The diaries and household accounts kept in Oguri Kōzukenosuke's house are now held as the Oguri Nikki in volume 7 of the Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials, and are designated an important cultural property of Gunma Prefecture. The years that passed before this record came out were eighty-four. From the summer of 1868 to the autumn of 1952 it lay at the bottom of a chest in an old family's house, known to nobody.
Slipped into a coat just short of the fire
Why did these records survive in an old family's house at all? After Oguri's execution, Ōne Ryūtarō, the inspector, ordered Gotō Hachirōemon, a wholesaler of the post town of Shibukawa in Kōzuke, to settle the disposal of Oguri's effects. Hachirōemon was at the work of disposing of the goods until the twenty-fifth day of the intercalary fourth month. What could be sold was sold off, and of the documents that remained — the letters touching France above all — most were burned.
Out of that heap for burning, Hachirōemon quietly put the diaries and the account ledgers into his coat and carried them home. He never spoke of it to anyone afterwards. Out of regard for the government's army and for those around him, he kept them hidden at the bottom of a document chest and, it is said, went to his death without telling even his descendants.
How dangerous it was in those days to keep by one the records of a man condemned as a rebel can be imagined. Oguri's execution was carried out with no examination and no sentence, and after it the name of “traitor” was put about. Around the village of Gonda, anything connected with Oguri was looked into one thing after another, and houses were searched. Hachirōemon's silence was a judgement made in that air.
September 1952, at the Gotō house
The finding was by chance. In September 1952, Honda Natsuhiko, a local historian, visited the Gotō house at Shibukawa to look at records, and there turned up two volumes of Oguri's diaries, four of household accounts, and Hachirōemon's own notes. Because the man who had brought them home died in silence, their value was unknown on the family's side as well.
The find drew a great response as an important source for the history of the shogunate's last years. Until then almost no record in Oguri's own hand had survived, so that Nagakura Mamin, author of Rosesu to Oguri Kōzukenosuke (Roches and Oguri Kōzukenosuke), had even said that “Oguri may have been a poor hand at writing”. The appearance of the diaries and the accounts overturned that reading.
In 1956 Gunma Prefecture designated them an important cultural property of the prefecture and printed them as the Oguri Nikki in volume 7 of the Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials. The report of investigation for the designation was written by Honda as well. Ōtsubo Sadakata, a student of Oguri, also copied the originals out by hand, and his copy was presented to the house of Ichikawa Yasoo and used later in the compiling of the Kurabuchi Mura-shi.
What was written in them
The household accounts are in four volumes. The first covers five and a half years, from the first month of 1850 to the fifth month of 1855, before Oguri had succeeded to the house. Two and a half years are then missing, and the second, third and fourth volumes record the six years from the first month of 1858, after the succession, to the twelfth month of 1863.
The first volume is a ledger of ninety-five sheets, sixteen centimetres by twelve point one, about the size of a paperback. On the cover was written “Ryōnyū Seishutsu Bo” — the book for measuring what comes in and restraining what goes out. Each year opens with the income for the year, with the month-by-month outgoings after it, and the entries run on in the same even manner.
The diaries are the same. In contrast to Katsu Kaishū's diaries, which set down feeling frankly, Oguri's diaries, Sakamoto Fujiyoshi remarks, are carried through in a style that keeps feeling out to an extreme degree and states facts evenly. For that very reason the details — the day's purchases, the gifts of money, the visitors, the cost of observances — survive just as they were, with no ornament.
The weight of eighty-four years asleep
Diaries and household accounts are not like official documents: they can be lost on the single judgement of the family that owns them. Drawn out of a heap for burning, set at the bottom of a chest without a word said, and still neither disposed of nor scattered — these eighty-four years were the result of one chance after another. Had Hachirōemon not put out his hand, or had someone in the Gotō house thrown the old ledgers away, we could not have known in any detail how the Oguri house lived from day to day.
The finding of these diaries and accounts untied a number of facts that had not been known before. Along with Oguri and his wife, who kept the records, the people who guarded them and passed them on are a fact worth keeping in mind.
Sources: Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family); Tatsunami, the journal of the Oguri Kōzukenosuke memorial society; Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7
→ Honda Natsuhiko, who found them: what followed ／ Daily life and the household accounts ／ What the accounts tell of the Oguri household's finances