by John Man
Then at some point there was a formal identification and the few comments that passed for an autopsy: “Saigo Takamori. Clothing [which must have been removed and laid nearby]: light yellow-striped unlined kimono. Dark blue leggings. Wounds: head separated from body. Bullet wound from right hip passing through to left femur. Old sword wound in right ulna. Dropsy of the scrotum.”
“Such a ghastly sight,” continues Hubbard, “we could not long look upon, so we made our way down the hill,” passing lines of noncombatants bringing in dead rebels by the score. On the way back to the boat,
we branched off a little and went to a large enclosure where there were about a hundred prisoners [that’s the evidence for the number of survivors]. They were a hard looking set; many of them quite young while others were old and grey-headed. All looked very sorrowful and dejected. One of the officers there told us they were all samurai and would probably lose their heads too. We wandered around amongst them till noon, and after a rest [apparently changing their minds about going back to the boat] started off for the hill where the Satsuma leaders and others had met their end. We found the dead were being put in their graves, and this, no doubt, is the closing act of the Satsuma Rebellion.
19
TRANSFIGURATION
SAIGO’S TRANSFORMATION TO SEMIDIVINITY STARTED EVEN before his death. In the summer of 1877 a comet appeared, which a regional newspaper said framed an image of Saigo, if you looked through a telescope. In fact the comet, named after its German discoverer Ludwig d’Arrest twenty-six years earlier, is entirely unexceptional, returning every six and a half years as a tiny fuzzy blob; a telescope makes it a slightly larger fuzzy blob, but a blob in which, it seems, Saigo enthusiasts could read their dreams, rather as psychiatric patients see patterns in inkblots. The report sparked a fad, and people all over Japan started looking for Saigo in the heavens. Some climbed onto roofs for a better look; there were even reports of roofs collapsing and causing injuries. Mars was also in the news, because it was close to earth right then (as a result, its two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, were spotted in the very month of Saigo’s death). A newspaper reported that he had become Mars, his loyal companion Kirino his satellite. In September the American zoologist and orientalist Edward Morse, in Japan to research brachiopods, reported on the popularity of Saigo-as-Mars prints: “Many of the people believe he is Mars, which is now shining with unusual brilliancy.” That their hero should live on as a heavenly body was not too far-fetched for people who believed that ghosts were as real as their own bodies. If such a hero had died, he would continue to exist in spirit and would surely return to wreak havoc on his enemies.
Officially, of course, immediately after his death Saigo was vilified as a rebel and failed general, the imperial army lauded as brilliant and the government as wise. He had after all encompassed the death of many thousands and caused the government almost to bankrupt itself. “The only consequence,” said an editorial in Hochi Shimbun, “has been a vast destruction of life and property and large expenditures of money on both sides. Excepting these sad ends, nothing has been attained . . . Are not all the people of our country rejoiced to hear such good news as this?” The rebel leader’s destruction was “a universal triumph.”
But just two weeks after his death the balance was beginning to shift, with press analyses beginning to present him as less villainous, more heroic. The newspaper Nichi Nichi Shimbun did its best to serve both opinions. “When we consider his great works we ought to respect him for his heroism; honor him for his wisdom; and love him for his patriotic actions; but also award such punishment as our pen can inflict for revolting. Who will blame us for praising what is worthy and assailing what is evil?”
Once the scales had tipped, it didn’t take long for Saigo the rebel and outcast to become Saigo the Great again: loyal, courageous, fearless, incorruptible. Even when most reviled he had his supporters, one of the most powerful being Japan’s leading expert on the West, Fukuzawa Yukichi. He had been to San Francisco in 1860, was part of the first embassy to Europe (1862), spoke Dutch and English, and wrote the best-selling, ten-volume Things Western and the hugely popular Encouragement of Learning in praise of Western-style education. Writing only a month after the end of the rebellion in 1877, he complained bitterly about the way Saigo, once the national idol, was now cast as “the great traitor.” It was iniquitous, he said, and the government’s “dark, unjust policies” were to be blamed for driving him to his death.
