KAGOSHIMA (Kyodo) What may be a death song written by Takamori Saigo, a hero of the 1868 Meiji Restoration, has been discovered in the diary of an army doctor who was in the antigovernment force Saigo led in the 1877 Seinan War, it was learned Saturday.
The song, written in the traditional quatrain poetry style featuring seven Chinese characters on each line, was discovered in a diary entry made by Taisuke Yamazaki that was dated Sept. 24, 1877. That was the day when Saigo, one of most popular figures in Japanese history, committed suicide in Kagoshima during the civil war.
Tsuyoshi Takayanagi, head of a museum in the city of Kagoshima that commemorates Saigo, and other experts argue that the death song was written by Saigo himself, given its content and grammatical accuracy — traits that indicate it could only have been written by a highly educated person.