Saigo Takamori and the Satsuma Rebellion

A cave on a hill above Kagoshima, and the face nobody ever photographed

西郷隆盛 · 1828–1877 · last checked 2026-10-27

Saigo Takamori commanded the army that took Edo in 1868, sat in the government that replaced the shogunate, walked out of it in 1873, and in 1877 died on a hillside in his own city fighting the state he had made.

Twelve years later that state pardoned him. In 1898 it put a bronze of him in Ueno Park. Japan has never quite decided what he was, and Kagoshima never had to: here he is simply Sego-don, and the hill he died on is in the middle of the view from everywhere.

Look at that picture, because it is the strangest thing in this article. Saigo lived until 1877, had every opportunity to be photographed, and was not — his son Kikujiro said flatly that his father never once sat for a camera. Every other man of his generation in government is photographed repeatedly. Saigo is not photographed at all.

So the face on the ten-thousand-yen reproductions, on the statue, on the posters for the drama, is this: a conté drawing signed E. Chiossone, Tokio 1883, made six years after he died by an Italian engraver at the government mint who had never met him. The usual account is that Chiossone built it from the features of Saigo’s younger brother Judo and his cousin Oyama Iwao.

It is the one portrait on this site that is an invention, and it is the most famous face in the whole collection.

Part 1 — Where the war started

Saigo came home in 1873 after losing an argument in cabinet about Korea, and opened a school. The Shigakko took the young ex-samurai of Satsuma — men the new order had just abolished, with pensions commuted and swords banned — and gave them somewhere to be.

In January 1877 the government moved to take the arsenal’s weapons out of Kagoshima by ship. The students got there first and raided it. Saigo had not ordered it and by every account was not even in the city, but it was his school, and that was that.

The wall of the school still stands, pitted where the bullets hit it at the end, and the castle stonework next door carries the same marks — the Shimazu had held this province for seven hundred years, and the war that finished their old retainers was fought across their front gate.

Part 2 — Shiroyama

The campaign went north, failed at Kumamoto Castle, and came back. By September 1877 what was left of the Satsuma army — a few hundred men against some thirty thousand — was on the hill behind the city.

Saigo spent his last five days in a cave on that hill. It is still there and you can walk to it: four metres deep, three across, a mouth about the height of a man. There is nothing in it. That is rather the point.

On the morning of 24 September the government army attacked, Saigo was hit coming down the Iwasaki valley, and he died there with Beppu Shinsuke as his second. The spot is marked. Ten minutes’ walk above it, the lookout gives you the city, the bay and Sakurajima — the view the Shimazu built a garden to borrow, and the last thing the rebellion had.

Part 3 — The graves

Seven hundred and forty-nine stones for something over two thousand men, on a slope above the bay, with Saigo in the middle and Kirino Toshiaki and Murata Shinpachi beside him.

The shrine next to the cemetery was founded in 1880 — three years after the government had killed him as a traitor and twelve before it pardoned him. Work out what that means about how the pardon actually happened and you have understood something about the Meiji state that the textbooks say more slowly.

Check rooms in Kagoshima for your dates

Part 4 — Fact and legend

Documented: there is no photograph. Not a lost one, not a disputed one. His son said he never sat for one. Every image of his face postdates his death.

Documented: he did not start the war. The arsenal raid was his students’ and he was not in Kagoshima for it. He took command afterwards, which is a different decision and the one he can be judged on.

Documented, and the part that undoes the legend: he was not fighting for the old order. Saigo had abolished it. He had led the army that ended the shogunate, sat in the government that dissolved the domains, and signed the measures that stripped his own class of its pensions and its swords. The rebellion was by men he had helped disinherit, led by one of the people who disinherited them.

Retold, and softer than the record: “the last samurai”. The film is a film. The Satsuma army had artillery and rifles and used them; the romance of men with swords against a modern army is a later overlay on a war fought mostly with firearms by both sides.

Not settled: how he died. Seppuku with Beppu Shinsuke as second is the standard account and the one the marker on the hill gives. Some sources argue that the bullet had already made the formal act impossible and that what happened was simpler. The hill does not tell you.

Part 5 — The route

All four places are in Kagoshima and all four are on the City View loop bus. Nanshu first, then Shiroyama — the cemetery is on the north side of the same hill — then down to the Shigakko wall and the castle, which puts you back in the middle of town for the evening.

That is most of a day. If you have two, the second one is the Shimazu: Sengan-en and the Shuseikan are forty minutes up the coast and are the other half of why Satsuma mattered.

Before you go

The cave, the place he died, the lookout, the Shigakko wall and the cemetery are all free and all outdoors. There is no ticket to any of it.

The Saigo Nanshu Memorial Hall by the cemetery is open 9:00 to 17:00, last entry 16:40, closed Mondays — the following weekday when the Monday is a holiday — and from 29 December to 1 January. Its own site says four hundred yen; most listings say two hundred. Take four hundred.

From the bus stop to the cemetery is about a hundred steps up, which the city says plainly and most guides do not. The lookout has free parking; the cave has none at all.

Kagoshima has sixty-five properties bookable in English, which is the second deepest list on this site, and they are city hotels rather than ryokan — the water is under the pavement here, not in a village of inns. The three below are picked from what is bookable.