Hara Yasutarō was the inspecting officer of the Tōsandō expeditionary force headquarters who, in the intercalary fourth month of 1868, took Oguri Kōzukenosuke at the village of Gonda and directed his execution. Born into a poor samurai family at Sasayama in Tanba, he was good with a sword and was teaching fencing at Kyoto when, in the upheaval of those years, he became a subordinate of Iwakura Tomomi and marched east with the Tōsandō force under Iwakura's son Tomosada as its commander. He was still twenty-two when he set out for Gonda, by his own account.
From the headquarters at Itabashi to Gonda
How Hara came to set out for Gonda survives in two records, in his own words. One is the talk he gave the local historian Mashimo Kikugorō, included in Tatebayashi Shishi (the Tatebayashi town history).
We had been staying at Itabashi until the middle of the fourth month, when word came that Oguri Kōzukenosuke, lord of Gonda in Jōshū, had called in Furuya and his party and would strike at Itabashi, the commander's headquarters. On orders from the headquarters to go west with all speed and arrest Oguri, I went to Gonda with Toyonaga Kan'ichirō, under the title of inspector, taking some of the domain troops from around Takasaki, questioned Oguri Kōzukenosuke closely, and had my men behead him
The other is a recollection given in an interview years later. While Iwakura had his headquarters at Itabashi, reports kept coming in that “Kōzukenosuke has cannon in Jōshū and will set himself against the headquarters”, and Iwakura called Hara in and ordered him to “go quickly to Gonda in Jōshū and strike”. Hara called himself “a man at the commander's side”, and added: “we” — the commander's headquarters — “had no cannon at all. And to hear that Oguri's side had them gave me a chill.”
The cannon Oguri had brought to Gonda were two, and there was no live shot for them. He had only brought back pieces he had kept at his Edo house and been fond of, and what was called a fortified position was no more than a dwelling built with a view to settling there for good. The three domains of Takasaki, Annaka and Yoshii examined the matter against the terms of the arrest circular, judged that there was no trace of a plot, and withdrew. It was Hara and Toyonaga Kan'ichirō who were angry at this as too soft, threatened to march against the three domains as well, and made them send troops out again. On the evening of the fourth day of the intercalary fourth month the two entered the castle town of Takasaki and gave the order to march; the domain troops were turned out in the night; on the fifth they held a council of war at the village of Sannokura, sent half the force to the high ground behind Tōzenji and half round to the front gate, and surrounded the temple.
Why there was no questioning
At the end of 1932 Abe Dōzan, abbot of Fumon'in, the family temple of the house of Oguri, read in the Heibonsha encyclopaedia that Oguri had been “beheaded on the sixth day of the fourth month of 1868 on the bank of the Karasu River at the village of Gonda in Gunma prefecture, his own fief, by Toyonaga Kan'ichirō and Hara Yasutarō”, and looked in the year-book. Hara Yasutarō's name was there, an imperially appointed member of the House of Peers, living at Nikaidō in Kanagawa prefecture. The man who had cut Oguri down was alive.
On 23 December Abe wrote a long letter and enclosed the full-length photograph of Oguri taken aboard the American ship Powhatan on the voyage to the United States. The reply came on the twenty-sixth, written with a brush in a shaking hand: “I have not forgotten. This is certainly a photograph of Kōzukenosuke.”
On 4 January 1933 Abe called at Hara's house in Kamakura. The questions and answers exchanged there are what carries the detail of the day of the execution down to us. Hara told Oguri, who was in an inner room at Tōzenji, “I have come to arrest you and your men”, and Oguri answered only “yes”. They did not bind him. “Until the day before he had been a man of high rank and high office. We did not bind him. We put him in a palanquin.” The three retainers, he added, he remembered binding.
Asked why there had not been a single examination, Hara answered:
I thought nothing could be done by anything petty officials like us might say, and so I said nothing
On the place of execution: that the three retainers were cut down first and Oguri last; that, asked for any last words, he said at first that he had none, closed his eyes a while, then opened them again and said “I have one word” — “I have let my aged mother and my wife get away; I ask that they be dealt with leniently”; that his neck stood straight and was hard to strike, and that when he was prodded in the back with a pole he cried out “insolence!”, glared, and then lowered his head himself. Hara, saying it must have been “a disorder of the mind”, confessed that it took him three strokes.
A great man of his age indeed. Calm and unshaken at the end, a true model of a warrior. I cannot forget it. I am sorry to the bottom of my heart
Pressed on whether he did not think it wrong, Hara answered: “I do not think I did wrong. But I do think I did a pitiful thing.” He also said that Oguri's grave at Gonda was put up on his own order to Ōne Ryūtarō.
Whose blade came down
Accounts have long differed on who actually brought the sword down. Kurata Mura Kyōdo-shi (the Kurata village local history) records that Kasahara Nobuyoshi, a samurai of the Takasaki domain, struck the blow and that Hara and Toyonaga were witnesses; but that man is not to be found on the roll of Takasaki samurai who marched to Gonda. Others name Koyō Kiichirō, a foot soldier of the Takasaki domain, or Asada Gorōsaku, a samurai of the Annaka domain. Koyō Kiichirō appears to have been confused with the man who carried out the beheading of Matakichi and his retainers at Takasaki on the seventh, the next day.
Hara's own testimony is not all of one piece. To Mashimo Kikugorō he said, “I had my men behead him. I had it done entirely before my own eyes”; to Abe he said that he cut him down himself, in three strokes. Either way, that the officer who ordered the execution without an examination or a sentence was Hara does not change on any account.
Ninagawa Arata, a connection of the Oguri family, learned that it was Hara who had cut Oguri down only in the autumn of 1919. At a reception the Japanese Red Cross held for Ninagawa on his return from visiting the Red Cross societies of Europe after the First World War, the society's president Ishiguro Tadanori told him under his breath: “I have just said to Hara Yasutarō, one of our standing councillors, that Dr Ninagawa, our guest of honour today, is a nephew by marriage of Oguri Kōzuke. Hara was greatly startled.” The government's side had kept that fact quiet for a long time, Ninagawa writes.
The day he saw Yokosuka
In 1871 Hara joined Iwakura Tomomi's suite on its tour of Europe and America. Stopping at Yokosuka on the way out, he saw a fine shipyard standing there. Told that it was a place where warships were to be built by the country's own hands, and then that it was Oguri who had begun it, he thought, by his own account, “Oguri was a tremendous man”. That was three years after the execution.
After coming home he was governor of Yamaguchi prefecture for many years, left that in 1894 to become director of the Hokkaidō government, retired from office in 1896, became an imperially appointed member of the House of Peers, and served as a standing councillor of the Japanese Red Cross. In his last years he took the name Muka, “no flower”, explaining himself that it meant having no home in any of the three worlds.
On the day Abe called, when the talk had run out, Hara asked the abbot of the family temple to read a sutra for the repose of the dead. The reading began close beside the hard-of-hearing old man, and partway through tears ran down both his cheeks. When it ended he cried out, “ah, that was good; that is as it should be”, and, as Abe took his leave, asked him to offer flowers and incense at the grave and held out an offering — so the record has it.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family); Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957; Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987
→ Mukasa Ginsuke, who guarded his lord's head ／ Sannokura and the riverbed at Mizunuma ／ Ninagawa Arata and the rehabilitation