Ikeda Kayo was born in 1852, a daughter of Ikeda Tamikichi, an infantryman of the Oguri house. The family were the Ikeda of Uenokubo in the village of Gonda, who went by the house name Kamiya. After Oguri Tadamasa came to Gonda she was always going to Tōzenji to help, she said.
Of those who saw the Oguri household at close quarters while it lived at Tōzenji in Gonda, she is the only one whose account of them reached the Shōwa era.
The account taken down in the autumn of 1943
In the autumn of 1943 Ōtsubo Motoji, ill and resting at Kawarayu, went to Gonda and met Kayo for the first time, introduced by Ikeda Sozō, who kept the Ikedaya inn. She was ninety-one. Seventy-five years had passed since the spring Oguri was at Gonda.
Ōtsubo set down how she was that day: “a nose planted solidly in the middle of a round, kindly face, gentle long narrow eyes, and from a large mouth the story of seeing Lord Oguri's face at seventeen comes pouring out as though it were yesterday.” Her account was taken down several times after that, and later went into print.
“Tall, with a pockmarked face”
Lord Oguri came to Tōzenji when I was seventeen. It was the cold time of year, and he set about building the house straight away. His lordship was tall, with a pockmarked face; his colour was dark, but his face was gentle. The young lord was tall as well, and he was fair, a fine-looking man. His lordship went out walking now and then, but the young lord rode to Kannonyama every day
That his face was pockmarked is written in the American record kept by those who sailed with the embassy as well: “his face, a little pitted by smallpox, shone with intelligence and understanding.” On his height, the same record calls Oguri “a small man”.
Kannonyama, where the young lord rode every day, is the place where Oguri meant to build a house and a school.
“And then there was Outa, twenty-two or twenty-three”
Let me see, there may have been twenty retainers. Her ladyship was tall, with a slender face, a wonderfully beautiful person, the very picture of a princess on the stage; and then there was Outa, twenty-two or twenty-three, and about three maidservants. I cannot really remember it clearly
To the eyes of Kayo at seventeen, Michiko was “the very picture of a princess on the stage”. A woman called Outa is counted apart from the three maidservants. That name is taken up in a separate article, together with the “Oaya” who appears in the Oguri household accounts. Kayo herself put in the caution that she “cannot really remember it clearly”, and the account carries it no further than that.
Botamochi, and the dolls for the girls' festival
Her ladyship was with child, and now and then a maidservant would take her hand and a retainer would attend her, and she would come walking near our house and look in. I made her botamochi, and she ate one mouthful, laughed, and went home as she was. Later a groom brought dolls for the girls' festival, and said they were from her ladyship
She spoke of life at the temple too. The fifteen-mat room at the back was his lordship's and the young lord's, and the rest of the place was wide, so they all lived in it any way they could. The “fresh young lady” who was to be married to the young lord once the house was finished — Masako, Matakichi's betrothed — was there as well. Among the retainers, “a young one of seventeen or eighteen called Mukasa Ginnosuke or some such gave himself airs, but a samurai of about forty named Arakawa seems to have managed everything.”
Her father and her brother
When his lordship was taken off to Sannokura I knew nothing at all about it. My father and my brother became Lord Oguri's retainers, and my brother went with her ladyship to Aizu. Oh, it was nothing but frightening
Her father Tamikichi was forty-one at the time. He joined the escort for the wife's escape as Nakajima Sanzaemon's other second-in-command. The name “Tamikichi” appears in the letter of commendation that came from Oguri Teishirō to the escorts in June 1869, and it is cut on the burial mound behind Tōzenji as well. Kayo stayed at Gonda.
“My brother” is Ikeda Denzaburō, later Den, and Akinobu. A sumo wrestler kept by the Ueda domain had died while staying at a relative's house at Hagiu, and Tamikichi took in the child left behind and adopted him; he was Kayo's betrothed. The affair of Oguri began just before the two were to drink the marriage cups. Denzaburō, who knew the country from Agatsuma into Shinshū well, went ahead as guide on the road to Aizu; after the castle fell he crossed from Sendai to Hakodate in the Kaiyō Maru and fought at Goryōkaku, and he did not return to Gonda but became a policeman in Kyoto.
In the sixth year he turned up again. He had set up house in Osaka and had a wife and children, Kayo said, and he wept and asked her to forgive him. On that visit Denzaburō announced that, having nothing to offer at his lord's grave, he would offer the head of Tōshichi; the headman Satō Tōshichi was terrified, there was a great commotion, and the men of the village came between them and settled it. Koitabashi Ryōhei puts this in June 1872. Tōshichi died not long afterwards.
Denzaburō went on sending Kayo some money every year until he died. The parcels held Kyoto rouge and small wares, it is said. Kayo later took Shūkichi as her husband.
→ Honda Sanzaemon — the man who went to fetch his lord's head ／ The twenty who joined the escort
“He did not stir a hair”
Oguri's end is not something Kayo saw. She told it as what she had heard in the village.
His lordship was killed by treachery. The retainers were cut down bitter at it, saying it was too good a man to kill in such a place and in such a way; but his lordship, they said, did not stir a hair. What a great man he was
After this passage the account adds: “tears shone in the old woman's eyes.”
Kayo died in 1952, past a hundred years old. Ōtsubo wrote of her: “she left us a great many precious conversations, and she was the only person who knew Oguri's face.” Koitabashi Ryōhei, it should be said, makes Kayo Tamikichi's younger sister.
Sources: Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975 (the account taken down in “Oguri Koborebanashi”, pp. 345–349); Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family), Asao-sha, and Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941; Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987
→ The end at the riverbed at Mizunuma ／ Suwa Ehaku — the fourteenth abbot of Tōzenji