Samurai
Page 20
An advance guard of four thousand gathered on the flat area at the top of Shiroyama and set out northward, as if on a jaunt that would bring the government to its senses without the need for real action.
Two days later, at 6:00 A.M., Saigo—dressed in his imperial army uniform—oversaw the rear guard, artillery units and command group as they gathered on the private school parade ground; two hours later he led them away from Kagoshima through the snow. Since he was a loyal subject leading loyal subjects, he expected little or no resistance, and left no force behind in case of trouble in Kagoshima. In support, they had twenty-eight small cannons, two field guns, thirty mortars and all the ammunition they had raided from the city’s arsenals. Much more than samurai in terms of weapons, they were still samurai in spirit: strong, fit and well prepared, full of zest, élan and all sorts of the morale-boosting right stuff, much of it inspired by Saigo’s presence as leader. Mark Ravina quotes one forty-three-year-old soldier, Kabayama Sukeami (forty-three—they were not all young bloods!): “I thought that if it was Saigo’s doing it just could not be a mistake.”
Among the rebel leaders—principally Kirino Toshiaki, supreme swordsman, brigadier-general and now Saigo’s number two—there had been a plan to head straight up to Shimonoseki, where they would overwhelm any imperial forces. But that would leave imperial troops behind them in the great fortress of Kumamoto, a threat that might cut them off from their home. Better first deal with Kumamoto, where the garrison would surely take one look at them and surrender. Saigo even sent an optimistic letter to Kumamoto’s commander: “I am en route to make an inquiry of the government,” he wrote, and politely requested that the fortress be handed over to his command “on the occasion of our passage through the garrison.” A week or so later they would cross the straits and march on to Tokyo. Then what? No one was quite sure, but whatever it was it would be glorious. None saw the contradiction in their cause: they loved the emperor, they were off to beg him to reconsider decisions they considered catastrophic, yet they already knew they would be confronting, if not fighting, the emperor’s troops.
So they were not cast down by the snow, which clogged the road leading around the edge of the bay to Kajiki. Feet may have been wet and cold, but spirits were high. At Kajiki, where people knew and adored Saigo, they were greeted with cheering and drumming and the sound of the shamisen, the local instrument that resembles a long-necked, three-stringed guitar or lute. They carried their own provisions, and would surely be given more by the grateful people of Kyushu along the way. Saigo’s immense bulk did not sit well on a horse, so he was borne in a palanquin. Horses were loaded with ammunition while the field guns were taken halfway to Kajiki by boat, being landed only where the road veered away from the coast before heading up into the hills.
Today, it’s a pretty little road that winds into the forests above Kajiki. A little way up, almost hidden by firs and bamboos, another sort of road branches off. I would have missed it, but Michiko and I had expert guidance in the diminutive form of the extremely cheerful Yamaguchi Morio, in his seventies but lithe and energetic. He led the way onto the paved section, now carefully preserved, of the old road made in the mid-eighteenth century to guarantee that horses and palanquins could climb these steep and somber slopes in all weathers.
“We’re thirty kilometers from Kagoshima,” I said, “and they were on foot. So it would have taken them, what, two days to get here?”
“One day! Oh yes. But v-v-v-very awful.” Morio had learned his English working for the U.S. Air Force decades before, and he was so eager to spill his information and show off his rusty language that his words tripped over themselves. “The heaviest snowfall in fif-ifty years. Oh yes.”
That first night they camped outside Kajiki, drying their leggings and sandals in front of open fires. Then came the climb. I’m not sure whether the stones would have helped or hindered in those conditions. We walked the road in high summer, serenaded by cicadas twittering like birds, but the sun hardly penetrated and the forest held dampness like a sauna. The stones were not flat, but domed like buried pillows, and slick with green moss, turning the road into a surface that resembled a supersize, well-oiled alligator skin. In winter, with the trees dripping meltwater and snow, it would have been treacherous even under rope-soled sandals, and much worse for horses laden with ammunition and dragging cannons.
