What happened at the Battle of Shiroyama?
In September 1877 Saigō Takamori, leader of the Satsuma Rebellion, returned to Kagoshima with a few hundred followers after breaking through the government lines in Hyūga, and dug in on Shiroyama, the hill above the town. Government troops surrounded the hill and shelled it for days. Before dawn on 24 September they stormed it. Saigō was shot and then beheaded by one of his own men, and Kirino Toshiaki, Murata Shinpachi, Beppu Shinsuke and more than a hundred others died with him, ending the last samurai rebellion.5
Japanese dictionaries of history call the Satsuma Rebellion the largest and the last rising of the former samurai against the Meiji government, and Shiroyama was its end. The rest of that day is told in 24 September in military history, and other last stands in our list of the greatest last stands.6
Saigō and the private schools
Saigō Takamori was one of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration. The National Diet Library's biography recalls that he concluded the alliance between Satsuma and Chōshū, negotiated the bloodless surrender of Edo Castle with Katsu Kaishū and, as a councillor of the new government, pushed through its reforms. In 1873 he lost the dispute over sending an envoy to Korea and resigned.7
Back in Kagoshima he set up private schools for the former samurai of Satsuma. The National Diet Library's online exhibition describes how the private-school faction, organised by Kirino Toshiaki and others, joined with the prefectural governor Ōyama Tsunayoshi to run Kagoshima almost independently of Tokyo. The Japanese edition of Britannica notes that the prefecture became the greatest stronghold of opposition to the government.8
Across Japan the former samurai had lost their stipends, their right to wear swords and their monopoly of arms, and in 1876 risings broke out at Kumamoto, Akizuki and Hagi. Mōri Toshihiko writes in the Nipponica encyclopedia that Saigō, whether he wished it or not, had become the symbol of their opposition, although he stayed quietly in Kagoshima and answered none of their calls. The Heibonsha encyclopedia quotes the diary of Kido Takayoshi, who wrote in April 1877 that Kagoshima was like an independent country.9
The march of February 1877
The spark came in January 1877. The government tried to move arms and ammunition out of Kagoshima, and students of the private schools raided the army powder store and the navy arsenal to stop them. At the same time the confession of a police agent, Nakahara Hisao, who had been sent from Tokyo, was taken as proof of a plot to assassinate Saigō.10
Saigō could not hold his followers back. On 15 February 1877 he marched north from Kagoshima at the head of about 13,000 men, intending, in the words of the National Diet Library, to press questions on the government in Tokyo. The Heibonsha encyclopedia notes that he set up his headquarters on Shiroyama, the hill above the town where the war would end.11
Other former samurai of Kyushu joined him on the way, and the Heibonsha encyclopedia puts the whole force at about 30,000. The government named Prince Arisugawa Taruhito commander of the punitive expedition, with Lieutenant General Yamagata Aritomo and Vice Admiral Kawamura Sumiyoshi as his deputies, and on 25 February stripped Saigō of his rank. The imperial envoy Yanagihara Sakimitsu, sent to Kagoshima, reported to the minister Iwakura Tomomi that Saigō had reasoned that he would be put to death whether he rebelled or not, and so had chosen to march. The Heibonsha encyclopedia adds that the government meant to use the rising to crush the samurai revolts once and for all.12
Kumamoto and Tabaruzaka
The rebels' first objective was Kumamoto Castle, held by the government garrison under Tani Tateki. They stormed it on 22 February and, when the walls held, settled down to a siege. Mounsey, a British diplomat who collected accounts of the war in Tokyo, records that by early April the garrison had lost 468 officers and men killed and wounded and was living on rice gruel and boiled millet.13
The relief army came south from Hakata, and from 4 March the slope of Tabaruzaka, north of the town, saw some of the hardest fighting of the war. In the same weeks, the Heibonsha encyclopedia notes, Major Nogi Maresuke, acting commander of the 14th Regiment from Kokura, lost his regimental colours to the rebels. The Yamakawa dictionary of Japanese history dates the end of the siege to 14 April, when the rebels lifted it and withdrew, and Mōri to 15 April, when the relief force broke through.14
Retreat through Hyūga
From then on the rebels were on the defensive. They fell back through the mountains of central Kyushu into the province of Hyūga on the east coast. Nipponica lists the towns they lost one after another: Hitoyoshi on 1 June, Miyakonojō on 24 July, and Miyazaki and Sadowara on 31 July.15
By mid-August the survivors were pressed into a few square miles around Nagai, near Nobeoka. Mounsey gives the government's five divisions there as 25,600 men with thirty-two guns, under Generals Tani, Nozu, Takashima, Ōyama and Miyoshi, against fewer than 10,000 rebels who had almost no ammunition left.16
