CONTENTS List of Maps Preface A Note on Transliteration and Dating Prologue: Out of the Volcano 1 The Way of the Warrior: Beginnings 2 A Young Life Transformed 3 The Way of the Warrior: A Short History of Swords 4 The Coming of the Americans 5 The Way of the Warrior: Cutting the Belly 6 New World, New Life 7 The Way of the Warrior: Bushido 8 A Death in Kinko Bay 9 Exile, and a New Life 10 A Brief Taste of Power 11 The Prisoner 12 Into the Maelstrom Photographic Insert 13 The Unhappy Revolutionary 14 The Accidental Rebel 15 Failure at Kumamoto 16 Retreat 17 The Long Road to Death 18 Saigo’s Last Stand 19 Transfiguration Acknowledgments Bibliography Index Also by John Man Credits P.S. About the author Read on Copyright About the Publisher LIST OF MAPS Saigo’s Japan, showing Kyushu and the way to Edo The Satsuma rebellion, 1877 PREFACE This is three stories intertwined. One tells of the fast-flowing and dramatic events by which Japan, for 250 years a feudal patchwork almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world, became a unified, outward-looking and fast-developing nation. In 1850 the country was much as it had been in 1600: a self-contained world of thirty million serfs dominated by three hundred lords who owed their authority to the nation’s military dictator, the shogun, yet locally were absolute rulers. At the top of this pyramid was the emperor, a semidivinity, pampered as a lapdog, remote from everyday affairs. The second story is that of the samurai, a military élite of some two million who underpinned the whole system with attitudes, behavior and equipment that all reached as far back into the past as the history of their local lords and the shogun they served. By 1880 the lords and the samurai were gone, and with them the whole edifice of feudalism. Japan had leaped from the Middle Ages into the modern world. It was not a popular revolution, because the peasants had no say in it, but it produced a society familiar to Europeans: a sovereign at the top, a governing élite, an emerging middle class, and a restless but subdued mass of peasants. The third story is that of the man who helped drive this revolution, and at the same time became its victim. A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND DATING Except for Japanese names and words common in English (e.g., Tokyo), Japanese has been romanized according to the “revised Hepburn” system, with a macron to indicate long vowels, mainly the o. Unfortunately, because most e- book formats cannot accommodate macron symbols, these marks are absent from all electronic editions. Traditionally, Japan used the lunar calendar, which divided the year into twelve months, each with 29 or 30 days. This gave 354 days in each year, so a thirteenth month had to be added every three years (approximately, because one year is about, 365.25 days, not an exact number of whole days). On January 1, 1873, the Japanese government adopted the Gregorian calendar. Some sources use both systems, but to avoid confusion I use only the Gregorian. PROLOGUE OUT OF THE VOLCANO LONG AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY, AND ALSO NOT LONG ago right here on earth, two warriors prepare for action. Though inhabiting separate worlds, Digital and Reality, the two have much in common. They are expert in the use of swords, despite the fact that they can call on the most fearsome and destructive of long-distance weapons. The real warrior carries a supremely strong yet flexible steel sword known as a katana, with edges that make flesh and bone seem as soft as new bread; the digital one wields a “light saber,” a blade of energy that emits a rather annoying hum when switched on and deflects other light sabers and almost anything else with a sharp crackle. Both say they are willing to fight to the death, though only one means it. Both could wear armor that would make them look like rather exotic insects, but prefer loose tunics. Yes, the samurai, though long gone, are with us still in the Jedi knights of Star Wars, exemplified by the young hero, Luke Skywalker. Luke is not only the son of Darth Vader; he is also the spiritual heir of our real-life hero, Saigo Takamori, “the last samurai.” They are linked by more than their equipment. Both have an epic task ahead of them: to restore to power a vanished but virtuous world. Both adhere to austere chivalric rules supposedly based on ancient principles. Both have their spiritual masters, whose voices echo down through the ages. Yamamoto Tsunetomo, in his early eighteenth-century classic Hagakure [Hidden Leaves]: The Book of the Samurai, dispenses wisdom “that has been passed down by the elders,” like “Stamp quickly and pass through a wall of iron,” for the wisest counsel is often obscure. Yoda expounds precepts in Hollywoodese: “Named must your fear be before banish it you can,” he tells Luke. Wise he is, so backward he talks. An inspiration for Star Wars: that’s just one example among many of the ways Japan’s