In Kagoshima Saigo’s rehabilitation was swift, thanks mainly to the hostage, Kono, who had tried and failed to win a reprieve for his master. After the rebellion he was jailed for ten years, but released after two, because there were enough in Tokyo’s government who felt that Saigo’s memory was being wronged. That was when the memorial to Saigo’s birthplace was set up, proclaiming him a model for coming generations. Kono set to work on something rather more substantial. He obtained permission for a cemetery, not simply for Saigo but for all the soldiers from Satsuma who had died. Donations quickly raised enough money for the land, and government money bought the memorials, 755 of them. In 1880, just three years after Saigo had been cast into outer darkness, he was back in favor, his tomb the central element in the Nanshu Cemetery, after the name he adopted when exiled.
The guide spoke so fast and so loudly and so unstoppably that Michiko didn’t have a chance to translate everything, so I never understood how the 2,023 dead were properly remembered with only 755 memorials, but it doesn’t matter. You come not to count but to feel. The stones have little stylistic merit, for they are no more than boxlike blocks. But they stand in rows, as if on parade, and they impress by their massed presence, set off by a superb view of the bay and the volcano. Each stone is named—here are Beppu, and Saigo’s brother Kohei, and Kirino—and the largest, Saigo’s, adorned with vases of fresh flowers. One of the stones commemorates the youngest to die on Shiroyama, a boy of fourteen years and six months, no older than many who come every Sunday to the flat area of gray volcanic gravel below to practice their Jigen-ryu fighting. It is as if they are performing for their ancestral relatives, most of whom died too young to father children of their own. As I had tracked Saigo back and forth across Kyushu I had been amazed, often, and intrigued, but this was the first and only time I found myself moved.
In 1880, as part of the new Meiji constitution, Saigo received an official pardon and had his former rank restored, “as if,” in the words of Ivan Morris, “the rulers of the country had realized, somewhat belatedly, that they had a fully fledged hero on their hands and must rise to the occasion by granting him the proper honours.” His followers had always worshipped him; now it was universally acknowledged that he deserved respect. His status as a national treasure was confirmed by deferential mentions in school textbooks. He had achieved a unique and paradoxical position, in Mark Ravina’s words, as “revered rebel and loyal traitor.”
Revered, respected yes, and more: adored. There were songs, anonymous poems—
Now my sword is broken, and my steed has fallen dead,
The autumn wind will bury my bones
Here in the hills of my native town.
—and then the legends started, mainly concerning his death. The truth, that he had been badly wounded, and was beheaded, was simply not good enough. Saigo did not commit seppuku, as we know from Hubbard and the official autopsy, yet illustrations of the event soon had him doing exactly that. They veered back into reality with the beheading by Beppu, and then out of it again. Traditionally, the head of a fallen hero had to be honored by the opposing commander, so soon other versions of what happened to Saigo’s began to circulate. One became accepted as gospel. According to this account, the head is delivered to Yamagata. He receives it with due reverence. Reenacting the ritual supposedly performed on many a medieval battlefield, he cleans it—no: cleanses it—in pure water. Stroking it, he says wistfully, through tears, “Saigo, your face has not changed. Perhaps three days have passed since your hair was cut.” Th
en facing his assembled men, he utters a peroration: “How peaceful is his face! Truly Okina [“the old man”] was among the greatest of men. No one knew me better than he; no one knew him better than I. That I have not slept for one hundred days is due solely to him, yet now he is lost to us. This is, indeed, the lingering regret of one thousand autumns.” Then he tenderly places Saigo’s head on the corpse as a steady rain begins to fall, cleansing Shiroyama of its blood and gore, but not of its memories. It’s a tale that must be told with the right vocabulary and the right actions, the Japanese equivalent of an Arthurian romance. It serves its emotional purpose, it fortifies the listeners and readers, but historically it’s rubbish. Yamagata was not even present when the head was placed, unceremoniously, by the body.
Saigo even became a character in a children’s nursery rhyme, a girls’ song sung to the rhythm of a bouncing ball. My guide in Kyoto had learned it from her mother, though “children nowadays don’t know the old nursery songs any more.” She sang it for me under a spreading tree in the Imperial Gardens: a strange story of a girl of seventeen with flowers and incense in her hand, a girl who is (by implication) pregnant. Like many nursery rhymes, it’s mostly nonsense, with roots in a historical event distorted by folk memory and constant repetition. The narrator, sitting on a bridge, asks: “Where are you going, my pretty maid?” and she replies something like the following, except that in Japanese it is in thirteen highly rhythmical lines:
I am the daughter of Saigo Takamori, from Kagoshima in Kyushu, and I am going to the grave of my father, who committed seppuku in March of the 10th year of Meiji [1877; but why March, not September?]. When I sit by the grave and pray, a tear comes to my eye. If this child is a boy, I’ll send him to university and make him study English, and he will have a nightingale on his arm, and the nightingale will make a ho-ho-kekyo noise, and that’s the end of this song.
