by John Man
Later, when Japan turned to the business of building an empire, these schools and others like them elsewhere came to be seen—especially in America—as forerunners of the “patriotic societies” that fueled Japan’s extreme nationalism. It was assumed that Saigo was the shadow lurking behind the private schools, and sources often refer to them as “Saigo’s schools.” But this assumption is based on his fame and the fact that the schools’ members formed the bulk of Saigo’s rebel troops. The connection with Saigo was indirect, through his inspirational but vague educational philosophy, based on Confucian ideals: loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, love. A monument outside one of the school buildings in Kagoshima mentions only some general ideas about cooperation, unity, virtue and progress, which is hardly evidence of a malign nationalist agenda.
Saigo himself spent much more time at a school outside the city which was devoted to the study of agriculture. Here the students cleared land and planted rice and studied military matters and Chinese, pursuing Saigo’s ideal of the scholar-samurai, inculcating self-reliance. “These days, I’m a farmer through and through,” he wrote in April 1875, “and I am studying earnestly. At first it was rather difficult, but now I can till about two plots a day . . . With no sense of privation and unperturbed by anything, I am at peace.”
He was at peace because he was out of the hated business of politics. In his absence the matter of Korea had moved on, in a way that disgusted him. A Japanese ship on a surveying mission off a Korean island was fired on, and replied by destroying the Korean coastal fortress. Okubo used this as a pretext for some gunboat diplomacy, sending warships to threaten Korea: either sign a treaty recognizing the new government or it would be war. Korea signed. Saigo thought this was despicable. It was sheer intimidation of a weak power by a stronger one, a shameful act violating “Heaven’s principles.” It is hard to understand why gunboat diplomacy was worse than actually going to war in revenge for Saigo’s death, which was one of the outcomes he had envisaged. In his eyes it just was, because he was a moralist, not an imperialist.
(The Taiwan crisis was solved in an equally high-handed way, with an ill-planned invasion led by—of all people—Saigo’s younger brother Tsugumichi. The conscripts did nothing but contract disease and “shoot a few semi-savages,” in the words of an otherwise pro-Japanese writer, Frank Brinkley.2 An American war correspondent, Edward House, sneered: “I do not like to think what the consequences might have been if the Japanese had been met upon the beach, or in the jungles, by a determined enemy . . . The whole business of landing was carried through in the most confused and laissez-faire manner imaginable.”)
But heaven’s principles were not enough to preserve the peace. Old Satsuma wanted independence; new Tokyo wanted a centralized state. Orders came from on high to end the samurai privilege of administering criminal justice, to introduce private ownership of land, to do surveys for a land tax, to open government service to commoners: all were largely ignored by Kagoshima. The two were on a collision course.
Each new regulation from Tokyo inspired a reaction in defense of local feeling. From 1875, the private schools banned their students from studying in Tokyo or overseas, a controversial measure that caused resentment. The following year, new laws struck at the very core of the samurai ethos. First, they banned all samurai except soldiers and police from carrying swords, which was as explosive as a sudden government ban on the right to bear arms would be in America today. Next came a ban on the samurai’s topknot hairstyle. Five months later the government ordered them to convert their rice stipends into government bonds. The stipends were like pensions paid in kind, both a guarantee that they would not starve and, if sold, a guaranteed cash income. The new bonds paid 5–6 percent annually, and the change meant a drop in income of some 30 percent. Of course, the stipends had been a huge drain on the national finances, and most of the samurai were unproductive, at best supplementing their meager incomes by growing their own food. Now, suddenly, they would have to find jobs, a demand for which they were utterly unprepared. At a few strokes of the pen they had lost identity, status and income. Never without extreme violence has such a large élite been reduced so fast from emotional and financial security to resentment and penury.
Okubo Toshimichi, Saigo’s great friend—and enemy. Also from Kagoshima, Okubo was the leading light in the Meiji Restoration and the new government.
(Toshimi Okubu, postcard: Alamy)
Saigo Tsugumichi, Saigo’s younger brother, was commander in the Boshin War. He then traveled in Europe with Yamagata Aritomo, who would drive the elder Saigo to his death. Later, Tsugumichi achieved eminence as privy counselor, admiral and marquis.
(Saigo Tsugumichi in 1872, photo by Frederick F. Gutekunst)
The result of the increasing pressure on samurai privileges and aims was outrage and a rash of violent outbreaks in western Kyushu (and elsewhere). The first occurred in early February 1874. The former justice minister Eto Shinpei, one of those who had resigned with Saigo over the Korea crisis, had returned home to Saga, 175 kilometers north of Kagoshima. He led a few disgruntled samurai to seize a bank, the castle and some government offices, but this miniature uprising was quickly crushed by imperial troops. Eto himself was captured and beheaded along with fifty of his collaborators, his head being exposed as an example to others.
