THE LAST SAMURAI The Life and Battles of Saigo- Takamori MARK RAVINA John Wiley & Sons, Inc. THE LAST SAMURAI THE LAST SAMURAI The Life and Battles of Saigo- Takamori MARK RAVINA John Wiley & Sons, Inc. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Copyright © 2004 by Mark Ravina.All rights reserved Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada Design and production by Navta Associates, Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as per- mitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. 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DS881.5.S2R35 2004 952.03'1'092—dc21 2003006646 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my parents Contents NOTE TO THE READER ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii INTRODUCTION 1 1 “POWERFULLY SENTIMENTAL” 13 Saigoµ’s Early Years in Satsuma 2 “A MAN OF EXCEPTIONAL FIDELITY” 43 Saigoµ and National Politics 3 “BONES IN THE EARTH” 77 Exile and Ignominy 4 “TO SHOULDER THE BURDENS OF THE REALM” 107 The Destruction of the Shogunate 5 “TO TEAR ASUNDER THE CLOUDS” 151 Saigoµ and the Meiji State 6 “THE BURDEN OF DEATH IS LIGHT” 191 Saigoµ and the War of the Southwest NOTES 215 BIBLIOGRAPHY 240 SOURCES 255 INDEX 257 vii Note to the Reader Dates Prior to 1873 Japan used a lunar calendar with twelve months each of 29 or 30 days for a total year of about 354 days. Intercalary or “leap” months were used to keep this lunar calendar synchronous with the solar year.This adjustment is common with other lunar/solar calendars, such as the tradi- tional Jewish calendar, which also uses “leap” months to reconcile lunar months with the solar year. Following historiographic convention I have expressed lunar calendar dates in year/month/day format and converted Japanese years, but not months or days, to the Gregorian calendar.Thus, the fifth day of the eleventh lunar month of the sixth year of the Hoµreki era is rendered as 1756/11/5. The letter i represents an intercalary or “leap” month.The date 1756/i11/5 represents the fifth day of the eleventh intercalary (or twelfth) month of 1756. In converting dates I relied on the tables in Tsuchihashi 1952. The Japanese year began “late,” and the exact Gregorian date for the Japanese New Year varied between January 21 and February 19.The Meiji government adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873. January 1, 1873, and 1873/1/1 are the same day. Names, Romanizations, and Spelling Japanese words are romanized according to the modified Hepburn system used in Kenkyusha’sµ Japanese-English Dictionary. Japanese nouns do not have plural forms: thus, for example,“shogun” and “samurai” are singular or plu- ral depending on context. I have presented Japanese and Chinese personal ix x• NOTE TO THE READER names in traditional fashion: family name followed by given name. For Chinese words I have used the pinyin romanization system, but I have included the older Wade-Giles system in parentheses in cases where the older version of the name is likely to be more familiar to readers. Rendering Japanese names in English presents certain problems. In nineteenth-century Japan, important men commonly used several names. SaigoµTakamori, for example, was given the name Saigoµ Kokichi at birth, and took the name Takamori at adulthood, but wrote poetry under the name Saigoµ Nanshuµ. Samurai and nobles received new names with promotions in rank.Thus the daimyo Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu became Tokugawa Yoshinobu after his succession as shogun. In addition, Japanese names often have more than one reading, since characters can be read in either Chinese or Japanese fashion.Yoshinobu and Keiki, for example, are simply different readings of the same two characters. In confronting these issues I have put the interest of an American readership foremost. I consistently refer to individuals by the same name, even when this is technically inaccurate.Thus I continue to refer to Hitotsubashi Keiki as such, even in referring to the period after he became shogun and received the new family name of Tokugawa. Further, where there are multiple readings of a given name, I have chosen the most distinctive reading:Thus Keiki instead of Yoshinobu, since Keiki better dis- tinguishes him from his rival Yoshitomi. I also have used unofficial names whenever this seemed easier to remember: thus I refer to the daimyo of Fukui as Matsudaira Shungaku rather than as Matsudaira Yoshinaga.See page 256 for information on accessing variant names for major figures. Japanese place names present different problems.The suffixes to Japanese place names are often descriptive. Shiroyama, for example, means “moun- tain of the castle,” so technically the phrase “hills of Shiroyama” is redun- dant. One can correct for this redundancy by dropping suffixes, but this creates new problems.Anyone looking for Shiroyama needs to look under that name and not Shiro or Mount Shiro.There is no established solution to this problem. I have tried to avoid redundancy,but I have included such terms as “hill” or “temple” when necessary for clarity. For daimyo domains, there are other issues. Large domains were known by several names: the name of the castle town, the name of the daimyo house, the name of the province, or the name of the region. In this work I have generally identified domains by the name of their castle town with the following important exceptions: Satsuma domain instead of Kagoshima NOTE TO THE READER •xi domain; Choµshuµ domain instead of Hagi domain; and Tosa domain instead of Koµchi domain. I have tried to be systematic with the translation of Japanese titles. I have employed the term “lord,”however, to refer to a range of late Tokugawa fig- ures who were powerful samurai rulers but not daimyo.Tokugawa Nariaki, for example, was a dominant force in Mito even after he formally retired in favor of his son.Alternately,Shimazu Hisamitsu never became daimyo at all but effectively ruled Satsuma through his son, the daimyo Shimazu Tadayoshi. In Tokugawa Japan there were specific terms in Japanese for fathers of daimyo and retired daimyo, but in English, for the sake of sim- plicity,I refer to all of these daimyolike men as “lords.” The common English translation of Seinan sensoµ is “Satsuma rebellion,” but I feel that this misrepresents both the original Japanese and the war itself. The struggle extended far beyond Satsuma, and, in scale, it was far closer to a civil war than a rebellion. Rather than “Satsuma rebellion,” the term is translated throughout the book as “War of the Southwest.” All translations from Japanese in the text and notes are mine unless oth- erwise noted. For those interested in pronouncing Japanese, the following may be helpful. Japanese vowels are pronounced as in Italian.The macron, or long vowel mark, changes the length of the vowel rather than its sound.Thus the “o” in “Saigoµ,” a family name, and “saigo,” a word meaning “last,” are both pronounced as in “Roma” or “prego.”The “o,” in Saigoµ, however, is held longer and would count as two syllables rather than one in poetry.Doubled consonants such as “kk” are similarly held longer in time. I have included macrons for all Japanese place names except for Ryukyu, Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, which are conventionally printed without them in English-language publications. I have also omitted macrons on those common nouns found in standard American dictionaries, such as daimyo (daimyo)µ and sumo (sumo).µ Measures I have converted all measurements into U.S.