The man who found Oguri Kōzukenosuke's diaries and household accounts, set them in type and brought them before the world was Honda Natsuhiko (Riichi), a local historian who served as a committee member on cultural property for Gunma Prefecture. Volume 7 of the Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials, the Oguri Nikki, could not have existed without his work.
September 1952, at the bottom of a chest in the Gotō house
Honda Natsuhiko came upon the material in September 1952. It happened in the course of an ordinary visit to look at records at the Gotō house, an old family of Shibukawa city in Kitagunma district, whose head was then the second Zenjūrō. What came out of the bottom of a chest was two volumes of diaries and four of household accounts in Oguri Kōzukenosuke's own hand, together with Gotō Hachirōemon's notes and other papers. More than eighty years had passed before they met a human eye.
As to content, the diaries run to three hundred and fifty-four days for 1867 and a hundred and twenty days for 1868. They are written up to the second day of the intercalary fourth month, so that only the last four days, the day he was killed among them, are blank.
“The most valuable cultural property as a source for the Restoration”
The originals were submitted to the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo, kept there for some months, and returned with care, with a certificate calling them “the most valuable cultural property as a source for the Restoration”. A private record of one man's days had been judged a source of the first rank for understanding the shogunate's last years. The originals were afterwards designated an important cultural property of Gunma Prefecture. The report of investigation for the designation was written by Honda himself, and it was later included just as it stood, in place of an introduction to the Oguri Nikki.
The Oguri that Honda read in the diaries
In that report Honda did not only state the value of the material; he set down the character he could read in the diaries.
In his diary there is neither joy nor anger, nor any grief. He was, I suppose, a man like iron
In the first month of 1868, at the great council in Edo Castle, Oguri argued for fighting on, and, pressing his case to the extreme while holding down the hem of the shogun Yoshinobu's hakama, drew his anger and was relieved of his office by the shogun in person — an event said to be the only one of its kind in three hundred years of Tokugawa rule. Even of that, the diary's entry “sets down nothing but the surface of it, plainly and evenly”.
One other thing moved Honda: the last leaf of the diary. It was a sheet of backing paper tucked into the entry for the second day of the intercalary fourth month, on the thirty-fifth leaf. Ruled with fifteen lines in ink, the sheet was black on both sides with the grease of long handling. Seeing in it the proof of a careful man who wasted nothing, Honda wrote: “who could keep his breast from filling, for the sake of Kōzuke?”
The same character showed in the household accounts. At the start of each month an allowance was allotted, as under a monthly-salary system, beginning with his mother and going down to himself, his wife, and his adopted son Matakichi and his wife. What ten years of accounts carry is that budgeted way of living.
What followed for the finder — “how deep the sin of a thing like research is”
The discovery must have been a thing to be proud of for Honda, and at first he thought so himself. In the afterword he later contributed to the Oguri Nikki, however, he left an unlooked-for reflection.
That I found Lord Oguri of Jōshū's diaries during a visit to the Gotō house (whose head was then the second Zenjūrō) on one of my regular calls to look at records, in September 1952, I privately took at the time for a great feat of my own; but as the years went by, far from a great feat, I had intruded into the privacy of the Gotō house without being asked, and had old Hachirōemon been alive then he would certainly have been sorely vexed that I had done a needless thing
When I consider the offence of having, in entire good faith, laid bare the privacy of a predecessor and a man of my own country, I cannot help my spirits darkening at how deep the sin of a thing like research is
That the Gotō house had kept these papers hidden so long without telling anybody had its reasons. His own act in digging them out and making them public is what Honda, after the years had passed, was questioning again. Nothing speaks so plainly as the finder's own words of the weight that always attends the finding of a source in local history.
Setting it in type, and the work beyond
Volume 7 of the Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials, the Oguri Nikki, was published as the seventh instalment on 20 September 1972, twenty years' work from the finding. At the end of the volume are printed with it Gotō Hachirōemon's notes, “Muramura Yakunin Negaide Toritsugi-dome (intercalary fourth month, 1868)”, the “voyage diaries (extracts)” by Satō Tōshichi and Yanagawa Kenzaburō, and Honda's own study, “Oguri Kōzukenosuke's proposal for setting up an exchange office”.
This “proposal for setting up an exchange office” shows well what Honda's search for sources was like. It is a single memorial that he had picked up among wastepaper which had come out of the Gonda neighbourhood — Oguri's proposal that a government exchange office be set up and the handling of gold and silver taken back into the state's hands. Honda later compared the hand with that of the diaries he found, and adds that it does seem to be in Oguri's own hand. The exchange office itself was suppressed on the opinion of his superiors that the existing money changers served well enough, and never came about.
Honda went on walking the ground into his last years. At the Jūōdō in Gonda he examined the gravestones of Honda Sanpeiji, Satō Tōshichi and others with care. He also handed material over to local historians, saying, “this is a Gonda document, so I give it to you.” Both the finding and the setting in type rested on such a steady accumulation of walking.
Sources: Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7 (Honda Natsuhiko's “report of investigation”, his afterword, and “Oguri Kōzukenosuke's proposal for setting up an exchange office”); Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family)