The Real Last Samurai?

I saw The Last Samurai at a cinema in Hamamatsu, and enjoyed most of it - the parts where Tom Cruise wasn’t doing his snarl instead of act routine. Actually, I’d be being more honest if I said I enjoyed the parts where Tom Cruise wasn’t doing much.

This was my only problem with the film (not specifically Tom Cruise, although he didn’t help matters). It was completely, implausibly untrue: there was never any whitey trying to make peace with himself through an honourable and valiant fight to the death alongside some rebel samurai. As cool as that sounds, it just never happened, and probably never would have.

Much, much later, I read Looking For The Lost, one of Alan Booth’s books about Japan. Alan Booth was a Londoner born and bred who moved to Japan in the seventies, and ended up staying until his untimely death from stomach cancer. His books on Japan seem to follow a pattern - Alan gets bored, and goes for a big walk somewhere in Japan (or all over, depending on how he feels). Then he writes about what he saw, but more importantly - who he met. His ability to flawlessly capture personalities on paper, coupled with rich descriptions of his journeys, make his books essential reading for anyone interested in Japan as a real place, as opposed to the bonkers country of noodles and pain obsessed gameshows.

Thanks to Alan Booth, I found out about The Real Last Samurai - Saigo Takamori. Booth decided to follow Takamori’s last march, and it’s easily one of the best walks in the book.

Takamori was born in 1827, in what was then called Satsuma, and is now Kagoshima. He wasn’t born into a high ranking family, but he was loyal and good at his job, which always helps. Along with two other men, Iwakara Tomomi & Okubo Toshimichi, he was responsible for the coup d’etat in January 1868, which brought about the Meiji Restoration - that is, the Tokugawa shogunate was dissolved and the Emperor ceased to be a figurehead. Ironically, the intention of this was to keep Japan Japanese - yet it was to be under the Emperor Meiji’s leadership that Japan would power into the 20th Century, leaving behind the feudal system, and with it the samurai.

Takamori liked a good scrap, and it was this tendency of his that led to his resignation as a councillor. Korea had rejected Japan’s ambassadorial overtures, and Saigo had his heart set on popping over there himself, possibly with the intention of getting assassinated, and bringing about a war. (No-one knows for certain, and there’s a great deal of speculation about it.) He never got his wish - he was forced to resign his post, and went back to Kagoshima in what can safely be called a bit of a bad mood.

With the feudal system on the wane, there were a great number of unemployed samurai knocking about. Takamori didn’t have much else to do, except maybe some hunting with his dogs, so he and some friends established the Shigakkou, miltary oriented schools. Schools which quickly became highly influential, growing to dominate the local government. Naturally, Tokyo wasn’t entirely comfortable with this situation - rebellion was a kind of local pass-time round Takamori’s way - and so they sent a naval unit to clean out Kagoshima’s arsenal.

The shigakkou students decided that this wasn’t cool, and they thwarted the navy’s attempt. Something Saigo probably wasn’t best chuffed about, but if he really had a death wish, they’d done him a favour.

6 months of fighting ensued, with Takamori leading his troops from rout to rout, only sometimes gaining the upper hand. He made his last stand on 24th September 1877, in Kagoshima, where he took a bullet in the thigh, although some people believe this is a polite way of saying he got shot in his testicles. Either way, he knew he was done for and had his lieutenant decapitate him.

The Imperial Army had won, after a fashion. Saigo’s last 6 months had struck a chord with the general public, and as a result, myths & legends sprung up like wildfire, most of them proclaiming he was still alive and ready to do it all again. He became a folk hero, and was pardoned posthumously in 1891.

Interestingly, any time I present my Saigo Takamori theory to Japanese people, I never meet with a firm assent, and a “Yeah!Totally! Nice work!”. I get an indulgent smile, and a “Maybe…” Yet, the Wikipedia article on Saigo-san asserts - with no disclaimers - that :

Saigō’s last stand against the Meiji government was the historical basis for the 2003 film The Last Samurai.

Monday, June 5th, 2006 Japan, Japanese History, Japanese Trivia, Noteworthy Trackback URL for this entry