Of all the stories about Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa, the most widely known is surely the legend of treasure buried on Mount Akagi: that when the shogunate fell an enormous store of its gold was buried somewhere on Mount Akagi, and that Oguri directed the work.
The story has no historical grounds. That digging went on even after it had been said again and again to have no grounds, and that the people of the Oguri family suffered real harm because of it, are themselves on record.
“A thing with no historical grounds whatever”
Abe Dōzan's Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden, published in 1941, has a section headed “is it false or a fact that military funds were buried on Mount Akagi?”. Abe Dōzan wrote even then that the advertisements claiming hundreds of millions of yen buried on Mount Akagi, or on Kannonyama at the village of Gonda, or in Yamanashi prefecture, were causing a great many people trouble, and declared this.
This is a thing with no historical grounds whatever, and it serves no purpose but to soil Oguri's loyalty and the high character of the man
Abe also made a guess at where the rumour came from. In the country around Gonda and Takasaki there is a tradition that Oguri handed out money to the villagers as a parting gift when he went into retirement. That he should have had five hundred or a thousand in pocket money on giving up the residence is nothing to wonder at. Such facts called up imagination, and imagination called up more, and so bred a preposterous dream. “The business of the gold buried on Mount Akagi,” he concludes, “is a dream somebody else had on a long summer night.”
Cannon hauled along the Nakasendō
Abe gives a particular scene as another seed of the rumour. On the eighteenth day of the first month of 1868, Oguri wrapped cannon bought from France firmly in oiled paper and had more than twenty attendants haul them along the Nakasendō. It was on the road to Gonda. “Old men still tell me they saw it,” Abe writes.
Heavy loads, and more than twenty retainers following them north along the highway. This sight, he says, became one cause of the rumour that “a hundred million ryō of military funds was stored on Mount Akagi”. Seventy-one years later, as it happens, these cannon were presented by the Yokosuka naval arsenal to Fumon'in, the temple of the Oguri family.
Why Oguri's name was used
Abe explains the line of reasoning by which the story came to be fastened on Oguri, and puts it bluntly. The shogunate must have had three million or five million ryō of gold; Edo Castle was handed over without trouble; the Meiji government was short of money and in difficulties. So much everybody knows. Then what became of the shogunate's gold? In that gap there is room to deceive people who do not know the history of those years.
Who, then, to put in the leading part? Tokugawa Yoshinobu will not do; nobody would believe it of Katsu Kaishū, of Fukuzawa Yukichi, of Kurimoto Joun or of Kimura Kaishū. A great figure of the shogunate's last years from the close of the Ansei era into Keiō; the shogunate's last commissioner of finance, the chief manager of all the gold in Japan. Beheaded, moreover, with no clear word of him before or after. Only one man met the conditions: Oguri Kōzukenosuke. “This is a man well fitted to build such a detective-story tale around,” Abe writes. “There is nobody he can offend.”
The hole in Yamanashi, and the harm done to the Oguri family
The digging was not on Mount Akagi alone. At Tsukiyone in Masuho village, Minamikoma district, Yamanashi prefecture, excavation went on at a large scale. The digger was a man named Kawahara Hidemori, who claimed to be a descendant of Oguri. The work from 1932 on was on the scale of a scaffold seventy feet high, four five-horsepower pumps, and a lift going down two hundred and fifty feet underground. By 1940 seven hundred thousand yen had been sunk in it, and in the early 1950s the electricity alone was reported to cost sixty thousand yen a month (Yomiuri Shinbun, 4 January 1953).
The money came from outside. At first a group of believers in a religious body worked with Tōyama Mitsuru's Gen'yōsha and the like; after the war warehousemen and mine operators from Nagoya came and went; and later, the same paper reported, a Nagoya pachinko operator had become the capitalist behind it.
Harm was done as well. In 1934 Kawahara Hidemori appeared before the head of the Oguri house, Oguri Matakichi. He told of a secret document box handed down from Tada Geki, a retainer of the Oguri, holding papers that would give a clue to the buried treasure but which, so it had been said, must not be opened except in the presence of the main house. Matakichi did not trust the man and went on refusing his repeated visits, but Kawahara pressed him to attend at least the opening of the box, and at last he went. The box was not shown him; and he was given what seems to have been poisoned drink, needed a doctor's care, and barely came through with his life. The police were brought in, but the matter ended for want of evidence (Oguri Tadahito, “Maizōkin Yomoyamabanashi”, odds and ends about the buried treasure, in Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society).
The same man had been calling on Abe Dōzan too. Having visited the grave again and again until he was admitted to Abe's study, he put it to him that if the digging succeeded he would build Fumon'in a new gate single-handed. Abe was angered and refused him. Asked to show the secret papers, he would produce nothing but copies written out with a brush on cheap paper, and never showed the originals. Around 1951 he drove up to Tōzenji at Gonda as well in several foreign cars, asking that thirty priests be gathered because he wished to hold a great memorial service for Lord Oguri. The temple hurriedly gathered thirty priests and held the service, but the costs it had advanced were never paid, and it suffered a heavy loss, by this account.
The “name” that keeps changing
Oguri Tadahito saw the nature of the legend on a single point. What in the early Shōwa years was “gold coin buried by Oguri himself” has today changed its name to “the Tokugawa treasure” and “the shogunate's military funds”. Change the name and those entitled to a share change too. “This one fact of the treasure changing shape is enough to show that it wants taking with salt.”
Tadahito argued it from economics as well. Would a businessman with more than enough money of his own go out of his way to borrow at high interest from a bank to start a new venture? It was the same in those years: Oguri was working hard to get a loan from France at interest. If there had been gold enough to bury, there would have been no need to borrow at all.
On the Yamanashi affair, the local history society of Masuho town had already reached its conclusion at the time. Not one of the old people of the place had ever heard such a story. The treasure, it was said, had come up the Fuji River from Iwabuchi on Suruga Bay to Kajikazawa, and from there by horse and porter over snowy mountain roads to Tsukiyone; but to go up eighteen ri of the Fuji River's rapids takes three days, and a seagoing vessel cannot enter, so the load would have to be shifted to flat-bottomed boats — it could not possibly have been carried.
Kawahara Hidemori died in 1967 without ever seeing the gold.
How Oguri lived is recorded with care in the household account book he kept himself, the Gokatteikata Kanjōchō, and the possessions the government's army confiscated at Gonda show a plain and modest way of living. The memorial society writes that “the talk of buried treasure was no more than a rumour put about with ill intent”.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family), and Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society
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