Saigō: The Meiji Hero Who Became Meiji’s Enemy

At three o’clock on the morning of 24 September 1877, at the base of a wooded hill called Shiroyama overlooking Kagoshima Bay, Saigō Takamori was sitting on a camp stool at the mouth of a small cave, waiting for General Yamagata Aritomo’s Imperial army to resume the general assault. His remaining command was forty men. The force arrayed against him was thirty thousand, dug into elaborate ring-trenches he had been watching them build for three weeks. Five warships in the bay below were ranging their guns on his position by first light.

Saigō was forty-nine years old that morning. Nine years earlier he had commanded the Imperial army that overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate and installed the Meiji emperor. Four years earlier he had been the senior military figure in the Meiji government, commander of the Imperial Guard, councillor of state, the most visible public man in Japan.

He was now the most-wanted rebel in the country. He had spent the summer walking four hundred kilometres through Kyūshū in a long fighting retreat from Kumamoto, sleeping rough and eating whatever his men could forage, to arrive at this cave above a bay he had been born beside. The general frontal assault began at about six in the morning. Saigō was shot in the right hip and the abdomen during the first twenty minutes, calmly asked his lieutenant Beppu Shinsuke to sever his head, faced east toward the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, and died.

That is the end of the story. The beginning is more surprising than the end, because the man who died at Shiroyama in rebellion against the Meiji emperor was also the man who had put that emperor on the throne.

Kajiya-chō, 1828 — a koshogumi boy at the bottom of Satsuma

Saigō was born on 23 January 1828 in a row-house at Kajiya-chō (加治屋町) in the castle town of Kagoshima, the oldest son of a low-ranking Satsuma samurai named Saigō Kichibei. The family stipend was 47 koku of rice — enough to eat but not enough to live well. There were sixteen people in the household at its peak: Saigō’s parents and grandparents, his six younger siblings, and his father’s younger brother’s family, all sharing a single urban retainer’s plot in the shitakajiya quarter. His family rank was koshogumi (御小姨与), second-from-the-bottom in the Satsuma samurai hierarchy.

The Satsuma domain under the Shimazu clan ran a two-tier boys’ school system called the gōjū, which combined martial arts training, Confucian moral instruction, and peer discipline in the neighbourhood unit. Every Satsuma boy went through it. The cohort Saigō grew up with in the Shitakajiya gōjū included Ōkubo Toshimichi, the man who would eventually become his closest political collaborator and then his adversary, and a considerable number of the men who would later lead the Meiji Restoration. Kagoshima is an unusual place in Japanese history because of this: a single neighbourhood school cohort, born within a decade of each other, produced the core leadership of an entire national revolution.

Saigō had a large frame and a quiet temperament that his schoolmates described as heavy rather than warm. When he was thirteen or fourteen — sources disagree on the exact year, and he himself gave different accounts in different letters — he got involved in trying to break up a quarrel between two gōjū groups and was struck on the inside of his right arm by another boy’s drawn sword. The nerve was cut. He never fully regained the use of the arm for sword work.

This is why the formal portraits almost always show him stocky and stout: he had been steered toward sumō and toward scholarship from mid-adolescence onwards because he could not hold a katana properly. The practical effect was to push him into the kōri-bugyō (county-bureaucrat) track rather than the front-line infantry track. That routing is a large part of how he ended up in Shimazu Nariakira’s office in 1854.

Saigō entered the kōri bugyōsho as an assistant clerk at age sixteen, in 1844, and spent the next ten years inspecting Satsuma villages, overseeing tax collection, and filing reports on peasant welfare. The work made him deeply aware of what the tax levies of a 720,000-koku domain actually cost the people paying them. In an 1856 memorial he would later write that Satsuma’s peasant suffering was caused not by the tax rate itself but by the moral degradation of the local administrators, the gōshi rural samurai who had lost their sense of duty.

The argument is pure Confucian moralism, but read carefully you can see the policy core of the man he became: the peasants need relief; the relief is the fault of the officials; the officials need to be reformed; reform starts with personal virtue and ends with political overthrow. He would say variations of this for the rest of his life.

Edo, 1854 — the unexplained promotion

In early 1854, with no recorded explanation, the twenty-six-year-old assistant clerk Saigō was summoned out of the Satsuma countryside by Shimazu Nariakira himself and appointed as Nariakira’s personal attendant on the daimyō’s biennial sankin-kōtai journey to Edo. Nariakira was the most progressive daimyō in Japan — he ran a private iron foundry at Shūseikan, he was the first Japanese noble to sit for a daguerreotype, and he corresponded with Western scholars at a time when this could still get you killed. Why he picked a low-ranking bureaucrat out of the county office nobody has satisfactorily explained; Saigō himself, in his later letters, attributed it to favour from Heaven and declined to speculate further.

In Edo, Nariakira gave Saigō the title of oniwaban — literally “garden supervisor” — which was an innocuous court post that let Saigō move freely through the Edo daimyō quarters without attracting shogunal surveillance. He was, in effect, Nariakira’s political messenger. The messages he was carrying, up and down the sankin-kōtai road between Edo and Kagoshima and out through the daimyō compounds, concerned the shogunal succession crisis that had opened up with the arrival of Commodore Perry’s black ships and the illness of the shōgun Tokugawa Iesada. Nariakira was backing Hitotsubashi Keiki (later Tokugawa Yoshinobu) for the succession against Ii Naosuke’s Kii Tokugawa faction; he was opposing the Harris Treaty; he was trying to pull the country toward some form of daimyō-council consultation rather than autocratic rule from Edo.

Saigō was twenty-seven, thirty, thirty-one during these years. He walked into Edo a Satsuma clerk and came out of it a national political operator with a direct line to the Mito school of imperial reverence, to the Fujita Tōko faction of sonnō-jōi (“revere the emperor, expel the barbarian”) thinking, and to Nariakira personally. He later described this period as the happiest of his life.

He was absolutely loyal to Nariakira. When Nariakira’s infant son Torajūmaru died in 1854 — poisoned, Saigō was convinced, by the rival Ōyura faction in the Satsuma succession dispute — Saigō formally declared himself willing to die to avenge his lord. It was not a figure of speech.

Then Nariakira died. On 16 July 1858, at Tenpozan near Ōsaka, Nariakira suddenly took ill during a military review and was dead within the day; sources variously give cholera or poisoning from the rival faction. Saigō’s patron was gone.

The Ansei Purge had just begun in Edo under Ii Naosuke, and one of the names on the purge list was Saigō’s ally Gesshō, a Kōfuku-ji monk who had been working with Saigō on anti-shogunal contacts in Kyōto. The two of them fled south to Kagoshima. When the Satsuma government refused to shelter them, they made a pact.

On the night of 16 November 1858, in a small boat on Kinko-wan (Kagoshima Bay), they embraced and threw themselves overboard together. Gesshō drowned. Saigō was pulled out alive, unconscious.

Amami and Okinoerabu — two exiles

Officially the Saigō who had gone into Kinko-wan with Gesshō was dead; the Satsuma government could not acknowledge that a fugitive from the Ansei Purge was alive on the Kagoshima books. So in early 1859 the revived Saigō was put on a ship to Amami Ōshima, the northernmost of the Ryukyū islands under Satsuma’s control, and registered there under the alias Kikuchi Gengō.

He lived on Amami for three years. He married a local woman named Aigana, had two children by her (a son Kōjirō and a daughter Kikusō), taught village children kanbun Chinese classics, and wrote calligraphy. The exile was not particularly harsh — he was essentially in rural political retirement.

He was recalled to Satsuma in early 1862 by Shimazu Hisamitsu, Nariakira’s half-brother and the de facto new ruler of the domain. Hisamitsu wanted to take a Satsuma army into Kyōto to pressure the shogunate for reforms. Saigō arrived back in Kagoshima, looked at the plan, and told Hisamitsu to his face that the plan was reckless and would get Satsuma samurai killed for no return.

Then, disobeying orders, he went ahead of Hisamitsu to Ōsaka and Kyōto to restrain the more radical Satsuma men who were already there. Hisamitsu, who never forgot an insult, had him arrested on arrival and exiled again.

The second exile was worse. Saigō was sent to Okinoerabu-jima, a smaller, poorer island south of Amami, and for the first six months he was kept in a free-standing outdoor cage exposed to wind and rain. He got dysentery, lost weight he did not have to spare, and came closer to dying than at any point before Shiroyama.

A local official named Tsuchimochi Masateru, who admired him, eventually moved him to house arrest and kept him alive through the second year. Saigō used the time the way he used every interval of his life — he taught children, he studied the Confucian classics, and he wrote poems in classical Chinese about his relationship to Heaven, loyalty, and the concept of makoto (sincerity). His later philosophical writing, the fragments that survive, mostly came out of these two years on Okinoerabu.

The Satchō alliance, 1866 — the deal that killed the shogunate

Saigō was pardoned and recalled from Okinoerabu in the first month of 1864, and his old gōjū classmate Ōkubo Toshimichi handed him command of the Satsuma expeditionary contingent in Kyōto on arrival. He was back in national politics inside a month.

In July 1864 he was the ranking Satsuma commander at the Kinmon no Hen (禁門の変) — the Forbidden Gate Incident — when Chōshū radicals attempted to storm the Imperial Palace in Kyōto. The Satsuma-Aizu combined force repelled them. Officially this was a victory for the shogunate and its allies; in practice it was the last moment Satsuma fought on the shogunal side.

Saigō came out of Kinmon convinced the Tokugawa regime was terminal. A private meeting with the shogunal naval officer Katsu Kaishū in late 1864 tipped him over the edge: Katsu, who was meant to be defending the shogunate, told Saigō that the shogunate was finished and that a daimyō-council successor regime was the only plausible next step. Between late 1864 and early 1866 Saigō, Ōkubo, and the Chōshū envoys Katsura Kogorō and Takasugi Shinsaku opened back-channel negotiations for a Satsuma-Chōshū alliance. The broker was Sakamoto Ryōma of Tosa, a freelance political entrepreneur who had been running up and down the country selling the idea of a Satchō pact to anyone who would listen.

The deal was signed in Kyōto on the night of 21 January 1866 at Komatsu Tatewaki’s residence, with Saigō and Katsura as principals and Sakamoto as witness. It was a secret pact — neither clan acknowledged it publicly — but the substance was that Satsuma would not participate in any shogunal expedition against Chōshū, and would supply Chōshū with Western arms through its own arms-purchase channels.

When the Second Chōshū Expedition went ahead in summer 1866 without Satsuma, Chōshū’s modernised rifle companies took the shogunal army apart. The Tokugawa regime lost its last plausible claim to be the military authority of the country. From that point onwards the shogunate was dying; the question was only how it would die.

Bōshin and Edo Castle, 1868 — the bloodless surrender

The Bōshin War opened on 27 January 1868 at Toba-Fushimi, south of Kyōto, when the Satsuma-Chōshū force under the Imperial brocade banner engaged and routed the main shogunal army. Saigō was the field commander for Satsuma. Within three days the shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu had fled by ship to Edo; within three weeks the Imperial army was marching east along the Tōkaidō road in Yoshinobu’s direction, with Saigō at the head of it.

By the middle of March 1868 he had advanced to Sunpu (modern Shizuoka) and was preparing the final assault on Edo. A hundred thousand Imperial troops were arrayed along the Kantō plain. Yoshinobu had sheltered in Edo Castle and was refusing to surrender personally while his senior retainer Katsu Kaishū tried to negotiate.

On 13 and 14 March 1868, in two meetings at Katsu’s residence in the Takanawa Satsuma compound, Saigō and Katsu worked out the terms. Katsu was offering unconditional surrender of Edo Castle and the shogun’s immediate retirement to Mito, provided Saigō called off the planned assault on the city.

Edo at that point had a population of roughly one million people, most of them crammed into wooden tenements, and a coordinated attack would have burned a third of them out by nightfall. Saigō had the authority from the Imperial government to refuse. He accepted.

On 3 April 1868 (old lunar calendar), the shogunal forces surrendered Edo Castle without a shot being fired. The city did not burn. The Tokugawa regime ended in a formal ceremony on the castle grounds, not in a four-day street battle.

This is one of the quiet moments of Japanese history: Saigō, who had been willing to attack Edo, agreed not to attack it because the alternative was civilian casualties on a scale he could already picture. Katsu would later say that the negotiation worked because Saigō understood that a military victory and a political victory were not always the same thing. Saigō would never again have this kind of clarity about his own purposes; the next ten years were increasingly confused.

Sangi, 1871 — inside the Meiji government

Saigō went home to Kagoshima after the Bōshin War ended in 1869 and appeared to intend to stay there. He was forty-one, exhausted, chronically ill with a parasitic infection from his Amami exile, and had already said in letters to Ōkubo that he wanted to live quietly. The new Meiji government did not let him.

In early 1871 he was summoned to Tōkyō as the central figure in the establishment of the Imperial Guard (goshinpei), a conscript force drawn from Satsuma, Chōshū, and Tosa that would provide the military backing for the next round of reforms. In July 1871, with that force visibly in place on the palace grounds, the Meiji government formally abolished the han domain system — haihan chiken — and dissolved the clan territories into centrally-administered prefectures.

This is one of the paradoxes of the Saigō story. He was a Shimazu-clan loyalist by upbringing and feudal instinct, and he personally liquidated the Shimazu domain. He did it because he had concluded that the samurai class had to end if Japan was going to survive the Western powers, and he was prepared to carry out that conclusion against his own clan’s interests.

