Katsu Kaishū (Rintarō, later Yasuyoshi) was born in 1823 at Honjo Kamezawa-chō, four years older than Oguri Tadamasa. The Katsu stipend was a little over forty-one koku, which does not bear comparison in standing with the Oguri house, hatamoto of 2,500 koku. Abe Dōzan's Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy) takes that difference as “one thing that makes clear where Oguri and Katsu each stood in an age that set much store by lineage”.
The two began from the sword. The hall Tadamasa knocked at as a boy was that of Onogai Seiichirō of the Jikishinkage school. Katsu Rintarō too entered the hall of Onogai, who was his cousin. Katsu left it for Shimada Toranosuke's hall in 1838, at fifteen. From the overlap of those years, Sakamoto Fujiyoshi's Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke) holds it “very likely that at some point in their boyhood the two who later came into the sharpest opposition crossed swords in the same hall”, and calls it a strange chance.
Onogai is said to have praised Tadamasa warmly on watching him fence in later years: “who would have thought that this man's sword would reach such a pitch.” To Katsu the same Onogai said: learn Dutch studies and navigation rather than fencing. The man then called the finest swordsman in Japan sent one of his pupils away from the sword.
Where each stood on the Kanrin Maru
Both took part in the same voyage, the 1860 embassy to the United States, but not in the same ship. Tadamasa sailed as inspector (metsuke) in the American ship Powhatan; Katsu was captain of the Kanrin Maru, which went along as escort. The man in overall charge of the Kanrin Maru was the commissioner of warships Kimura Yoshitake (Settsu-no-kami, styled Kaishū), and Katsu was his subordinate. At the naval training school at Nagasaki too, Katsu had been under Kimura.
In later years, though, the crossing of the Pacific by the Kanrin Maru came to be told as Katsu's achievement alone. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi writes that “from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War it was trumpeted, bound up with the raising of patriotic feeling, as the great feat of ‘the Japanese, that is, Katsu Kaishū’”, and that on the Kanrin Maru in particular “many false images exist”. The mild Kimura said almost nothing of it in later years, and Fukuzawa Yukichi, who sailed in the same ship, left this in Fukuō Jiden (his autobiography): “Katsu Rintarō was a man very poor at sea, and for the whole voyage could not get out of his own cabin, like a sick man.”
One rises, the other sinks — the shape of their opposition
After he came home Tadamasa argued steadily for opening the country. Bakumatsu Seijika (statesmen of the last years of the shogunate) records that, when the call to close the country and expel the foreigners was loud and no one could say a word for opening it, “Oguri alone, with deference to nobody, set out what was fine in the civilization of America … and astonished the senior councillors and others”. Katsu himself names three men in his journal as arguing for opening the country in Edo: Ōkubo Ichiō, Oguri and Okabe Suruga.
The balance of power inside the shogunate divided into Katsu's line, backed by Matsudaira Yoshinaga (Shungaku) and recommended by Ōkubo Tadahiro, and Tadamasa's line, which argued for opening the country as reform-minded officials. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, taking the opposition to its root as “in the end, the opposition of Katsu Kaishū and Oguri Kōzukenosuke”, pointed out how oddly precisely the two men's careers change places.
The twenty-third day of the fourth month of 1863 — the day Tadamasa resigned in opposition to an increase of stipend for Yoshinobu. On the same day Katsu was given leave by the shogun Iemochi to found the naval training station at Kobe. Ishii Takashi called it, for Katsu, “the best day of his life”.
The fourteenth day of the fifth month of 1864 — while Tadamasa was without a post, Katsu rose to commissioner of warships and was given the title Awa-no-kami.
The tenth day of the eleventh month of 1864 — Katsu was dismissed as commissioner of warships, charged with keeping in touch with Chōshū. On the same day the building of the Yokosuka ironworks, which Tadamasa had long been pressing for, was formally approved.
When Katsu rose, Tadamasa sank; when Tadamasa rose, Katsu sank. Chōshū's defeat at the Kinmon incident, on the nineteenth day of the seventh month of 1864, sank Katsu and brought Tadamasa up.
1866: the secret he was told
In the middle of the second expedition against Chōshū, the shogunate, wanting Satsuma to join the army, made the dismissed Katsu commissioner of warships again and sent him to Osaka. The letter reached him on the twenty-seventh day of the fifth month of 1866. The alliance between Satsuma and Chōshū had been made in the first month of that year, but the shogunate did not know it.
The day before he left for Osaka, Tadamasa told Katsu a secret of the shogunate. Katsu looked back on it later in Hikawa Seiwa (his talks at Hikawa):
Oguri said to me in secret: your going west this time must be on business to do with the Chōshū negotiations. If so, we have such and such a plan, and no doubt you will agree with it; and that, he said, is why I venture to tell you this secret
The plan was to set up a prefectural system under the shogunate and, through the French minister Roches, borrow six million ryō in silver and several warships. No more than four or five men knew of it, Yoshinobu among them. Katsu said not a word against it then: “thinking argument useless, I merely assented” (Kainanroku).
On reaching Osaka, though, Katsu attacked Oguri fiercely before the senior councillors in the castle. His journal, Kaishū Nisshi, has the line “the treasure of the country being spent to nothing, pledging the land, borrowing coin … from France”, and sets out Oguri's plan as one that would “give the soil of Japan in pledge”. The prefectural system itself was not a bad idea, Katsu argued, but if it were to be done the shogunate should “first bring itself down and cut itself small” and then go at it.
On the Yokosuka ironworks alone, however, Katsu allowed him the credit in Kaigun Rekishi (a history of the navy): “Oguri Kōzukenosuke, holding the warship office along with the finance commissionership, saw the times well, understood that the navy must be enlarged, and was the first to argue for founding a shipyard … and this too deserves high praise.”
“Yasegaman no Setsu”, and Katsu's reply
Fukuzawa Yukichi wrote the draft of “Yasegaman no Setsu” (on keeping up appearances) in 1877. It took Katsu and Enomoto Takeaki to task, on the ground of the warrior's code, for how they had conducted themselves — shogunal officials who went on to serve the new government. Fukuzawa sent the draft as it stood to Katsu himself, asking his opinion: “is there perhaps some mistake of fact in it?” On the sixth day of the second month of the following year, Katsu answered:
What I do and do not do rests with me; blame and praise are other men's business, no concern of mine and no affair of mine
Fukuzawa did not make it public in Katsu's lifetime. Twenty-four years later, after Katsu died in 1899 at seventy-seven, it came out in 1901 — thirty-three years after Tadamasa was cut down in 1868 at forty-two.
The contrast as later years have handed it down
Sakamoto Fujiyoshi gives as one cause of the fixed picture of Tadamasa as a man who “had nothing in view but the shogunate” “the view of Oguri Tadamasa that his political enemy Katsu Kaishū spoke and wrote, well on into the Meiji era”. Behind the long tilt of judgment to one side lay a difference in the number of those who spoke, and in the years they went on speaking.
This site does not write one man down in order to honour the other. Its policy is to set out, as plainly as it can, what each chose and what each accomplished in the position he was placed in. The relation between two men who shared the way of the sword and could not agree on the way of politics is also a mirror of how tangled those last years of the shogunate were.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941