Samurai

by John Man

  It was not that Mount Eno was inaccessible. It is only 727 meters high, a two-hour climb for a fit young soldier—or a fit priest, for, as Mr. Kodama said, it was a sacred mountain. “No women were allowed up there. Buddhist priests of the Shugendo sect used to tie their feet together and hang upside down up there.” (That’s what he said, and it may be true. Shugendo was an ancient form of esoteric Buddhism which tested adherents’ courage and devotion with rigorous rituals.) “There’s a path all the way up.”

  That meant that what the imperial troops were doing on Mount Eno was no secret to the locals. Approaching along trails from the other side, they had dug themselves in just below the crest of the ridge. Saigo was proposing a surprise attack, which had to be made on the eighteenth, to pre-empt the imperial attack due on the nineteenth. If successful, there would then be an escape over the mountains with the aim of heading back to Kagoshima, where they would either—with élan and a great deal of luck—regain control of the city, or (far more likely) die in the attempt. How exactly they were to do this was an open question. After the breakthrough, they would regroup thirty or so kilometers farther westward, at the town of Takachiho, and there decide on a plan of action.

  Surprising the imperial forces meant attacking while they were still asleep. So, late on August 17, about 10:00 P.M., according to Mr. Kodama, Saigo’s troops were ready. These were interesting times, to say the least, and some of those looking death in the face took care to record their thoughts in diaries, some of which they left behind with other possessions that were later found and placed in the museum. Mr. Kodama retrieved from a showcase four diaries written with brushes on rice paper. There had been five, but he had loaned one to someone and never got it back. No, he replied to my eager question, there was nothing personal here. It was all quite bland: “12,050 bullets shot,” wrote Sergeant Kirota Minesuke, thereby ensuring that his name would receive at least some sort of recognition. “This morning the soldiers advanced . . . rain, again.” Saigo left a few things behind, each a symbol of some aspect of his life—a bugle made in London (was he thinking of adopting British army traditions?), a camping pillow so tiny it looks like a sausage, a compass, one of those promissory notes printed in Miyazaki, a brush and ink tray—indeed, he was writing even now, as suggested by a poem discovered while I was researching this book.

  It was, of course, in Chinese, four lines, seven characters per line, and it was found in the papers of a doctor named Taisuke Yamazaki, who apparently copied it when attending Saigo in his final hours in Kagoshima. If it is Saigo’s (and this was much disputed), it could well have been composed in some quiet moment in Nagai, as he wondered whether he had always done right, decided he hadn’t, and accepted his coming death—with trepidation:

  All the roads to Higo and Bungo2 are blocked.

  Let’s return home to our grave. I unwillingly backed [the restoration], for nothing.

  Now when I look back on my life, I see merits and demerits.

  How can I face my lord [Nariakira] in the Underworld?

  It was about 10:00 P.M. on August 17 (not that anyone had a watch or a clock), with no light at all under the trees. None of the rebel students came from the area, so a local woodcutter had been persuaded to act as a guide. Leaving about one hundred injured behind, the five hundred of them, walking silently in their rope sandals, set off up the narrow path in single file, banned from smoking and talking, following little swatches of cloth tied to trees by those in front. Some sources claim that Saigo had to be carried in a litter because he was too ill to walk (on which more later), but more likely he, too, was walking this narrow, slow climb. A line of five hundred men, some perhaps with matchlocks, but everyone with a sword or two, would have stretched out for almost a kilometer. It would have taken something like four hours for the leaders to get near the imperial troops sleeping in their hastily dug trenches, and surely much longer for all five hundred to settle within striking distance.

  Shortly before dawn, when the eastern sky was beginning to glow and the imperial troops were still asleep, the rebels attacked. A painting in the museum shows the scene: the rebels in cotton jackets, pantaloons and sandals wielding swords against rifle-bearing imperial troops in their uniforms. A cannon lies on its side in an emplacement, ready to be set up for the bombardment planned for later that day. It was a perfect breakout—the imperial contingent quickly killed and scattered, the rebels streaming over and around the top of Mount Eno.

