Saigō Takamori

Samurai

• Born: 1827 or 1828
• Birthplace: Kagoshima, Kyūshū, Japan
• Died: September 24, 1877
• Place of death: Kagoshima, Kyūshū, Japan

Japanese politician

Saigō’s military leadership and political support were instrumental in the events leading to the demise of Japan’s last feudal government in 1868, while his championing of samurai ideals, culminating in the failed 1877 Satsuma Revolt, during the early Meiji reform era, earned for him the reputation as one of the last supporters of an honorable but outdated value system he ironically helped destroy.

Area of achievement Government and politics

Early Life

The eldest of seven children of a low-ranking samurai serving as head of the Satsuma accounts department, Saigō Takamori (si-go tah-kah-moh-ree) was born in the castle town of Satsuma, on the southern island of Kyūshū, a tozama domain ruled by the Shimazu clan. The Tokugawa Bakufu military government was a feudal polity controlling from its capital at Edo (modern Tokyo) about 260 hereditary han (domains) ruled by local daimyo lords. Former enemies of the Tokugawa clan were included in this arrangement as tozama (outside lords), and their lands were latent repositories of anti-Bakufu sentiments.

Once proud fighting men, many samurai, as a result of the Pax Tokugawa, had become bureaucrats, assisting their lords in various administrative capacities. Saigō’s father was such a retainer. Proud of his warrior heritage, yet reduced to the role of a fiscal manager, he struggled to supplement his low salary by farming.

Saigō, a heavyset boy with a thick neck, bushy eyebrows, and penetrating eyes, was reared among memories of his family’s samurai heritage and his domain’s proud history. During his youth, Saigō was trained in the fighting arts and had inculcated in him the principles of Bushidō, the code of samurai ethics. His formal learning occurred at the Zōshikan, the Satsuma clan school. There he received a traditional education grounded in neo-Confucian ethics, the activist moral philosophy of the Ming Chinese philosopher Wang Yangming, complemented by swordsmanship, Zen meditation, the nativist Shinto beliefs, and regular school subjects. He had a reputation for being a mischievous, headstrong, inarticulate, yet brave and charismatic young man. His burly stature and weight stood him well in sumo wrestling matches, but it also made him the butt of classmates’ jokes. Upon finishing school at sixteen, he became an assistant clerk in the county magistrate’s office.

Saigō became politically active when he became involved in a succession dispute within the domain’s ruling family by siding with Shimazu Nariakira, who became daimyo in 1851, two years before Commodore Matthew C. Perry steamed into Uraga Bay near Edo with a squadron of “black ships” to demand an end to the self-imposed seclusion policy begun during the 1630’s.

In recognition of his crucial support for his lord’s rise to power, Saigō was taken into Nariakira’s service. His presence at Nariakira’s Kagoshima headquarters gave him entrée into the inner circle of Satsuma political discussions and policy-making. Saigō, from 1855 to 1858, traveled to Edo and Kyoto as Nariakira’s private emissary in the complex political maneuvering among shogunate, imperial court, and daimyo over a commercial treaty that had been proposed by American consul general Townsend Harris and the naming of an heir to the childless shogun Takugawa Iesada.

Nariakira’s political star eclipsed in 1858, when his preferred Hitotsubashi line candidate for shogun was rejected in favor of the Kii line. The victory of the Kii proponents brought to power Ii Naosuke, who became great elder in the summer of 1858. Ii signed the Harris treaty without court approval in July and launched the Ansei purge (1858-1860) to oust those opposing him and the shogunal policy of kaikoku (open the country).

Nariakira died in August, 1858. In despair at the loss of his patron and now on the political outside, Saigō resolved to commit suicide; he was dissuaded from doing so by Gesshō, a proimperialist Buddhist monk, who was also on Ii’s purge list. Together they fled from Kyoto to Satsuma, where the authorities would not give them protection. They decided in a joint suicide pact to drown themselves in Kagoshima Bay. Gessho succeeded; Saigō, however, was retrieved from the water and, after recovering, banished to Amami Oshima in the Ryukyu Islands.

