He could see the city from up there. That was perhaps the cruelest detail. Saigo Takamori stood on the summit of Shiroyama hill, above Kagoshima — the city where he had been born 49 years earlier, where he had grown up, where he had known almost everyone — and looked down at the ring of steel closing around him.

Among the commanders below was Admiral Kawamura Sumiyoshi, directing the naval forces in Kagoshima harbor. Kawamura, according to tradition, had been Saigo's childhood companion. Now he sat aboard a warship, ordering its guns trained at the hill where his old friend was starving.

By September 11, 1877, the 包囲 (hōi, encirclement) of Shiroyama was complete. General Yamagata Aritomo had arrived with 30,000 Imperial Army troops — himself a former samurai from Choshu domain, now commanding Japan's new conscript military — and constructed a ring of earthworks and trenches stretching over two kilometers around the base of the hill. Five government warships sat in the harbor below, guns elevated. The Meiji state had brought Gatling guns, modern artillery, and organized logistics. The men on Shiroyama had swords, dwindling ammunition, almost no food, and very little water.

Approximately 500 samurai had seized the hill on September 1, retreating back into Kagoshima after eight months of fighting across Kyushu. They were the last survivors of the Satsuma Rebellion, which had opened in January with roughly 20,000 men marching out of Kagoshima behind the banner of 西郷隆盛 (Saigō Takamori) — one of the most celebrated figures in Meiji Japan. Saigo had been a hero of the Meiji Restoration, a man who had overthrown the Tokugawa shogunate and helped remake Japan's government. Then the government he had helped create moved in directions he could not accept — the abandonment of samurai values, the slow erasure of the warrior class — and he had come home to Kagoshima and, in the end, placed himself at the head of a rebellion he perhaps knew from the start could not win.

The rebellion's record was paradoxical. The Satsuma samurai had won almost every individual engagement they fought. Imperial soldiers who faced them in close quarters — poorly trained conscripts against men who had trained with the sword since childhood — often broke and ran. At the Siege of Kumamoto Castle, from February through April 1877, a government garrison of 3,800 had held out against Saigo's thousands primarily because the rebels refused to use artillery and mining tactics against fellow Japanese. The siege failed. The momentum shifted. The retreat through Kyushu's mountains had consumed the rest of the year and the rest of the army.

By September 1, only approximately 500 remained. They slipped back into Kagoshima under cover of darkness and seized Shiroyama, the old castle hill. It was a gesture with one meaning: they would die at home, on their feet, facing forward.

Yamagata's forces surrounded them immediately. For the next three weeks — through September 11 and beyond — the samurai on the hill were slowly consumed. Bombardment. Starvation. The slow arithmetic of attrition. By the time the final assault came on September 24, only about 300 of the original 500 remained. At 4:00 in the morning, Imperial troops stormed the hill. By 6:00 a.m., approximately 40 rebels were still alive. Saigo, critically wounded — accounts vary on whether he was shot in the femur, the stomach, or both — performed 切腹 (seppuku) assisted by his aide Beppu Shinsuke. He died on the hill above the city of his birth.

The 西南戦争 (Seinan Sensō, Southwest War) was over. The samurai age was over. But Saigo's defeat would prove more powerful than many men's victories.