  17

  THE LONG ROAD TO DEATH

  THE BACK COUNTRY OF KYUSHU IN SUMMER IS HOT, GREEN and wrinkly. The slab of territory across which Saigo’s rebels now started is basically 2,600 square kilometers with hardly any flat land to speak of. There are some 50 mountains of over 1,000 meters, not high, but each with its foothills and ranges and valleys, where rivers rush between steep forests down to the coastal lowlands. The rebels did not know this, because there was yet no master plan, but they had 75 or so kilometers as the crow flies to cross before they were out of the higher hills and into lower ones. But they were not flying. Twists and turns doubled the distance, ups and downs tripled it. Where did they go exactly? Some of the places were recorded, but as for the back ways, no one knows now, because when today’s roads were cut and paved no one used the back ways any more, and mushroom pickers and charcoal burners were not enough to keep them clear. It was hot, very hot. And then there were the wasps and the adders. All these inconveniences were recorded by the British writer Alan Booth, who climbed Mount Eno in 1986. And the flies: “They fed in my armpits, swam in my sweat, flew into my mouth and died in my hair.”

  An anecdote about Saigo on this epic retreat was told to one of his biographers—this must have been in about 1950—by an old peasant named Kawakami Takeshi, who as a little boy was walking with a man named Maki when they saw Saigo coming toward them, wearing a sword and a cap:

  Maki stopped me suddenly and said, “Wait a minute, boy.”

  “What is the matter?” I asked, turning back.

  “You must get out of the way, for the Master is coming along.”

  We two got out of the way to the left hand side. Saigo the Great was walking along quietly, with a cap on [from one of the private schools], and wearing a sword at his side. He seemed as if he were hunting at ease over a peaceful field, forgetting the presence of the enemy. When I thought that this accounted for the stately mien and magnanimity of the greatest hero the world had ever seen, I could not help revering him.

  “How great a man the Master is!”

  “Yes, he is a god.”

  Then Saigo drew level, they bowed, and Saigo acknowledged their bows. That was the core of Kawakami’s memory. A man who was a samurai, a former top general and minister, who should have been weighed down by defeat and impending death, acknowledged the bows of two peasants. For the boy, it was a wonder beyond imagining.1

  Later, the two saw Saigo again, this time in a different mood:

  I have never forgotten the image of Saigo the Great then. He was squatting with his elbows on his knees, the hilt of his sword thrust forward, his left shoulder a little higher than his right, his lips tightly pursed, his eyes glaring fiercely at the men who were following him down the track. The terrible glare must have been a reproof for their tardiness. A wild animal crouching to spring on its prey could not have looked more ferocious.

  A small digression on Saigo’s health, which was by some accounts poor. In these two memories, he was both walking and squatting, which is not something a sick person does easily. True, there had been bouts of ill health, but no hint of anything debilitating or life threatening. Yet other accounts speak of him being carried in a “palanquin,” presumably nothing more than a wooden litter or stretcher. Another anecdote in the same biography describes how, nervous about crossing a shaky rope-and-wood bridge over a river in his palanquin, he climbed off it, took off his overcoat and crawled across. Many pathological conditions have been claimed for Saigo, including filariasis (a mosquito-borne disease, possi
bly picked up in Amami Oshima or Okinoerabu, that swells remote bits of the body), a hernia or a fever; but there’s no evidence to confirm that he had any of them.

  The best indication of what was wrong was the official autopsy after his death, which reported “dropsy of the scrotum.” In other words, he was suffering from an excess of fluid in the hydrocele, the sac that surrounds each testicle; it was this that caused the swelling. Sometimes, the excess is the result of disease, which does not seem to be the case with Saigo. It is usually painless, but may cause discomfort, especially if a lot of walking is involved. Hence, we must assume, the litter. In the village of Akadani, an old man told Alan Booth:

  My grandfather’s brother [Sakada Bunkichi] would have been sixteen or seventeen at the time, and some of Saigo’s men stopped at the house [in the nearby hamlet of Miyanohara] and asked him if he would help carry the palanquin. Saigo’s testicles were swollen something terrible and he couldn’t walk. He was sitting waiting in the grounds of the temple. My grandfather’s brother helped carry him as far as the next temple at Sakamoto, another four kilometers down the road, where he was planning to spend the night. Saigo wanted to pay him for his trouble, but he had no money, so instead gave him a pouch made of rabbit-skin that he used for carrying his tobacco. It was in such a filthy state after all the months of fighting and scrambling up and down mountains that my grandfather’s brother threw it away.

