The “one come again” in Nakazato Kaizan's Daibosatsu Tōge

Nakazato Kaizan's Daibosatsu Tōge was begun at the end of the Meiji era, started to appear from the beginning of the Taishō years, was written on until the author's death in 1944, and was left unfinished. It was made into plays and into films, and carried the reading public for more than twenty years. Kaizan himself, it is said, disliked having it called a “popular novel” and asked that it be called a “Mahayana novel” instead.

Oguri Kōzukenosuke appears in this long story many times, and not as a passing minor figure either. Abe Dōzan wrote: “the Oguri Kōzukenosuke who appears in this Daibosatsu Tōge is drawn without error and with nothing wanting; he is Oguri come again, I think. Oguri has found a good friend.”

Where Oguri comes out most strongly is volume seven, “the Ocean volume”. It is the only volume in the whole work with an English title, and Abe Dōzan remarked that “one has the feeling that this volume was written almost for Oguri”.

The key to the volume is a character named Komai Jinzaburō, formerly Komai Noto-no-kami of the Kōfu garrison, who is made good at English. The Komai of the story is surveying the depth of the sea at the village of Yokosuka under Oguri's orders — that is, he is placed on the ground where the survey for the shipyard was made. Standing on the beach at Kujūkuri, Komai says this to Yamada Hakuun.

“This sea is called the Pacific Ocean. One would translate it as the great peaceful sea, or the great expanse of water. There is not one thing between us and the country of America. We are looking at the widest sea in the world from the point at which it can be seen at its widest.”

What is entertaining is the scene in which a group head under the commissioner of warships turns up at the survey ground at Yokosuka. Coming on the strength of Katsu Awa's name, the group head finds fault with a flag out in the offing: “that is not the crest of the Takasaki domain, is it?” A subordinate answers, “it looks like a standing wave in a circle.” At which the group head realizes, “there is no mistaking it: this is the crest of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, commissioner of finance”, and consternation comes over his face. The standing wave in a circle is the crest of the house of Oguri, and Abe Dōzan adds a note that it had originally been a five-ring pagoda, changed to the standing wave in later generations.

From page 511 of the same volume, what stands is no longer the narrative of a novel but an essay on Oguri.

“That the shipyard at Yokosuka in Sagami came chiefly out of Oguri Kōzukenosuke's own mind needs no saying. Not the shipyard at Yokosuka alone: the martial arts academy, the military training school, the Kaiseijo, the naval establishment — not one of the shogunate's new military and diplomatic institutions but waited on Oguri's strength. Even such a man as Katsu Awa (Kaishū) could not lift his head before Oguri, either in authority or in ability.”

The well-known passage about forgetting follows.

“Of all the names at the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, the name of Oguri Kōzukenosuke is one that should be forgotten less than any other; and since the Restoration it has been forgotten as thoroughly as a name can be.”

Kaizan explained the reason by a comparison with the theatre. The great closing scene of the handing over of Edo Castle was brought down as a curtain by two men — Saigō Takamori, “an actor worth a thousand ryō”, and Katsu Awa as his supporting player — “with as neat a turn of hand as the passing over of a kitten”, so that in that one act every other actor became wholly needless. “History, for the time being, is always the history of the winning side.” Having said so, he writes that “if the stage had been turned rightly (or had it turned the other way), the actor standing face to face with Saigō at that moment would have been not Katsu but Oguri”.

His judgement on page 514 runs thus.

“At least around the time of the Meiji Restoration, it is a fact that in military affairs, in diplomacy and in finance there was not one man who could stand beside him.”

Kaizan went further and set up the supposition “if Oguri had succeeded”. The Tokugawa had already returned power to the emperor, and Oguri's mind had long been settled on putting a system of prefectures into effect, so that even then the shogunate's high days would not have come back. Oguri was not a man to ride a wave of advantage to satisfy an ambition, so that falling in with the general course might rather have gone smoothly. On that ground he regrets that the name of this “man of parts without fortune”, who met his end in a corner of the country in Jōshū, goes unsung.

Oguri does not appear in the Ocean volume alone. The third book, “the volume of Dōan and Bora-hachi”, has a scene in which a Western-style powder works is built at Takinogawa, on the outskirts of Edo. Officers of the government come out to the neighbourhood of Jinbei's water mill at Takinogawa and begin staking out the ground, and word goes round that the plan seems to use the flow of the river. In time it turns out to be a powder works. So the passage opens.

“This powder works, unlike the making of powder as it had been done before, means the building of the first Western-style powder works in Japan. The plan was the undertaking of Oguri Kōzukenosuke and Takeda Ayasaburō together, and Sawa Tarōzaemon joined it somewhat later.”

On the same page stands: “Oguri Kōzukenosuke, who planned this powder works, was a man of parts of the first order and the foremost advocate of fighting on within the shogunate. Commissioner of finance and commissioner of both army and navy at once, he had Katsu and Ōkubo alike working under him.” Abe Dōzan records that Kaizan was the first to write about the powder works at Takinogawa, and confesses that his own work of commemoration owes a great deal to this novel.

Kaizan and Abe Dōzan met on 26 April 1936. Kaizan had gone out towards Ōmiya, partly to test a small motor car that had been stolen and returned, and between Yono and Ōmiya he caught sight of a signpost reading “Oguri Kōzukenosuke's head-mound, Fumon'in”, and called in on the way back. His own magazine, Tōge, carried an account of the day in its sixth number. In the temple grounds stood a great stone with the title in Tokugawa Iesato's hand and the text by Ninagawa Arata, and weapons presented by the Navy Ministry; Kōzukenosuke's grave was a natural stone.

When he went into the priests' quarters, Kaizan writes, “a man in a striped robe, apparently the abbot”, came out and attended to him, but “was rather blunt about it”. The memory on the other side runs thus. A stout gentleman in nothing but a shirt, with a thick moustache and a sharp eye, is standing at the entrance. He asks about Oguri so persistently that the abbot asks for his card, and the card, with no address on it, read “Nakazato Kaizan”. It was the author of the Daibosatsu Tōge that the abbot had devoured as a schoolboy, hidden from his teacher. He had imagined a thin man, he writes, and was surprised to find “a gentleman of the military type”.

Having seen the card the abbot changed altogether, showed him into the guest room, and let him hear the old documents and the stories handed down at the temple. This place had been Ōnari village, part of a five-hundred-koku holding of the Oguri, and the temple's mountain name too is “Ōnarisan”. When Oguri left Edo for Jōshū he called here and left many things in offering and in trust. The character “Tadamasa” carved on the stone lantern beside the grave had been rubbed out at the time of the Restoration out of fear, and the lantern thrown away; it had lately been found and set up again. “We came to know each other only through the connection of a single Oguri signpost,” Abe Dōzan writes.

When Abe Dōzan wrote Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden in 1941, Daibosatsu Tōge was still unfinished. He tried to see Kaizan again for the first time in a long while, for the writing of it, but he was himself laid up in bed when Kaizan left for America on the first of June, and he records that not being able to ask what had moved him to write Oguri was “a real regret”. The chance never came, and the work too was left unfinished.

Source: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (including quotations from Nakazato Kaizan's Daibosatsu Tōge and from the sixth number of Nakazato Kaizan Junsui Kojin Zasshi Tōge, his own personal magazine)

→ Oguri Kōzukenosuke in Shimazaki Tōson's Yoake Mae　→ The plan for a powder works　→ The crest of the house of Oguri