Rebellion against the imperial government of Saigō Takamori

Saigō, who was in the mountains on a hunting trip, hastily returned. By the time that he reached Kagoshima, his supporters were operating the arsenal themselves to provide supplies for further military action, and Saigō reluctantly agreed to become the leader of their rebellion.

Plans were made to march on Tokyo with the vague idea of presenting grievances to the government, and on February 15 Saigō’s army started out. Government forces blocked his advance at Kumamoto, and full-scale war ensued for the next six months. Saigō’s old friend Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922), now minister of war, became the field commander against him. By May, Saigō was on the defensive; during the summer he suffered a series of disastrous defeats, and by September the situation was hopeless. With a few hundred men, he returned to Kagoshima to make his last stand on a hill overlooking the city. On Sept. 24, 1877, the government troops launched the final attack; Saigō was critically wounded, and, as had previously been arranged, one of his faithful lieutenants took his life by beheading him. Of the 40,000 troops he had led in February, only some 200 remained to surrender. Losses on both sides were estimated at approximately 12,000 dead and 20,000 wounded.

In the narrow sense, the failure of Saigō’s rebellion meant the end of what he had lived for. The conscript army had defeated the samurai; never again would the government fear local uprisings or samurai threats. If the great Saigō could not win, no one else would be foolhardy enough to try. But in a broader sense, Saigō probably emerged the victor. To the Japanese people, he became the apotheosis of the national character, one more exemplification of the giri-ninjō conflict (“duty” versus “sentiment,” or “compassion”) that is such a well-loved theme of Japanese tale and drama. He became a legend: as late as the 1890s, some still believed that he had not really died but was in retirement waiting to emerge once more at the proper time.

Legacy

Such a complex character must necessarily have had detractors as well as admirers. His critics have called him changeable, because he joined a government he did not believe in and then left it; insincere, because he proposed offering negotiation to Korea although he was hoping for war; and undignified, in seriously proposing to have himself murdered by the Koreans. Possibly the most serious criticism is that, if Saigō had truly regarded the rebellion as unwise, he could certainly have prevented it. Yet there are few who would call him a rebel: the government itself gave him a posthumous pardon and raised his son, Toratarō, to the nobility. His contemporary, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Japan’s great modernizer and one of its most independent thinkers, in a detailed analysis of the rebellion pointed out that Saigō could not be called a rebel against the emperor, since there was never the slightest doubt of his loyalty, and that the government with its increasing authoritarianism, suppression of criticism, and lack of interest in consulting public opinion, was as much at fault as Saigō.

In attempting to summarize this argument objectively, it is probably fair to say that Saigō’s real weakness lay in his inability to think things through logically to their conclusion; that he was ruled more by intuition than by reason. To say this is to say that he was a tragic figure, possessed of undeniable talent, who, although he had had much to do with bringing a new age to birth, could not make a complete adjustment to it in his own mind, and finally sought escape in the only way that seemed honourable to him: self-destruction.

In the early 21st century, Western audiences became familiar with Saigō’s life through a fictionalized account of his ill-fated rebellion in the Hollywood-produced film The Last Samurai (2003).