The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori

Abstract

Smits reviews The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori by Mark Ravina.

The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori. By MARK RAVINA. Hoboken, NJ.: John Wiley and Sons, 2004. xvi, 265 pp. $30.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

When I arrived in Kagoshima in the late 1980s, I was struck by the ever-present image of Saigo Takamori, from monumental statuary to boxed sets of cookies formed in his likeness at the train-station gift shop. Over the course of living there for a year, I heard numerous romanticized accounts of Saigo's glorious seppuku on Shiroyama. Although I listened to these tales with a grain of salt, I never made any serious inquiry into Saigo's life.

Reading Mark Ravina's thoroughly researched biography, I was not surprised to find that the cold hard facts of Saigo's death lacked the glory of the popular versions that I had heard. Despite its realism, The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori is not a work of radical iconoclasm, nor does it read like a detached report. Many of the images of Saigo from previous biographical accounts hold up reasonably well under Ravina's scrutiny, and his considerable literary skill makes the book a lively read. It is, to my tastes, a perfectly balanced analysis of Saigo the human being, Saigo the historical actor, and Saigo the cultural legend. Ravina's biography also serves as an excellent study of the nineteenth-century history of the Satsuma domain and of bakumatsu-erii politics. Although it is written with a general readership in mind, anyone interested in Japanese history along the temporal borderline between Tokugawa and Meiji Japan will benefit from The Last Samurai. Moreover, the book serves as a useful corrective to the Orientalist fantasy advanced by the recent hit movie of the same title.

In many respects, Saigo did generally exemplify a set of ideal samurai values. He was deadly serious about loyalty, service, and honor; he studied both the military and literary arts (bunbu); he delighted in simple pleasures such as hunting and fishing; and he seems to have avoided hedonistic excesses of any kind. Grounded in a classical Confucian education and influenced by the ideas of Wang Yangming (O Yomei), Saigo sought moral clarity as the basis for his actions. Although he was deeply rooted in the culture and values of Satsuma, the universalism inherent in Saigo's Confucianism gradually permitted him to develop a cosmopolitan view of the world.

It was Saigo's pursuit of moral clarity that motivated him to accomplish something worthwhile after a near-miraculous revival from an attempt at suicide by drowning. His moral compass also enabled him to thrive during two periods of exile in the northern Ryukyu Islands. As an actor on the broader stage of Japanese politics, Saigo became convinced that the bakufu was hopelessly corrupt and ineffective and that the imperial house should be the proper object of samurai loyalties. Acting on this conviction, he was instrumental in bringing about the downfall of the bakufu and bringing on the Meiji Restoration. This same sense of moral clarity caused Saigo to resign from the new government in 1873 and agree to take up arms against it in 1877.

In addition to providing insight into the man himself, by examining bakumatsuera history through the lens of Saigo's life, Ravina brings to the fore several important points that might otherwise be overlooked. For example, starting in 1869, Satsuma initiated sweeping reforms of its domainal government, including a leveling redistribution of samurai income and the elimination of major distinctions among them. The domain modernized its administration, its military, and its governance of the countryside, which led to improved morale and financial solvency. Although the emperor commended Shimazu Hisamitsu on these measures, they were problematic for the central government because "[i]f Satsuma could create a modern state within the boundaries of a traditional domain, then perhaps local autonomy was a viable alternative to initiatives from Tokyo" (p. 163). At a minimum, the case of post-Restoration Satsuma calls into question the tendency to regard the Meiji state as an inevitable outcome of late nineteenth-century conditions.

Ravina takes Saigo's Confucianism seriously, explains it in a clear manner, and brings it to bear usefully on key issues. Saigo's well-known aversion to the minutiae of government administration, for example, was connected to his interpretation of Confucianism in that "it was the purpose of the government elite to provide general moral guidance rather than extensive legal regulation" (p. 175). Confucian universalism also informed Saigo's understanding of the relative strengths of Japan and the Western world and his fear that "Japan would learn the wrong things from the West and import the facade of Western culture rather than the underlying virtues that led to Western strength" (p. 194). Likewise, Saigo reacted with strong distaste to Okubo Toshimishi's unprincipled method of forcing Korea into treaty negotiations in 1875.

The Last Samurai is a rigorous biography of Saigo and a useful account of Satsuma's role in bakumatsu and early Meiji politics that reads like a novel. It deserves wide reading.