warrior class lives on in the present. Novels, cartoons, DVDs, games, TV series without number and followers of martial arts the world over all show the enduring popularity of the subject. In Japan, samurai movies have been so popular—twenty-six films have been made about one character alone, the blind swordsman Zatoichi, who fights by hearing—that their influence on the West was virtually inevitable. They come down to us indirectly through the films of Kurosawa Akira (Akira being his given name, which comes second in Japanese). Without Seven Samurai—seven ronin (masterless samurai) hired by villagers to protect them from bandits—there would be no Magnificent Seven (1960), its Wild West remake; without Yojimbo, no Fistful of Dollars (1964) or Last Man Standing (1996). You would think from most portrayals of samurai that they were solely a medieval phenomenon. They should have been. The Middle Ages were their heyday. Yet they survived not only as anachronisms but as a vital part of Japanese society until their destruction in the rebellion of 1877, as anyone who has seen Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai knows. That’s about the only historical fact you should take from the film, which is hardly more about samurai than Star Wars is. It is a beautifully made, well-acted hall of mirrors, splicing together bits of fact and fiction to make a story appealing to Western tastes. There were a few Westerners—Cruise-like figures—who fought in the Japanese ranks down through the years, and a couple who fought as samurai, but none on either side in this war. The samurai in the film are portrayed as a tribe apart, living like America’s Amish in noble isolation; in fact, they were interfused with the rest of society, many playing crucial roles as administrators. In the film, their leader Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) is a traditionalist—one who, wonderful to relate, speaks English—steeped in the Way of the Warrior; in fact, the real-life samurai leader, Saigo Takamori, was a complex and contradictory mixture of past and future, revolutionary and reactionary, top government minister and rebel; a man who despised foreigners yet reluctantly accepted the need for change, a warrior who never actually fought, a man of action who loved to compose Chinese poetry, a man with a zest for life who spent much of it determined to die well, a leader who did not choose to lead the rebellion that ended in his death. This is Saigo’s story. It is also the story of the formation of modern Japan. To understand him and his crucial role you have to start with the region from which he sprang. The southern tip of Japan’s most southerly island has one particularly famous feature. I knew it was there, of course, yet missed seeing it for hours. From the airport expressway it was hidden by steep green hills. If you come by bullet train, you will miss it too, for you glide into Kagoshima’s heart through tunnels and cuttings. Away from the coast, views are blocked by new buildings. There are clues: the coarse, gray dust that gathers on footpaths, roads, parked cars and collars; perhaps a column of smoke darkening a blue sky. Soon, though, you will glance down an avenue leading to the sea, and stare astonished at the thing that defines the city, and the whole region: the great, gray, fuming volcano. After that first revelation, Sakurajima was never out of mind, and hardly ever out of sight. From the eighty kilometers of curving coast, from the bulky green hill at the city’s heart; from hotel rooms and balconies and trams—you see it at every turn, half hidden by its own smoke or pale in dissipating mist or in crystal clarity under a blue sky. No wonder they sell Kagoshima to Europe as the Naples of the Orient. Sakurajima looms as large as Vesuvius over a bay that is as glorious as the Gulf of Naples, and safer for shipping too: Kinko Bay, protected by a fifty-kilometer inlet, is an inland lake, almost totally enclosed. The volcano is as erratic as Vesuvius, though less destructive, because Sakura is a jima, an island, with a handy three-kilometer stretch of water between volcano and city. Actually, it’s not quite an island anymore, because an eruption in 1914 pumped out enough lava to make a causeway to the mainland, but that is on the far side of the bay, and no one has suggested changing the name. Sakurajima defines this place: its history, the city and the character of its people. Its explosive outbursts thousands of years ago cut this part of Kyushu, formerly known as Satsuma, from the rest of Japan (by pumping out ejecta that makes wonderful soil for the oranges named after the province—and cherries: Sakurajima means “Cherry Island”). Historically, Satsuma was hard to get to from the north, and hard to leave. But southward lay the open sea, and the outside world. It was this interplay of accessibility and isolation that made Satsuma what it was—and today’s Kyushu what it is: a province that was in