Mukasa Ginsuke — his first name was Ginnosuke. He was born inside the Oguri residence at Kanda Surugadai in Edo, the second son of Mukasa Yūzaemon, the head steward of the Oguri household. The back of the gravestone he had put up himself in his lifetime is cut: “second son of Mukasa Yūzaemon Takanari, steward to Oguri Kōzukenosuke. Born at the Oguri residence, Surugadai, Edo.”
The Mukasa had been stewards since the time of Tadamasa's father Tadataka. A receipt of 1832 for goods delivered to the temple carries “Mukasa Yūzaemon, black seal” beside the name “Matakichi”, that is Tadataka, which shows that Yūzaemon held a post of weight and went as the house's representative. The family lived within the Oguri residence. Yūzaemon was also a man of such standing that on the anniversary of Tadataka's death he went in the family's place to worship at Hozenji, the family temple at Ushigome Yokodera-chō.
To Gonda in his father's place
In the third month of 1868, when Tadamasa moved to his fief at the village of Gonda in Jōshū, Yūzaemon was to have gone with him. He was past seventy by then, however, and troubled by high blood pressure — a stroke, in some accounts — so he was left out of the party and, it is said, sent his son Ginnosuke to Gonda as a page in his place. Yūzaemon himself stayed in Edo and served as the steward left in charge.
What Ginnosuke was charged with at Gonda is clearly on record. In the third month, when the band of rioters gathered at Sannokura came down on the village of Gonda, the Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries) records this.
“Her ladyship the mother, Omichi, Omasa and the women, together with Sanehiko's household, were withdrawn into the hills within the village, with Mukasa Ginnosuke and Satō Tōshichi attending them and village officials besides”
His task was to get all the women and children of the house — Tadamasa's mother Kuniko, his wife Michiko, Masako, who was betrothed to Matakichi, and the family of the steward Tsukamoto Masahiko — away into the hills on the western foot of Mount Haruna, together with the village headman Satō Tōshichi. While Tadamasa himself led more than a hundred men against the enemy, it was this boy who held the lives of the household.
The one who was not cut down
In the intercalary fourth month Ginnosuke went to Takasaki with Matakichi. They were shut up in Sekijōji, and on the seventh four men — Matakichi, Tsukamoto Masahiko, Kutsukake Tōgorō and Tada Kinnosuke — were beheaded at the Takasaki domain's prison. Ginnosuke was counted among them, and he alone was spared.
The reason handed down in the family is this. Suwa Ehaku, the abbot of Tōzenji — who in 1868 went by the name Akuhaku, written 悪伯, and took the name Ehaku in the household register of 1874, and who was then forty-nine — saw the boy in his bonds, thought it too cruel to cut down one of that age, and begged for his life over and over, beside himself. That, it is said, moved the men who had taken him. Another account holds that the boy was so handsome that the deputy inspecting officer Hara Yasutarō thought it a pity to cut him down. A photograph taken when he was about twenty survives; he is described as tall and fair, with long narrow eyes and a high nose.
His age at the time differs between the sources. Abe Dōzan gives eighteen; the memorial society's own inquiry gives sixteen, with fourteen also proposed. On being released he was given three ryō — one ryō in another account — and reached his mother's family home in Saitama safely.
The later half of his life, as a village head
Ginnosuke was then adopted by Mukasa Takesada, a wealthy farmer of the same Mimuro village in Kita-Adachi district, succeeded as the thirteenth of the Mukasa house, and changed his name to Ginsuke. He is said to have studied English from foreigners at Yokohama, his ambitions high. In time he became head of Mimuro village, and threw himself so far into village government and public works that he is said to have used up the Mukasa property. When young men of the village went as conscripts to the naval corps at Yokosuka, he would say, “very well, I will write you a letter to the commandant”, and give them a note to take. This was in the years when the shipyard his old lord had built had become the naval arsenal.
Of Gonda, on the other hand, he never spoke. In his cups he would shed tears without minding his family, and lament that he had failed his lord and failed his friends. His debt to the priest Ehaku, who had begged for his life, he is said never to have forgotten. His son Kyōsuke later told connections of the Oguri family and researchers that “my father did not speak of it in his lifetime”.
He died of illness on 1 January 1921 at the Kyōundō hospital, which stood at Kanda Surugadai, the same place where he was born. He was sixty-seven. The grave he had put up himself in his lifetime is cut on the front: “Grave of Mukasa Ginsuke, the thirteenth”. A record survives of a day in September 1933 when Abe Dōzan, then abbot of Fumon'in, rode out by bicycle with an old man of the district as guide and visited the site of the house, still standing in the middle of the fields, and the Hakue Kannon hall where the graves of the generations of the Mukasa stand in a row.
The family kept the last long letter Tadamasa wrote to Yūzaemon. A set of Hyakunin Isshu cards, said to have been given them by the house of Oguri, also remained: each card carefully painted and the poem written on it, the backs in gold, a thing of some luxury.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941; Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family), and Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society; Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7
→ A loyal young man, and the story of how he guarded his lord's head