Before dawn on 24 September 1877 the Imperial Japanese Army stormed Shiroyama, the hill behind Kagoshima Castle, where Saigō Takamori had made his last stand with the remnant of his Satsuma rebels. Reduced to a few hundred men against tens of thousands, the rebels came down the hill to meet the attackers. Saigō was shot and died on the slope, and the Satsuma Rebellion, the last great revolt of the samurai against the modernizing Meiji state, was over.
The rebellion
Saigō Takamori had been one of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration, but he left the government after it refused his plans for a war with Korea and returned to his home domain of Satsuma, where he opened private schools that drew thousands of discontented samurai. The new state had abolished the feudal order that supported them, and when Tokyo moved to seize the firearms stored in Satsuma in 1877, the region rose in revolt.1
Saigō's army laid siege to Kumamoto Castle but failed to take it, and over the following months it was ground down by the government's conscript forces in central Kyushu. By late summer only a few hundred men were left; they broke back to Kagoshima and dug in on Shiroyama.2
The last stand
The government force, commanded by Yamagata Aritomo with Kawamura Sumiyoshi, surrounded the hill. Japan, Culture and History puts it at about 30,000 imperial troops against some 500 samurai, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at no more than 400 rebels, and TheCollector writes of odds of sixty to one. According to Japan, Culture and History, five warships in the bay and the army's artillery fired more than 7,000 shells into the rebel positions.3
The final attack came in the early morning of 24 September. Japan, Culture and History says that by 6 a.m. only 40 of Saigō's men were still alive, and by about 7 a.m., according to the museum's account, Saigō and his last followers came down the hill to meet the imperial army and die.4
The death of Saigō
Halfway down the hill Saigō was shot through the hip and thigh and fell. Tradition holds that he then committed ritual suicide, with his follower Beppu Shinsuke cutting off his head as his second. The museum's account, drawing on the historian Mark Ravina, notes that historians confirm the beheading but suggest that Saigō, crippled and in shock from his wound, may have been unable to carry out the ritual himself. A servant hid his head, so that head and body were found apart.5
Saigō and the other rebel leaders were buried in Kagoshima, and his grave now lies in the Nanshū cemetery there. The battle ended the Satsuma Rebellion. Prints of the last stand, such as the triptych by Utagawa Kunimasa IV published on 4 October 1877, were on sale within weeks, and they already showed the rebels' end as a heroic drama.6
