The school Tadamasa attended as a boy was not far off. The row house of the Oguri residence was itself the school. It was the private academy that Asaka Gonsai, a leading scholar of Chinese learning in those years, kept in rented quarters in the row house of the Oguri at Kanda Surugadai. Its register holds a varied set of names from the end of the shogunate into the Meiji era, and it sent out many able men.
A school opened in the row house of the Oguri residence
Gonsai was born in the third month of 1791 at Kōriyama in Asaka district, Mutsu province. His father was priest of the Asaka Kunitsuko shrine. His name was Shigenobu, his style Shijun, and he was commonly called Yūsuke; Gonsai was the name he took. As a child he learned Confucian studies under a domain scholar of Nihonmatsu, and later came up to Edo, served as a student-servant to Satō Issai, and then studied under Hayashi Jussai.
He is said to have opened the school in the Oguri residence in 1814. His Bunryaku, written in 1831, won him a name, and his learning grew finer still afterwards, until he was known throughout Japan. Of striking appearance and given wholly to scholarship, he made so little of poverty that his wife, it is said, left him, among other hardships.
In 1843 he was taken on as tutor to the lord of Nihonmatsu and moved there for a time; he soon returned to Edo, and in 1850 became at last a professor of the Shōheikō. The Shōheikō was then the highest place of learning in Japan, and a professorship there weighed far more than a professorship in a national university does today. Gonsai understood progressive thought as well, kept company with Watanabe Kazan and Takano Chōei, and took a hand in translating American and Russian books.
What follows is characteristic of the man. Gonsai seems to have felt deeply the help the Oguri house had given him in his years of poverty, and neither when he was called to the Nihonmatsu domain nor after he became a professor of the Shōheikō did he close the school within the Oguri residence. It is said to have continued until Gonsai's death in the third month of 1860.
Tadamasa is said to have begun going to the school in 1834, at six, the year he lost his younger sister. It is thought, though, that the boy was taught directly by Gonsai's senior pupils, Morita Teisuke and Kuraishi Tenta.
Those who sat at the desks
The Meiji Ishin Jinmei Jiten (a biographical dictionary of the Meiji Restoration, Yoshikawa Kōbunkan) names the following nine as Gonsai's representative pupils.
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One, Kurimoto Joun Five years older than Tadamasa. Third son of Kitamura Kaien, one of the shogun's own physicians, born at Urasarugaku-chō behind Kanda Ogawa-machi. He became commissioner of foreign affairs, and carried the building of the Yokosuka ironworks together with Oguri.
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Two, Oguri Tadamasa Son of the head of the Oguri house, which was also the school's landlord.
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Three, Kawaji Toshiakira An able official of the shogunate's last years, who held the offices of commissioner of finance and of foreign affairs in turn. In the dealings with Putyatin he carried the main weight of the negotiation.
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Four, Takasugi Shinsaku A samurai of the Chōshū domain. He organized the kiheitai, and in the second expedition against Chōshū attacked the shogunate's forces at Kokura castle with success.
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Five, Iwasaki Yatarō The businessman who later laid the foundation of the Mitsubishi combine.
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Six, Nakamura Keiu (Masanao), Kanda Takahira, Fukuchi Ōchi and Ōsuka Inken Men who left their names in the official world, in public argument and in scholarship in the Meiji era.
There were men of the shogunate and there were men who set themselves to bring it down; some made names in business, some carried the public argument of the Meiji era. Under one master sat men who would take wholly different roads in later years. In the second expedition against Chōshū, the shogunate's forces, whose costs Oguri undertook, fought Takasugi's kiheitai at Kokura — two men whose names stand on the same school's register.
Of the ties formed at this school, the longest-lasting was the friendship of Tadamasa and Kurimoto Sebei. It began in boyhood and never changed in either life. At Tōzenji in Gonda, in Jōshū, where Tadamasa met his end, their two busts stand side by side to this day.
The roads they took after leaving the school were of their time too. Kurimoto went on to the Shōheikō and in 1843, at twenty-two, passed the kōshi kōka, the examination for appointment as a shogunal official, and was rewarded with fifteen bars of silver. Iwase Tadanari was of the same year. Being large of frame and imposing in appearance, he was called, it is said, “Kitamura the goblin”. In that same year, however, he fell foul of the rules of the Shōheikō and was expelled, and the course of his life changed greatly from then.
Kurimoto himself left recollections of Tadamasa as a boy. Inukai Tsuyoshi in later years called Kurimoto “teacher” all his life and himself a “disciple”. The line of learning that began in Gonsai's school ran on into unlooked-for places.
Source: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, “Hyōgo Shōsha” o Tsukutta Saigo no Bakushin: Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the last shogunal official, the man who created the Hyōgo Shōsha: the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987
→ Asaka Gonsai's private school, and the company of able students ／ Kurimoto Joun — from Ezo to the shogunate's councils, a lifelong friend