Saigō Takamori lay on a rocky slope before Kagoshima, a bullet in his thigh, surrounded by thirty thousand government soldiers. Around him: three hundred exhausted men — the last survivors of his private schools. He asked his loyal companion Beppu Shinsuke to strike off his head.

Three years later, the Meiji government that had condemned him posthumously restored his honours. In 1889, Emperor Mutsuhito unveiled an equestrian statue of Saigō in Ueno Park in Tokyo. The dangerous rebel had been turned into a national mascot.

That is the story of the Meiji Restoration in brief: a revolution that swallowed its own fathers — and set up its own opponents as national icons.

Bakumatsu: Why the Shogunate Collapsed

The Tokugawa shogunate ruled Japan for 250 years. It collapsed not because of Saigō Takamori or because of gunboats. It collapsed because it had lost its own economic foundation.

The Tempō crisis of the 1830s and 1840s was a decade of crop failures, famines and social unrest. As Jansen shows, the structural weakness of the shogunate was not military, but fiscal: the domains fell into debt, the central state had no means of redistribution, the samurai class became gradually impoverished.

Then came the Black Ships. Commodore Matthew Perry appeared in 1853 with four steam-powered warships before the harbour of Uraga. The bakufu signed the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854. The sonnō-jōi movement used the forced opening as proof that the bakufu could not protect Japan. In 1866, Satsuma and Chōshū concluded a secret alliance. In 1868, a brief military campaign removed the Tokugawa shogunate.

What followed was no return to the imperial rule of the Heian period. It was a modern dictatorship of lower samurai.

The Reforms: How a Warrior Caste Abolished Itself

The Meiji oligarchs — Ōkubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi, Itō Hirobumi, Yamagata Aritomo — were samurai. And they abolished the samurai. That was no irony, but logic: to make Japan a modern great power, they needed a conscript army, not feudal warriors.

In 1871 the domains (han) were dissolved and replaced by prefectures under direct government control. In 1873 the conscription law came into force — every Japanese man between 20 and 40 could be called up, regardless of birth status. In 1876 followed the Haitōrei — the sword ban: from then on, only members of the military were permitted to carry swords in public.

At the same time, the samurai were financially ruined. Their stipends were redeemed through one-off bonds — whose value sank. Samurai without a traditional profession and without a capitalist education were left with worthless paper notes.

Saigō’s break with the Meiji government is to be understood against this background. He was no reactionary — he had himself helped to build the modernisation. But he believed in a “government of virtue” based on Confucian principles. What he saw was corruption, self-enrichment and the systematic humiliation of the warrior class.

The Satsuma Rebellion: The Last Stand

In 1877, the pent-up anger exploded in the rebellion that bears Saigō’s name — although he did not want it. The Shigakkō, the private schools Saigō had founded in Satsuma, were training camps for disappointed samurai. In January 1877, radical students stole government ammunition. The government responded with arrests. Saigō, ill and undecided, allowed himself to be placed at the head.

The rebellion lasted nine months. The Meiji army was modernly armed, had artillery and supplies. Ironically, Turnbull shows that Saigō in fact used modern weapons: it was no fight of sword against rifle, but of a small modern army against a large modern army.

Shiroyama on 24 September 1877 was the end: 300 against 30,000. Saigō was wounded and had himself beheaded. Japan had defeated its last samurai uprising.

What the Sword Ban Really Meant

The Haitōrei of 1876 has become, in samurai mythology, the symbolic death blow of the warrior class. The reality is more nuanced. The sword as a combat weapon had been marginalised at the latest since the introduction of the arquebus in 1543. In the Edo period it was above all a status symbol. The Haitōrei removed the symbol, not the martial art.

What the sword ban really struck was the visual identity of the class. A samurai without a sword was, for contemporaries, no longer a recognisable social category.

In the Samurai Museum Berlin, display case C39V documents a calligraphy by Yamaoka Tesshū (1836–1888) — sword master, calligrapher and politician, the embodiment of the Meiji era between tradition and modernity. He played a decisive role in the peaceful handover of government from the Tokugawa shogunate to the Meiji emperor.

The Afterlife: How the Samurai Became a Brand

In 1889, Saigō Takamori received his imperial pardon. That was politically shrewd: a rebel whom one has pardoned and immortalised can no longer be feared.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the samurai class was retrospectively declared an elite of virtue. Nitobe Inazō’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900) wrote down a code of honour that had never existed as such — in English, for Western readers. As Benesch shows, Bushidō was the retroactive construction of a tradition meant to underpin the Meiji state ideology.

This mythologisation had consequences. The Bushidō cult of the early 20th century supplied a legitimising language for militarism and imperialism.

Frequently Asked Questions about the Meiji Restoration

What was the Meiji Restoration?

The Meiji Restoration (1868) was the seizure of state power by a coalition of lower samurai from Satsuma and Chōshū, formally in the name of the young Emperor Meiji (Mutsuhito, 1852–1912). It ended the Tokugawa shogunate and initiated Japan’s modernisation. In effect, it was a coup d’état by one samurai elite against another.

What was the Haitōrei?

The Haitōrei (1876) was an imperial edict that restricted the public carrying of swords to members of the military. Since swords had primarily been status symbols since the Edo period, the edict struck less at combat capability than at the social identity of the warriors.

Who was Saigō Takamori really?

Saigō Takamori (1828–1877) was a Satsuma politician and military strategist who played a decisive part in the Meiji Restoration. He was no technology-averse traditionalist, but a pragmatic moderniser. His break with the government was political and moral: he opposed the corruption of the new oligarchs.

When did the samurai class officially end?

The samurai class effectively ceased to exist with the introduction of conscription (1873) and formally with the Haitōrei (1876). The Satsuma Rebellion (1877) was the last military uprising of former samurai.

Visit the Samurai Museum Berlin

Display case C39V preserves a calligraphy by Yamaoka Tesshū, sword master and Meiji politician. Display case C41V shows a tantō from the Bakumatsu period. Open daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Auguststraße 68, Berlin-Mitte.

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List of Sources

  • Jansen, Marius B. (ed.) (1989): The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 5: The Nineteenth Century. Cambridge University Press.
  • Ravina, Mark (2004): The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Turnbull, Stephen (2010): Katana: The Samurai Sword. Osprey Publishing.
  • Benesch, Oleg (2014): Inventing the Way of the Samurai. Oxford University Press.
  • Samurai Museum Berlin (2021): Armours of the Samurai.

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