Alan Booth

“But such was the loyalty of Saigo’s troops that, so long as the great man remained to be protected, their compliance with this decision could not be guaranteed. So in the dead of night, with the moon sinking and a fog rolling down through the inland valleys, Saigo and those closest to him accomplished the impossible. They broke through the enclosing hoops of the enemy and escaped into the empty hills, leaving the remainder of their shattered force under the command of officers who had pledged to lay down their weapons when the dawn came. The council had determined that the escaping band would contain only men who faced a likely death sentence. But so indissoluble were the ties that bound the students of Saigo’s old military-style schools to their sensei that those who heard of his planned escape could not be deterred from joining him. The eventual number who left the camp and advanced along the footpaths of Hyono toward the slopes of Enodake—the one route left half open to them because the imperial commanders had considered it impassable—was between six and seven hundred, almost all of them ex-students of Saigo’s schools, all from samurai families, all resigned to their deaths. By some accounts, the escape was a noisy one, with a heavy exchange of rifle fire and the small contingent of imperial troops guarding the approaches to Enodake overwhelmed and relieved of their weapons and supplies. By other accounts the escape was made in silence, in single file along a wild boar track that led in a steep, tangled climb to the summit of the hill, with word passed in whispers down the line to tread softly and to muffle all sounds. Whatever the circumstances, Saigo escaped. Over the next sixteen days, pursued by the imperial brigades they had eluded, he and the last of the rebels fought their way first west, then south along the backbone of the Kyushu mountains, across daunting tracts of some of the wildest country in Japan, in a last-fling effort to reach their home city of Kagoshima and make a final stand there. It was a journey that, in the dozen years since I had first seen Saigo’s bullet-headed statue, had rattled about inside my head like a fly in a closed room. I wanted to make that journey myself, alone, on foot, as nearly as possible over the same mountain passes, down the same tracks, through the same forgotten villages, on the same days as Saigo had. I wanted to see how closely I could follow in his footsteps, how much the countryside had changed, what had gone, and what remained. I wanted to know what turns a man into a planetary, statued, woodblock-printed god. So on the morning of the 17th of August, a Sunday, with the Bon drums silent for another year and the baseball drums driving cats into the street, 109 summers”
― Alan Booth, Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan