At Takasaki in Gunma Prefecture, a city closely connected with Oguri Kōzukenosuke, a memorial museum setting out his work and his character is reported to be in preparation. The village of Gonda, now Kurabuchi in Takasaki, is where Oguri spent his last two months, and the riverbed at Mizunuma on the Karasu River is where he died. For the people of the place, Oguri Kōzukenosuke is not merely a figure in history but one bound up closely with the history of their own district.
The museum is a new undertaking; the commemoration in this place, however, has well over half a century behind it. What follows sets out what has been built up.
From the stone “cut down in this place, though he had done no wrong”
The starting point was a single stone. “The great man Oguri Kōzukenosuke was cut down in this place, though he had done no wrong” — the raising of that stone was the occasion and the driving force from which the association for the preservation of the Oguri Kōzukenosuke sites (president Tsukakoshi Denzaburō) came into being at Kurabuchi village. On 1 September 1967 the association dissolved itself to grow into the Oguri Kōzukenosuke memorial society. The village headman took the presidency, and it became a body of the whole village. A “society for the study of Oguri” was later formed by the younger generation as well.
The memorial society published its journal Tatsunami, in which committee members on cultural property and local historians have gone on printing the results of their research. Among those named as its officers were Tsukakoshi Shin'ichi, Ichikawa Yasoo and Ichikawa Kōichi, men who had studied the local history of the place. Many of the fine details now told about Oguri have been stored up in this journal.
To search, to raise a stone, to hold a service
The society's work has not been confined to the village. Koitabashi Ryōhei's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki sets down a number of records of members travelling outside the prefecture.
In 1955 members visited the site at Hōrinji in Tatebayashi where the heads of Oguri and his son were buried. In April 1956, searching for the remains of the sisters Tsukamoto Maki and Chika, who had taken their own lives, they examined the slope of Ryūgaonezawa-yama with the guidance of an old family of the place, and found two stone chambers, one large and one small, built up of small stones. These had already been dug out, however, and were empty. An image to console the spirits of the sisters was raised at Tōrazu-no-fuchi on the upper Aimagawa, and the service of consecration was held on 4 December 1993. Several dozen people gathered — the memorial society, the village authorities, and well-wishers from within the village and outside it — and a memorial service was held.
For Tsukakoshi Tomikichi, who fought the Boshin war as an infantryman from Gonda and fell at Aizu, the society went as far as Takasato village, as it then was, to make enquiries, and with the help of the village headman, the superintendent of education and the local historical society raised a memorial stone in a corner of the Tashiro family burial ground. About thirty members of the society and people of the place attended the unveiling. To track down, more than a hundred years after, a man who had left their village and died in another province, and to raise a stone for him there: that is the kind of work it is.
In 1998, at the memorial for the hundred and thirtieth year since Lord Oguri's death, the governor of Gunma Prefecture and the mayor of Yokosuka visited Tōzenji together and offered incense and flowers at his grave. Kurabuchi village entered into a relationship of friendship with the city of Yokosuka, and the abbot of Tōzenji and members of the memorial society are invited each year to the “Oguri-Verny festival”. It is a coming and going in which the man beheaded at Gonda and the man who left works behind at Yokosuka are confirmed to each other as one and the same.
What is to be exhibited is already in the place
The relics too have stayed in this district. In the collection at Tōzenji there survive a Western plate some thirty centimetres across, patterned with blue-violet flowers, and an ivory comb about eighteen centimetres long, left as thanks at a house that had sheltered the Oguri family. The famous spear by Nobukuni, a treasure of the house since its founder's time, came down to Tōzenji too. The preparation of a museum is a matter of gathering evidence scattered in this way into one place and showing it.
For the date of opening and for what exactly is to be exhibited, the surest course is to check the official announcements of the city of Takasaki and of the memorial society. The “places” pages of this site also take in the sites within Takasaki, the village of Gonda and the riverbed at Mizunuma among them.
Moves with the taiga drama in view
In 2027 the NHK taiga drama “Gyakuzoku no Bakushin”, with Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa as its central figure, is due to be broadcast. For anyone who comes to know of Oguri Kōzukenosuke for the first time through the broadcast, whether there is a proper place of information on the ground will decide whether that interest can be carried on into going round the actual sites. Whether a place can be made where a visitor can take in at once all that more than half a century of commemoration — a journal, lectures, the raising of stones — has built up: that is what is being asked of the museum.
Sources: Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family); Tatsunami, the journal of the Oguri Kōzukenosuke memorial society
→ Visiting the places ／ The retainers who died on the Karasu River ／ The course of his commemoration