Or perhaps he had survived to flee to an Indian island or China or Russia, and would soon return in a sort of second coming to send the Meiji regime packing, lead an invasion of Korea and save the nation. Indeed, in 1891 there was a brief, crazy rumor that he would reappear on a Russian warship bringing the crown prince, Nikolai, on a state visit.
The myth machine works on today, with the toys and trinkets and tourist kitsch portraits that you see in any gift shop, and many statues. The most famous is the one in Tokyo’s Ueno Park, among the few remnants of the great Kan’ei-ji temple whose destruction he authorized. He is not in uniform, but dressed as a simple samurai, a summer kimono wrapped around his solid belly. Holding his dog by a lead, he leans forward, resolutely, hand on sword, ready for anything the world can throw at him. In Kagoshima, they chose a different image: his statue here, with Shiroyama as its backdrop, shows him as a maker of modern Japan, in army uniform to show his authority, but without his medals to show his humility. The statues are not only at sites associated with him. There’s a big new one at Kagoshima’s airport, which I would not be surprised to see renamed after him one day.
Why the adoration? Certainly not because of his success, for his historical significance stemmed from his failures. In so far as he was successful—as part of the revolution that brought about the restoration—he was one of several leaders, with less political skill than some and less military skill than others. Only when he struck out on his own did he do something truly original, and that was to heap on his nation death and destruction and waste. In many ways, he achieved precisely the opposite of what he wanted. Before, there had been much opposition to the new regime and three other uprisings with which he had been in sympathy. Now, as a result of his own rebellion, no one would ever again take up arms against the central government. Violence would be in the hands of individual assassins, opposition in the hands of politicians. The domains and prefectures, whose independence he valued, had come together not as a loose federation of states but as a nation. He had assumed that samurai would continue to monopolize both the armed forces and the administration, yet the samurai had vanished and the army—the army he helped create—was one of conscripts. Its victory under Yamagata sealed the end of the samurai as a force in Japanese history. Saigo’s domain, Satsuma, had been the proudest and sturdiest in defense of its independence—which made it all the more extraordinary that the drive both for and against reform should have come from Satsuma, and that the driving forces for both should have been childhood friends, Okubo and Saigo, who lived within walking distance of each other.
Irony and paradox don’t guarantee a hero’s reputation. That comes from Saigo’s peculiar character, and his essential appeal. Inside this giant of a man, with his vast shoulders and belly and bull neck and pop eyes, there was a nature that was passionate, visionary, generous, highly moral, utterly uninterested in wealth, selfless and totally committed to whatever cause and whatever friendships he attached himself to. He was at ease with his equals, and gentle with his inferiors. In Ivan Morris’s words, he had “a simple, almost childlike enjoyment of the moment and an immediate, earthy humour.” Of course, of those who adored him, few knew his darker side, his obsessive loyalty unto death, the willful, crazy readiness to risk self-destruction, like a gambler betting on Russian roulette. Yet those who knew this aspect of his character loved him, too. He may not have been much into domesticity, but there is no hint that he behaved badly to the few women in his life, or that they resented him. What was there not to love?
Well, from the point of view of his colleagues, quite a lot, because he was all ideals and no practicality. Often, his ideals came up against the limits of the possible, at which point he would court rejection or simply pull away, leaving the messy business of administration to others. So he appealed to some as a potential savior, to others as the one who retained a sense of morality. He allowed himself to be persuaded to join the government, then condemned it as the “meeting-place of robbers.”
