the tall blond guy goes to japan

The Story of Saito

Kagoshima

Looking at the tourist map, they seemed to make quite a big deal out of this Saigo Takamori person. So, having nothing better to do, I decided to walk around a while and see the city on the pretense of finding out about this guy's life from the little bilingual information boards near all the mouments.

Saigo Takamori, looking a bit annoyed.

Well, you'd be annoyed too, I suppose, if you couldn't move for a few decades, like this statue.

Well! This man had quite the life. Sit back and catch the Tall Blond Guy's Abridged Japanese History 101.

This guy was born in 1827- quite recently, by Japanese standards. He was named Takahari at birth, but he was also known as Kichinosuke and Narshu. We don't know why.

He was a buddy of the Lord Shinazu Nariakira, who took hum under his wing and taught the boy about government and politics and stuff. When Nariakira suddenly died, our friend Saigo got all loopy and tried to drown himself with a monk. The monk died, but Saigo lived, and was forced into exile. While gone, he got himself into the government. In fact, when some of the leaders left for Europe (we don't know why they'd all go and do that) they left the country under Saigo's power.

Anyway, during this time, he arranged for the secret alliance of Satsuma (now called Kagoshima: here) and Choshu, figured out how to negociate a peaceful surrender of a Shogun's castle in Edo. He also invented the "prefecture", which is similar to a state or a province.

But all this good stuff was not to last. After a big disagreement about how to handle Korea, he resigned and headed back to Kagoshima, where he started a school for Samurai. Saigo brought teachers from Europe over to teach in these schools, as he wanted his pupils to have a different education than was available in Japan at the time.

He would talk to his students about politics, and I figure he was probably still bitter about that Korea thing- so his students decided to declare war on the government. They put up huge stone walls around the school (which are still there, by the way, pockmarked with bullet dings) and fought bitterly, with Saigo as their leader.

Things were not going well. The government had sent thousands of men to wipe oput the few hundred students loyal to Saigo. When things started looking really bad, Saigo hid in a cave up in a large hill above Kagoshima.

Saigo's cave

After realizing it was a lost cause, he decided to walk down to Kagoshima where he would be able to die in his hometown. He never made it.

Struck twice by stray bullets, he knelt to the ground, faced east, prayed, then committed hari-kari.