A martial art called the Oguri school is handed down in the Oguri house. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi called it “irregular swordsmanship”, because it combined the sword with “methods of grappling” and with jūjutsu, which made it an unusual school for its day. This Oguri school, moreover, was the art that Sakamoto Ryōma of Tosa learned from boyhood.
The school that Oguri Niemon Nobuyoshi devised
Trace the Oguri school to its source and it reaches Kamiizumi Ise-no-kami Hidetsuna of the Shinkage school. Kamiizumi's line was taken up by Yagyū Sekishūsai Muneyoshi, and from his school it divided in two: one carried on as the orthodox Yagyū school through Yagyū Munenori, Mitsuyoshi and Munefuyu, and the other, the collateral line, was the Oguri school.
Its founder was Oguri Niemon Nobuyoshi, a son of Oguri Tadamasa, the founder of the Oguri line, who was called “the first spear again”. Nobuyoshi learned the sword under Yagyū Muneyoshi and, joining jūjutsu to it, devised a swordsmanship of a kind of its own. His originality in combining what had been thought wholly separate arts, and so opening a new swordsmanship fit for real fighting, was valued, and in the Kan'ei years it swept the age. Daimyo and hatamoto entered it one after another until its pupils numbered three thousand six hundred, and matches were even held before the shogun.
The Oguri school crosses to Tosa
In the last years of the shogunate the man who spread this Oguri school in Tosa was Asahina Hanzaemon. Ryōma, with his elder sister Otome, went daily to the hall of Hineno Benji of the Oguri school. The certificates Ryōma received are plainly on record.
First month of 1853, at seventeen: “Oguri-ryū Wa-heihō Jimokuroku”, a list of the matters of the Oguri school's art
1854: “Oguri-ryū Heihō Jūni-kajō” and “Nijūgo-kajō”, the twelve articles and the twenty-five articles of the school's art, one scroll each
1861: “Oguri-ryū Wa-heihō San-kajō”, the three articles of the school's art, one scroll
What Ryōma learned, then, was not something else of the same name but the Oguri school itself, which came out of the Oguri house. This does not mean, however, that there was any direct relation of master and pupil between Tadamasa and Ryōma. That there is no record of the two having crossed swords, or even of their having met, needs to be kept in mind.
What Tadamasa himself learned was the Jikishinkage school
What of Tadamasa himself, then? What he learned was not the family's Oguri school but the Jikishinkage school. He entered the hall of Onogai Seiichirō Nobutomo, called the first swordsman of the shogunate's last years, and is said to have received full certification from Fujikawa Seisai (the sources do not agree on the details). His jūjutsu, it is said, he learned from Kubota Sukedarō and his gunnery from Tamura Kazue.
As to the course by which Tadamasa came to that certification, however, there are four differing accounts so far as Sakamoto Fujiyoshi knew, all of them pointing to a connection with Onogai. One has him entering Onogai's hall at Honjo Kamezawa-chō (or at Mamiana in Azabu) through his father Tadataka's connections, taught by Onogai directly, and certified afterwards by Fujikawa. One has him entering first the school of Shimada Toranosuke, Onogai's leading pupil, and later parting from him for Fujikawa's. One has him studying under Yokokawa Shichirō, named with Toranosuke as one of a matchless pair, and then moving to Fujikawa's. One has him knocking at Yokokawa's door, being introduced to Toranosuke, finding on meeting him that his boasting did not suit his temper, and walking off in anger after a quarrel to enter Fujikawa's school. In every version the one point in common is that Tadamasa and Shimada Toranosuke did not take to each other.
The Jikishinkage school too is an old one, deriving from Kamiizumi Ise-no-kami. The man who made its name was Naganuma Shirōzaemon Kunisato, who invented and improved the shinai of four split bamboos used today, together with the mask, gauntlets and breastplate. Naganuma's hall at Shiba Nishikubo had abuse heaped on it from other schools, but in time those same men came to use the armour. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi sees in Tadamasa's choice — not a fashionable hall, at a time when Edo in the Tenpō years was in an unprecedented craze for private halls, but a school of old tradition that was carrying through a reasoned change of technique — the temper of a man who “could not bear shams or bluster”.
Of his skill with the sword, his master's words are handed down. Onogai is said to have watched Tadamasa fence in later years and praised him warmly.
Who would have thought that this man's swordsmanship would reach so fine a point.
Three men joined by the sword
In the same line of the Jikishinkage school stands another large figure: Katsu Rintarō, later Kaishū. Katsu first entered the hall of Onogai, who was his cousin, and in 1838, at fifteen, when Shimada Toranosuke of Onogai's school set up a hall of his own, he moved there. Tadamasa did not choose Shimada and stayed with Onogai, and Sakamoto Fujiyoshi holds it very likely that these two, who would later be the sharpest of opponents, competed with the sword in the same hall at some point in their boyhood.
Ryōma of the Oguri school; Tadamasa and Katsu of the Jikishinkage. Sakamoto notes that it was Tadamasa who made the first joint-stock company in Japan, Ryōma who conceived its forerunner as an organization, and Katsu who had a weighty influence on Ryōma, and writes that the three were already joined by an unseen thread through their training with the sword in their teens. He adds that the school Iwasaki Yatarō — who ran the Kaientai with Ryōma and later founded Mitsubishi — attended when he came up to Edo was Asaka Gonsai's, which stood inside the Oguri residence.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957
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