Saigō Takamori
Samurai of the Satsuma domain, supreme commander of Japanese army, one of the three great nobles who led the Meiji Restoration (1828-1877) · Japan · Politicians · Died at 49
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Something wrong?He helped demolish the shogunate and install the emperor, then turned around and died fighting the government he'd built. The man who negotiated Edo's bloodless surrender ended in a suicide charge against imperial guns - making him Japan's most romanticized contradiction.
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Born into a minor samurai house in Satsuma Domain on 23 January 1828, Saigō Takamori rose through service to the daimyō Shimazu Nariakira, working the political circuits of Edo and Kyoto. After Nariakira's death he was exiled twice - first to Amami Ōshima, then the harsher Okinoerabujima - before being pardoned and recalled to forge the Satchō Alliance between Satsuma and Chōshū, the pact that broke the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868. He commanded imperial forces in the Boshin War and brokered Edo Castle's surrender without bloodshed. In the new Meiji government he held senior posts and drove reforms like the abolition of the han system, but resigned in 1873 after his Korea mission proposal was rejected. Back in Kagoshima he became the reluctant figurehead for samurai who couldn't stomach modernization, leading the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877 until the imperial army crushed it at Shiroyama. Critically wounded, Saigō committed seppuku on 24 September 1877; every one of his men died in the fight.
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