Samurai

by John Man

  Kumamoto’s keep is now well restored after the fire that destroyed it during the 1877 siege.

  Eighteen kilometers to the north, in Tabaruzaka, the rebels failed to repel imperial forces advancing up the sunken approach road, where each stage of the advance has its marker.

  This one is marked “First Slope.” Their losses are among the fourteen thousand commemorated on a war memorial.

  ESCAPE, A LAST STAND AND DEATH

  Having retreated up Kyushu’s east coast, Saigo led a hard core of some six hundred followers in a dramatic escape over Mount Eno. Fighting their way southward, the rebels entered Kagoshima and seized its central hill, Shiroyama. From his HQ in a cave—in effect, a hiding place—Saigo and a small group fled downhill, until Saigo was struck in the leg by a bullet. Unable to go farther, he asked his aide to behead him.

  Mount Eno, looming over what is now a Saigo Takamori museum.

  In a museum tableau, Saigo presents options to his advisers.

  A diary left behind by a rebel soldier.

  A painting in the museum records the escape over Mount Eno. Attacking at dawn, rebels overwhelm a small imperial force dug in below the peak.

  On Shiroyama, the caves in which Saigo sheltered are now on the tourist trail.

  Sketches kept in another cave nearby show rebels as superfit samurai warriors stripped to their loincloths. In fact, they were soon beaten by overwhelming numbers of imperial troops.

  Beppu Shinsuke, acting as Saigo’s aide (kaishaku), raises his sword to cut off his master’s head with a single blow.

  A memorial marks the site of Saigo’s death, which it describes as “suicide.”

  Today, Saigo’s statue stands in front of Shiroyama, the hill on which he died.

  FROM REBEL TO NATIONAL HERO

  Though his rebellion had accomplished nothing but death and destruction, Saigo quickly became one of Japan’s most admired figures. Today his image is everywhere, on postcards, wall-paintings, mugs, T-shirts and tourist trinkets.

  Even before Saigo’s death, people claimed he was already in heaven, as a comet, visible through a telescope in full dress uniform.

  Kagoshima’s Nanshu Cemetery, with its view of Sakurajima, commemorates 2,223 local soldiers who died during Saigo’s rebellion, including, of course, Saigo himself.

  Fresh flowers mark his tomb.

  Saigo’s statue in Kagoshima shows him in military uniform, but without medals to indicate his humility. The most famous one in Ueno Park, Tokyo.

  Portrays him as a samurai, with his two main attributes, sword and little dog.

  A miniature statue for tourists.

  “Saigo in the heavens”: a woodblock print gives him star billing, literally.

  (Saigo in the heavens, contemporary woodblock print: Kagoshima City Museum of Art)

  A SAMURAI LEGACY

  In Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai, Toshiro Mifune is the masterless ronin who leads six others to fight for villagers oppressed by bandits. Like Saigo, he takes on a noble cause for its own sake, not for reward. Unlike Saigo, he succeeds.

  (Toshiro Mifune in the Seven Samurai directed by Akira Kurasawa, 1954: © AF Archive/Alamy)

  In Star Wars, Darth Vader’s flared helmet and grim face mask were inspired by the headgear of wealthy samurai.

  (David Prowse in Return of the Jedi, 1983, directed by Richard Marquand, 1983: © Photos 12/Alamy)

  In Kill Bill, “The Bride” (Uma Thurman)—“deadliest woman in the world”—takes terrible revenge on her enemies with a specially made samurai sword.

  (Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, vol. 1, 2003, directed by Quentin Tarantino: © Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy)

  13

  THE UNHAPPY REVOLUTIONARY

  IN ONE SENSE, THE RESTORATION FULFILLED THE MISSION Saigo had set himself: the emperor back in power, Satsuma developing nicely. But it had taken a toll on him. He felt his age. His joints ached. He had a fever, stomach pains and diarrhea. With no other task before him, and an adequate income for a man of his simple tastes, he retired to recuperate at a hot springs a couple of hours’ ride from Kagoshima. There was a river to fish in, a forest to hunt in, several dogs to keep him company—and that would be enough, until, as he wrote, he had a chance to return to his family on Amami Oshima. So set on retirement was he that he turned down a generous cash bonus and the equivalent of a peerage offered by the imperial court.

  It took a visit from Tadayoshi himself to break his resolve. The ex-daimyo, now governor, came in person to ask for his help in dealing with the local low-ranking samurai. They had had their expectations raised by promises of reform, and then by what looked like some real change: the four leading daimyos had handed over their lands and subjects to the imperial government—which had promptly made them governors of their old domains. The only thing that had changed, apparently, was the title. This was not good enough, and Tadayoshi (though still under his father’s thumb) recognized it. “It is obvious,” he wrote to Saigo, “that government appointments should be made irrespective of rank.”

  Saigo didn’t actually have to do anything, said Tadayoshi, just show his support for reform. Given his reputation—low-born high achiever, ex-minister, commander, wrongfully convicted exile, a virtual saint—that would be enough to calm things. He agreed, and became in effect a nonexecutive director of Satsuma, a presence assuring men of similar lowly origins that there was someone to speak for them in the ranks of the province’s government. With hindsight, it is clear that this was where the real trouble began. From this point on, he would find himself ever more deeply mired in conflicting loyalties, to his province and the nation, his lord and the emperor, the samurai as an independent group and the need for national unity, his own inner need for rigidity and a politician’s need to compromise. These forces would, in the end, tear him apart, and they were already at work.

  Change did follow, mainly initiated by Tadayoshi and his top vassals. Rich samurai had their incomes slashed by over 80 percent, while the stipends of poor samurai increased by over 20 percent—a dramatic change in a province where a few rich families (actually one in five hundred) had previously controlled almost half the income of all samurai. Satsuma acquired a cabinet system, relative equality of class and opportunity, fairer taxes, a modern army. All samurai between eighteen and thirty-five were organized into new military formations, giving Kagoshima some fifteen thousand men under arms, with officers of middle and lower rank being elected by their troops, and most of them retaining their jobs. In other words, as Charles Yates says, Kagoshima had become a military state in a condition of permanent mobilization. It thrived astonishingly well, switching from feudalism to modern capitalism in a few years. This is not to say that all was peace and harmony: the middle-ranking samurai remained resentful at their loss of privileges, a feeling that would burst out in a few years’ time and carry Saigo along with it.

  Saigo was not happy as a local politician. He was bored by administration, he longed for action, and he mourned the loss of the old days when loyalty to a daimyo gave meaning to life.

  Meanwhile, Satsuma’s success had raised fears in Tokyo. If Satsuma could succeed on its own, what was the point of the new centralized government? Was Satsuma perhaps planning to break away? Some observers foresaw civil war. Among those in Tokyo’s new imperial government who worried about this was Saigo’s childhood friend Okubo. Having identified the problem, he saw a solution. In February 1871, he and several others came from Tokyo to ask Saigo and Hisamitsu, on behalf of the emperor, to join the central government. One of the delegation was Saigo’s younger brother, Tsugumichi, who had been to Europe and was now a lieutenant general in the new imperial army. Another was a senior general, Yamagata Aritomo, Saigo’s friend and future nemesis, of whom more shortly. It took three days of tearful pleading to persuade Saigo to come on board, and even then he and Okubo could not agree on the nature of government (a difference that did not bode well for the future of their relationship). Okubo wanted a strong, centralized bureaucr
acy; Saigo a much lighter hand, based on the Confucian ideal of ruling by general principles. Where they were at one was on the need for a national army, and this was the task Saigo agreed to take on, as general, commander of the imperial guard and state councilor, eventually with the unique rank of field marshal.

  No one else in the entire country had this degree of moral authority. Imagine Nelson Mandela crossed with the duke of Wellington. He had served time in prison, having been wrongly accused, had reintegrated himself without rancor, and had then become a victorious general and government minister. His presence as a member of the governmental team again had the desired effect. People stopped talking of a possible civil war.

