The statue of an age-wearied field marshal astride his horse guards the entrance to Hagi Chuo Park. Perhaps he’s scrutinizing files on parade or gazing upon a battlefield, though these days his only remaining enemies are pigeons and errant balls. His sculpted bronze hide has nearly a century of age and the lines of both rider and steed are design too fine for a monument intended for a rural city park; if he looks out of place it’s because he is. Most bronze horses don’t put many miles or kilometers under their hooves; due to being immobile metal statues and what not, but this equestrian statue of Yamagata Aritomo is an exception.
Hagi is a quiet rural town now, but during the violent waning years of the Tokugawa Shogunate the samurai of Hagi were among those most responsible for toppling the old regime. During the Edo-era (1603-1868) Hagi was the capital city of the Choshu Domain, a combination of neighboring Nagato and Suo provinces ruled by the Mori family. As losers in the 1600 Battle of Sekigahara their influence and power was limited in the Shogunate, but not their wealth or potential. Men like Yoshida Shoin taught a generation of future leaders, resulting in the beginning of uprisings against the government and acts of domestic terrorism in the capital, Kyoto. Opposed to foreign influence and presence in Japan, they were keen on foreign technology and matching pace with the West, which also resulted in Hagi’s construction of a blast furnace in 1856.
It was against this backdrop that Yamagata Aritomo, a low-class Hagi samurai, would join the Kiheitai militia, rising through the ranks as the bloody Bakumatsu came to an end with the Boshin War in 1869. Now a senior military leader in the new Imperial government, Yamagata would have a hand in the establishment of the Imperial Japanese Army and the creation of a conscription system to man it. By 1873 he was the War Minister and from there held a series of both military and political posts of increasing importance. He served in the war ministry, Ministry of Justice, served as Home Minister, Chairman of the Privy Council and twice was appointed prime minister in 1889-91 and 1898-1900. During this same period he also led the fight on the battlefield against Saigo Takamori’s 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, led the First Army into Manchuria during the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War, and later was Chief of the General Staff during the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. As a member of the genro, the elder statesmen advisors to Emperor Meiji, he held considerable unofficial political power and prestige for the rest of his life.
Given his role in the creation of the Japanese army, it isn’t surprising a statue of him in uniform on horseback was commissioned and erected at the Army General Staff Headquarters in 1927. The artist commissioned for the work was Kitamura Seibo from Nagasaki Prefecture. (Weird side note, he competed in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, which had artistic competitions as part of the games. The summer Olympics had artistic competitions from 1912-48)
His was one of roughly 900 statues of public figures erected across Japan between the years 1880-1940, though after the 1938 National Mobilization Law the metals needed for statue creation were turned over to the military due to the war in China. In 1943 the nation began melting down statues, with only those carefully selected by the government because their destruction would be “harmful to national morale,” being allowed to stay. Kitamura’s equestrian Yamagata was one of those lucky hundred spared from the smelter.
It was again spared after the war when the occupied nation began reviewing what statues would be “appropriate” for the “new Japan.” Similar to what’s being done with controversial statues within the United States, statues of men such as Aritomo, an ardent militarist who held poor views of democracy, were quietly pulled from their public pedestals. None were destroyed however.
It spent more than a decade in outdoor storage at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum at Ueno Park before the “problematic” statue found a new home for public display at Kichijoji’s Inokashira Park Zoo in 1962. It was put back on display not because of the sculpture’s subject, but rather its creator, Kitamura Seibo. Kitamura created the new famous Nagasaki Peace Statue at his Inokashira Park workshop in 1955; that workshop is now a museum and along with it is now a 250 piece indoor and outdoor sculpture collection.
Despite Kitamura’s amazing talents as a sculptor, today the park is probably more famous internationally for the work of a different kind of artist, Miyazaki Hayao, as it’s the home of the Ghibli Museum. No doubt it is popular but does it have the same drawing power of a horseback mounted field marshal turned two time prime minister?
The statue made a thousand kilometer trip from Tokyo to Hagi in 1992 for its final destination, a local park. While Hagi had been the capital of Choshu when Yamagata fought to reinstate imperial rule, its now neither center of government or commerce and not even on a vital transportation route, making the once great city fade into obscurity. Likewise the statue which once graced a prominent government facility in Tokyo is now guarding a common city park. It’s been a strange journey, but impressive in that during the war and then every step of the way after it could have easily just been sent to the smelter and melted down like so many other statues but wasn’t. It makes me wonder if it’s true, that if an apocalypse does occur the only living things left on this planet will be cockroaches inhabiting a pile of AK-47s while feasting on Twinkies, and all under the watchful eye of Field Marshal Yamagata’s statue.
This article originally began as a small paragraph in a larger travel article on Hagi’s UNESCO Meiji Industrial Revolution World Heritage Site. I like to know details and to try to comprehend what I’m looking at, and the more I looked into this overly grand for a city park statue’s back story the deeper and stranger it became. It involved not just the man himself, a product and producer of changing times, but also the Olympic arts competition, the guy who made the Peace Statue, and how changing public perception can pull an individual figuratively and literally from a high public pedestal. All this next to a feudal castle town samurai district attached to a UNESCO world heritage site that’s about an industrial revolution. It’s been a rather entertaining, enlightening ride writing this and it has taught me things I did not expect to learn.
Also, here’s an extra random tangent- When I was looking into what museum may have housed the dismounted (bad cavalry pun) statue in Ueno Park, I’d initially assumed the Tokyo National Museum as it was originally the Imperial Household Agency archives. The first director of said archives was Yamagata’s fellow army general, Mori Rintaro, better known to the literary world as Mori Ogai. Like Yamagata, Mori was from a samurai family, his was the next domain over from Choshu, and both men died in 1922. Ogai ended up having nothing to do with this article, but I found these little parallels between them interesting.
ADDRESS
C95W+Q5 Hagi, Yamaguchi (Google Maps plus code)
https://www.hagishi.com/search/detail.php?d=100101
REFERENCES
Most of the information concerning Japanese statuary in general comes from “Public Statuary and Nationalism in Modern and Contemporary Japan” by Sven Saaler
https://apjjf.org/-Sven-Saaler/5077/article.pdf
Information on this particular statue’s movements came from this blog, which cites “Modern Japanese Sculpture Collection, Early Showa Period” by Tanaka Shuji for the statue’s background. As the book is in Japanese and difficult to come by I can’t verify the post’s accuracy, but am willing to accept it is likely correct as it also lines up with Saaler’s article which talks about the statue but is more detailed.
https://ameblo.jp/n-kujoh/entry-11551565356.html
When the Olympics Gave Out Medals for Art
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-the-olympics-gave-out-medals-for-art-6878965/
Inokashira Park
https://musashino-kanko.com/en/enjoy/spot/park.html
Yamagata Aritomo
https://www.ndl.go.jp/portrait/e/datas/208.html