The rebel leaders met in council and agreed that the war was lost. The Yamakawa dictionary dates the dissolution of the army to 17 August, and Mounsey the council to the 18th. Most of the men were told to lay down their arms. According to Mounsey, Katsura Yemon surrendered to General Nozu with 8,000 men, 3,000 of them wounded.17
The breakout and the road home
Saigō did not surrender. With Kirino, Murata, Beppu, Hemmi and, by Mounsey's count, about two hundred samurai, he broke through the government lines in a thick fog, took food and ammunition from the camps he overran and vanished into the hills. The Yamakawa dictionary describes them as a few hundred picked men, and the editors of the Kagoshima Prefecture collection of war documents speak of an almost miraculous crossing of the steep heights of Mount Enodake on 17 August.18
The government thought the war was over and for more than a week did not know where Saigō had gone. Mounsey writes that his men marched south along bridle paths, warned by the peasants of every move against them, and reached Kagoshima on 1 September, where the small garrison of recruits and police fell back to the quarter by the harbour. The government telegrams collected by Kagoshima Prefecture also date the rebels' entry onto Shiroyama to 1 September, and the Heibonsha encyclopedia dates the government's entry into Kagoshima to the same day. The return caused alarm in Tokyo. Mounsey records that 1,700 police and 800 troops were sent to Kagoshima at once, and that on 3 September Vice Admiral Kawamura arrived with the fleet and landed troops north of the town to take the rebels from behind. Saigō withdrew with rice, rifles, ammunition and some captured guns to the summit of Shiroyama.19
The hill above Kagoshima
Shiroyama is a hill of volcanic shirasu soil 107 metres high in the centre of Kagoshima, with a view over the town, the bay and the volcano of Sakurajima. In the fourteenth century, in the age of the Northern and Southern Courts, the Uwayama family had its castle there, and in 1602 it was made part of the defences of Kagoshima Castle, built at its eastern foot.20
Mounsey puts the rebels on the hill at about five hundred men. Their leaders sheltered in hollows in the rock, the men built huts of brushwood, and they fenced the steep slopes with stockades. The government brought up troops from every quarter until, by his count, 15,000 men surrounded the hill, dug trenches and threw up earthworks. Sorties at the start of the siege were cut to pieces. The government's telegrams, the Kagoshima editors note, reported the encirclement day by day and warned the authorities at Nagasaki to watch for an escape by sea to Amakusa or the Koshiki islands. By about 10 September the lines were complete. The government set up mortar batteries, armed its earthworks with heavy guns from the ships and shelled the summit day and night, while covered approaches crept up the slopes. Mounsey estimates that the bombardment cost the rebels about 200 men. The National Diet Library holds the report of Ōyama Iwao on the artillery attack on Shiroyama from 19 to 24 September, which lists the guns used.21
The last parley
On 23 September two envoys came down from the hill and asked to see Kawamura. Mounsey, who heard the story from Japanese officials, writes that they asked why they were treated as rebels and whether Saigō's life would be spared if they surrendered. Kawamura answered that only the Emperor could pardon and that he could accept nothing but unconditional surrender, and he gave them until five in the afternoon. The envoys did not return. Mounsey doubts that Saigō knew of the mission at all, and adds that the government had probably decided not to offer him terms: even as a prisoner he would have remained a danger. The assault was set for the next morning.22
The assault before dawn
Before dawn on 24 September 1877 the government guns opened a heavy bombardment on the summit, and under its cover the assault parties climbed the slopes in the dark. The National Diet Library and the Japanese encyclopedias all date the general attack to that morning. By 6.30 a.m. the governor of Kagoshima was already telegraphing the governor of Yamaguchi that the government army had attacked Shiroyama and that the rebel chiefs Saigō Takamori, Kirino Toshiaki and others had been killed or had surrendered.23
Mounsey writes that the rebels, misled by earlier feints, were taken by surprise. Their batteries were seized and their guns turned on them, and they fought on with small arms until the end. By his account the fight was over within about an hour and a half of first light, and the attackers lost only thirty men.24
The dead included nearly all of Saigō's commanders. Nipponica names Kirino Toshiaki, Murata Shinpachi, Ikegami Shirō, Hemmi Jūrōta and Beppu Shinsuke among those who fell beside him. The Yamakawa dictionary puts the rebel dead on the hill at about 160, and the Heibonsha historical gazetteer at more than a hundred. Mounsey counts the leaders and a hundred of the principal samurai killed, and 210 men taken, many of them badly wounded.25
How did Saigō die?
Japanese reference works disagree. The Nichigai dictionary of politicians says that Saigō killed himself on Shiroyama, and the Japanese Britannica that he took his own life during the general assault. Mōri in Nipponica writes simply that he was killed in battle, and the Heibonsha encyclopedia that he fell on Shiroyama at the age of 51.26
The historian Mark Ravina, writing in the Journal of Asian Studies, argues from the primary sources that Saigō could not have killed himself as commonly described: he was crippled by a bullet wound and beheaded by his followers. The story of a ritual suicide, Ravina writes, became an established part of Japanese history only in the early 1900s, with the rise of bushidō as a national ideology.27
Mounsey's account of 1879 is more specific. Saigō was among the first to fall, wounded in the thigh by a bullet, and his lieutenant Hemmi Jūrōta cut off his head to spare him capture, gave it to a servant to hide and then killed himself. The Kōdansha biographical dictionary instead names Beppu Shinsuke as the man who beheaded Saigō before he was himself killed. Mounsey records what followed. The next day the dead were brought down to the temple of Jōkōji for burial. A headless body with a bullet wound in the thigh was found beside Kirino's, the head was found and brought in, and Kawamura, Saigō's old comrade from the wars of the Restoration, washed it with his own hands. Saigō was buried in the centre of a common grave, with his officers in rows on either side.28
The cost of the rebellion
On 25 September a notice in Tokyo announced that the rebels of Kyushu had been reduced to quiet. Mounsey describes the mood as relief mixed with admiration and regret, with no rejoicing. The figures for the whole war differ from source to source. Mounsey gives 65,140 government troops employed in Kyushu and about 40,000 rebels in all, with 6,899 government and 7,000 rebel dead. Mōri gives 58,600 government troops, 19 ships and over 6,800 dead against more than 30,000 rebels with about 6,000 dead. The Heibonsha encyclopedia gives 58,558 government troops and, from the Army Ministry's annual report, 16,195 government killed and wounded, 6,527 of them killed or died of wounds.29
The punishment was severe but limited. A special court at Nagasaki sentenced 2,764 people, among them the former governor Ōyama Tsunayoshi, by the Heibonsha count, and Mōri counts 22 beheaded among the more than 2,760 punished. Over 40,000 others were pardoned, the Heibonsha encyclopedia adds.30
From rebel to legend
The Japanese reference works agree on what the war meant. The conscript army of commoners, scorned by the samurai, had defeated the strongest samurai force in the country, and armed revolt against the government was finished. Opposition turned instead to the Freedom and People's Rights Movement and its campaign for a constitution and an elected assembly.31
The Heibonsha encyclopedia names other reasons for the government's victory: the speed of the telegraph, which gave its commanders a picture of the whole war, and the navy, which the rebels did not have. The peasants who had risen against the land tax did not join the samurai either, partly because on 4 January 1877 the government had cut the land tax from 3 to 2.5 per cent. In October 1877 Fukuzawa Yukichi wrote a defence of Saigō, published only in 1901.32
Saigō himself became a popular hero almost at once. Mounsey heard that thousands visited his grave and that many believed his spirit had gone to live in the planet Mars, where his figure could be seen. Ravina lists the Mars legend and stories that he had escaped to Russia among the many tales of his end in the 1870s and 1880s.33
Woodblock prints portrayed him as a hero within weeks of his death. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art notes a portrait published on 5 November 1877 showing him in full uniform, and adds that he received an official pardon and the restoration of his court rank only at the end of February 1889. The Nichigai dictionary of politicians confirms that the rebel was later pardoned and given the senior third court rank.34