Between 1871 and 1873 he served as Imperial Councillor (sangi), full general of the army, and member of the caretaker government while the main Meiji leadership was in Europe and America on the Iwakura Mission. The caretaker government under Saigō enacted conscription, land tax reform, a national education system, and the early framework of the modern Japanese state.

But he was miserable. The correspondence from this period — collected in the Nanshū Okō and the various Saigō-keke edited volumes — is dense with complaints about bureaucratic triviality, official corruption, expensive Western clothes, and men he had fought alongside at Bōshin becoming paper-shuffling ministers. He referred to Tōkyō in one letter as “a place where samurai go to stop being samurai.”

He was also watching the Imperial Guard that he had built become the instrument by which the former samurai class was being disarmed. His philosophical writing from this period keeps circling back to makoto — sincerity — and to the idea that sincere action is preferable to clever action, even when the sincere action is politically futile.

Seikanron, 1873 — the break

Korea refused to recognise the Meiji government in 1873. The Korean court, operating under the hwi protocol of the Qing-centred tributary system, regarded the Imperial restoration as a lateral-legitimacy event and declined to adjust its diplomatic vocabulary. Saigō proposed that he himself travel to Kyōngsong as envoy, present the Meiji credentials, and accept the likely consequences.

He was explicit about what he thought the likely consequences were. He expected to be assassinated by Korean nationalists, and he expected that his assassination would give Japan a casus belli to invade Korea. He wanted both outcomes — a meaningful death for himself and a useful war for the restless samurai population he had spent the previous four years watching disintegrate in Tōkyō.

The Iwakura Mission returned from Europe and America in late September 1873 and immediately moved to block the proposal. Ōkubo Toshimichi — Saigō’s oldest friend, the man he had known since both of them were boys at the Shitakajiya gōjū — led the blocking faction. Ōkubo’s argument was that domestic modernisation had to come first, that Japan was in no condition to prosecute a foreign war, and that Saigō’s death-seeking impulse was a personal pathology being dressed up as policy.

On 23 October 1873, at a final cabinet meeting with Emperor Meiji presiding, Ōkubo’s faction prevailed. The Korean envoy plan was cancelled.

Saigō resigned from every government post the same afternoon. So did Councillors Itagaki Taisuke, Etō Shinpei, and Gotō Shōjirō; so did roughly six hundred Satsuma military officers and Imperial Guardsmen, who left their posts and went home to Kagoshima. The rupture between Saigō and Ōkubo was total.

They never spoke again. Four and a half years later, Ōkubo would be assassinated in Tōkyō by six Kaga samurai who specifically cited the Seikanron betrayal of Saigō in their sentencing statement.

Shigakkō, 1874 — the private academy in Kagoshima

Saigō went home to Kagoshima in November 1873 and founded a private academy, the Shigakkō (私学校), to occupy and employ the six hundred former Imperial Guardsmen who had followed him out of Tūkyō. Within eighteen months there were 132 branches across Satsuma. The curriculum combined Confucian classics with weapons drill and artillery training, and the students were mostly ex-samurai in their twenties and thirties whose government jobs had disappeared in the Seikanron purge.

Saigō himself spent most of 1874-76 hunting boar in the Kagoshima hills, fishing on Sakurajima, and corresponding with former colleagues. He is described in visitors’ accounts from this period as calm, physically thinner than he had been in Tōkyō, and uninterested in politics. He was also the governor of Satsuma prefecture in everything but title.

The Meiji government in Tōkyō watched the Shigakkō with increasing concern. Satsuma under Saigō had effectively seceded from central control; the prefectural administration was stacked with Shigakkō graduates, the Kagoshima arsenal held a substantial Western-pattern weapons stockpile, and the 1876 eliminations of samurai rice stipends and the ban on the wearing of swords hit Satsuma harder than anywhere else in Japan. Three small samurai uprisings during 1876 — the Saga Rebellion, the Shinpūren Rebellion in Kumamoto, and the Hagi Rebellion — had each been suppressed quickly and violently by Imperial conscripts. Ōkubo’s government feared that Satsuma would be the next, and the largest.

In December 1876 the Tōkyō government sent a police officer named Nakahara Hisao into Satsuma with fifty-seven men to investigate. The men were caught by Shigakkō students; under torture, Nakahara confessed to a plan to assassinate Saigō and the Shigakkō leadership. Whether the confession was accurate or extracted is still disputed; what mattered was that it was believed.

On 30 January 1877 an Imperial warship arrived in Kagoshima harbour to remove weapons from the Somuta arsenal. Fifty Shigakkō students raided the arsenal the same night to prevent the removal. Over the next three days a thousand more students raided the Kagoshima naval yards. The rebellion had begun without Saigō ordering it and effectively against his consent.