Nariakira’s half brother Hisamitsu had become regent for his son Tadayoshi, the new lord of Satsuma. Hisamitsu, persuaded by Saigō’s boyhood friend Ōkubo Toshimichi, decided to send troops to Kyoto to support the emperor and then march on Edo to force reforms on the Bakufu. Ōkubo interceded with Hisamitsu for Saigō’s return. On March 12, 1862, Saigō was recalled to Satsuma and soon consented to head an advance party of Satsuma troops to Kyoto. He irked Hisamitsu by holding discussions in Kyoto with radical rōnin (masterless samurai) wanting to overthrow the Bakufu. Consequently, he was ordered into a second exile (only six months after his pardon) to the islands south of Satsuma. Saigō spent his second banishment (1862-1864) brooding over his failure to avenge his honor through suicide, practicing his calligraphy, wrestling, writing poetry, and starting a family with a commoner, by whom he had two sons (he would take an official wife, Itoko, in 1865).

Life’s Work

Again at the urging of Ōkubo, Saigō’s second exile ended on April 4, 1864. After Ii Naosuke was assassinated by samurai extremists in March, 1860, the weakened shogunate tried to reach an accommodation with the pro-emperor, antiforeign forces in Kyoto. Given the title of war minister, Saigō was sent to Kyoto to serve as a Satsuma watchdog. There he faced plotters from the tozama han Chōshū (a Satsuma rival), maneuvering to overthrow the Bakufu elements at court. Saigō and his men helped pro-Bakufu Aizu samurai expel the Chōshū troops from Kyoto. Chōshū was declared rebellious, and a punitive expedition was authorized by the Bakufu to chastise this southwestern domain. Saigō was a leader of the December, 1864, Chōshū expedition that forced the domain to apologize, surrender some land, disband its militia, and have some leaders commit suicide. Saigō was instrumental in preventing a harsher treatment of Chōshū.

By 1865, however, Chōshū was rebuilding itself after an internal revolt by midrank samurai. Satsuma was now concerned that the Bakufu was becoming more powerful. Saigō and others began aiding loyalists such as Sakamoto Ryōma, a young Tosa (another outside domain) samurai, and certain Kyoto nobles allied with Iwakura Tomomi, an important court official. Saigō also met Great Britain’s first envoy to Japan, Sir Harry Parkes, to try to persuade the English from wholeheartedly supporting the Bakufu. These efforts impressed Chōshū: the two han, burying differences in favor of a united front against the Bakufu, their common enemy, entered an alliance in March, 1866. A powerful tozama coalition, soon augmented by Tosa, was in place to challenge the Tokugawa. When a second punitive Bakufu-led army (without Satsuma participation, at Saigō’s insistence) was launched against Chōshū in the summer of 1866, the strengthened Chōshū domain had no trouble repelling them.

The ascendancy of Tokugawa Yoshinobu to the shogunate late in 1866 revived the central government; reforms were initiated and Western military matériel was secured. In the face of Satsuma opposition, however, the shogun had to agree in the fall of 1867 to a Tosa compromise requiring him to step down and join the daimyo ranks as the head of a power-sharing council. There was fear that the Tokugawa, still the strongest of the daimyo, might reassert its right to national rule; to counter this threat, Satsuma troops entered Kyoto, where Saigō and others, with the support of Iwakura, formulated a proclamation to be issued in the name of the fifteen-year-old emperor Mutsuhito, declaring the restoration of imperial rule.