For a man who was catapulted into the mainstream of politics, he was unique in one respect, a characteristic so marked it needs several terms to emphasize it: his austerity, his asceticism, his frugality, his active dislike of luxury. A samurai was expected to display abstinence as a sign that his life was devoted to higher things, but Saigo was spartan beyond the call of samurai duty. Even as a high official, he lived like a monk, with no luxuries, refusing to draw his salary for months on end. Often, he gave away whatever he could. As a government minister, he lived in a room that cost three yen a month—the equivalent of $3.00, which today is something like $450—quite a contrast to the way government employees lived then, let alone now. He always wore a simple country kimono, never the frock coats and top hats that became fashionable after 1868. It takes an extraordinary character not only to wear a monk’s clothing in the imperial palace, but then to remove his clogs and go barefoot, courting arrest as an intruder.
There’s no denying that his austerity was part of him. But it was also a deliberate provocation. At times, he sounded like a Confucian version of a Puritan preacher scourging his congregation. In 1870 a patriotic samurai committed seppuku in front of the national council building in protest at the corruption of the new regime, a deed of which Saigo approved, beginning his obituary: “Many of the government officials, addicted to dissipation and debauchery, are living in such extravagance that they fall into error.” Sharing the suffering of the poor, he spoke for them. In death, he remained a symbol of unstained purity.
There were many other strands in Saigo’s complex appeal, for he was so varied and contradictory a character that he served as a man for all men and all seasons. Some loved him for being part of the samurai tradition; some for his confrontation with Korea; some for his role in creating the new regime, some for his opposition to it; some for his support of Western technology, some for the way he rejected any dealings with the West (for he was one of the few major players who never visited the West, nor expressed any interest in doing so); some because he was a conservative, or a socialist, or a democrat, or a nationalist, or anything that anyone could wish.
> Or even a closet Christian, as suggested by Japan’s most famous Christian, Uchimura Kanzo (1861–1930). A misfit from childhood, Uchimura studied English, converted, married, divorced and fled to the U.S. for a year to avoid the embarrassment of the failed marriage. Shocked by the laxness and ignorance of Americans, he returned and became a writer—in English, in order to explain both his own troubled self and Japan to foreigners. Translated into Japanese, his books made him famous. How I Became a Christian portrays the difficulties of a convert’s life. Japan and the Japanese consists of five biographies of men he considered examples of high moral rectitude, the equals of any Western leader. One of them was Saigo, who had helped Japan to modernize. Uchimura portrays him as humble, direct, selflessly making Japan a moral entity as Luther did Germany, Cromwell England and Washington America. His only weakness was letting subordinates talk him into rebellion. What Uchimura was after was respect in Western eyes, and Saigo was a device to achieve it, as were the books themselves, written in high Victorian style. Saigo’s biography begins by aping Rule Britannia: “When Nippon first, at Heaven’s command, arose from the azure main, this was the charge to the land: ‘Niphonia, keep within thy gates. Mingle not with the world till I call thee forth.’ So she remained for two thousand years and more, her seas unplowed by the fleets of the nations, and her shores free from their defilement.” God ordained it, and it was good. But times changed, and that, too, was ordained. Perry, the instrument of change, was “one of the greatest friends of humanity the world has ever seen.” Great Saigo, too, was God’s instrument. His reliance on the Chinese philosopher Wang Yangming proves it. Wang’s philosophy was covert Christianity, which meant that Saigo’s was, too. “Shall we deny to our hero a voice direct from Heaven’s splendour as he roamed over his favourite mountains? . . . Did not a ‘still small voice’ often tell him in the silence of the cryptomeria forest, that he was sent to this earth with a mission?” His mission was to unite the nation and lead it in imperial conquest, “that Japan might be a compeer with the Great Powers of Europe . . . a career assigned from the beginning of the world.” Saigo was thwarted by a duplicitous government. Peace was mere effeminacy, indecisiveness, injustice. That he became a rebel was lamentable, but it was not his fault. His sensibility was too keen; he, “the strongest of men was almost helpless before the suppliant entreaty of the needy.” Yet in the end he exemplified the virtues of a Christian monk: humble, caring nothing for possessions, selfless, generous-hearted and righteous. “What conceptions he had of Heaven . . . we have no means of knowing. But that he knew it to be all powerful, unchangeable, and very merciful, and its Laws to be all-binding, unassailable, and very beneficent, his words and actions abundantly testify.” Uchimura doesn’t quite say so, but the implied conclusion is pretty clear: Saigo was a Japanese Jesus, perfect in spirit, crucified thanks to his own virtues and the blindness of his enemies.