This brutal act did nothing but give heart to another, larger, group near Kumamoto. These were rebels of a different hue: young, xenophobic extremists with bizarre attitudes toward all things Western, avoiding Western clothes, the Western calendar, Western weapons, Western technology—even telegraph lines, which they would walk under only while protecting their heads with white fans. Their manifesto was uncompromising: “Our country differs from all other lands, in that it is the country of the gods . . . Diabolical spirits now prevailing are bent on abolishing customs which have been cherished and observed since the time of the gods.” They were particularly incensed by the presence in Kumamoto of an American military instructor and missionary, Captain Leroy Lansing Janes, who had actually managed to set up a small group of Christian converts. The rebels were known as the League of the Shinpuren, “Divine Wind,” from an alternative reading of the signs that spell kamikaze, the “divine wind” that had destroyed the Mongol fleet and would give its name to the Second World War suicide bombers. Their leader was a Shinto priest, Otaguro Tomoo, who claimed divine inspiration. On October 24–5, two hundred rebels, wearing armor and wielding swords, made a nighttime attack, killing the commander and the governor in their sleep and cutting down several other senior officials and three hundred ordinary soldiers. They also searched for the American, Captain Janes, but he had wisely left town the day before. Retaliation with guns crushed the uprising the next day, killing over half the rebels. Otaguro himself was badly wounded and asked an aide to behead him. Eighty-five of his followers committed seppuku—the largest case of ritual suicide in peacetime in Japanese history.
By this time a third bunch of rebels, about two hundred, were marching the one hundred kilometers from Akizuki (now part of Fukuoka) to help, unaware that Otaguro and half his force were dead. They were easily scattered by imperial troops. Four leaders committed seppuku, two were beheaded and 150 of their followers were sentenced to hard labor.
All these groups shared the same anti-Western agenda and traditional attitudes toward the use of swords and ritual suicide to avoid dishonor, and all rose in the hope that Satsuma would join them, with Saigo in the lead. All were defeated by conscripts in an imperial army that was quickly gaining experience and a spirit of its own. All foreshadow the fate of Saigo’s uprising, and his own fate.
Saigo himself, however, remained silent. He was sympathetic to the rebels’ cause and knew that he could influence events—“no doubt if I were to go into action,” he wrote, “it would astonish the entire world”—but said and did nothing to indicate that he supported them.
So events gathered pace without him. An inspector reported to Tokyo about the school
s, the unrest, the hostility, the contacts between disaffected leaders and in particular the presence of military hardware built up over recent years by the Shimazu—two armament plants and three ammunition depots. He advised that direct and immediate action was necessary to bring Kagoshima into line with the rest of the country. In January 1877 the government sent imperial troops on a chartered ship to Kagoshima to remove arms and ammunition. It was supposed to be a secret operation, but after the crew sneaked ashore at night they were discovered. About one thousand young men, mainly from the private schools, drove them off empty-handed. Over the next two days, the students broke into several ammunition stores themselves, making off with firearms and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, which they proudly paraded through the streets. Kagoshima was in open rebellion.
Saigo had no knowledge of this until after the event, because he was hunting and fishing across the bay, one hundred kilometers away. When he heard, according to folklore, he swore: Shimatta! (Damn!), but added that, although he disapproved of the rebels’ actions, he was moved by their loyalty and vowed to die with them in battle. In early February he hurried to Kagoshima, where he exploded in anger at the students for their stupidity. Saigo’s seventeen-year-old son, Kikujiro, who had been summoned from Amami Oshima to be educated, later recalled he had never heard anyone shout so loudly—“What a monstrous thing you have done!” But they were from schools to which he had lent his name, they were his students, and when he calmed down he saw it as his duty to support them, even if it meant giving his life. As Ivan Morris says, “it was as if he realized that once again he was being given an opportunity to compass a noble death.”
His arrival coincided with the “discovery” of a “plot” to assassinate him—the quotes flagging the extremely dodgy nature of this incident. The main culprit was a shadowy character called Nakahara Hisao, a police corporal. He had come from Tokyo to Kagoshima to do the job, boasted of his mission to a friend and been overheard by a spy, who told his superiors, who told the police, who arrested Nakahara, who confessed all. At first glance it looks pretty damning.
This was the story he told:
In the previous November—“I forget the exact day”—he went to see the Tokyo police chief Kawaji Toshiyoji, who told him that, although there were indications of disquiet in Kagoshima, Saigo’s presence was expected to control things. “He added, however, that in case a rising should break out, there was no help for it but for me to confront Saigo and kill him.” The following month, he and another twenty police colleagues, traveling separately, went back to Kagoshima intending to infiltrate the private school system and persuade as many students as possible of “the impropriety on the part of loyal subjects of exciting a war on no good pretext,” but that “in the event of the rising taking place, Saigo was to be assassinated, and the fact at once telegraphed to Tokyo; that then a combined attack should be made by the navy and army, and the members of the shigakko [the private schools] killed to a man.” On January 11, Nakahara arrived in Kagoshima, where three weeks later “the secret plot of assassination was discovered, and I was arrested. Now, in consequence of your examination, I have confessed that by the order of Kawaji I formed a plot to assassinate Saigo.”