That was the hardest part of the journey, a few hours of struggle that took most of the second day. At the top, they were on their way to Kumamoto, which, if all went well, they would reach in another two days. Saigo’s bulk was transferred to a riverboat at Hitoyoshi, some seventy kilometers short of Kumamoto, from where he floated downriver for a day before setting up his headquarters in Kawashiri, eight kilometers to the south of Kumamoto.
One glance at Kumamoto Castle tells you that this is a place Saigo should never have thought of taking. One of Japan’s three greatest fortifications, it is a supreme example of what a castle should be, with nine kilometers of wall, six towers and forty-nine turrets. It was built in the early seventeenth century by a lord who knew exactly what he was about, having fought in Korea, taken many castles and built many others to protect his conquests. This was his last masterpiece. Dominated by its wooden towers and a six-story keep—a jewellike mass of gables and roof corners—it stood on a bluff defined by two streams, which, according to folklore, could be dammed to create a moat all the way around. The walls soar upward for 20 metres from curving bases that look like approaching tidal waves. The stones are of andesite, extremely hard, with cornerstones dressed to fit the prowlike curves. The design evolved as the best way to build high walls in an area notorious for earthquakes, for a broad, wavelike base can support a much higher wall than the straight-up-and-down designs of Europe. To attackers, they look alluring, because you can run up them part of the way, as visiting kids do all the time today. But you can’t get far; and rocks and logs tossed from the battlements did not drop straight down, as from European castles, but bounced, taking attackers with them. On two sides, the walls rise sheer and forbidding; on the two other sides, where the slopes are less steep, both walls are lower, but the one to the south runs straight for 242 meters along a branch of the Shira River, while the west wall has baffling indentations where attackers can be assaulted from overlooking battlements. If attackers turned besiegers, they had to be prepared for a long wait, because there are within the castle walls 120 wells, and nut trees to provide starvation rations. With good planning, the place could hold out for months.
(Kumamoto Castle in 1872, photo: Nagasaki University Library)
(Officers of the garrison who fought Saigo’s troops in 1877, photo from Ancient photographs of the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods)
Kumamoto Castle in 1872, five years before Saigo’s siege, and some of the officers who opposed him.
Not surprisingly, it had never been taken, partly because 250 years of peace descended shortly after it was built. For all that time it was in private hands, until it was taken over by the new Meiji Regime in 1870. Now, seven years later, it was the base for 3,800 extremely nervous imperial conscripts. Few had much training, many of them had friends or relatives among the rebels, and most admired the samurai spirit of Great Saigo. They were also outnumbered, though they had no idea by how many. If they advanced from the castle and fought in the streets of Kumamoto town, they would be face-to-face with men they knew, with unforeseeable consequences. For the leaders, there was no alternative: they had to stay in the castle, and defend it. This was the nut—formidable on the outside, possibly rotten within—that Saigo intended to crack. No one had a clue as to what the outcome might be. It would all be down to the quality of the defenders. They held the key to Japan’s future.
Hindsight, of course, makes all clear. It was a fatal error for the rebels to attack Kumamoto. All the defenders had to do was sit tight until help came, which it would eventually, because the rebels were vastly outnumbered by imperial forces in the rest of the country, and vastly
outgunned as well—the imperial government was producing over a million rounds of ammunition a week for their breech-loading rifles. However long the war, they wouldn’t run short. But at the time, all were blinded by false emotion: unrealistic fear on the imperial side, unrealistic confidence on the other. No one was certain whether there would be war here and/or elsewhere, whether reinforcements would come to the imperial troops from the north, or from other areas to bolster the rebels, whether the food and ammunition would hold out, whether talks would be held or deals done.
The rebels had already made one fatal error. They—in particular Saigo—had failed to capitalize on their greatest asset, which was the disaffection in other areas. When others rose, when they sent messages asking for help, he remained aloof. If he had committed himself earlier, rather than waiting for the private school students to force his hand, he could have organized a counterrevolution that could have seized the whole island of Kyushu before the imperial army had time to respond. Instead, Satsuma was infected by parochialism, which doomed all the southern uprisings to defeat, his own included.
