that in Japanese eyes they had done nothing wrong. In fact, almost certainly there was only one culprit—the one who struck the first blow—and he is buried in the Tofoku temple complex in Kyoto, the place where Saigo and Gessho used to meet. His name was Shinichi Arima, said the monk who showed me around, and his tomb is still respected, because, after all, “he was protecting the country’s honor.”

  We, like Saigo, are being drawn into the whirlpool of events that sucked Japan into the 1868 revolution, the end of the shogunate and the restoration of the emperor in the person of the young man who came to be called Meiji. There was a lot of fear, and a lot of chaos. As in most revolutions, things happened very fast, possible outcomes emerging and sinking day by day, hour by hour. Some details are still obscure. But two things are remarkable when the Meiji Restoration is compared with other world-shaking revolutions, particularly those in France, America and Russia. The first is that there were very few deaths, despite months of civil war; there were no nationwide or even city-wide riots and no mass executions. This makes the restoration less a revolution, and more of a regime change in which one oligarchy replaced another. The important decisions were made in back rooms. And the reason—the second remarkable feature—was that everyone agreed on one thing: the emperor was sacrosanct. This was the fixed point around which chaos swirled, the element that assured continuity and, in the end, a nation at peace with itself at home (though to assert itself over coming decades in ways that were not at all peaceful abroad).

  This is how chaos came to Japan, and why Satsuma was at the center of it, and why Saigo would not be allowed to remain happily in exile:

  Hisamitsu’s attempts at reform—at forcing the shogun to share power with the daimyos, the emperor to be given approval of their decisions—had come to nothing. No one at court, let alone the emperor, had a clue about managing a modern state. The daimyos were more eager to grab power for themselves than to cooperate with each other, or the shogun, or the emperor. In addition, some of the more extreme samurai thought the answer to all problems was, as ever: Sonno joi!—“Revere the emperor! Expel the barbarians!” These people were terrorists, pure and simple, killing foreigners, harassing the shogun’s demoralized armies, burning the houses of opponents, even attacking imperial officials. One senior court noble received the severed ears of a “treacherous” Confucian official; another was sent a severed hand. The shogunate was dying, and helpless to do anything to save itself.

  To add to this mayhem, Saigo’s own province was almost at war with its near neighbor and great rival, Choshu, as it was generally called; in fact that was the name of the clan, which ruled what was then Nagato province (the western part of today’s Yamaguchi prefecture) and thus dominated the Shimonoseki Strait, with its steady back and forth of foreign ships. Choshu and Satsuma, each of which might have been able to save both emperor and shogunate, had a love-hate, hot-and-cold relationship, which at this moment was shifting toward hatred and coldness. Five dissident nobles had defected to Choshu, where the pro-imperial radicals had seized power. They were all for revering the emperor and expelling barbarians, to the point of undermining Japan’s future, by (for example) opening fire on western vessels passing through the Shimonoseki Strait. Choshu was also eager to undermine Hisamitsu’s more temperate influence at court.

  Desperate to retain power, Hisamitsu agreed to a quick alliance with another domain (Aizu, part of Mutsu province) and tried to organize a coup by seizing control of the emperor. On September 30, troops from the two domains attacked the imperial palace in Kyoto, a place of vast gardens and unpretentious but extensive single-story wooden buildings, which in Saigo’s day had been there less than ten years, the previous ones having been destroyed by fire. The attackers had allies inside, so the task quickly ended with the Satsuma men ousting those from Choshu.

  But for Hisamitsu to be on the inside did not achieve anything. There was too much hostility toward him. In these dire and worsen
ing circumstances, Hisamitsu could do with all the help he could get, even from a man he himself had condemned to exile, imprisonment and possible death.

  He sent for Saigo.

  At the end of March 1864 a steamship—perhaps the first seen by the islanders—arrived at Okinoerabu bringing three of Saigo’s friends, who carried the astonishing news that he had been pardoned and was summoned to return as soon as possible.

