How Accurate Is the Movie The Last Samurai?

Saigo Takamori, the rebellion of 1877, and the swords-versus-guns story that did not happen

The Last Samurai (2003) is loosely built on a real rebellion, the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, but its central image of sword-carrying traditionalists refusing firearms is not history. The rebels of 1877 were armed with rifles and artillery and used them until their ammunition ran out. The film's Katsumoto is modelled on Saigo Takamori, who really did lead that rebellion and really did die at its end, but the historical Saigo had spent the previous decade as one of the most powerful men in the new Meiji government, and he had no objection in principle to modern weapons.

The outsider at the centre of the film has a real ancestor too, just in the wrong decade. Nathan Algren is very loosely modelled on French officers of the military mission to Japan, above all Jules Brunet, who arrived in 1867 as an artillery instructor and then refused to leave when the shogunate collapsed. Brunet fought on the losing side of the Boshin War and served the breakaway Republic of Ezo, which was defeated at Hakodate in 1869. That is eight years before the Satsuma Rebellion, and Brunet was not a traumatised veteran of the American Indian wars.

What the film gets genuinely right is the emotional shape of the period: a warrior class dismantled in about a decade by its own former members, a country modernising at extraordinary speed, and a last stand that Japan afterwards chose to remember with sympathy rather than contempt. Saigo was posthumously pardoned and became a national figure, which is the part of the story the film understands best.

The real rebellion of 1877

The Satsuma Rebellion ran from January to September 1877, in and around Kagoshima in the far south west of Japan. It was the largest and last of a series of samurai revolts against the Meiji government, and it was crushed by a conscript national army that the government had built only a few years earlier.

Saigo Takamori did not begin as a rebel. He was one of the architects of the Meiji Restoration and held high office in the new government. He resigned in 1873 after losing the argument over whether Japan should force a confrontation with Korea, went home to Kagoshima, and founded private academies that filled up with unemployed and resentful former samurai. When students raided a government arsenal in early 1877, Saigo reluctantly took command of a rising that had effectively started without him.

The campaign turned on Kumamoto Castle. The rebel army moved north in February and failed to take the fortress, and the siege tied them down until imperial reinforcements broke through in April. After that it was a long retreat southward against an enemy with better supply, more men and command of the sea.

The end came at Shiroyama, a hill above Kagoshima, on 24 September 1877. A few hundred survivors faced an overwhelming government force. Saigo was hit by a bullet in the hip and abdomen, and accounts differ as to whether he then committed seppuku or was beheaded by a follower. The government army suffered heavy casualties across the campaign as a whole, but the outcome was never really in doubt after Kumamoto.

Samurai and firearms

The film's most persistent invention is that its samurai reject guns as dishonourable. Japanese warriors had used firearms since the sixteenth century, and by the 1870s the domains of the south west, Satsuma very much included, were among the most heavily armed and militarily modern forces in the country. The men who overthrew the shogunate did so with imported rifles and artillery.

The Satsuma rebels of 1877 fielded infantry battalions with rifles, and they assembled mountain guns, field guns and mortars. Their problem was not principle but supply. Cut off from ammunition and from any way of replacing it, they fell back over the summer on whatever they had left, and the final actions were fought with dwindling cartridges and, at the very end, with blades because nothing else remained.

That is the grain of truth the film inflates into a philosophy. A last stand in which men who have run out of bullets draw swords is not the same thing as a warrior class that refused bullets on principle, and the difference matters, because it turns a political and economic revolt into a fable about spiritual purity.

The famous closing sequence, in which massed modern firepower cuts down a cavalry charge, is a compression rather than a record of a specific action. Government forces in the campaign were equipped with modern rifles and artillery, and the imbalance of firepower at Shiroyama was extreme, but the film stages it as a single symbolic massacre.

Saigo Takamori and Katsumoto

Katsumoto is a romantic simplification. He is presented as a reactionary who wants to hold Japan still, a man untouched by the modern world who is finally destroyed by it. Saigo was nothing of the kind. He supported modernising Japan, had helped build the institutions that were dismantling the samurai, and understood modern weapons perfectly well.

The grievance behind the revolts was also less noble than the film suggests. The Meiji reforms abolished the samurai's legal privileges: conscription in 1873 opened military service to commoners, an 1876 edict banned the wearing of swords in public, and the hereditary stipends that supported the warrior class were commuted and then ended, leaving thousands of families without income. Historians have pointed out that many samurai fought modernisation because it destroyed their status, not because they were defending a philosophy.

Nor were the samurai a group with a single opinion. A great many of the Meiji government's leading reformers were themselves former samurai who had given up their own privileges voluntarily, and the conscript army that beat Saigo was commanded by men from the same class as the men it was fighting.

