SHIROYAMA

A final showdown pitting a rebellious samurai clan against a Westernised army of Japanese conscripts launches a new Asian empire

- MIGUEL MIRANDA

The rising that began on 15 February 1877 had the gravitas and splendour of the Sengoku Jidai (the bygone Warring States period) that roiled Japan from 1457 to 1600. But the circumstances of 1877 were different as samurai in their thousands, armed to the teeth, swept through northeast Kyushu – Japan’s prominent southern island.

Outwardly, these fighting men of Satsuma Province announced a long trek to the imperial capital Tokyo as a means for pressing their cause. Within weeks, however, the campaign faltered as a botched siege and a wobbly command structure undermined the rebels.

Adding insult to injury, the response from Tokyo was the arrival of army and police regiments in their drab marine-blue uniforms. Leading the imperial forces were aristocratic samurai and courtiers who were determined to uphold the new era: the end of the Tokugawa bakufu and the permanence of Emperor Meiji, whose backers had triumphed in the Boshin Civil War that was fought from 1868 until 1869. The contrast between the two opposing sides was at the heart of the conflict, where low-ranking samurai of Satsuma’s Shimazu clan feared their class and the very social order in which it existed was being eroded by the modernising reforms of the 1870s.

Leading the rebels was Saigo Takamori, once a champion of restoring the emperor but now fully committed to overthrowing the state. Tall and muscular, his most distinguishing features were a barrel chest and two thick eyebrows. Opposing him was not just the young Emperor Meiji, formerly known as Prince Mutsuhito, but the imperial court, or mikado, that was staffed by the heads of other samurai clans, all firm believers in a modern society that could stand among the world’s industrial powers.