  That was a bit farther on. We left the rebels moving west, into the mountains, along back roads and trails. They were not just trying to travel in secret. They had to head for their rendezvous, Takachiho, because this ancient and much revered little town had bridges over the rushing headwaters of the Gokase River. Of course, Yamagata knew that, too, and had sent a force—well fed, well armed and with no need to remain hidden—upriver to cut them off. It was important to get there in time, before Saigo did something dramatic: not that there was evidence that he would, but he could. Takachiho, then known as Mitai, is one of two places that claim to be where the grandchild of the sun goddess landed, bringing from heaven the imperial regalia—mirror, sword, jewels—that have been the emperor’s symbols of power since time immemorial (coincidentally, Saigo would be passing the other Takachiho later in his grand tour of Kyushu). The sun goddess herself disappeared into a nearby cave, plunging the world into darkness until another goddess lured her out with a lewd and comic dance, inspiring traditional dances that are today one of the town’s main tourist attractions—if you can get there, which even today is quite a challenge. Once, the place had over five hundred shrines, and it still has a dozen temples. What Saigo might do to make some political gain out of all this sacredness and symbolism was anyone’s guess. It would certainly be a dramatic place to stage a final shoot-out. Yamagata’s orders were simply to break him, kill him, capture him—anything to stop him in his tracks, and it was for this reason that he had taken troops away from Kagoshima and was now pursuing Saigo in such overwhelming numbers, with contingents dropped off from ships at three coastal towns ready to march across the country and cut him off.

  It took both forces three days to reach Takachiho. They met on August 21, just outside the town. The rebels could not hope for victory, but fell back along a 7-kilometer gorge of sheer gray cliffs carved by the Gokase River through lava.2There was nothing to do now but go on running, back home to Kagoshima, and there find death in whatever glory might still be possible. In the village they found time to seize 7,280 yen in cash and 2,500 bales of rice—which sounds far too much for 300 men (or was it 500? Sources vary, but see my note on page 269) to carry into the mountains—before heading off southwest, following a river valley, back east to the spaghetti loops winding up and over the Iiboshi Pass, then at last southward, where the road winds back on itself as it descends ridges to the river. Sakamoto, Morotsuka, around the flanks of Mount Shimizu, over another pass, down the Matae-no-haru River . . .

  “The Satsuma men came down from the pass through Matae-no-haru, along the same road you took today,” a seventy-year-old named Tsushida told Alan Booth. “Whenever they passed a house or a hut, the people who lived there came out and gave them shochu [a local alcoholic drink] and pickled plums and anything else they could spare . . . But when the government troops came through later in the evening, they turned their backs on them and ignored them. Partly it was because they admired Saigo so much, and partly because they felt sorry for his followers, who were just boys.

  “By the time Saigo and his men reached [the village of] Mikado,” Tsushida went on, “they had started to come under sniper fire from the advance parties who had raced across the pass and spread out along the route, so they took cover among the buildings that are scattered through this valley. At the house on the right, from about four o’clock till about eight o’clock on the evening of the 24th, Saigo himself rested and had something to eat. That’s puzzled the members of our local historical society for years, you know. One minute Saigo’s under rifle fire, and the next he’s sitting having a snack . . . It’s just possible that a temporary truce was arranged, for even Saigo’s enemies had the greatest admiration for him. Three Satsuma men died in the skirmish. You can see their graves here in the village.”