15 February 1877 — the march north

On 15 February 1877 Saigō put on his old army uniform, formally accepted command of the Satsuma forces, and marched north out of Kagoshima with roughly 13,000 men. His stated purpose was to travel to Tōkyō and “ask questions of the government.” He made no attempt to contact sympathetic domains, left no rear guard at Kagoshima, and rejected volunteers from outside Satsuma.

The whole operation was conducted with a curious fatalism — as if Saigō knew he was not going to reach Tōkyō, and was walking north because walking north was what his position required of him.

The snowfall on 15 February 1877 was the deepest Satsuma had seen in fifty years. Some of the marching men interpreted this as a favourable omen — nine years earlier, on exactly the same date in 1868, the Meiji Restoration armies had set out through similar snow. Others read it the other way. The army crossed into Kumamoto prefecture on 14 February, reached the outskirts of Kumamoto Castle on 19 February, and opened fire on the castle garrison the same day.

Kumamoto, 19 February – 14 April — the castle that refused

Saigō’s plan for the rebellion rested on the assumption that Kumamoto Castle could be taken quickly. It could not. Tani Tateki’s Imperial garrison, 3,800 conscripts and 600 policemen, were mostly Kyūshū locals with questionable loyalties — a number of the officers were Kagoshima-born — but Tani chose not to risk a sortie.

He closed the gates, distributed his men along the inner walls, and sat. Kumamoto’s defences had been designed in 1598 by Katō Kiyomasa, a man whose approach to castle-building had been shaped by eight years of combat against Korean fortresses. The defensive geometry held.

The main Satsuma attack came on 22 February 1877 in a two-sided pincer — and failed. Saigō’s forces broke inside the outer moat but could not breach the inner walls; the stone counter-battery positions Kiyomasa had laid down along the kuragari-tsuuro (the “dark passage”) broke up wave after wave of the assault. After two days of frontal attacks the Satsuma forces dug into the frozen ground around the castle and began a siege.

By early March Saigō’s army had swelled to around 20,000 as Kumamoto ex-samurai rallied to him. It did not matter. The food supply inside the castle — which had been badly damaged by a warehouse fire days before the rebellion began — was gradually made to hold by strict rationing, and the walls did not move.

Saigō himself, watching the defence, is reported by several retainers to have said something close to: “I was not defeated by the Imperial army. I was defeated by Kiyomasa.” The remark is in at least four different contemporary and near-contemporary sources, which is roughly the threshold above which a samurai quotation can be trusted.

What he meant was that the Meiji conscripts — whom every Satsuma samurai had been taught to regard as peasants with rifles — were not the reason the castle was holding. The reason the castle was holding was the dead Katō Kiyomasa, whose 279-year-old stonework was doing the work no amount of nineteenth-century military reform could have done. Two warrior cultures separated by nearly three centuries were meeting at the Kumamoto walls, and the older one was winning.

Tabaruzaka, March 1877 — eight days

While the Kumamoto siege dragged on, General Yamagata Aritomo’s relief army was advancing south down the Kumamoto road. On 4 March 1877 Yamagata ordered a frontal assault on Tabaruzaka (田原坂), a ridge blocking the approach to Kumamoto held by about 15,000 Satsuma, Kumamoto, and Hitoyoshi samurai. The Imperial Ninth Brigade was 9,000 men.

The battle lasted eight days. Both sides took more than 4,000 casualties. It is one of the most intense single engagements of nineteenth-century Japanese history and is the moment at which the Imperial conscript army unambiguously established itself as a modern fighting force. Tabaruzaka broke the back of the Satsuma field army.

On 8 March an amphibious Imperial force landed at Kagoshima itself, seized the arsenals, and arrested the Satsuma governor — cutting off Saigō’s base behind him. On 9 March Saigō, Kirino Toshiaki, and Shinohara Kunimoto were stripped of their court ranks and titles by Imperial decree. On the night of 8 April the Kumamoto garrison broke out of the castle for a single successful resupply sortie; on 12 April General Kuroda Kiyotaka’s main relief force arrived at Kumamoto, outflanked the besieging Satsuma army, and lifted the siege. Saigō fell back from Kumamoto on 14 April with what remained of his forces — probably around 10,000 men — and began a seven-day retreat southeast to Hitoyoshi.

Through Kyūshū, April – September 1877

What followed is the kind of retreat you would expect to read in a Ming-dynasty campaign history rather than in nineteenth-century Japan. Saigō walked his remaining force — shrinking daily as men either fell in combat or slipped away to surrender — through the mountain valleys of central and southern Kyūshū. From Hitoyoshi he moved east to Miyazaki.