Hindsight might have been our only guide to the next fifty-four days, which is how long the siege lasted. But luckily a lieutenant of artillery, Takehiko Ideishi, was inside the castle and many years later delivered an eyewitness account in a series of lectures, which were taken down in shorthand. His story is selective and confusing, as you might expect from an ordinary soldier recalling events of fifty years before with the help of a few mementos, but it is all we have. What follows is based on his words.
While Saigo’s rebels were gathering in Kagoshima, Kumamoto was awash with rumors. Old Man Saigo was raising an army; no, he wasn’t; yes, he was, but he wouldn’t be taking any part in the conflict. Trouble was coming, that was sure, so no one took any chances. The war minister wrote to the commanding general Tani Tateki: “Kumamoto must, at all costs, be held.” The prospect involved “unspeakable anguish” for those inside the castle, because so many officers were from Satsuma and the soldiers didn’t care much for the new central government. The chief of staff, Karayama Shiki, was a friend of Saigo, and the only action the conscripts had seen had been against the Shinpuren rebels last October. “Therefore there was extreme anxiety about the outcome of pitting these demoralized troops against those strong rebel soldiers who were full of resentment and willing to fight to the death.”
As it happened, Karayama set his friendship with Saigo aside, the officers showed themselves willing to share the privations of the men, and shared danger strengthened morale. Shared pleasure, too: on February 13 and 14, a Great Memorial Day Celebration commemorated those who had fallen in other uprisings, with bystanders packing the streets to watch sumo wrestlers and a fireworks display. But inside the fortress soldiers were digging trenches and storing provisions, driven on by reports that Satsuma mutineers were approaching—with or without Saigo, no one knew.
In the middle of the morning on February 19, 1876, for reasons never explained, a fire broke out in the castle’s main storehouse, which housed most of the provisions and stood right above a stone-built ammunition magazine. “In the time it takes me to say ‘This is terrible!’” said Takehiko, “the fire spread in every direction and it was impossible to do anything.” There was no way to bring water up from below. After a few minutes of horrified inaction, a staff officer named Kodama yelled for the troops to open the magazine underneath the blaze and save the ammunition. With the flames engulfing the keep, throwing out embers that set fire to the city below, troops—Takehiko among them—risked opening the door and started to carry out the ammunition, terrified that the tower would collapse on top of them. “The bodies of all of us who were working were in the jaws of death. Would it be death? Or life? Fortunately, the tower which should have fallen towards us, by some quirk of circumstances, fell inward with a great rumble, like a thousand thunderclaps heard at once. Truly it was an indescribable piece of luck.” The provisions were gone, but at least the ammunition was saved.
In the square beside the smoking wreck of the keep, a tent was put up to act as the commander’s HQ. That very afternoon, three messengers arrived from Saigo and were received in the tent. They brought his letter, written back in Kagoshima, requesting permission to be allowed to proceed to Tokyo. Perhaps he still hoped that all would be well, that his good intentions would be enough to pave the way to Tokyo. If so, the reply from the chief of staff, Karayama, would have disillusioned him. Karayama told the messengers that “if Satsuma broke the laws of the land, and if by chance they carried arms, formed units, and by force tried to secure passage through the garrison, they must be prepared to be killed without mercy.” The next day, Tokyo published the official response to Saigo’s plans. He might think he was on a legally justified expedition to question the government, but the government disagreed. Saigo’s men were “unlawfully bearing arms against the Imperial authority,” and so “His Majesty the Mikado has ordered an expedition sent to chastise them.” Reinforcements would leave the next day (the twentieth) and arrive in Hakata Bay, one hundred kilometers to the north, in a few days. If anyone still doubted it, they could doubt no longer: this was civil war.
Also on the twentieth, the castle received another boost. Totally unexpectedly, some six hundred police entered to strengthen the defense, just as the first rebel troops, perhaps some of Saigo’s supporters from the countryside, began to arrive in town, warily eyeing the townsmen carrying swords and guns who were also patrolling the streets. “Enemy jostled enemy in the very heart of the city, but there wasn’t even a single exchange of blows. Recalling it now, it was certainly a curious situation,” because the new arrivals were arrogant men, certain that the imperial troops were mere peasant conscripts who, with no samurai traditions to make them fighters, would simply flee or be cut to pieces with no trouble at all.