  That evening, there occurred an incident that highlights the strange nature of this war, and of Saigo himself. As the imperial troops advanced, Saigo’s men took to the surrounding woods. At dusk most of the village houses were requisitioned by imperial officers to sleep in. When darkness fell the rebels emerged to rejoin Saigo, and discovered as they passed a temple that an imperial medical officer was billeted there without sentries. So they seized him, dragged him to Saigo, and asked if they should behead him. They were, of course, only kids, teenagers or in their early twenties: hotheaded, unthinking, eager to prove their spirit, even in these appalling circumstances. Saigo reproached them gently, sent them off, and invited the medical officer to sit down and share some shochu. Wars, he observed, were hard on all; he wished the officer well; hoped he would soon be home safe with his family; and sent him off back to his temple billet.

  At one o’clock in the morning, in rain, Saigo and his band were off again. Down to Shiromi, cross-country, over pass after pass, westward to Mera, Murato, Suki—tiny places that don’t exist on any map that I have found. Anyway, at this point the sources become vague about Saigo’s route. Was it due south over the switchback Omata Pass, or over the ridges farther west, across the prefectural border into Kumamoto? It hardly matters. It was August 27, Saigo had been fleeing for nine days, and the worst of the mountain crossing was over. On the twenty-eighth he reached Kobayashi, a proper town at last, just in time to scare off a tired contingent of imperial troops advancing from the coast a day’s march away. As if this were a major victory, he was joined by some three hundred more troops—rejoined, actually, because they were some of those who had thinned Saigo’s ranks by returning home while he was fleeing this way after the siege of Kumamoto a few months earlier; or so one otherwise reliable source claims.3 Kagoshima was sixty fast kilometers ahead, and spirits had revived yet again.

  Ever since Tabaruzaka five months before, Saigo had been staging hairsbreadth escapes or been one step ahead of Yamagata. Now, in this final push, speed was as essential as ever. The same imperial troops they had just scared off were heading back to Kagoshima to reinforce its poor defenses, skirting the great volcanic wilderness of Kirishima—twenty-three mountains, ten crater lakes, numerous hot springs, and the other Takachiho, which (with somewhat better credentials) also claims to be the mountain where the sun goddess’s grandson descended to earth with the imperial regalia. Now tourists crowd into these two hundred square kilometers, because they form Japan’s oldest and perhaps most glorious national park. For Saigo, it would have been a death trap. So he and his little band also skirted it to the north, and then swung south, through Yoshimitsu and Yokogawa, where the highway now runs up past the airport. He might then have rejoined the coast road, the one he had taken many times through Kajiki, the one that lea
ds past the spot where he “recovered” after failing to drown himself; but the coast was dangerous, because it was within range of Yamagata’s warships, which either had already arrived or would do so shortly.

  So he and his ragtag army, now settled at about six hundred, the toughest of the tough, used to living off the land, eager to die well, arrived just outside Kagoshima on the last day of August. The next day Saigo walked—or was carried, who knows which—along the ridge-top road above Kajiki, ten kilometers inland, to the village of Kamo, where he spent that night safe from Yamagata’s shells.

  18

  SAIGO’S LAST STAND

  THE NEXT DAY, AVOIDING THE SCRAPPY IMPERIAL DEFENSES, Saigo joined his followers heading for the steep and forested knoll of Shiroyama—Fortress Hill—which dominates Kagoshima. Some attacked imperial troops who had occupied one of the private schools at the bottom of the hill and managed to remove four pieces of artillery before the enemy launched a counterattack and forced them out again; you can still see the hundreds of bullet holes that scar the stone walls. But there was as yet no large-scale opposition to the returning rebels. Saigo had left no protection when he marched out six and a half months before, gambling everything on his march to Tokyo; and Yamagata had made the same mistake, gambling everything on catching Saigo in Tabaruzaka, or Miyazaki, or Nobeoka, or Kobayashi. So now the rebels could take their swords and their four cannons and their fifty firearms and their pathetic little store of ammunition and climb unhindered up Shiroyama’s forested flanks. Death was likely, but not yet inevitable. They could still dream. If they could make themselves impregnable, they could perhaps still break out and regain control of Satsuma, still stand in the way of change for long enough to question the government about its decisions. Perhaps there were some who really believed this. If so, they did not know what awful odds they would soon be facing.