Plans were made to march on Tokyo with the vague idea of presenting grievances to the government, and on February 15 Saigo's army started out. Government forces blocked his advance at Kumamoto, and full-scale war ensued for the next six months. Saigo's old friend Yamagata Aritomo (1838-1922), now minister of war, became the field commander against him. By May, Saigo was on the defensive; during the summer he suffered a series of disastrous defeats, and by September the situation was hopeless. With a few hundred men, he returned to Kagoshima to make his last stand on a hill overlooking the city. On Sept. 24, 1877, the government troops launched the final attack; Saigo was critically wounded, and, as had previously been arranged, one of his faithful lieutenants took his life by beheading him. Of the 40,000 troops he had led in February, only some 200 remained to surrender. Losses on both sides were estimated at approximately 12,000 dead and 20,000 wounded.
In the narrow sense, the failure of Saigo's rebellion meant the end of what he had lived for. The conscript army had defeated the samurai; never again would the government fear local uprisings or samurai threats. If the great Saigo could not win, no one else would be foolhardy enough to try. But in a broader sense, Saigo probably emerged the victor. To the Japanese people, he became the apotheosis of the national character, one more exemplification of the giri-ninjo conflict ("duty" versus "sentiment," or "compassion") that is such a well-loved theme of Japanese tale and drama. He became a legend: as late as the 1890s, some still believed that he had not really died but was in retirement waiting to emerge once more at the proper time.
In attempting to summarize this argument objectively, it is probably fair to say that Saigo's real weakness lay in his inability to think things through logically to their conclusion; that he was ruled more by intuition than by reason. To say this is to say that he was a tragic figure, possessed of undeniable talent, who, although he had had much to do with bringing a new age to birth, could not make a complete adjustment to it in his own mind, and finally sought escape in the only way that seemed honourable to him: self-destruction.
(D.M.Ea.)
The Meiji Restoration and the process of modernization