Shiroyama: The End of the Samurai Class

On the morning of September 24th, 1877, in the hills above Kagoshima Bay in southern Kyūshū, the last fully samurai-organized military force in Japanese history made its final stand. Of the original 12,000 men who had marched north under Saigō Takamori in February, perhaps three hundred and fifty remained. They were positioned along the eastern slope of Shiroyama, a small ridge overlooking the city of Kagoshima where Saigō had been born forty-nine years earlier. Imperial Army troops, equipped with Snider-Enfield rifles and field artillery, ringed the position at a distance of about eight hundred meters. The Imperial commander, Yamagata Aritomo, had explicit orders from Tokyo to take Saigō alive if possible.

Saigō Takamori was killed at approximately seven a.m. by a bullet that struck him in the hip and severed the femoral artery. The most reliable accounts agree that he then knelt facing the rising sun above Kagoshima Bay and was beheaded by his lieutenant Beppu Shinsuke, in the standard kaishaku assistance to seppuku. He was forty-nine. Within an hour every other defender at Shiroyama was dead.

How They Got There

The rebellion that ended at Shiroyama had begun seven months earlier, on January 30th, 1877, when students at Saigō's private military academy in Kagoshima broke into the Imperial Army's local munitions depot to seize weapons. Saigō had not authorized the raid. The Tokyo government, learning of it, dispatched warrants for the academy's leaders. The Satsuma militia, considering the warrants an attack on their lord, mobilized. By February, Saigō — under enormous pressure from his own retainers — had agreed to lead them.

The political backdrop reached back five years. In 1873 Saigō had been the second-ranking figure of the Meiji government, the architect of the Imperial Guard, and the most senior decision-maker on military policy. He had argued that summer for an expedition to Korea — partly as a foreign-policy initiative, partly as a way of giving the disenfranchised samurai class an honorable role in the new state. His proposal was rejected by the Iwakura faction, which had returned from a long tour of European capitals convinced that Japan needed internal modernization, not foreign adventure. Saigō resigned and returned to Kagoshima.

Over the next four years, his private academy in Kagoshima became the center of disenfranchised samurai discontent across southern Japan. The 1876 abolition of samurai stipends and the prohibition on the wearing of swords were the final triggers. By early 1877 the Satsuma militia was organized, armed, and ready for a fight Saigō personally still hoped to avoid.

The Campaign

The first phase of the rebellion was Saigō's drive northward toward Kumamoto Castle, which he intended to take as the base for an advance on Tokyo. The Imperial Army garrison at Kumamoto under General Tani Tateki — only four thousand men — held the castle through a fifty-five-day siege. The siege was the rebellion's strategic catastrophe. While Saigō was tied down at Kumamoto, the Imperial Army moved fresh divisions south by sea and land. By April, when Saigō finally lifted the siege, his army was outnumbered four to one and being pushed back on a broad front.

The retreat south through Kyūshū lasted five months. The Satsuma forces fought a series of competent defensive actions but were unable to win battles outright. Saigō's army shrank from 12,000 to 4,000, then 2,000, then a few hundred as men were killed, captured, or disbanded. By September the survivors were back in the hills above Kagoshima, where the war had begun.

The Last Stand

Yamagata Aritomo, who had served alongside Saigō in the Restoration and considered himself a friend, sent a final letter on the night of September 23rd asking Saigō to surrender. The letter survives. It is a remarkable document, half official communication and half personal plea: 'If you will lay down arms, I can guarantee your life and the lives of your men. I beg you to consider this for the sake of what we did together in 1868.' The reply, if there was one, has not been preserved.

At dawn on September 24th the Imperial guns opened fire. Saigō and his remaining officers, three hundred and fifty men, made a final charge down the slope rather than be killed in their entrenchments. They were cut down within three hundred meters of their starting position. Saigō was hit early, knelt, and asked Beppu to perform the kaishaku. Beppu obeyed, then continued the charge until he too was killed. By eight a.m. the Satsuma Rebellion was over.

What Ended

The rebellion's defeat is conventionally dated as the end of the samurai class. The dating is correct. The Imperial Army at Shiroyama was equipped with the modern bolt-action rifles, the uniform discipline, and the centralized logistics of a contemporary European force. The Satsuma forces were equipped with a mixed inventory of swords, spears, older rifles captured from the depot, and personal pride in samurai descent. The collision was not close. After Shiroyama, no Japanese military force ever took the field organized along samurai lines again. The category 'samurai,' which had been the dominant social class of the country for seven centuries, ceased to function as a military reality on a single September morning.

The political consequences worked themselves out over the next decade. The Imperial government, having proven that the new Western-style army could defeat any internal challenger, pushed through the final wave of Meiji reforms with little remaining domestic resistance. The Imperial Constitution of 1889 and the Imperial Diet of 1890 — the institutional framework that would carry Japan into the twentieth century — were possible because Shiroyama had settled the question of whether the new order could survive its own ex-samurai discontents.

How He Was Remembered

The Meiji government, which had killed him, posthumously rehabilitated Saigō. Twelve years after his death the new Emperor Meiji granted him a posthumous pardon and rank promotion. In 1903 the famous statue in Ueno Park was unveiled — Saigō in country clothes with his dog, looking south toward Kagoshima — and the wound that had been opened at Shiroyama was officially closed. He has been the subject of every popular medium since: Meiji-era kabuki, Taishō pulp novels, Shōwa film, post-war NHK epics, and the loose loose model for the Watanabe Ken character in 'The Last Samurai' (2003).

Yamagata Aritomo, who survived him by forty-five years and lived to see the Empire of Japan he had helped build defeat Russia and emerge as a great power, never spoke publicly about Shiroyama. According to his private diaries, he visited Saigō's grave in Kagoshima every September 24th of his life, in plainclothes, alone.

"Reverence Heaven, love mankind."