24 September in military history: the Battle of Shiroyama, 1877

24 September 1877 · 149 years ago

The rebellion

The National Diet Library calls Saigō Takamori a leader of the Meiji Restoration. In 1873 the cabinet rejected war with Korea and Saigō left the government. Mounsey, who had recently been British secretary of legation in Japan when he published his history in 1879, adds that Saigō went home to Satsuma in defiance of an order to stay in Tokyo.¹

Early in 1877 students of the “private schools” of Saigō’s followers broke into the government’s arms stores in Kagoshima: Mounsey dates the first raid to 29 January, while Griffis gives 1 February for the seizure of the arsenals and powder mills. The National Diet Library adds that the government had sent secret agents to Kagoshima, and that Saigō, pressed by the private-school faction, began his march on 15 February.²

His army besieged Kumamoto Castle, but Colonel Tani’s garrison held out until the rebels withdrew; Griffis puts the siege at fifty-five days. In August, Griffis writes, Saigō’s forces, reduced to fewer than ten thousand men, were defeated at Nobeoka, and the leaders escaped with a few hundred followers. For the fighting of 15 to 18 August Mounsey counts five government divisions of 25,600 men with thirty-two guns.³

Trapped on Shiroyama

Mounsey and the Kagoshima city heritage guide date Saigō’s return to Kagoshima to 1 September; Griffis gives 2 September. According to Mounsey, 400 samurai joined him in two days, but the garrison held out by the harbour, and when Admiral Kawamura arrived with the fleet and marched on the town with General Miyoshi’s troops, Saigō withdrew to Shiroyama, the hill behind the town, “with about five hundred followers”. Griffis writes of “less than four hundred followers”.⁴

According to Mounsey, the besiegers ringed the hill with trenches and earthworks and placed “a force of 15,000 men” in the lines, and Griffis writes of “fifteen thousand troops of the imperial army”. Mounsey writes that the bombardment went on day and night and cost the rebels about 200 men. Ōyama Iwao’s report on the siege artillery lists 53 guns in 31 sections; from 19 to 23 September each gun was limited to ten rounds, and on the 23rd a 16 cm Krupp gun supplied by the navy smashed two or three large rebel works behind the hill. The Kagoshima guide says Saigō spent his last six days, from 19 September, in a cave on the hill.⁵

On 23 September, Mounsey writes, two envoys from the hill asked Admiral Kawamura whether Saigō’s life would be spared. Kawamura answered that only the Mikado could pardon, demanded unconditional surrender, and set a deadline of 5 p.m.; the envoys never returned.⁶

The last stand

Ōyama’s report opens the final day: “On the 24th, at 4 a.m., a great attack on all four sides of Shiroyama. As the signal for the advance, the Second Detached Brigade fired three rounds from a 4-pounder mountain gun” (our translation). The infantry broke into the rebel works so quickly that the guns ceased fire, and “the attack on this day was over in a short time” (our translation).⁷

Mounsey describes the same morning: “Before dawn on the 24th of September a tremendous shower of shells was poured on the summit of the hill, and under its cover and in the darkness the assaulting parties quickly scaled its slopes”. In his account the rebels, deceived by earlier feints, were caught unprepared, their gunners were cut down, and their own guns were turned on them. The Kagoshima guide also places the start of the general attack before dawn.⁸

The National Diet Library names Ōyama as the officer who led the attack at Shiroyama; in Mounsey’s account it was Admiral Kawamura who kept his word and ordered the assault. Prince Arisugawa was commander-in-chief of the government army.⁹

The death of Saigō

Mounsey writes that Saigō “was amongst the first to fall, wounded by a bullet in the thigh”, and that one of his lieutenants, Hemmi Jiurôda (Hemmi Jūrōta), cut off his head with one blow “in order to spare him the disgrace of falling alive into his enemy’s hands”, gave the head to a servant to hide, and killed himself. Griffis says only that Saigō “was beheaded by one of his friends”.¹⁰

The Kagoshima guide gives the local version: hit by a bullet and unable to walk, Saigō said “Shin-don, Shin-don, here will do” (our translation), asked Beppu Shinsuke to act as his second, and took his own life. The National Diet Library also says that he committed suicide. The historian Mark Ravina argues from a close reading of primary sources that Saigō “could not have killed himself as commonly described” and was “crippled by a bullet wound and beheaded by his followers”; in his account the suicide became an established part of Japanese history only in the early 1900s.¹¹

According to Mounsey, the head was buried so hastily that some hair showed, and a coolie found it. Next day it was matched to a headless body with a bullet wound in the thigh, and Admiral Kawamura, “the senior officer present, reverently washed the head with his own hands”.¹²

The cost

Mounsey writes that Kirino, Murata, Beppu, Ikegami Shiro and “one hundred of the principal Samurai” fell around Saigō, that the remaining 210 rebels, many badly wounded, were overpowered, that the fight was over within an hour and a half of sunrise, and that “The Imperialist losses were only thirty men”. Griffis gives nearly three hundred of the band dead with their three leaders and writes that “Not one of the imperial soldiers was killed”.¹³

According to the Yamaguchi Prefectural Archives, at 6:30 a.m. that day the governor of Kagoshima telegraphed the governor of Yamaguchi: “Today the imperial army attacked Shiroyama, Kagoshima. The rebel chiefs Saigō Takamori, Kirino Toshiaki and others have been killed or have surrendered” (our translation). On the morning of 25 September, Mounsey records, a notice in Tokyo announced that Prince Arisugawa had reported by telegraph “that the rebels of Kiushiu have been reduced to quiet”. The National Diet Library also dates the end of the rebellion to the attack of 24 September.¹⁴

Mounsey writes that the dead were buried the next day in a trench at the temple of Jôkô-ji, with Saigō in the centre. The Kagoshima guide says the government allowed 40 of the dead, Saigō among them, to be buried provisionally at Jōkōmyōji, and that in 1879 the remains were moved to the present site, the Nanshū cemetery, where 749 gravestones now mark 2,023 Satsuma dead.¹⁵