Saigo Takamori was a senior Satsuma samurai leader who helped overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate and restore Emperor Meiji in 1868. The new government then embraced Western dress, tactics and industry and converted samurai rice stipends into bonds. In the 1873 Korea debate Saigo proposed going to Korea as an envoy so provocative that he would be assassinated, giving Japan a cause for war and his class an honorable death. Tokyo refused, he resigned, and thousands of Satsuma men in the army and police followed him home to Kagoshima, where in 1874 he founded 132 private academy branches that taught weapons, tactics and artillery alongside the Chinese classics.
By late 1876 Satsuma had stopped sending taxes to Tokyo. Captured government spies confessed under torture to a plot to kill Saigo, and in January 1877 his students raided the arsenal a warship had come to empty. Saigo marched north in his Imperial Army uniform, failed to take Kumamoto Castle from peasant conscripts, and was shattered at Tabaruzaka. Trapped on Mount Enodake, he burned his uniform and slipped away with 500 men to Shiroyama, where 30,000 troops under Yamagata Aritomo stormed the hill on September 24, 1877. Twelve years later Emperor Meiji pardoned him and statues followed, including the one in Tokyo’s Ueno Park.
- His men took the heaviest snowfall in 50 years as a divine sign, recalling the snowstorm of their 1868 march.
- At Tabaruzaka government forces fired over 320,000 rounds and 1,000 shells a day, and each side lost over 4,000 killed or wounded.
- During that battle Saigo secretly wrote to an imperial prince seeking a peaceful settlement, and the government refused.
- The autopsy found no self-inflicted abdominal wound, suggesting Beppu Shinsuke beheaded him after a bullet shattered his hip.
- The war cost 420 million yen, forced Japan off the gold standard and led to a sell-off of state factories that seeded the zaibatsu.
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