The film's other liberty is the emperor. Meiji was a young sovereign in a system run by an oligarchy of ministers, and the notion that a foreign officer could walk into his presence, present a dead rebel's sword, and change national policy on the spot belongs to fiction. Saigo's rehabilitation was real but slower: he was pardoned posthumously in 1889 and became one of the most admired figures in modern Japanese memory.

Nathan Algren and the foreign advisers

Foreign military advisers in Japan were entirely real. France sent a military mission in 1867 to train the shogunate's forces, and Jules Brunet, then in his late twenties, went as an artillery instructor. When the shogunate fell, Brunet resigned his commission rather than be recalled, stayed to fight, and became a senior figure in the short-lived Republic of Ezo on the northern island of Hokkaido, serving as second in command of its army.

That resistance ended at Hakodate in 1869, where the Ezo forces were beaten by a much larger imperial army. Brunet was evacuated, faced official displeasure at home, and then rejoined the French army in 1870. He served in the Franco-Prussian War and eventually reached the rank of general of division. Another French officer, Eugene Collache, fought in the same campaign and left an account of it, and both men are sometimes named as models for the film's protagonist.

The film transplants that story forward by eight years and attaches it to the wrong rebellion, then adds material that has no historical counterpart at all: the capture and gradual conversion of the American officer, the village winter, and the personal relationship with the family of a man he has killed. Japan in the 1870s did employ large numbers of foreign instructors, but they were advisers on contract, not adopted insiders.

It is worth adding that by 1877 the foreign advisers who mattered to the Japanese army were increasingly French and German professionals working for the government, not romantic defectors. The modern conscript force that destroyed Saigo was itself partly a product of foreign instruction, which is an irony the film has no room for.

What the film is good at

The production is careful about the surface of the period. Costume, armour, architecture and the texture of a castle town are handled with more respect than most Hollywood films set in Japan, and the Japanese cast were allowed to act in Japanese at length rather than in accented English throughout.

It is also right that the Meiji transformation was genuinely brutal for the people it displaced, and that Japan afterwards felt real ambivalence about the cost. Saigo's afterlife as a tragic national hero, honoured by the state that killed him, is the strongest evidence for that, and the film's instinct that his defeat was mourned as much as celebrated is sound.

Treat it, then, as a well-made invention that borrows the shape of 1877. If you want the actual rebellion, the reading below will get you there, and the real Saigo, a modernising insider who ended up leading the last stand of the class he had helped to abolish, is a more contradictory figure than any film has yet tried to put on screen.

Frequently asked questions

Is The Last Samurai based on a true story?

It is loosely based on the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, which ran from January to September of that year and ended at the Battle of Shiroyama on 24 September. The rebellion, its leader Saigo Takamori, and the defeat by a conscript imperial army are real. The American officer at the centre of the film is not.

Was Katsumoto a real person?

He is modelled on Saigo Takamori, who was real, but the portrayal is misleading. Saigo had been one of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration and a senior figure in the new government until he resigned in 1873. He supported modernising Japan and used firearms, unlike the film's traditionalist.

Did samurai really refuse to use guns?

No. Japanese warriors had used firearms since the sixteenth century, and the Satsuma rebels of 1877 fought with rifles and with mountain guns, field guns and mortars. They ended up relying on blades because they ran out of ammunition and could not resupply, not because they rejected modern weapons.

Who was the real Nathan Algren?

There is no single original. The character is very loosely based on French officers of the 1867 military mission to Japan, principally Jules Brunet, who stayed on after the shogunate fell and fought for the Republic of Ezo until its defeat at Hakodate in 1869. Eugene Collache is sometimes named as well. Both stories belong to the Boshin War, not to 1877.

How did Saigo Takamori actually die?

At the Battle of Shiroyama on 24 September 1877. He was wounded by a bullet in the hip and abdomen during the final action, and accounts differ over whether he then committed seppuku or was beheaded by a follower. He was posthumously pardoned in 1889 and became a celebrated national figure.

What were the Meiji reforms the samurai were fighting?

The measures that removed their legal position: conscription in 1873, which opened military service to commoners, an edict of 1876 banning the public wearing of swords, and the commutation and ending of the hereditary stipends that had supported samurai families. Historians note that the revolts were largely about lost status and lost income.

Further reading

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Sources consulted

• Wikipedia, 'Satsuma Rebellion'
• Wikipedia, 'Jules Brunet'
• Wikipedia, 'The Last Samurai'
• Open Library, Mark Ravina, 'The Last Samurai'

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