Author | Cold Research Author Team - Blowing Snow
Word count: 3462, Reading time: about 13 minutes
Editor's note: The Hollywood movie "The Last Samurai" must have been seen by many readers, although some people regard its historical background as the Meiji Restoration's Fallen Curtain War, but in fact, the real background of this movie is the "Southwest War" of infighting between the Meiji Restoration and the Fallen Curtain Faction. I originally came to introduce this southwest war.
In 1871, not long after the Meiji Restoration began, the heads of government of the Meiji government sent an expedition to go abroad on their feet to "seek knowledge in the world" and to explore a new strategy for building a modern country in Western capitalist society. However, Saigo Takamori chose to stay in China.
This is because Saigo Takamori reached the peak of his political career at this time. In June 1871, Saigo was appointed to the Senate at the age of 45. In July 1872, Saigo was appointed Field Marshal and military governor of the Guards. In May 1873, he was promoted to the rank of general of the Army, and held a prominent position in the Meiji government army. However, there are not a few subordinate samurai who oppose the reform of the restoration and dream of establishing a samurai military dictatorship in Japan, such as Torio Koyata, who participated in the Fall war with Saigo, who once suggested that Saigo use samurai instead of conscription, such a proposal is not a new political negotiation, but Saigo has long practiced a re-edition of the samurai government in Satsuma, so Saigo said that he "completely agrees with your proposal." However, it will not be implemented until the Iwakura Mission returns home. (The lower samurai represented by Torio were in favor of Saigo's "Conquest of Korea")
In September 1873, the Iwakura Mission returned home. After returning to China, they formed the concept of "leaving Asia and joining Europe" in their minds. The remaining government officials, led by Saigo, became increasingly conservative in their thinking and became political representatives of the lower samurai. In fact, as early as June 25, 1871, when the cabinet was reorganized, the only people who had resigned from the previous Senate were Saigo Takamori and Kido Takayoshi who continued to serve as senators, and Okubo Ritsu was appointed as the secretary of the Cabinet, and Daisuke Shigenobu was demoted to Daisuke. After the news of this cabinet reshuffle broke, the lower samurai were overjoyed that the great Saigo would begin to act for the benefit of the samurai. Saigo, a representative of the lower samurai, stubbornly advocated invading neighboring Korea and then establishing a samurai dictatorship in Japan. As a result, a sharp struggle was formed between the "samurai faction" headed by Saigo and the "bureaucratic faction" represented by Okubo. Then in October 1873, senators such as Saigo Takamori, Itagaki Shōsuke, Eto Shinpei, Foreign Secretary Vice Shima Taneto, and Goto Shojiro resigned, openly announcing their withdrawal from the government. Subsequently, more than 140 Satsuma officers, including Kunikan Tsubara and Toshiaki Kirino, resigned and returned to their hometown of Satsuma Domain. The Tosa officers also resigned. At this time, the Guards, which consisted of samurai from the Three Domains of Sa, Naga, and Tosa, nearly disintegrated, but the new officers trained by Yamagata Aritomo rebuilt the Guards in only two weeks. In this way, the command of the Guards was transferred from the hands of "samurai" warlords such as Saigo to the new warlords of the "bureaucratic faction". However, it must be pointed out that in fact, the two factions are the same hill and both are militarists.
▲ Statue of Takayoshi Kido (Katsura Kogoro).
After Saigo Takamori withdrew from the government, on November 10, 1873, he returned to his hometown of Kagoshima. In December of the same year, Saigo, together with Toshiaki Kirino and others, burned down the Kagoshima sub-camp in Kumamoto Town, disbanded the Kagoshima garrison, and thus took control of Kagoshima Prefecture, did not pay taxes to the central government, ignored the central government's decrees, and implemented a military dictatorship of "military government". Subsequently, Saigo privately established a non-commissioned officer school with Toshiaki Kirino, Kunikan Shibara, and Shinpachi Murata. In order to avoid the suspicion of the central government, it called itself a private school. (In addition to the art of war, the disciplines established by the Noncommissioned Officer School also teach the Zuo Zhuan and the Analects.) The purpose of the private school is to honor the king and love the people, the so-called "honor the king sword, is loyal to the king, the so-called "love the people" refers to the morality of the lower samurai. Cultivate the children of samurai with the idea of honoring the king and loving the people. The Noncommissioned Officer School also has thirteen branches and sends students abroad every year. People who join private schools even write oaths with their own blood, swearing lifelong loyalty to their organizations. Saigo openly established a local warlord regime, and Kagoshima became an independent kingdom of the old samurai.
▲Stills of the Big River Drama Saigo Takamori
In November 1873, the restoration government decided to establish the Ministry of internal affairs, and Okubo Ritsu was appointed secretary of the interior to form the Okubo regime. Okubo quickly reorganized his government. Daiki Shigenobu, Ito Hirobumi, and Yamagata Aritomo were reused, and Okubo, Daiki, and Ito became the mainstream faction within the government. Okubo also followed the example of the German Prime Minister to strengthen the violent rule of the bourgeoisie, and after the reconstruction of the Guards, the Japanese Army established a staff office in 1874, and in December 1878, it was reorganized into a staff headquarters, and soon the army was modernized. Subsequently, Okubo relied on the army in his hands to implement the policy of enriching the country and strengthening the army, and resolutely embarked on the road of bourgeois Europeanization. The Okubo regime pursued a policy of modernization and adopted a series of measures to deprive the samurai of their political and economic privileges. A few of them rose to the rank of official, landlord, and capitalist. The vast majority of former lower-ranking samurai became wage earners and exploited.