Saigo’s force—three times the number of defenders—arrived en masse on the twenty-first and attacked at dawn the following day with constant barrages of rifle fire, now from one side, now from another. The chief of staff Karayama and regimental commander Yokura were among those shot and killed. Despite the officers’ worries, the conscripted imperial troops performed admirably. “The smoke from our artillery covered the castle inside and outside. You couldn’t tell one place from another . . . It was like darkness at noon. Above ground level, there was a semi-darkness because of the smoke, and from time to time the sun became invisible.” Officers and men fell to Satsuma bullets. “As for myself,” wrote Takehiko, “I thought first of the words of a wise old man, ‘No matter what happens in war, the most important thing is tranquillity.’”
Where was Saigo? Still no one knew, until a strange incident that afternoon. With typical samurai bravado, a Satsuma soldier waving a red flag led a body of rebels up the gentle western slope toward one of the gates. “Don’t let him advance!” came shouts from inside. “Shoot him down!” There was a rattle of shots, and the man fell. After nightfall, the defenders crept out, recovered the body, and found on it a diary—many soldiers kept diaries—recording the events of the previous week, revealing that Saigo was at the head of the rebel troops, but for the last two days had been based a few kilometres to the south in Nihongi.
Letters written by Saigo at this time to the commander of the imperial forces, Prince Arisugawa, show him outraged by the unfairness of life. Here he was, the target of a planned assassination, a samurai loyal to the emperor, whose only wish was to “question” the government in the form of his old friend Okubo, and the emperor’s own forces were opposing him, forcing him into the position of rebel—he, who was more loyal than anyone!
Still no one in the castle knew much about the rebel army. The only way to discover more was to sneak spies out in the hope that they could find out something useful and get back alive to report it. Several managed to leave, but none returned, presumed dead. About two of them there was no need to presume—their severed heads were tossed over the castle walls. One Shishido, a man with a reputation for brav
ery, politely agreed to try his luck: “Since you have gone to so much trouble, unworthy as I am, I humbly accept.” He was disguised in workman’s clothing and his exposed skin was covered with soot, as if he was someone who had been searching for possessions in one of the burned-out town houses. A week after setting out, he returned safely with a complete report of where the Satsuma rebels were deployed and the welcome news that “the rebels have no artillery”—other than their medieval guns that fired cannonballs—and imperial troops would be attempting to break through and rescue the castle in a few days.
By March 1, when the siege had been going on for a week, it was becoming obvious that if there was no rescue, they would starve. Officers calculated that there were nineteen days of supplies left. The defenders, who had been eating white rice, started to prepare brown rice, which had to be pounded to remove the husks. In quiet moments, the castle rang to the thump of the pestles in mortars.
Despite the distant sound of artillery and rifle fire, no breakthrough came. Occasionally, arrows came whizzing over the wall with letters attached designed to undermine morale—“What are you going to do, cut off in there? . . . Quick surrender is the best policy! . . . The Imperial Army is collapsing!”—to which the conscripts replied by firing arrow-borne messages of their own and hanging up huge posters proclaiming Saigo’s crimes and their own outrage: “—However, we will have mercy on you, you band of ignorant outlaws, and if you repent of your previous crimes, throw away your weapons and return to proper allegiance, your crimes will be forgiven.”
Not all Saigo’s troops—now some 20,000 of them, as more samurai poured in from the countryside—settled into the siege. Some 6,000 headed north, hauling six cannons, with good supplies of powder and ammunition, to confront the imperial reinforcements that were on their way to relieve Kumamoto. They fought and won a couple of skirmishes on their way, but had little idea of what they were taking on. The imperial army had 46,000 men and rising, each with a rifle and something like 1,500 rounds of ammunition. In addition, they could call on 45 so-called mountain guns, 20 field guns (German, made by Krupp), mortars, an Armstrong and 2 Gatlings. The force led by Prince Arisugawa had already left Hyogo in four ships and on February 22, landed in the great natural harbor of Fukuoka—Hakata Bay, for which the Mongols had aimed in their disastrous invasions seven hundred years before.