On 24 July the Imperial army forced him out of Miyakonojō; the combined pincer from Nobeoka and Saiki would have trapped him in late August had his men not cut their way free in a small hard engagement near Ōita. By 17 August 1877 the rebel force was down to 3,000 combatants and had lost most of its artillery.

On the slopes of Mount Enodake a Yamagata detachment outnumbered Saigō’s surviving men seven to one and pinned them against the mountain. Most of the remaining Satsuma army either surrendered or committed seppuku in place. Saigō himself, on the evening of 19 August, burned his army uniform and his private papers in a fire outside his tent, and slipped away into the mountains with about 500 men.

Over the next twelve days this column crossed Kyūshū west-by-southwest, moving at night, living on whatever they could forage from farming villages that were both sympathetic and frightened. On 1 September 1877 they reached Kagoshima, climbed Shiroyama (城山, “castle mountain”) behind the city, and dug in.

Shiroyama, 1 – 24 September 1877 — the cave and the last day

Shiroyama is a low forested hill of about 107 metres, directly behind central Kagoshima, overlooking the bay where Saigō had tried to drown with Gesshō nineteen years earlier. Saigō’s 500 men fortified the upper slopes, while General Yamagata brought 30,000 Imperial troops up from the town below and began constructing a ring of earthworks, trenches, and wooden palisades to prevent any attempt at breakout. Five Imperial warships — the Takao and four others — anchored in Kinko-wan and ranged their guns on the Shiroyama positions. Saigō spent the last week of his life in a small natural cave on the hill’s western face, now called the Saigō-dōkutsu (西郁洞窓), which was just large enough for a man to sit upright in.

On 1 September Yamagata sent a surrender letter — drafted, actually, by the twenty-two-year-old Suematsu Kenchō, later the translator of the Tale of Genji. Saigō received it and did not reply. Over the next three weeks Yamagata’s engineers completed the ring of earthworks, and the warship guns continued ranging fire into the rebel positions. Saigō, according to the retainer accounts that survived the final battle, spent the time reading, writing a few last poems in classical Chinese, and organising the order in which his remaining lieutenants would die.

The Imperial general assault began at 3 a.m. on 24 September 1877. It was a frontal attack from three sides, supported by the warship guns in the bay. By six in the morning only about forty rebels were still alive.

Saigō was shot — probably by a Minie-pattern rifle bullet — in the right hip and abdomen during the early part of the engagement. According to the widely-accepted account, he knew he was mortally wounded, stopped his retainer Beppu Shinsuke, and said: “Shinsuke, this place will do. Please be my second.” He then faced east toward the Imperial Palace in Tōkyō, bowed his head, and Beppu struck it off with a single katana stroke.

After Saigō’s death, Beppu and the last remaining rebels drew their swords and charged downhill toward the nearest Imperial positions. They were all killed inside fifteen minutes. By seven in the morning on 24 September 1877, the Satsuma Rebellion was finished.

Yamagata’s soldiers brought Saigō’s head to Yamagata for formal identification; Yamagata, who had served under Saigō during the Bōshin War, is supposed to have bowed to the head before ordering it buried with the body at a temporary grave on Shiroyama. All 500 of Saigō’s final column died in the battle. The Imperial army lost approximately 250 men in the same engagement.

The posthumous rehabilitation, 1889

Saigō’s reputation began rebuilding the instant he died. Within six weeks of the Shiroyama battle, Meiji print publishers in Tōkyō and Ōsaka were issuing commemorative woodblocks of him in full Imperial uniform, carrying inscriptions that walked a careful line between acknowledging the rebellion and celebrating his earlier service. By 1879 a comet in the night sky was being called the Saigō-boshi — “the Saigō star” — by popular tradition, on the premise that he had not really died and was somewhere offstage waiting to return. By the mid-1880s popular opinion in Japan had effectively decided that Saigō was not a traitor.

The official rehabilitation followed the popular one. On 22 February 1889, at the ceremonies marking the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution, Emperor Meiji issued a posthumous pardon for Saigō and restored him to his former court rank of shō-san-mi. Saigō’s son Torataro was elevated to the rank of marquis (kōshaku) in 1902. The “traitor to the Realm” label of the 1877 woodblocks vanished from official circulation and has not returned since.

A statue commission was opened for a public bronze of Saigō in Tōkyō, to be unveiled at Ueno Park. The sculptor was Takamura Kōun. The bronze was installed on 18 December 1898, twenty-one years after Shiroyama.

