Tōgō Heihachirō, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet at the battle of Tsushima, once invited Oguri Kōzukenosuke's descendants to his own house and told them of his thanks. It was in the summer of 1912, exactly seven years after the end of the war with Russia.
The father and son who were invited
Those invited were two: Oguri Sadao, who restored the house of Oguri, and his son Matakichi, then twelve. Tōgō had always thought of the cause of the victory over Russia as bound up closely with the existence of the Yokosuka shipyard. His gratitude towards Oguri Kōzukenosuke, the shogunal official who had pressed the building through, was strong, and ever since he became the victorious country's admiral he had wished for a chance to meet the family in person and tell them what he felt.
The first naval action Tōgō experienced in his life was the Anglo-Satsuma war in the shogunate's last years. As a Satsuma samurai of about twenty he fired a gun against British ships. A man who knew that bitter defeat went on to study naval technique in Britain and led the Combined Fleet to victory.
At the meeting Tōgō, recalling the action against Russia, named first among its causes the greatness of the Meiji emperor's majesty. Then, as the first of the military causes, he is said to have expressed his thanks plainly: “How much it served us that Lord Kōzukenosuke had built the shipyard at Yokosuka beforehand is beyond reckoning.”
Abe Dōzan, the abbot of Fumon'in, the Oguri family temple, also set the same scene down as told to him by Sadao himself. There Tōgō's words run as follows.
The great victory at Tsushima was due to the majesty of His Majesty alone. But it was by the arsenal Kōzukenosuke built that the strength of the Japanese navy could be shown to the full.
The dedication on “benevolence, duty, propriety, wisdom, faith”
As they were leaving, Tōgō offered to give them a piece of his own writing in memory of the day. Sadao thanked him warmly for the kindness and then made one request: since he was to write something, would the dedication be made out not in his own name but in the name of the boy he had brought with him, his son Matakichi?
Tōgō asked Sadao where the name Matakichi came from. It was a name taken in each generation of the house of Oguri, from Tokugawa Ieyasu's praise of Tadamasa, the fourth of the line — “first spear again?” — and Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa himself had borne the name Matakichi. Learning this, Tōgō readily agreed to the request and promised to send the writing later.
What came after a while were two scrolls, one written vertically and one horizontally. The text of both was the same five characters, “benevolence, duty, propriety, wisdom, faith”. The whole of it, signature included, read: “Benevolence, duty, propriety, wisdom, faith. Summer of the year of the water rat. For Master Oguri Matakichi. Written by Tōgō.” The year of the water rat is 1912 in the sexagenary cycle, and the boy's name stands in the dedication as promised. The vertical scroll was presented to the priest Abe Dōzan of Fumon'in at his request and kept as a treasure of that temple. The other was kept by the Oguri family and later given to Tōzenji, where it hangs in the main hall.
A marshal of the navy from Satsuma invited to his own house the descendants of a man condemned as a rebel in the shogunate's last years, named him the first cause of the victory, and thanked him. And the dedication on the writing was in the name not of the head of the house but of a boy of twelve. The whole of this behaviour carries a particular weight for a time when Oguri's name had not yet been publicly cleared.
A navy does not grow in a country without a shipyard
Why did Tōgō weigh Yokosuka so heavily? The reason is simple: a navy cannot develop in a country that has no shipyard. In a bare thirty-odd years from 1868, Japan came to hold naval strength that did not suffer by comparison even with Russia, then a great military power. The foundation for it was planned in the shogunate's last years, and was nine parts finished by the time Satsuma and Chōshū took the government over.
Without a place to repair ships, a ship must be carried abroad at every breakdown — those were Oguri's own words when he argued for building Yokosuka. Half a century later, it was because that fear had not come true that the Combined Fleet could fight as it did off Tsushima.
The navy's regard was not Tōgō's alone. Into the Shōwa years, Rear-Admiral Hoshino Moriichi, then head of the Yokosuka naval arsenal, attended the memorial service for the seventy-first anniversary of Oguri's death at Fumon'in, with two staff officers in attendance. Seeing Tōgō's writing hanging in the study, he said, “That is a good memorial”; before the grave behind the main hall he stood long with his head bowed and did not move; and after the service he addressed some three hundred who had come to worship. He had come to the grave, he said, because he had been appointed head of the Yokosuka shipyard which Oguri founded, and had come to report his appointment. “The Yokosuka shipyard, which you opened with your pains and your unbending spirit, … is today an arsenal to be proud of before the world.” “As long as our Japanese navy exists, your achievement will never sink out of sight.”
Abe Dōzan writes that the navy's people are grateful to Oguri “standing quite outside praise and blame”, because they think of the spirit in which he set up a shipyard that no one before him had thought of. Set aside political position and the distinction between rebel army and imperial army, and it was a case of practical men judging a practical man justly. Tōgō's words have been handed down to this day as a symbol of that judgement, and they led on as well to the mood in which the busts were later raised.
Sources: Oguri Tadahito, “The Russo-Japanese war and Oguri Tadamasa”, in Tatsunami, the journal of the Oguri Kōzukenosuke memorial society; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941
→ The statue was at first to be Verny's alone ／ The battle of Tsushima and Yokosuka ／ Kuniko, who carried on the house of Oguri