“The Kiso road is all among the mountains.” So Shimazaki Tōson's long novel Yoake Mae begins. The first part was begun in 1929 and finished in 1931, and ran to a volume of seven hundred and thirty-one pages. The setting is one of the eleven post stations of Kiso, Magome, on a highway running twenty-two ri along the valley from Sakurazawa on the eastern boundary to the Jikkyoku pass in the west. The upheavals of the shogunate's last years are shown through the eyes of Aoyama Hanzō, a young man of strong feeling, son of Aoyama Kichizaemon, keeper of the chief inn.
Oguri Kōzukenosuke shows his face twice in the novel, and in an important way both times. The man who read this point closely before the war was Abe Dōzan. In Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden he gave a chapter to “Kōzukenosuke as he appears in Shimazaki Tōson's Yoake Mae”, praising the work as “a fine book to be left to later ages” while pointing out where it departs from the record.
Page 192 — the Kanrin Maru passes offshore
Miyagawa Kansai, the physician who had given Hanzō his first grounding in national learning, turns by an unlooked-for change of heart to making money, and leaves Kiso with Man'ya Yasubei of Nakatsugawa for Yokohama, just opened to trade. Into Kansai's field of view there came something like a dream.
It was when the Kanrin Maru, carrying Japan's first embassy, passed off Kanagawa bound for America. The small warship, said to have been bought in by the Tokugawa shogunate, had sailed from Shinagawa. From Kimura Settsu-no-kami her captain and Katsu Rintarō her commander down to the ordnance men, the surveyors and the stokers, with no foreign hand to help them at all … the boldness of Japanese who would cross the open ocean astonished Kansai
Shimazaki Tōson, Yoake Mae, part one
Abe Dōzan points out two errors in the passage.
The ship the embassy sailed in was not the Kanrin Maru but the Powhatan, the warship the Americans sent all the way to Japan for the purpose. The party, under Shinmi Buzen-no-kami Masaoki as chief envoy, Muragaki Awaji-no-kami Norimasa as vice-envoy and Oguri Bungo-no-kami Tadamasa as inspector, boarded her on the twenty-first day of the first month of 1860 and reached San Francisco by way of Hawaii. By the preface Kaneko Kentarō contributed to Man'en Gannen Daiichi Kenbei Shisetsu Nikki (the diary of the first embassy to the United States, 1860), published by the America-Japan Society in 1918, the party numbered eighty-one.
The Kanrin Maru's captain was not Kimura Settsu-no-kami. Her captain was Katsu Rintarō, while Kimura, holding the office of commissioner of warships, stood over them as the head of the expedition.
Abe regrets this, saying that to have written, as the fact was, that they “boarded the American ship Powhatan” would not have lowered the value of the work but would rather have raised the regard in which it is held. He adds, on the authority of Captain Hirose Hikota of the navy, that the Powhatan had even her guns — a warship's life and her dignity alike — taken out, so as to give the envoys no needless alarm.
Page 707 — “a house for sale with a storehouse attached”
Towards the end of the first part, Tōson takes up Oguri's famous phrase head on.
A house for sale with a storehouse attached
These are words that came from the mouth of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, who might be called one of the chief stewards of the great Tokugawa estate, a man trying somehow to hold up as much of that tottering fortune as could be held. What is a house for sale with a storehouse attached? It is the new shipyard at Yokosuka, planned from about 1864 and at last begun upon from the start of 1865, when the shogunate was labouring to repair the warships and steamers it had bought from foreign governments … How is a shipyard a house for sale? … This was no passing jest of Oguri Kōzukenosuke's.
Shimazaki Tōson, Yoake Mae, part one
The meaning is that if the Tokugawa estate is to be put up for sale, a buyer will look at it differently if it is sold as a house with a storehouse — and that storehouse is the shipyard at Yokosuka. Tōson goes on.
And while even those inside the shogunate felt keenly that it was moving towards its fall, in one corner of it there lay hidden such modern works as these, as of men busily refusing to neglect their preparations for the age to come.
Of this sentence Abe Dōzan writes, “I cannot cease to be grateful to the author for having said it so well.” In Oguri's breast, he read, there was something dearer than Satsuma and Chōshū and dearer than the shogunate: the way to the country's renewal.
Who is “Kitamura Zuiken”?
Yoake Mae makes the plan for this shipyard the work of Oguri together with a friend named Kitamura Zuiken. Abe Dōzan declared flatly that the right name is Kurimoto Joun and that “Kitamura Zuiken” and the rest of it is wrong. His reason was that Joun's photograph hangs high in the mess hall of the Yokosuka naval arsenal, and that Oguri's right arm was Kurimoto is generally acknowledged.
The surname “Kitamura” that Tōson used is not unconnected, however. Joun was born into the Kitamura family, and was a student of such brilliance at the Shōheikō that people called him “Kitamura the goblin”. He succeeded to the Kurimoto house in 1848.
The shogunate's last years seen from the provinces
In the same work Tōson drew the wretched end of the Mito rōnin under Takeda Kōunsai. Of the fifteenth shogun Yoshinobu he wrote that “he is like a man who appeared in the last of the Tokugawa generations just to look at the notice of this house for sale with a storehouse attached”, while adding that, having dealt for years with politics at home and abroad, wide in what he had seen and long in experience, he was by no means an ordinary young nobleman.
The politics of the capital reach a single post station in Kiso as hearsay and rumour. Oguri's name was woven into the work as one of those distant events at the centre. From an angle other than that of the biographies and studies which treat Oguri as the principal, one can see how the age was taken in the provinces. But, as Abe pointed out, a novel being a novel, the discrepancies with the record remain. To read with an awareness of where the account rests on sources and where invention begins is the right way to keep company with this work.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (quoting part one of Shimazaki Tōson's Yoake Mae); Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987
→ Kurimoto Joun → The Yokosuka ironworks → The “one come again” in Nakazato Kaizan's Daibosatsu Tōge