September 24, 1877: The End of the Samurai

Saigō Takamori

September 24, 1877: The Satsuma Rebellion is crushed, ending the age of the samurai in Japan.

Samurai were soldiers who served as retainers to lords in Feudal Japan, starting in the late 12th Century. They were granted kiri-sute gomen: The right to kill anyone of a lower class in certain situations. Some important samurai and other figures in Japanese history wanted others to believe all of them engaged combatants using codes of martial virtues, called bushido, and followed various cultural ideals about how a samurai should act.

The American naval expedition of Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853 led to the opening of Japanese trade with the West, and to the modernization of the country under the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

But there was growing dissatisfaction with the direction the country was taking. The modernization of the country meant the abolition of the privileged social status of the samurai class, and had undermined their financial position. The very rapid and massive changes to Japanese culture, language, dress and society appeared to many samurai to be a betrayal of everything they stood for.

The Boshin War, sometimes known as the Japanese Revolution or Japanese Civil War, was fought from January 27, 1868 to June 27, 1869, between forces of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate and a coalition seeking to seize political power in the name of the Imperial Court. The Imperial coalition won, ending the shogunate that had been founded in 1603.

Saigō Takamori, one of the senior Satsuma leaders in the Meiji government, had initially supported the reforms. But he became concerned about growing political corruption: Popular prints depicted the rebel army with banners bearing the words shinsei-kōtoku: "New government, high morality."

Saigō was a strong proponent of war with Korea in 1873. At one point, he offered to visit Korea in person and to provide a casus belli by the likely outcome of his being assassinated by Korean nationalists. He expected both that a war would ultimately be successful for Japan, and also that the initial stages of it would offer a means by which the samurai whose cause he championed could find meaningful and beneficial death.

When the plan was rejected, Saigō resigned from all of his government positions in protest, and returned to his hometown of Kagoshima, as did many other Satsuma ex-samurai in the military and police forces. Support for Saigō was so strong that Satsuma had effectively seceded from the central government by the end of 1876.

Fearing a rebellion, on January 30, 1877, the Meiji government sent a warship to Kagoshima to remove the weapons that were stockpiled at the Kagoshima arsenal. This, accompanied by an elimination of samurai rice stipends, provoked open conflict. Outraged by the government's tactics, 50 students from Saigō's academy attacked the Somuta Arsenal and carried off weapons.

Over the next three days, more than 1,000 students staged raids on the naval yards and other arsenals. Presented with this sudden success, the greatly dismayed Saigō was reluctantly persuaded to come out of his semi-retirement to lead the rebellion against the central government.

It is widely presumed by modern Western culture that samurai, superbly trained in swordsmanship, would never use firearms, considering them to to be dishonorable. This was not the case at all, but they were outgunned by the Meiji forces, and, after some initial success, Saigō and his remaining samurai were pushed back to Kagoshima where, in the Battle of Shiroyama, Imperial Army troops under the command of General Yamagata Aritomo, and marines under the command of Admiral Kawamura Sumiyoshi, outnumbered Saigō 60-to-1.

After Saigō rejected a letter dated September 1 from Yamagata asking him to surrender, Yamagata ordered a full frontal assault on September 24, 1877. By 6:00 AM, only 40 rebels were still alive. Saigō was killed, and one of his followers, Beppu Shinsuke, had his head removed in order to preserve his dignity. Beppu and the last of the "ex-samurai" drew their swords and plunged downhill toward the Imperial positions and to their deaths. With these deaths, the Satsuma rebellion came to an end.

Financially, the cost of suppressing the Satsuma Rebellion forced Japan off the gold standard, and caused the government to print paper currency, and to reduce the land tax from 3 percent to 2.5 percent. The costs of pacifying the former samurai led to the Meiji government becoming virtually bankrupt. The government was forced to sell off state-owned enterprises such as factories and mines to politically-connected merchants and former officials at low prices, leading to the instant formation of large industrial firms.

Meanwhile, the remnants of the militaristic faction that supported Saigō's invasion proposal evolved into Japanese right-wing groups, which would become a problem for China in the 1930s, and the rest of the world in the 1940s.

The rebellion also effectively ended the samurai class, as the new Imperial Japanese Army, built on heimin conscripts, had proven itself in battle. More critically, the defeat of the samurai displayed the power of modern artillery and rifles, against which a banzai charge had no appreciable effect.

On February 22, 1889, Emperor Mutsuhito -- known after his death as Meiji -- pardoned Saigō posthumously. He has been labelled as a tragic hero by the people of Japan, and his actions were considered an honorable example of the samurai code of bushido.

The samurai are seen as a symbol of medieval Japan. Yet they lasted until 1877. Theoretically, a samurai could have made a telephone call to a teenaged Theodore Roosevelt.

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September 24, 1877 was a Monday. Baseball's National League was the only professional sports league in North America at the time, and only one game was played that day: The Cincinnati Reds beat the St. Louis Brown Stockings, 5-1 at the Avenue Grounds in Cincinnati.

These Reds folded after the 1879 season, and were not the current team with the name, which did not debut until 1882. Nor were these Browns, who folded within days of this game, the team that became the St. Louis Cardinals of the NL, which also started in 1882; or the St. Louis Browns of the American League that started in 1902, and became the Baltimore Orioles in 1954.