Ōkuma Shigenobu came from the Saga domain, rose through the centre of the Meiji government's diplomacy and finance, and later became prime minister. He stood on different political ground from Oguri Kōzukenosuke, a shogunal official, but the two houses were connected by marriage: Ōkuma's wife Ayako came of the Saegusa, a hatamoto family related to the Oguri.
Ōkuma's wife Ayako, and the house of Oguri
Ayako was the second daughter of the hatamoto Saegusa Shichishirō Yorinaga, and had an elder brother, Saegusa Moritomi. The sources call her “a cousin of Oguri Kōzukenosuke” and “a niece of Oguri Tadataka”, Kōzukenosuke's father; either way she was closely related to the house of Oguri. The Saegusa residence stood at Tsukiji, east of Nishi Hongan-ji, and the name “Saegusa Shichishirō” appears on the sectional maps of Edo. From 1869 to 1871 Ōkuma himself kept a residence at Tsukiji on some five thousand tsubo of ground, the site of the hatamoto Togawa Harima-no-kami's house.
The connection is said to have reached Yokosuka as well. Most of the loan contracted with France for the building of the Yokosuka ironworks had been repaid by Oguri's own hand, but the new government was hard pressed to repay the remainder, and it came to the point where France would have seized Yokosuka. Ōkuma, it is said, talked businessmen of Kyoto and Osaka into finding the money, and the danger was escaped. It should be set down with this, though, that Abe Dōzan, who records the matter, enters the reservation himself that “a little research is needed here”.
Those who supported the mother and child left behind
Oguri's surviving child Kuniko was born in the castle town of Aizu in the sixth month of 1868. Her father and his adopted heir Matakichi had been cut down; the pregnant Michiko escaped from the village of Gonda, reached Aizu by way of Niigata, and was delivered there. She was the only blood of the house of Oguri that remained.
When Michiko and Kuniko returned to Tokyo, after waiting for the Aizu war to end, the first to look after them was Minomura Rizaemon, the man Oguri had once picked out, who had become chief manager of Mitsui. Michiko's own family were the Tatebe, below the Kanda Myōjin shrine, but she did not turn to them, saying that, having once married out, she did not wish to be a burden on them — so Oguri Sadao, who became the adopted heir, told Abe Dōzan. Minomura sheltered mother and child at his villa in Fukagawa and took it on out of his old debt, although people whispered behind his back that he was keeping a mistress with a child. Even after Minomura's death the two remained under the protection of the Minomura house.
Things changed on 27 March 1885, when Michiko died at forty-eight at the Minomura villa. Kuniko, left alone at eighteen by the old count, was taken into the house of Ōkuma Shigenobu, formerly councillor of state and minister of finance, because Ōkuma's wife Ayako was a relation of Oguri's. So the tradition that “the Minomura took her in” and the tradition that “Ōkuma took her in” are not one right and one wrong: they come one after the other — the Minomura house while her mother lived, the Ōkuma house after her mother's death.
Keeping the house of Oguri going
On 10 December 1887 Kuniko, twenty by the old count, took a husband, with Ōkuma Shigenobu and Ayako acting as go-betweens. He was Yano Sadao, born on the twenty-eighth day of the eleventh month of 1861 as the third son of Yano Teizō, of samurai family, of the village of Saiki in Nankai district, Ōita prefecture; he was twenty-seven by the old count.
Sadao's elder brother was Yano Fumio (Ryūkei), known as a journalist and a politician. Fumio studied at Keiō Gijuku, was deputy chief writer of the Yūbin Hōchi Shinbun, entered the finance ministry, left office in the political crisis of 1881, and thereafter, as Ōkuma's right hand, played a central part in founding the Constitutional Reform Party and became president of the Hōchi Shinbun, which Ōkuma had bought. Sadao studied at the same Keiō Gijuku, taught English at a middle school, and, as his brother went into politics, came to work as a “speech man”, that is, a public speaker. The marriage was settled in December of the year his brother set about reforming the Hōchi Shinbun.
Until then the house of Oguri had been held for twenty years by Oguri Teishirō Tadayoshi, Matakichi's younger brother, as the thirteenth of the line. By the household register, Teishirō gave the headship over to Sadao and Kuniko and retired on 10 December 1887, the day of the marriage. On 5 September 1898 Kuniko bore a son, and he was named Matakichi, the name used by the house of Oguri generation after generation. So the blood of the executed head of the house carried, barely, into the next generation.
A statesman of the Restoration, and the house of the rebel side
Although the Hagakure of the Saga domain sternly forbade samurai to mix with merchants, Ōkuma kept company with merchants readily. That Minomura called often at Ōkuma's house, and that Ōkuma trusted him deeply, is not unconnected with the part the two houses played for Oguri's family.
Ōkuma also left words about Oguri's work. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi reports that in later years Ōkuma said “Oguri was fated to be done away with”, the reason being that the new Meiji government's design for modernization was a copy of his, point for point.
In September 1913 Ōkuma and his wife visited the grave of Oguri Tadataka at Hōonji in Teramachi, Niigata, and a service was held before it. Tadataka had died of illness at his post as commissioner of Niigata, and the grave was put up by Kōzukenosuke. And at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Yokosuka naval arsenal, on 27 September 1915, Ōkuma, who gave the congratulatory address as prime minister, was the only one to touch on Oguri Kōzukenosuke's services, modestly though he did it. Those who worked for Oguri's commemoration recorded that the absence of his name from the other high officials' addresses gave them “a strange feeling”.
Sources: 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; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family), and Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society; Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957
→ Kuniko, “the only blood of the house of Oguri”, born at Aizu