  Nothing could have surprised or delighted him more. At once, he disposed of his property: his books to the island, the rest—kimonos, kitchenware and fire stove—to individuals. His servant, Kanaka, received an iron kettle and a teapot, which would come in handy, because he stayed on and married an islander. There was just time to compose one last poem to his guard and savior Tsuchimochi:

  Parting seems like a dream, like a cloud

  The desire to leave, the longing to return, my tears fall like rain

  The kindness you bestowed on me in jail is beyond words of thanks.

  Onboard ship, he realized that he had not properly thanked his cook, who was among the little group seeing him onto the vessel. So, the story goes, he took off the top kimono he was wearing and wrapped it around the cook’s shoulders. The name of the cook is recorded: Shimatomi. Perhaps it was he who produced the extra food in the kitchen of Tsuchimochi’s mother. It’s a nice touch. Who knows, it might even be true.

  And then he was on his way, insisting on a stop to see his “island wife” Aikana and two children on Amami Oshima. He was there for three happy days, before leaving her for what would be the last time.

  On April 4, he was back in Kagoshima, and three weeks later in Kyoto, preparing to be briefed by his former oppressor, now his rescuer, his lord’s father, Satsuma’s regent Hisamitsu.

  12

  INTO THE MAELSTROM

  YOU KNOW THE NIGHTMARE IN WHICH YOU ARE ONSTAGE without knowing the story, let alone the script? That was Saigo in April 1864, suddenly finding himself in charge of Satsuma’s military affairs locally and the domain’s ambassador in Kyoto. Luckily, he had the support of his childhood friend Okubo; luckily also, he was in no worse a position than the court and shogunate, both of which were responding to events as they happened, with no coherent policy.

  To tell the events that followed over the next few months in detail would be tedious. As they unfold in my mind’s eye, I see not a play, but a film, a Kurasawa black-and-white, speeded up, all flickering images, compressing time, in which Saigo dashes back and forth, changing his plans and his mind with every new twist in the action.

  Choshu obsesses him. Its opposition demands a response. But to attack Choshu will play into the shogun’s hands, and besides, western powers are planning their own assault as a punishment for shelling their ships. For Satsuma to attack Choshu right now would seem pro-foreign, which is precisely what Satsuma is not. If only he could know what Choshu’s plans were! Then he would know if they were good or evil. The thought gives him an idea, a typically impulsive one. He will meet with Choshu leaders and ask them their intentions. If they kill him, so what? It’s in a good cause. At least his lord will know where Choshu stands. Is he serious? Probably. But Hisamitsu rejects the idea, and then suddenly it’s irrelevant, because on August 20, Choshu, determined to seize power back again, attacks the imperial palace and its Aizu and Satsuma defenders. The battle rages at several gates, bullets flying (you can still see the indents in the wooden gates and posts), until reinforcements called in by Saigo—his first time in action—take a few prisoners and force the Choshu men back.1 That solves Saigo’s problem: Choshu is irredeemably evil. Heaven’s punishment is required. The shogunate demands a punitive attack. Saigo is passionately for it. Not quick enough. Four western powers get their punishment in first, sending ships to shell Shimonoseki and force Choshu to sign a peace treaty. The shogunate, distracted by another insurrection, can’t get troops together or find a commander for its own campaign.

  We are now at the end of 1864, and the fast-forward slows briefly. On October 11, Saigo had a meeting that changed him, and thus had a profound effect on Japanese history. He was introduced to Katsu Kaishu, commander of the shogun’s navy. Katsu is worth a brief diversion. His father was a lowly samurai, that charming drifter who once practiced swordplay on dead criminals and in later life wrote the story of his adventures in Musui’s Story. Katsu had all his father’s intelligence, all the ambition his father lacked and a good deal of arrogance that was all his own. He studied Dutch and military history, and then captained the first Japanese steam-powered warship, which in 1860 carried the first Japanese delegation to America to ratify the Harris Treaty. Working his way up the naval hierarchy, he argued in favor of a unified naval command and became director of the leading naval college.

  Katsu Kaishu, commander of the shogun’s navy, in peacetime samurai dress, with his two swords. Katsu persuaded Saigo that the shogunate was finished and that the emperor’s powers should be restored.

