The Oguri Nikki for 1867 records that Chanoine, an officer of the French army (the diary writes “Shanowan”), called at Oguri's residence a number of times. He is one of the few foreign visitors whose name appears repeatedly within the year.
What Chanoine was in Japan for
Chanoine's coming to Japan grew out of Oguri's plan. On the thirtieth day of the ninth month of 1866 Flury-Hérard, the Japanese consul in France, concluded on the shogunate's behalf a contract engaging Chanoine and other French army officers. The purpose was that they should be instructors for the training of the three arms, infantry, cavalry and artillery.
Until then the shogunate's army had decided on the system of three arms without the substance to match. The cavalry merely did horsemanship; the artillery and the infantry kept their noses in the translated Sanpei Takuchīki and trained by guesswork. That was how Oguri and Asano Mimasaka-no-kami Ujisuke described the state of things to Kurimoto Joun. The judgement that nothing would serve unless real instructors were brought from abroad led to the engagement of Chanoine and the rest of the mission.
Less than two months after the contract, on the nineteenth day of the eleventh month of 1866, the army training school was opened at the Ōta barracks in Yokohama, and the training of officers of infantry, cavalry and artillery began. It was the beginning of formal training for a modern army in Japan. In the sixth month of 1867 the school was moved to the army establishment in Edo, the martial arts academy, and Etchūjima and Komabano were given over as drill grounds. Oguri's adopted heir Matakichi was taught directly by Chanoine and the others in this training, and served as head of the shogunate's infantry drill instructors.
Oguri's own office by this time, it should be said, was no longer commissioner of infantry. From the eighth month of 1866 he held the post of acting commissioner of the navy as well, with the commissionership of finance as his chief duty, and in the twelfth month of 1867 he took on the acting commissionership of the army too. What moved the reform of the military system was not the office of a commissioner on the ground but a position holding both finance and the forces.
The visits as the diary keeps them
Gathering the places where Chanoine's name appears in the Oguri Nikki for 1867 gives the following.
Twenty-second day, fifth month “Shanowan came; I received him”
Twenty-second day, seventh month “Shanowan and Iidaka Heigorō came; I received them”
Fourth day, ninth month “in the evening Hosoya Antarō, attending on Shanowan, came”
Twenty-fourth day, ninth month “Shanowan and Furinko came; I received them”
Third day, tenth month “Shanowan came; I received him”
Fourth day, tenth month “Shanowan and Furyunē came; I received them”
Eighth day, tenth month “Shanowan came”
Ninth day, tenth month “Shanowan came”
Oguri's diary distinguishes between writing only “came” of a visitor and adding “I received him”. The latter means that he came out and attended to the man himself. There is a stretch where the name appears four times on four days — the third, fourth, eighth and ninth of the tenth month — and the third and the fourth were consecutive.
“Furyunē”, who came with him on the fourth day of the tenth month, is thought to be Brunet, who had come to Japan as an instructor in the army training. It was he who later drew up the plan of operations for the shogunate's infantry and artillery at the burning of the Satsuma residence on the twenty-fifth day of the twelfth month of 1867. It is natural to take the visits as including practical consultation rather than mere courtesy.
The names of the Japanese who attended them are recorded too: Iidaka Heigorō in the seventh month, Hosoya Antarō in the ninth. Such men carried the exchanges where French could not be spoken directly.
The traffic did not run one way. On the fifth day of the tenth month Oguri himself “went over to the instructors' building at Sanbanhara from half past the fifth hour in the morning”, and went up to the castle from there — a day of calling on the mission before reporting for duty at Edo Castle.
What kind of record the diary is
Honda Natsuhiko, who found the Oguri Nikki and set it in type, names among the diary's features that it records in detail the frequent traffic of high officials and notable men, including visits to Oguri's residence by the French minister and the consul. The diary itself, on the other hand, is of a kind that sets down no feeling at all, and of a visitor it says no more than who came and that he was received. What was said has not survived.
Even so, that a French military officer came to the residence again and again in the course of 1867 — the year in which Oguri took the whole odium of the levy-money system on himself, and in which the news of the return of power to the emperor moved him to bitter indignation — tells in itself that the reform of the army on Western lines was not a plan on paper but practical work, carried on by daily coming and going.
Sources: Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7; Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957; 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)
→ The commissioner of infantry's reform of the army on Western lines