Whatever Saigo’s intentions, Tani had no intention of letting his army pass. By February 21, he had 3,800 soldiers and 600 policemen at his disposal. The police contingent was no mean addition to the garrison, for Japanese policemen were a paramilitary force recruited from the samurai class, comparable to the French gendarmerie or Italian carabinieri. It is interesting to note, however, that the Japanese police shunned the use of firearms, preferring to rely on their swords and martial arts skills.

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Since most of the garrison of Kumamoto Castle was from Kyushu, and many of the officers were natives of Kagoshima, their loyalties were open to question. Rather than risk desertions or defections, Tani decided to stand on the defensive. After laying in a large store of food and demolishing several hundred houses around the castle to provide fields of fire, the general and his command settled down to wait for Saigo.

Small clashes and skirmishes took place on February 21, forcing the imperial advance guards to withdraw inside Kumamoto. Although the castle, built in 1598, was among the strongest in Japan, Saigo was confident that his 9,000 samurai would be more than a match for Tani’s hitherto-untried peasant conscripts. After surrounding the castle on the 22nd and keeping up small-arms fire all day, the rebels launched a series of ill-coordinated assaults on the walls after dark. Though bloodily repulsed by concentrated fire, the samurai continued to hurl themselves at the walls with suicidal ferocity. After two days of fruitless attack, however, their ardor began to wane. While 3,000 men dug into the rock-hard icy ground around the castle and tried to starve the garrison out, a rebel detachment sent to block the passes north of town soon encountered the forward elements of the relief force. After several sharp clashes, both sides disengaged on the 26th.

By the time fighting resumed on March 3, both sides had been reinforced and numbered about 10,000 each. They faced each other along a 61¼2-mile front from Tabaruzuka southwest to Ariake Bay. Although Prince Taruhito Arisugawa was the official commander of the imperial forces assigned to put down the Satsuma rebels, real command was in the hands of General Aritomo Yamagata. A samurai from Chosu who had studied military science in Europe and headed the War Ministry in 1870, Yamagata was an old friend of Saigo’s. He believed in authoritarian government and shared Saigo’s desire for military expansion into Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria, but he also favored modernizing the Japanese army along Prussian lines. It was Yamagata who ordered a frontal assault on the Satsuma positions on March 4, which developed into the eight-day Battle of Tabaruzuka.

As the two sides were well dug in, a fierce war of position developed in which neither side could gain an advantage. There was little shooting, either due to lack of ammunition or from inclination. Imperial troops, no less than the rebels, made their assaults with cold steel alone. By the time the imperial forces managed to dislodge the rebels, each side had suffered more than 4,000 killed or wounded.

At the height of the battle, Saigo wrote a private letter to Prince Arisugawa, restating his reasons for going to Tokyo. His letter indicated that even at that late date Saigo was not committed to the rebellion and sought a peaceful settlement. The government, however, refused to negotiate. Its armament factories were producing 500,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition a day. The empire was on a full war footing and was determined to crush the rebellion.

In order to cut Saigo off from his base, an imperial force made up of three warships, bearing 500 policemen and several companies of infantry, arrived in Kagoshima on March 8. After the troops landed, they seized the arsenals and took the provincial governor into custody.

Deprived of supplies from home, rebel forces lived on food purchased from the local peasants with paper promissory notes, bearing the stamp of the Satsuma commander. Those notes continued in circulation long after the rebels had been driven out of the area and in spite of a government ban on their use. Nor was popular support for the rebels limited to monetary matters. A local dissident leader, Kichijuro Ikebe, gathering a force of 2,000 samurai from students of the private schools that he had founded in imitation of the Great Saigo, joined the rebellion.

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