On January 3, 1868, this proclamation was made in the context of a coup d’état in Kyoto led by Saigō. The office of shogun was officially ended; the Tokugawa were ordered to surrender all lands and titles, a demand that Yoshinobu refused. Saigō, a junior councillor in the new provisional government, led loyalist troops against holdout Bakufu forces, winning the Battle of Toba-Fushimi. His troops continued mop-up campaigns, which lasted until Edo castle was surrendered and the last Bakufu naval forces were defeated. Victorious in battle, Saigō spared most of his enemies, including the ousted shogun. The emperor, his reign title changed to Meiji (enlightened rule), was nominally restored in 1868, but the political future of the new government, transferred to the former Tokugawa seat of power, renamed Tokyo (eastern capital), was in the hands of a small coterie of young middle- and low-rank samurai from the domains of Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa, and Hizen.

As the fighting diminished in 1868, Saigō returned to Kagoshima along with many of his soldiers. Whereas his colleague Ōkubo stayed in Tokyo to launch the Meiji regime, Saigō entered semiretirement, working as a clan councillor. He was a national military hero. The court offered him the third rank junior grade to recognize his contributions to the restoration, but he declined in self-deprecating tones, because such an honor would have put him at a rank higher than his daimyo. Realizing that Saigō’s nonparticipation in the government and his influence at home could be troublesome, Iwakura, serving as an imperial messenger and accompanied by Ōkubo and Yamagata Aritomo, called on Saigō in January, 1871, with a direct order from the emperor, requiring his participation in the Tokyo government. Ever loyal, he acquiesced to the imperial command, becoming a chief counselor of state. He thus joined Ōkubo, Kido Kōin (Chōshū), Itagaki Taisuke (Tosa), and Ōkuma Shigenobu (Hizen) in a coalition government representing the leading pre-Meiji restoration han.

In 1871, confident that their reforms had firmly established them in power, Iwakura led more than half of the government’s leaders on a year-and-a-half-long trip to observe at first hand the United States and Europe and to persuade the Western powers to revise the unequal treaties. Saigō, Itagaki, and Ōkuma were left in charge of a caretaker government bound by written promises not to initiate any new policies while the Iwakura Mission was abroad. In the area of foreign policy, however, independent action was contemplated. When Korea, under Chinese suzerainty, rejected Japanese overtures to recognize the Meiji government, Saigō wanted to go to Korea alone and provoke the Koreans to kill him, thus forcing Japan into war. Earlier, when fifty-four Ryukyuans were attacked by Taiwanese aborigines in 1871, he had called for a punitive expedition against Formosa. Saigō favored a foreign war to create a role for the many samurai who had been replaced by the new conscript army of commoners and who looked to him for leadership.

Before Saigō could have his permission to go to Korea confirmed by the emperor, Iwakura returned and persuaded Ōkubo to head the opposition to Saigō’s plans. Ōkubo, the pragmatic realist, and Saigō, the romantic idealist, clashed over the seikan (conquer Korea) issue, ending their decades-long friendship. Iwakura followed Ōkubo’s efforts by forcing Saigō and his prowar partisans out of the government. To save face, it was announced that Saigō and many Satsuma supporters were leaving the government because of poor health. This was his irreversible break with the Meiji government, now dominated by the Ōkubo faction.

Takamori’s retirement was outwardly peacefully spent romping in the Kagoshima woods with his dogs and composing poetry; there was, however, a political dimension to his retirement as well. He founded several private schools to train Satsuma youth in the fighting arts and traditional ethics. Elsewhere, as samurai were being stripped of their class privileges and becoming impoverished by the financially strapped government’s reduction of their stipends, resentment turned into rebellion. In 1874, two thousand Saga samurai revolted unsuccessfully under Etō Shimpei, who had left the government when Saigō had. There were similar failed samurai uprisings in Kumamoto and Hagi two years later.

Wary of what Saigō might do, police informants watched for signs of disquiet in Kagoshima. The government decided to remove by ship a cache of arms from Kagoshima to prevent Saigō’s followers from arming themselves. Hotheaded young samurai attacked the imperial arsenals to forestall the arms’ removal, precipitating the 1877 Satsuma Revolt. Saigō, probably aware of the futility of the rebellion, backed his followers, reaffirming his allegiance to the emperor while berating the evil politicians who surrounded him. Saigō’s twenty-five thousand men faced at least three times as many government forces. A disastrous battle over Kumamoto castle depleted the rebel army, and its remnants were pursued throughout Kyūshū. In a cave at Shiroyama, Saigō rejected a request from Yamagata to surrender. As he was attempting to escape, he was wounded by a bullet. A samurai to the end, Saigō, to avoid capture and shame, committed ritual disembowelment on September 24, 1877.

Significance

Ending his life a traitor to the state he had helped to found, Saigō Takamori became a hero in death. In 1890, the emperor Meiji pardoned him posthumously and restored his titles. This apotheosis, coming at a time when the Meiji oligarchy was secure in its power, reflected the popular verdict that Saigō had been a sincere, patriotic hero representative of samurai values nostalgically celebrated in a modernizing Japan that was struggling for an accommodation with its feudal past. The Satsuma Revolt and Saigō’s suicide for the cause were not only his but also the country’s last backward glances at a consciously discarded tradition, the lofty virtues of which still resonated in the hearts—if not the minds—of many Japanese.

Saigō’s life bracketed the sweeping changes that in a short period ended a feudal regime and established a centralized nation-state in its place. Although the majority of the Meiji Restoration leaders looked forward, Saigō clutched at a past symbolic of the pure samurai motives his political activism espoused. For later eras, Saigō’s life and deeds would be a manipulatable legacy, often with altered facts, that would provide a model for jingoistic foreign adventurists, right-wing nationalists, and out-of-power political dissidents, who would claim him as their source of inspiration. Saigō’s life was so complex that liberals, Westernizers, and other more progressive elements could similarly adopt the Satsuma warrior as their own.

Bibliography

Beasley, W. G. The Meiji Restoration. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972. The most comprehensive treatment of the late Tokugawa to early Meiji period, with useful glossaries and a bibliography. Saigō’s role in the important events of the time are woven into this factual and analytical narrative.

Buck, James H. “The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877.” Monumenta Nipponica 28 (Winter, 1973): 427-446. A thorough account of the samurai uprising and Saigō’s participation, emphasizing the military and political maneuvers of the rebel and imperial forces.

Hillsborough, Romulus. Samurai Sketches: From the Bloody Final Years of the Shogun. San Francisco: Ridgeback Press, 2001. This collection of sketches about the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate includes information about Saigō, listed under the name Saigō Kichinosuke in the book’s index.

Iwata, Masakazu. Ōkubo Toshimichi: The Bismarck of Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. A biography of Saigō’s Satsuma compatriot, with numerous references to Saigō’s life where it intertwined with Ōkubo’s. Provides an overall view of Satsuma politics and the domain’s role in the restoration movement and early Meiji government.

Jansen, Marius B. Sakamoto Ryōma and the Meiji Restoration. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961. Though focusing on this Tosa loyalist samurai, numerous references to Saigō are interlaced in this biographical narrative, describing the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Mayo, Marlene. “The Korean Crisis of 1873 and Early Meiji Foreign Policy.” Journal of Asian Studies 31 (August, 1972): 793-819. An analysis of the background of and the reasons for the aborted Korean plan of Saigō and the political maneuvering that defeated it, placed in an overview of emerging Meiji diplomatic concerns.

Morris, Ivan. The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975. Chapter 9, “The Apotheosis of Saigō the Great,” is an excellent English account of Saigō’s life, analyzed as part of the Japanese fascination for failed heroes. Very useful notes contain additional biographical details.

Ravina, Mark. The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. Popular biography, recounting Saigō’s life and participation in the Satsuma Revolt.

Yates, Charles L. Saigō Takamori: The Man Behind the Myth. New York: Kegan Paul, 1995. The first English-language biography of Saigō examines his life and near-mythic status in Japanese history.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Nineteenth Century

January 3, 1868: Japan’s Meiji Restoration; January-September 24, 1877: Former Samurai Rise in Satsuma Rebellion.