▲There are friends in Yamagata Prefecture
In this way, Saigo Takamori became the representative of the samurai who had lost their privileged interests. The dramatic increase in the power of the Satsuma samurai of the Saigo faction was a mortal threat to the Okubo regime. In view of the political instability, Okubo sent Oyama-iwa and Sanjo Hideaki to Kagoshima in 1874 and 1875 to persuade Saigo to re-join the cabinet. But Saigo wrote poems to express Gan's determination to dedicate himself to the restoration of the samurai class. Attempts to resolve the contradiction between the "bureaucratic faction" and the "samurai faction" failed due to Saigo's categorical refusal, and by this time both the Okubo government and the samurai class represented by Saigo were fighting hard, and civil war was inevitable.
The Okubo government decided to transfer weapons and ammunition from the three warehouses of Iso, Kusumada, and Sakurajima to Osaka in order to prevent shiwei. By the night of January 11, 1877, the Satsuma Army had captured the area and seized weapons and ammunition. At this point, the Satsuma Army was clearly determined to launch a rebellion, and in order to become famous, in early February 1877, they suddenly arrested ten government police officers, Including Nakahara Shoo, who had returned to Kagoshima to visit his relatives last year, and then tortured them severely, causing Nakahara and others to make false confessions: "Under the secret orders of Secretary of the Interior Ōkubo Ritsuru and Metropolitan Police Department Director Kawaro Ritsura, they came to visit their relatives for the purpose of assassinating Saigo Takamori." The Satsuma Army used the pretext of "assassinating Saigo" and demanded that "we must fight the government", and Saigo Takamori immediately said, "Then do as you think, I will give myself to you." It can be seen from this that it was no one else who provoked the southwest war, and Saigo Takamori was the culprit of the civil war. Because Kagoshima is located in the southwest of Japan, this civil war is known as the "Southwest War".
After that, Saigo raised the banner of "New Deal Tsutomu" to show his opposition to the rule of the Okubo regime. On February 12, Saigo formed the Satsuma Army, with eight brigades and 13,000 men. The Satsuma Army supported Saigo Takamori as the "Grand Marshal of Conquest". When news of Satsuma's local military campaign came out, the old anti-government samurai in various places saw it as a godsend, and landless subordinate samurai such as Kumamoto, Fukuoka, and Oita Prefecture defected to Saigo's army, and Saigo's rebel army quickly reached more than 30,000 people. By February 15, 1877, Saigo commanded the Satsuma Army of 25,000 men and marched north to besiege Kumamoto Castle, thus opening the prelude to the Southwest War.
The satsuma army's strategic plan was to first "take" Kumamoto in one go, and then go east. At the beginning of the civil war, the Satsumas looked down on the government army, and they pinned their hopes on the sword, believing that the sword in the hands of the samurai was more useful than the new weapons of the government army. In response to Saigo's military campaign, the new government also sent Lieutenant General Aritomo Aritomo of the Army on February 12, 1877, to present a battle plan to the Minister of State, Sanjo Shimi, to recruit the Satsuma rebels. On February 18, the Meiji government issued a "Thief Order." He appointed Prince Akihito of Kikawa Palace as the governor of the Conquest Army, appointed Lieutenant General Yamagata Aritomo and Vice Admiral Junyoshi Kawamura as members of the army, commanded four brigades and six individual brigades, and mobilized more than 60,000 people in the army and navy. Went all out to encircle and suppress the Satsuma rebels. On February 24, the government army began its western expedition, and its base camp was located in Osaka.
The government troops stationed at Kumamoto Castle, commanded by the commander major general Taniganjo, concentrated the elite generals of the army and held the castle. The Satsuma army charged day and night, but Kumamoto Castle was so strong that the Satsuma army's strategy of light enemy began to be frustrated. On March 4, after half a month of fierce fighting in Tawarasaka, the swords and guns of the Satsuma army finally could not withstand the modernized weapons of the government army, the "myth" of the invincibility of the samurai sword was bankrupt, and the famous general of the Satsuma army, Shinohara Kunigan, was killed in battle. Since then, the war situation has changed, and the Satsuma Army has changed from offense to defense. The government forces finally captured Tawarasaka's strategic position and made contact with the kumamoto castle defenders, forming a siege of satsuma's army. After the Battle of Taharasaka, the Satsuma army was defeated all the way, and by mid-August, the Satsuma army was under siege and was facing a desperate situation of defeat under the attack of the new government army. On August 17, Saigo personally commanded the Satsuma Army to break through from Kaku-in Prison and return to Kagoshima. By the time it broke through the Lovely Prison, the Satsuma Army was less than five hundred men. On September 1, Saigo led the remnants of the defeated army back to Kagoshima and held castle hill to the ground. On September 24, the government army launched a general offensive, and Saigo was killed in the city after being shot by stray bullets. The Satsuma rebels were then completely annihilated, and the Southwest War ended with the victory of the government forces.
The Southwest War lasted eight months, with more than 30,000 casualties on both sides, and this relatively large-scale bloody civil war, which was waged by the old and inferior samurai in various places led by Satsuma, was, by its very nature, a white-hot manifestation of the contradiction between Japan's conservative forces and the reform forces, and the war destroyed the relatively stable social order in the early Meiji Restoration. But it also marked the complete demise of Japan's old forces. From the perspective of Saigo and Okubo's personal position, Okubo Ritsuto advocated that under the advanced political and economic system of the West, the country should be rich and strong, and saigo, the representative of the old forces, must be suppressed. Therefore, the Southwest War was something that Japan at the beginning of the Meiji era had to go through sooner or later, and without eliminating the old forces, it would not be possible to face Japan's future with all its strength. It's just that this future is the future of militarism...
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