By BC Cook
For Variety
WHEN do we hold on to tradition and when to we welcome change? Like many people, Saigo belonged to another age. Longing for a simpler time when everyone had a place and everyone knew where he stood, he confronted the forces of modernity and lost. The hopeless contest cost him his life but secured his place in history.
A century and a half ago, Japan strained under a massive effort to modernize the country. While the world embraced such changes as gunpowder weapons, industrialization, democracy and capitalism, the Japanese decided to reject such foreigners’ ways. The Japanese had everything they needed, but that changed when an American fleet of steel battleships steamed into Tokyo Bay. The Japanese responded to the potential threat by drawing their samurai swords but the contrast showed what was needed: Japan must modernize quickly to survive.
The rapid modernization of the Meiji Restoration thrust power into some hands while stripping it from others. Great changes affected Japanese culture for better and for worse. The samurai, Japan’s traditional warrior class, were the leftovers from a bygone era that had no role in the new society. With the introduction of modern gunpowder, armies the samurai were no longer the privileged class of the social order. Revered for centuries, they too had to yield to the new ways, but many were unwilling.
The Satsuma province was home to a strong warrior tradition. Naturally, when the samurai were displaced they gravitated to that province. Saigo organized 20,000 remaining samurai into an army and challenged the Japanese government, a classic conflict between old and new. Though the Satsuma Rebellion was not the first uprising against the government, it was the largest.
Saigo advanced from his base at Kagoshima to assault the government forces at Kumamoto castle. It was an uneven contest. At the battle of Tabaruzaka the samurai faced a government army of perhaps 100,000. After eight days Saigo’s forces, badly bloodied, were forced to retreat. The government’s armies could replace their losses, but he could not. Eventually the samurai marched back to Kagoshima where they hoped to recover, but it was not to be.
Giant armies surrounded Saigo and his samurai. At the battle of Shiroyama, outnumbered sixty to one, Saigo and the samurai were finally wiped out.
Saigo’s place in history has been disputed since the moment he achieved fame. Some Japanese remember him as a hero committed to traditional values and culture, longing for a return to a simpler time before the corrupting influences of the modern world. Others portray him as a relic, an obsolete part of an old Japan that had no choice but to join the modern world.
Tradition versus progress, the age-old conflict. Like Japan, islanders are locked in it. When to preserve the old, when to embrace the new?
Dr. BC Cook taught history for 30 years and is a director and Pacific historian at Sealark Exploration (sealarkexploration.org). He currently lives in Hawaii.