The Ueno statue is the image of Saigō that the Japanese public has since settled on. It is not the uniformed Meiji commander of the 1868 Bōshin War; it is not the ferocious rebel of the 1877 Seinan War; it is a middle-aged man in summer yukata walking his dog in the hills, returning to sumō and boar-hunting after being disgusted out of Tōkyō politics.

This is a remarkable act of collective forgetting. The politician who assumed Saigō would be best remembered as a civilian was correct. The man’s actual career ran through two civil wars; the statue has him going for a walk.

Why Saigō is still the figure he is

Every Japanese historical figure who matters gets one sentence that anchors the popular memory; the Saigō sentence is “the last true samurai.” I am sceptical about this framing. He was not an especially conservative samurai — he helped dismantle the samurai class in 1871, voted for conscription over hereditary warrior status, and signed off on the abolition of the domains.

He was not an especially restrained samurai — his willingness to march toward predictable death in Korea and then at Shiroyama reads, in the later letters, as closer to theological impatience than to stoic acceptance. What Saigō was, in the end, was a sincere samurai. That is a harder and rarer thing.

The category he belongs to, in my reading, is the small group of nineteenth-century Japanese political actors who took the Confucian concept of makoto (誠, sincerity) seriously enough to die for it. The Meiji government’s most effective leaders — Ōkubo, Itō Hirobumi, Kido Takayoshi — were men of rigaku, of calculation and compromise, and they built the modern Japanese state on that basis.

Saigō was the man who could not make the last compromise. He understood that the samurai class had to end, he personally ended it, and then when the ending hit him too he died rather than accept it. This is probably irrational; the point of the Saigō legend is that the Japanese tradition is not willing to accept that it is merely irrational.

You can see Saigō in modern Japanese politics almost anywhere you look. The pre-war ultranationalist Gen’yōsha drew its founding rhetoric directly from the Shigakkō tradition. The post-war literary reappraisal — Mori Ōgai’s, Shiba Ryōtarô’s, and eventually Edward Zwick’s misfiring 2003 film The Last Samurai — all leans on the Shiroyama death as a usable symbol.

The Satsuma-dialect nickname for Saigō — Saigô-don — is now the name of a shochu brand, a soba chain, and the NHK taiga drama of 2018. You cannot move around Kagoshima without running into a bust, a statue, a signboard, or a commemorative rice cake named after him. This is partly local pride. It is also the country still unable to decide what his death was about.

Where to visit Saigō’s story today

There are two cities to go to — Kagoshima and Tōkyō — plus a detour to Kumamoto if you are walking the Bōshin-Seinan route in order. Kagoshima is the heart of the Saigō pilgrimage. You can walk every site in this section in a long morning if you take a single taxi to start and finish on foot.

Nanshū-jinja and the grave at Nanshū Kôjô cemetery, Kagoshima

The Nanshū-jinja (南洲神社) sits in a quiet corner of Kagoshima’s Uenohara district, a fifteen-minute taxi ride east of the JR Kagoshima-Chûô station. The shrine was founded in 1880, three years after Saigō’s death, when the rebellion was still officially unforgiven; it was at first a private commemoration funded by surviving Satsuma clan families and only formally recognised as a shrine after the 1889 rehabilitation. The grounds contain the graves of Saigō and of 2,023 of his men killed in the Seinan War. The annual Nanshū-sai festival is held on 24 September each year — the anniversary of Shiroyama — and draws a small, mostly elderly crowd of Satsuma descendants.

The cemetery itself is called Nanshū Kôjô. It is laid out in ranks from the shrine entrance, with the common soldiers in the outer rings and Saigō, Kirino, Beppu, and Shinohara in the centre. Saigō’s own marker is a plain stone roughly 170 centimetres high, with his posthumous court rank engraved on one face and his courtesy name Nanshū on the other. His wife Itoko is interred nearby.

If you are coming on 24 September, you will need to arrive before 10 a.m. to find the ceremony; after 11:30 the shrine is back to normal, and the cicadas are louder than anything else.

Shiroyama Park and the observation deck, Kagoshima

Shiroyama itself is a public park now, ten minutes’ walk from central Kagoshima and threaded with paths up the wooded slopes. From the top you get the clearest view anywhere in the city of Sakurajima volcano across Kinko-wan — the same view Saigō would have had in September 1877 — and on clear days you can see forty kilometres south down the Kōshima peninsula. The observation deck is at about 107 metres of elevation. The stone marker for Saigō’s deathplace, the shyôen-no-chi, is on a side path about two-thirds of the way up, and is best approached from the Saigō-dōkutsu side rather than the main observatory road.