  For Okubo that was just a start. What was really needed, if the government was serious about becoming militarily independent and powerful, was to get rid of all the old domains and replace them with centrally administered prefectures. There would of course be resistance, not only from the daimyos but also from their samurai retainers. To have backing from Saigo—once a low-ranking samurai of impeccable loyalty, now commander of the imperial guard—would be vital. It took a while, six months, to get Saigo’s agreement. Change soon followed. Okubo became minister of finance, and Saigo joined a council of four low-born samurai who would oversee the reforms. For Saigo, it was a painful process. On the one hand, it was clear that to create a working central government, to preserve national security and to work with foreign powers, the domains had to go. On the other, he had a personal commitment to Satsuma and its lord. But he had no real option. He chose the lesser of two evils. For the time being, national interests trumped Satsuma’s.

  On August 29, came a second revolution. The emperor told the ex-daimyos, now governors of their old domains, that all domains were history. Over the next few months boundaries were redrawn, today’s prefectures established and new governors put in place, responsible to the imperial government for administering national taxes, laws and education. Almost all of them accepted these stunning changes, with more or less good grace, partly because they were in the midst of a revolution anyway, and partly because they received generous settlements and élite status—each governor was to receive 10 percent of his prefecture’s tax incomes for life plus the equivalent of a peerage.

  Only one objected: Satsuma’s ruler Hisamitsu, still regent for his son, though now as governor rather than daimyo. Hisamitsu was a problem for Saigo. It was he, the regent, who had exiled Saigo, had indeed issued those stern instructions that looked as if they were intended to be fatal; he to whom Saigo was so determinedly loyal. As regent, he had often acted in the place of the real daimyo, his son Tadayoshi. Now it was the son, by this point in his late twenties, who supervised the changes, Hisamitsu, fiftyish, who railed against them, ever more foul-tempered with each passing year. It was certainly hard on him: he was the proud heir to seven hundred years of family rule over Japan’s most independent domain, and he ranted about treachery—Saigo’s treachery in particular; but there was nothing he could do except fume at Saigo, and nothing that Saigo could do except suffer.

  It was time to turn to foreign affairs, to negotiate the revision of the so-called Unequal Treaties with the U.S. and other Western powers—unequal because they earned almost nothing in customs duties and put foreigners outside Japanese law—and avoid the fate suffered by China at the hands of colonial powers. As a first step there would be a high-level diplomatic mission to America and Europe, led by Iwakura, with Okubo as one of the four vice-ambassadors and a huge staff of forty-eight, plus sixty students. The mission’s brief was to talk, observe, learn, and gain ideas about how to renegotiate the Unequal Treaties. On no account, though, could its members actually sign new ones. They would be away for a year, during which time the country would be run by a caretaker government, under Sanjo Sanetomi as acting head of state and Saigo as his deputy, which was supposed to do nothing much until the mission returned.

  Saigo was not happy doing nothing, and neither were his colleagues. Two areas that needed reform were education and the law. One minister wanted free elementary education, with the building of fifty thousand schools; another a national legal system. But without a modern tax structure the costs of either would be prohibitive. In addition, the new army needed conscripts and modern weapons. And the samurai stipends took up half the government budget. The vice-minister of finance, Inoue Kaoru, proposed replacing the stipends with government bonds, to the fury of the officials on the Iwakura mission. There were arguments, corruption scandals, threats to resign.

  One matter Saigo had to sort out was trouble in the imperial guard. Half the guard were from Satsuma, while the commander was from Choshu; he had a business colleague who provided the supplies and was believed to have squirreled away large sums of cash. The Satsuma men were complaining that all Choshu men were corrupt. But there was also rivalry in the Satsuma ranks between town and country samurai. Saigo managed to soothe tempers, but it made him feel, he wrote, as if he were “napping on a powder keg”—a graphic way of describing the pent-up emotions that would erupt five years later.

  Saigo, who hated administration anyway, threw up his hands at all this quibbling and bad temper. What he wanted was to live out an exemplary life of virtue, guided by loyalty, piety, humanity and love. If only the leaders would avoid luxury and live simply, ordinary people would do the same, and all would prosper, in every sense. Revere heaven, love mankind—why wasn’t that enough? First that, then everything else could follow.

