In the shogunate's last years Oguri was negotiating a loan of the vast sum of six million dollars. The building of the Yokosuka ironworks, the reform of the army and navy, the setting of trade to rights — for a shogunate hard pressed in its finances, money from abroad was to have been the lever that moved all of these at once. The loan was never concluded, and vanished with the shogunate. And after Oguri's death this “six million dollars that never was” came to be used for a long time as material for calling him a traitor to his country.
It began not with a loan but with a plan for a company
The thing did not begin with borrowing money. The memorandum of enquiry on the organization of a trading company, submitted to the shogunate in the eighth month of 1865 in the name of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, commissioner of finance, opens as follows.
Lately, when Kōzukenosuke was at Yokohama on official business, the French minister proposed that a joint-company arrangement be set up …
Its substance was to put a stop to the smuggling then rife, to take back into Japanese hands the profit of a trade monopolized by foreign merchants, and to found one great trading company in order to put the management of trade and the business of the customs in order. In particular, Japan was to found a “great company of commerce and navigation” and station its representative in Paris, while the representative of a French “company of export and import” was to be placed at Yokohama, the two buying and selling goods according to the rates of the moment. The capital was to be put up by the merchants of each country. The man who worked for this plan on the French side was Fleury Hérard, a great banker of Paris.
In 1866 Coullet came to Yokohama as the representative of French business. Oguri negotiated with him and reached a conclusion. The minister Roches recorded in a report dated 31 October 1866 (the twenty-third day of the ninth month by the Japanese calendar) that Oguri Kōzukenosuke had gone to Osaka to show the shogun the draft contract with Coullet, and that the plan for founding a great Japanese company of commerce and transport to deal with a French company was to be explained to the shogun.
How the six million dollars broke down
The loan negotiations were not with France alone. They were conducted evenly with Britain and France, six million dollars each. And the six million from France, broken down, was to take the form of one million from the British Oriental Bank and the remaining five million jointly from the French Société Générale and the Oriental Bank. On the training of the army and navy too, Oguri took good care to keep the balance between Britain and France.
Britain was wary of all this. Winchester, the chargé d'affaires, asked with van Polsbroek, the Dutch consul-general, for an interview with the senior councillors, and demanded sharply to know whether it was true, as they had heard, that there was a plan to export raw silk in bulk to a single market in Europe in order to buy ships and arms. The councillors turned it aside, saying that which country in Europe Japan contracted with was for the Japanese government to decide, and that it was only natural to meet the payment out of the country's surplus produce. Parkes, who was to become minister later, pressed them too: how could so large an ironworks be built with no money, and if they went ahead Britain would obstruct it.
The story that he “pledged the country's territory”
What touches Oguri's honour most closely is the question whether this loan carried any security. What was widely believed through the Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa eras was that Oguri had tried to borrow money from France on the security of Japan's own territory. The man who said so first was Katsu Kaishū.
In the twelfth month of 1867 word came from France that the thing was off. From what the French minister said to me afterwards — that it was astonishing a man of Oguri's stamp should be knocked off his feet by the breaking off of a mere six million ryō — one can tell how disappointed Oguri was at the time. Oguri was ready to stake the Tokugawa's whole realm for a mere six million ryō.
Katsu Kaishū, Hikawa Seiwa
Sakamoto Fujiyoshi writes plainly that this is a misunderstanding. At least in the contract concluded in the summer of 1866, there is no mortgage whatever in the loan between Oguri and Coullet. Ōtsuka Takematsu's Bakumatsu Gaikōshi no Kenkyū, of the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo, and Ishii Takashi's Meiji Ishin no Butaiura (behind the scenes of the Meiji Restoration) have made this clear; the latter states that “the loan contract concluded between Coullet and Oguri had no mortgage of any kind in it”.
It is not that there was no talk at all resembling security. Marius Jansen's Sakamoto Ryōma and the Meiji Restoration reports that, at the stage of the sixth month of 1867, instructions from the senior councillor Ogasawara Nagamichi, the head of foreign affairs, to Kurimoto Joun appear to have included security in the form of revenue from the development of Ezo, or of the development rights or the coal-mining rights there. Joun crossed to France for loan negotiations that took this in, but before it was even formally discussed he received word that the shogunate had fallen. That is a different stage from Oguri's negotiation.
The propaganda of the “French danger”
Parkes and the Satsuma-Chōshū side made much of the “French danger”. But that danger, as Jansen also notes, was out of the question. France then had no power to invade Japan, and the land troops it could ship from Saigon came to two hundred at most. Oguri knew how matters stood. What France wanted was the profit of trade; as for territorial ambition, it was Russia first and Britain second that called for wariness. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi writes that the charge that “Oguri risked the colonization of Japan in order to borrow six million dollars from France” must plainly be sent back.
The loan was never realized, and the shogunate went forward with such undertakings as the Yokosuka ironworks and the Hyōgo Shōsha out of limited resources. Katsu, long afterwards in the Meiji era, said of Oguri that he “had both the strengths and the weaknesses of a Mikawa samurai”, and that “it was a pity for him that he was narrow”. That talk fixed the image of Oguri for a long time.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987 (quoting Ōtsuka Takematsu, Bakumatsu Gaikōshi no Kenkyū; Ishii Takashi, Meiji Ishin no Butaiura; Marius Jansen, Sakamoto Ryōma and the Meiji Restoration; and Katsu Kaishū, Hikawa Seiwa)
→ The Franco-Japanese joint-company scheme, and the setting of trade to rights → The Hyōgo Shōsha → Katsu Kaishū — a fellow of the sword, and his greatest political opponent