Early in the Shōwa era two well-known men came one after the other to Fumon'in at Ōmiya in Saitama prefecture, the temple that holds the Oguri family graves: the writer Tokutomi Sohō and the prime minister Okada Keisuke. Their visits show how the judgment on Oguri, who had lain under the name of enemy of the court through the Meiji era, moved in those years.
Tokutomi Sohō's visit — May 1933
Tokutomi Sohō, the author of Kinsei Nihon Kokumin-shi (a history of the Japanese people in the modern age), came to Fumon'in with his wife in May 1933, shown the way by the head of the Ōmiya police station. Abe Dōzan, then abbot, had been told by the historian Ninagawa Arata that “Sohō has little sympathy for Oguri and no sound historical view of him”, and so had his private doubts. Sohō, however, was smiling the whole time.
Taken round, Sohō offered incense before the unlettered stone where Oguri's head was buried, prayed in silence a while, and did reverence with his whole heart to the spirit of an unfortunate servant of the state. Abe then led him without a word to the grave of the founder of the line, Oguri Tadamasa, and Sohō, looking only at the name in religion and the date “the eighteenth day of the ninth month of 1616”, said this.
The grave of Tadamasa, founder of the Oguri line, the eighteenth day of the ninth month of 1616 ……
The name Matakichi was given him by Ieyasu. A master of the spear, he was.
Abe was astonished. He left it on record: “I have met many people until now, but there has been no other man who could look at Tadamasa's grave, with nothing but this name in religion and this date, and say at once that it was Tadamasa's tomb.”
The account of the visit in the Tōkyō Nichinichi Shinbun
Sohō wrote about the visit in “Nichinichi Dayori”, his column in the evening edition of the Tōkyō Nichinichi Shinbun.
From there we went to Fumon'in on the edge of Ōmiya town. This is the family temple of the house of Oguri. Led by the priest Abe, we went to the Oguri graves and paid our respects at the graves of the generations. On the founder Tadamasa's stone the characters for 1616 showed faintly. And before the unlettered stone where Kōzukenosuke's head is buried we offered a stick of incense. The present writer is a pupil of old Katsu Kaishū, who stood on different political ground from Kōzukenosuke. Yet I pity and grieve for Kōzukenosuke — bold, pressing forward, firm in what he believed, loyal to the house he served, and wishing, when he founded the dock at Yokosuka, that it should at least be a house for sale with a storehouse attached
Tokutomi Sohō, “Nichinichi Dayori”, as quoted in Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy)
He went out of his way to say that he was a pupil of Katsu Kaishū, and then wrote that he pitied and grieved for what Oguri had wished to do. That is where the weight of the piece lies. By Abe's account, it was only after this article appeared that the Oguri family temple became known, and letters and words of encouragement began to come in from unexpected quarters.
In the same article, though, Sohō also wrote: “the end of Oguri Kōzukenosuke was a tragedy indeed. But he could never have brought himself to keep his life whole and take office under the Meiji government.” Abe opposed this head on. Kōzukenosuke was not a man to throw his life away; a short-tempered hero who went with the current and chased a name might have killed himself, but Kōzukenosuke had no such small thoughts, and it is right to see him as a man who fell halfway while striving to rebuild the state of the day to come.
Sohō and his wife planted a pine with their own hands to mark the visit. By the time Abe wrote his book, it is said, the pine had already grown to more than a man's height.
Okada Keisuke's visit — June 1935
The other visitor, Okada Keisuke, was an admiral and the prime minister who formed a cabinet in 1934. In June 1935 he came to Fumon'in as prime minister in office, to honour Oguri as a benefactor of the Japanese navy.
Many navy men came to Fumon'in in those years: the admirals Kuroi Teijirō, Katō Kanji and Takeshita Isamu among the navy's leading figures, and the minister Tokonami. Before the war the head of the Yokosuka naval arsenal came every year and held a service before the grave. Besides Tokutomi Sohō, such men as Tōyama Mitsuru and Itō Chiyū showed their goodwill. In the temple grounds stands the “stone for the summoning of Oguri Kōzukenosuke's spirit”, inscribed in the hand of Prince Tokugawa Iesato, with Ninagawa Arata's text cut on the back.
Abe also set down that, when he spoke with Okada Keisuke, he asked how it could be that the world still did not recognize the Yokosuka naval arsenal as Oguri's idea, and that the two agreed the fault should be laid at the historians' door.
The argument the visits brought on
These visits had another side to them, however. The claim that Oguri's head is buried at Fumon'in was itself disputed. Koitabashi Ryōhei holds that the head was taken back from Hōrinji in Tatebayashi and returned to Gonda, so that the Fumon'in burial has nothing to do with the historical fact; and he records that, once the prime minister himself came to worship at Fumon'in in June 1935, it came to the point where the local historian Toyokuni Kakudō took the matter up in no. 220 of Jōmō oyobi Jōmōjin, in August 1935.
Visits by a leading figure of the press and by a sitting prime minister pushed Oguri's rehabilitation a long way forward. At the same time they set alight the argument over where his grave is.
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)
→ The day a prime minister came to pay his respects → Ninagawa Arata's research → Tatebayashi: the night the heads were taken back