The Senior Samurai of the Meiji Restoration Who Helped Modernise Japan and Then Was Killed Leading the Rebellion Against It

Saigō Takamori (1828–1877) was the senior field commander of the Imperial loyalist forces during the Boshin War of 1868–1869. The war overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate that had ruled Japan since 1603 and restored direct rule under the Emperor Meiji. Saigō’s command of the Imperial army at the decisive Battle of Toba-Fushimi in January 1868 made him the leading military figure of the new regime.

He served in the new Meiji government from 1868 to 1873 as Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Army and a senior councillor. He had been part of the central planning group that drove the four foundational early-Meiji reforms: abolition of the feudal domains (1871), the new universal land tax (1873), the new universal conscription law (1873), and the abolition of the samurai class (formally 1876).

The last of these reforms ended his career.

October 1873

The 1873 conscription law replaced the hereditary samurai military caste with a universal-conscription mass army modelled on the contemporary Prussian system. The change eliminated approximately 400,000 hereditary samurai stipends. The samurai class — about 6 percent of the Japanese population — lost its formal social role and most of its income within a five-year transition.

Saigō had supported the modernisation throughout. In October 1873 he resigned over a separate issue (the seikanron debate — a proposed Japanese invasion of Korea that the government majority rejected as premature), and returned to his home province of Satsuma in southern Kyushu. The Satsuma samurai had been the backbone of the 1868 Restoration army; the prefecture was unique in retaining a partial samurai militia structure into the mid-1870s.

Saigō ran a private military academy in Kagoshima from 1874 to 1877. Approximately 20,000 disaffected former samurai trained there.

January 1877

The trigger was a Tokyo government attempt to remove the gunpowder stocks from the Kagoshima arsenal in January 1877. The local Satsuma samurai interpreted the move as a prelude to suppression and stormed the arsenal first. Saigō, who had not initiated the rising, accepted leadership of it within days.

The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 was the largest and last samurai revolt against the Meiji government. Saigō’s army — approximately 30,000 traditional samurai, equipped with a mixture of katana, breech-loading rifles, and a few field guns — marched north into Kyushu in February 1877 with the stated objective of taking Kumamoto Castle, then advancing on Tokyo.

The eight-month campaign failed at every operational level. The siege of Kumamoto Castle lasted 54 days and was broken by the government’s relief army. The retreat south through Kyushu spring and summer of 1877 destroyed the samurai field force. The Imperial Army — conscript infantry under Yamagata Aritomo, who had been Saigō’s colleague in the 1868 Restoration — outnumbered, outgunned, and progressively encircled the rebellion.

Shiroyama, 24 September 1877

By September Saigō’s army had been reduced from 30,000 to approximately 400 survivors, holed up in caves on Shiroyama hill above Kagoshima. The government’s encircling force numbered approximately 30,000.

The final assault began at 4 a.m. on 24 September 1877. Most of the remaining samurai were killed in the first thirty minutes. Saigō was wounded in the hip and thigh by an artillery fragment. Conventional accounts (drawing on the post-battle testimony of his lieutenant Beppu Shinsuke) record that Saigō asked Beppu for assistance, knelt facing the imperial palace in the direction of Tokyo, and was beheaded by Beppu’s sword stroke in the ritual seppuku assistant position. Modern historical work suggests the death was probably simpler — a direct battlefield wound — and that the seppuku account is a posthumous Meiji-era stylisation.

He was 49.

The Imperial Army’s 1877 victory over the largest organised samurai force in the country eliminated samurai-class military relevance for the rest of Japanese history. The Emperor Meiji posthumously pardoned Saigō in 1889. His bronze statue at Ueno Park, Tokyo — unveiled 1898 — remains the most-photographed statue in Japan.

He had built the army that killed him.