Last Samurai

The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori by Mark Ravina, 214 pages

In 1877, Saigo Takamori died in battle against the army of the Emperor of Japan, an army he had once commanded and an emperor to whom he had pledged his life in service.  Even before his end, he was already popularly portrayed as a semi-divine figure transcending mere politics, and after his death he would continue to be celebrated by generations of Japanese romantics and reactionaries dissatisfied with the march of modernity.

Yet in Mark Ravina's telling Saigo had a crucial role in that march.  Not only was Saigo a key player in the overthrow of the shogunate after Progress was brought to Japan in the mouths of American cannons, he was central in the subsequent disempowerment of the daimyo, including his own liege lord, who had backed the ousting of the shogun.  Although it is impossible, at least from the material Ravina provides, to know exactly what Saigo believed would follow, it is difficult in hindsight to imagine anything other than a bourgeois democracy filling the resulting vacuum.  This is consistent with a view of Saigo's character that sees him as addicted to the grand gesture, the type of man who could sway the fortunes of a nation with a dramatic action at a pivotal moment, but who is uninterested in the minutiae of actually governing a modern state.  It is possible to judge this as foolishness or even indiscipline, or imagine it to be the disinterested pursuit of virtue and the selfless leadership of a true hero.  Whether deliberately or by accident, Ravina leaves that decision to the reader.