It is not as well known as the Yokosuka ironworks or the Hyōgo Shōsha, but Oguri put one more plan before the shogunate's councillors: the publishing of a newspaper. It was a plan for the first Western-style newspaper in Japan. And this plan too was never carried out.
The idea began with a printing press seen in America
The starting point lies on the voyage of the embassy to the United States in 1860. On the fifth day of the third month the Powhatan put in at Hawaii, and the party landed at Honolulu — “the island of Oahu in the Sandwich Islands of the Pacific, the port of Honolulu”. The place Oguri went straight off to see here was a newspaper office.
Morita Okatarō Kiyoyuki, the head of a finance group who went with Oguri as his right hand, set down what he saw of the press there in Akō Nikki, his diary of the American journey.
The wheel of the machine is called a press; it prints so fast that it does some sixteen hundred sheets in a day.
Sixteen hundred sheets a day. To a party that knew nothing but hand-pulled woodblocks, this was a shock. Oguri's view, though, did not end in simple wonder. Having the interpreter Namura Gohachirō translate the articles of the printed paper, he found many errors in them and criticized them sharply as “nothing but loose rumour, not to be trusted”. At his first meeting with it he saw at once both the power of the newspaper as a vessel and the unreliability of what it carried.
On the American mainland that followed, he was made to feel that power the more. By Abe Dōzan, no sooner had the party landed at San Francisco than its movements were reported in the next day's papers in full detail with photographs, and the party filled not only the dailies but the weeklies as well. The diary of Johnston, the American naval officer who accompanied them, records that of the whole party it was Oguri alone who felt the power of the newspapers strongly.
The plan to have Fukuzawa Yukichi publish it
What Oguri faced after his return was a country whose opinion was split four ways and could not be brought together — loyalty to the emperor, expulsion of the foreigners, support of the shogunate, the opening of the ports, the closing of the country. Abe Dōzan says that in the face of this confusion Oguri thought hard on two points — how to unify the thinking of the people, and how to correct mistaken views of foreign countries — and that his answer was the newspaper. Politics must not be a matter of secrecy; only by letting the people know the policy of the state and the state of affairs abroad does a country act as one.
The man Oguri had in mind to carry it was Fukuzawa Yukichi. Fukuzawa was seven years younger than Oguri. Born in 1834 at the Nakatsu domain's warehouse quarters at Dōjima in Osaka, the second son of Fukuzawa Hyakusuke, a samurai of Nakatsu, he had crossed to America at twenty-seven as an attendant of Kimura Settsu-no-kami Kaishū, the commissioner of warships who was in overall charge of the Kanrin Maru. He had seen America in the same year as Oguri, in another ship.
The plan was smothered by the shogunate's councillors. The reason was plain. The shogunate of the day was wearing itself out over leaks that came from somewhere even while it kept its policy strictly secret. To bring out a newspaper and scatter it among the whole people was out of the question — such was the councillors' decision.
Nihon Shinbun Hattatsu-shi (a history of the development of the newspaper in Japan) records the affair thus.
Oguri at that time had a plan to have Fukuzawa Yukichi publish a newspaper, but there was no one within the shogunate who would listen to it, and in the end he could not carry his purpose. When the shogunate fell in 1867, Oguri is said to have remarked that, had there been a newspaper, and had the secrets of court and shogunate and the inner state of government and people been laid open, matters would not have come to this.
It was after the shogunate fell, then, that Oguri himself said that with a newspaper things would not have come so far. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi likewise reports Oguri's own later remark that, had it come about, opinion in Japan in those years would have been much changed.
The line Kurimoto Joun carried on
Oguri never carried this plan out himself. The man who took it up was Kurimoto Joun, his right hand in the building of the Yokosuka ironworks. After 1868 Kurimoto refused office altogether, joined the Yūbin Hōchi Shinbun (later the Hōchi Shinbun) in 1873, and argued, on Oguri's lines, for unity of national opinion and the priority of national defence. A part of Oguri's policy was carried on in the field of public argument.
Men who would carry the politics of later years grew up around Kurimoto. Hara Takashi, Inukai Tsuyoshi and Ozaki Yukio — all of them began their lives' work as newspaper reporters, and gained their grounding as politicians under Kurimoto. Inukai Tsuyoshi in particular called Kurimoto “teacher” all his life and himself a “disciple”, and in March 1892 wrote a short life of Kurimoto Joun.
The plan of making things, the Yokosuka ironworks; and the plan of conveying information, the newspaper. Different fields, but the root of the thinking — to make the workings of society new — was the same. Oguri's list of proposals holds, besides these, the setting up of gas lamps, a postal and telegraph service, and a railway between Edo and Yokohama. The plan for a newspaper is to be read within that company.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941
→ Kurimoto Joun — from Ezo to the shogunate's councils, a lifelong friend