What truth was there in this? Well, there were other arrests and other confessions. But there were reasons to doubt them, the main one being that the confessions were extracted under torture by police who were pro-Saigo and therefore wanted evidence that would foment rebellion. There was never any evidence of government forces planning to invade Kagoshima before Saigo’s uprising and kill the private school students. A Tokyo newspaper called it a “sheer fabrication.”3 And later, after the rebellion was crushed, the plotters were found in prison, tried by an imperial court, and acquitted on the charge of plotting against Saigo’s life.
But at the time pro-Saigo samurai had good reason for suspicion. Some fifty policemen, originally from Satsuma but now Tokyo based, had slipped into Kagoshima over the previous two months. No one knew their purpose, so it was widely assumed they were spies. Perhaps there were plans for a government clampdown. Whatever the truth, it was enough to persuade students from outlying schools to come into Kagoshima and arm themselves for action, in the belief—which as time passed became certainty—that Tokyo, driven by Saigo’s old friend and now treacherous enemy Okubo, was planning to assassinate their hero.
The plot, true or false, confirmed Saigo’s decision to act. He had seen Nakahara’s confession as soon as he arrived in Kagoshima (so the police must have been in a hurry to make sure he knew about it, since Nakahara had been arrested only three days earlier). The next day, February 7, he had a meeting with his friend Oyama Tsunayoshi, the city governor. He shook his head over the business of the students seizing the gunpowder. If only he had been there, he might have prevented such a reckless act. “But now the die is cast,” he said, “and matters must take their course,” the reason being that he had seen the Nakahara confession, and believed it. Kawaji may have ordered the assassination, but the treacherous Okubo was behind it. Previously, Saigo would never have rebelled against the government of which he had been a part. But now that government had turned on him. It was no longer his. The emperor had to be protected from Okubo and his lot, “the great criminals of the universe” as Saigo called them. That justified action. The idea also fit in with his sense of responsibility toward the students. He could, he believed, control them, turn their violent feelings from negative to positive. And, of course, he once again had a cause in which he could, if necessary, sacrifice his life.
But it shouldn’t come to that. He would do as his former lord Nariakira had planned and as Hisamitsu had done successfully: he would lead the rebels to Tokyo, confront the government and “demand an explanation from Okubo.” Oyama’s role would be to send messengers to all the private schools with copies of the confession and of a statement of Saigo’s intentions, which was done a week later.
It would cost. You cannot expect to take several thousand young men away from home for months without feeding them and giving them some pocket money. Oyama made the arrangements, as he explained in a later statement confessing his role in “establishing a commissariat within the kencho [the prefecture’s central office], whence the Satsuma troops were furnished with supplies.” He ordered his staff to raid the prefecture’s tax accounts and the funds held to pay salaries and departmental costs. Then he did the same for the subprefecture of Hyuga, the enclave to the east that Saigo had been aiming for when he set off on his ill-fated boat trip with Gessho. Within just two days these visits to the banks and strong rooms pulled in 120,000 yen. “I then handed the whole sum to Saigo and his party.”
The Japanese had recently (on May 10, 1871) decided to adopt a silver dollar coinage under the name of “yen,” meaning “a round object.” The yen was therefore basically a dollar, defined as 0.78 ounces (24.26 grams) of silver or 1.5 grams of gold. A decline in the value of silver since 1873 had brought the yen down in value: indeed, over the next twenty-five years its worth would be cut by half. But in 1877, 120,000 yen was still almost $120,000, which, even considering the costs of keeping poor samurai and students in food, clothing and ammunition, was a huge sum, perhaps something like $20 million in today’s terms. Given the previous raid on official stores of gunpowder, given that most men had a flintlock and a sword or two (some even had rifles), Saigo was all set up for a revolutionary campaign—with one major qualification: that it was not really revolutionary, in that it would not involve any large-scale military action and he was not intending to overthrow the government. A march to Tokyo would be fine; a quick battle could be managed; anything more, and he would quickly run out of cash.
So all was in order. The assassins had been arrested and had confessed to their “wicked design.” There were legitimate questions to be asked. Saigo had right—and cash—on his side. And the crowds of young men thronging the streets of Kagoshima felt justified in their resentment, well supplied and eager for action.
/> 15
FAILURE AT KUMAMOTO
WINTERS IN KAGOSHIMA ARE MILD. IT GETS COLD, IT RAINS, and the rain is sometimes messy with the ash from Sakurajima, but it almost never freezes and snow is rare. On February 15, 1877, however, it snowed, heavily, dumping twenty-five centimeters, the best part of a foot, on the roads and hills.
They had been gathering for a week: not just the core of the seven thousand private school students, but thousands of others of the dispossessed and angry from the countryside, until there were twelve thousand of them clogging Kagoshima’s streets and overflowing the school buildings. Most, but not all, had guns of some sort, whether breech loaders, muzzle-loading muskets or pistols; a few had rifles; and all, of course, had swords. Dressed in heavy cotton shirts, pantaloons, leggings and rope sandals, they looked more as if they were going to a huge martial arts meeting than preparing for war.