  As to adopting the system of every other country to improve our own way of life, it is necessary first to base our country on a firm foundation, develop public morals and after that consider the merits of foreign countries. If, on the other hand, we blindly follow the foreign, our national policy will decline and our public morals decay beyond rescue.1

  And then, of course, Saigo had to bear Hisamitsu’s bitter tirades. The former daimyo refused a position in Tokyo. He wanted to be made governor of the new Kagoshima prefecture. He railed like an old-fashioned conservative—he was now in his midfifties—against the growing fashion for western dress, against the breakdown of the distinction between samurai and “commoners,” against the education of women. No one could understand why he was so cross. Perhaps it was to do with a feeling of impotence at being “merely” the father and regent of the governor; perhaps it was the feeling that Satsuma, once virtually an independent country, was now less than a province. Whatever the reasons for his discontent, it stoked resentment among local samurai, who were increasingly pro-Kagoshima and anti-Tokyo.

  Saigo found Hisamitsu’s behavior intolerable. He said it felt as though someone were shooting at him with a cannon. Saigo was the emperor’s man now, dining with him every couple of weeks, chatting about the issues of the day. The problem called him back to Kagoshima, for six stressful months, but it made no difference. Hisamitsu, his own former lord, continued to undermine him, and in the most underhanded way. When the emperor arrived for a state visit to Kagoshima in July 1872, Hisamitsu slipped a courtier a memo accusing the government of arrogance, yearning for a return to the old days, demanding the resignation of Saigo (and Okubo, though he was far away with the Iwakura mission). “The country grows weaker every day,” Hisamitsu moaned, because of the evil abuses of the government and the nation’s subjection to the western barbarians.

  In early 1873, gifts and entreaties from Tokyo won Hisamitsu’s grudging agreement to take a position in the capital.

  Saigo returned to the capital to resume his three posts: member of the Council of State, commander of the imperial guard and army general.

  At this point Japan was in the midst of yet another shattering change. A law had been passed in late 1872 to establish, organize and train a modern, national army. The idea, which had emerged soon after the restoration, was obvious: Japan had vast numbers of peasants who had been deprived of their arms by the Great Sword Hunt of 1587, mainly because they had proved a danger to their rulers when oppressed. For nearly three hundred years since
then they had been kept in their place by their feudal lords and the sword-bearing samurai. But in military terms they were a huge potential resource, as those who had been to Europe or studied European sources knew. The Prussians had just proved how effective a well-trained peasant army could be by winning a stunning victory over France in 1870–1. So now the peasants were to be used, by introducing universal military service. Every man became eligible for three years of service at twenty, creating an army of thirty-one thousand in peacetime, rising to forty-six thousand in war. In addition, peasants would also be in the ranks of the four-thousand-strong imperial guard. The samurai, of course, objected bitterly, because the project threatened their whole ethos, their belief that only they should bear arms. Many of the peasants objected as well, because it deprived families of their most fit young workers and because they feared it would lead to tax increases. But on the other hand a vast number of both peasants and poor samurai hated the old regime, and thousands had happily joined the ranks of Saigo’s new imperial army in the 1867–8 war. So from 1873 training went ahead, under French auspices (which accounts for the French look to Japanese uniforms).

  The new army was loathed and needed in equal measure, and its central figure was Saigo. Samurai looked to him to focus their distress. On the other hand, Saigo himself saw that a national force was necessary to deal with two crises, both of which foreshadowed war.

  The first involved Taiwan. Fifty-four sailors from the Ryukyu Islands—the chain from Okinawa to Amami Oshima—had been wrecked there when their ship went adrift, and had been murdered by locals. Taiwan, like the Ryukyu Islands, was claimed by China, though it never bothered to do much about either. Satsuma had been de facto sovereign of the Ryukyus for 250 years, without too much trouble, but now, of course, ultimate ownership was claimed by Japan’s new imperial government—a claim that China refused to recognize. So Japanese officials enlarged their claim: if China could not control the Taiwanese, Japan would. In short, both sides were up in arms, literally. A clash seemed inevitable.