  (Kaishu Katsu, photograph: JTB/Photoshot)

  The two men were very impressed with each other. “Smarter than anyone I know,” said Saigo of Katsu; “I am utterly enthralled by Katsu.” Katsu was left wondering if Saigo was perhaps “the one to shoulder what people call the great burden of the realm.” What really impressed Saigo was Katsu’s forthright opinion that the shogunate was finished, that the entire system was incompetent, indecisive, rotten. What was needed was an alliance of daimyos rallying behind the emperor, an end to “expel the barbarian” and a government of national unity that could deal with the West.

  Saigo had never considered a Japan without a shogun. It all made sudden sense. Choshu would still have to be punished for its treachery, but then brought on board. With that little problem out of the way, and with the shogun gone, Japan’s daimyos could cooperate, unite, renegotiate treaties with the foreigners, restore imperial honor, create proper armed forces and build a new Japan.

  And the next month it all looked possible. Saigo, already responsible for Japan’s largest army (Satsuma’s), was appointed war secretary by the shogun and given command of the campaign against Choshu. But Saigo now had a long-term agenda of his own: first to crush Choshu, but then to win it over. Foreshadowing Theodore Roosevelt’s aphorism, he would carry a big stick, but speak softly. Using the stick alone would merely strengthen Choshu’s belligerence. So his demands would be moderate, targeting individuals rather than the whole domain.

  At a meeting with an intermediary on Choshu’s borders, he put his rock-bottom demands: the severed heads of those behind the attack on the imperial palace; the execution of its leaders; and the return of five dissident nobles who had fled to Choshu. To show his goodwill, he released the Choshu prisoners taken in their attack on the palace.

  It worked. He was thanked for his “great mercy.” Heads were delivered, and checked. Executions followed. All seemed to be going smoothly . . .

  . . . when Choshu collapsed into civil war because radical loyalists objected to what they saw as weakness. In the chaos, the loyalists spirited the five nobles into hiding. That meant that Saigo’s final condition could not be fulfilled. A lesser man might have despaired. But Saigo—committed to virtuous action, always willing to risk life itself for what he believed—contacted the loyalist rebels, set up a meeting deep in their territory, and went to see them. Once again, he entered “the field of death” to prove his sincerity. They listened, and—because both sides were at one in their adoration of the emperor, because of Saigo’s bravery, because of his obvious sincerity—he won a concession. The five nobles would be transferred to neutral territory, under neutral guards. Face was saved, Saigo’s mission was accomplished and his troops could go home. Civil war in Choshu continued, but—as he said—there was nothing more to be done until violence ended.

  By any standards, Saigo’s achievement was a triumph. Back in Kagoshima in early 1865—he was traveling back and forth by steamer via Osaka these days—he was given an ecstatic reception: a letter of gratitude from Hisamitsu, a top-
quality sword, promotion to the fourth-highest position in Satsuma, a vastly increased stipend and (the following year) a place on the Council of Elders, making him one of the most eminent men in Japan.

  He also got married, to Iwayama Ito, the daughter of a senior official in Kagoshima. There was no great romance. This was an alliance between the Establishment and Fame, a statement by Saigo of his arrival at the heart of power and influence. There would be a son and two daughters, but the basis of the marriage seems to have been that the two were useful to each other, in a perfectly friendly way. No letters between the pair of them survive. He once wrote a poem about her, describing her as a good wife who did not complain: hardly enough to guarantee her a place in history.

  Besides, Saigo also had a mistress in Kyoto, where, as a well-respected official, he often went with friends to teahouses to be entertained by geishas. He struck up a friendship with a geisha about whom very little is known, perhaps not surprisingly given the traditional discretion of the geishas and the care with which their world was entered. There was another reason for secrecy: she was enormous, and therefore the cause of hushed comment and some inappropriate hilarity. According to the only source, Katsu Kaishu, the naval commander who had inspired Saigo with his ideas on the need to restore the emperor, she was known as “Princess Pig.” The two apparently made a powerful impression on Saigo’s colleagues, this robust woman a suitable match for his massive, 110-kilo frame, now restored to its full bulk after the rigors of exile. But discretion being the better part of rumor, nothing more is known about the depth of the relationship, which is precisely as Saigo would have wished.2