Saigō-dōkutsu — the cave, Kagoshima

The cave is a five-minute uphill walk from the Shiroyama Park main entrance, along a paved path with handrails. It is a shallow natural opening in the hillside, perhaps three metres deep and wide enough for two or three people standing shoulder to shoulder. Saigō spent the last five days of his life here, from 19 to 24 September 1877.

There is a modest stone marker, a wooden signboard in both Japanese and English, and a small offerings shelf. Nothing else — no recreated tatami, no sound installation. This is unusual for a modern Japanese historical site, and is one of the things I most like about the Shiroyama setup.

You should go at about 8 a.m. if you want it to yourself. The school tour groups start coming through around 10:30 and turn the path into a gentle traffic jam. The signboard is worth reading carefully: the Japanese version contains three lines about Saigō’s last poem (“I do not regret the step I have taken; I only regret that I shall not see it through”) that the English version paraphrases into a blandness the Japanese text does not have.

If your Japanese is strong enough to read cursive, the original is better.

Ueno Park and the Takamura Kōun statue, Tōkyō

The Ueno Park statue is accessible from Ueno Station’s Shinobazu exit, a four-minute walk uphill into the park. Takamura Kōun’s 1898 bronze stands on a stone plinth about three metres above ground level, with the informal-yukata Saigō holding a hunting rope and his dog Tsun sitting at his right knee. The statue is 3.66 metres tall overall and was cast in Tōkyō at the Kawaguchi foundry. The plinth carries a bronze plaque with the dedication inscription, and an older plaque to the side commemorates Takamura’s design work.

I have mixed feelings about this statue. It is the single most-photographed image of a historical Japanese figure anywhere in Tōkyō, and it is not even close to the Saigō that historical scholarship actually knows. Itoko’s widow-remark about not recognising her husband is preserved in the 1898 dedication-day journalists’ accounts, and on the evidence it is correct: Saigō did not wear yukata in public, he did not hunt with Akita dogs, and he did not stand in the calm contemplative posture this bronze has settled into.

But the statue is not about what Saigō looked like. It is about what the Meiji state had decided to remember him as — a man who had come home from politics and gone for a walk. Which, in a way, is the truest thing you can say about him: the rebellion, the death at Shiroyama, was in one sense the forced ending of a man who was trying to retire.

Tabaruzaka battlefield and the Satsuma cemetery, Kumamoto

If you are travelling from Kagoshima back toward Kumamoto Castle, spend half a day at Tabaruzaka on the way. The battlefield is a preserved site 35 minutes north of Kumamoto city by bus. There is a small museum at the top of the ridge with a reasonable display of weapons, uniforms, and photographs — including some of the Tomishige Rihei and Ueno Hikoma plates I have quoted here — and the Tabaruzaka cemetery a ten-minute walk from the museum holds the graves of both Imperial and Satsuma soldiers, side by side. The memorial is a single large stone, inscribed with the names of all 4,000 dead from both armies.

From Tabaruzaka it is a thirty-minute bus ride down into Kumamoto Castle, which Saigō could not take — the inner walls that broke his February-March attacks are still there, rebuilt after the 2016 earthquake, and the Shōkunden memorial hall inside the castle park carries a plaque commemorating the 1877 defenders. If you are doing the pilgrimage in the proper order, this is the last stop, not the first: you go to Shiroyama for the death, you go to Tabaruzaka for the retreat, and you go to Kumamoto Castle to stand where the last samurai army stopped. The castle Katō Kiyomasa built in 1600 is the reason Saigō died at Shiroyama rather than in Tōkyō; it deserves the pilgrimage closing.

Coda — returning to the cave

What I keep coming back to about Saigō is not the rebellion. It is the nineteen years between the night he went into Kinko-wan with Gesshō and was pulled out alive, and the morning he sat down outside the cave on Shiroyama and waited. He had spent the first suicide pact on his knees in a boat with a Buddhist monk, and the second one on a camp stool with forty retainers.

In between, he had put the emperor on the throne, written the conscription law, and killed the samurai class. He spent all nineteen of those years trying to die for someone and never quite managed it until Beppu did it for him.

If you are going to Kagoshima anyway, go to the cave at eight in the morning before the school groups arrive. Walk up the path from the road, stand at the mouth of it for a minute, and look out through the trees at Kinko-wan below. It is the same bay Saigō had swum in as a child and had tried to drown in at thirty. The cave faces it.

He would have been able to hear the warships ranging their guns from here on the morning of 24 September 1877. If you are quiet you can hear the cicadas over the town below, which is not the same thing, but it is close enough to remind you that he died at home.