The same words come up in the Oguri accounts over a span of years: “money borrowed on account of the earthquake” — the record of repayments on funds taken from the shogunate for recovery from earthquake damage. How a single disaster went on as years of outgoings in a household's accounts is there just as it stood.
1855, the year he became head of the house
1855 was the year the headship changed in the Oguri house. On the twenty-eighth day of the seventh month his father Tadataka died of illness at his official residence as commissioner at Niigata, at fifty-eight. Tadamasa succeeded to the house and took the name “Matakichi”, the style borne by each head of the house in turn, on the twenty-second day of the tenth month of the same year.
Sakamoto Fujiyoshi notes that the order of magnitude of the sums in the accounts changes from this year on. The allowance to his wife, for instance, jumps all at once from one or two bu to one ryō one bu, two and a half to five times what it had been. Prices may have risen, but Sakamoto's reading is that it was because his father's death left Tadamasa in full charge of the household.
In the same Ansei years, one great earthquake followed another in different places. The samurai residences of Edo did not come off unharmed. To a house that had suffered, the shogunate lent funds in the form of haishaku-kin, money borrowed from above. It was this debt that Tadamasa, only just head of the house, came to carry.
The same line in five years of ledgers
The Oguri household accounts held in the Oguri Nikki are divided into four volumes: Ryōnyū Seishutsu Bo (first month 1850 to fifth month 1855), Katteikata Kanjōchō (first month 1858 to twelfth month 1859), Kanjōchō (first month 1860 to twelfth month 1861), and the ledger from the first month of 1862 to the twelfth month of 1863. The portion from the fifth month of 1855 to the first month of 1858 is missing, and no ledger survives to say when the repayments began. In the ledgers that do survive, though, the same item stands year after year.
1858, the year of the horse “money borrowed on account of the earthquake: payment for this year of the horse”
1859 “repayment of the earthquake loan”
1860 “borrowed at the time of the earthquake: payment, as above”
1861 “payment on the earthquake loan”, “paid into the treasury”
1862 “money borrowed for the earthquake: paid into the treasury”
Two things can be read from these. One is where it was paid: in every case into the treasury, the shogunate's own strongroom. The other is how it was paid: as the entry for 1858 says, “payment for this year of the horse”, it was paid as that year's portion, marked off. The whole sum was not repaid at once; it was an annual instalment, a share allotted year by year. Within the surviving ledgers alone it runs five years without a break.
Another debt shows how it worked
What kind of money haishaku-kin was is shown well by another record. The Oguri Nikki for the twenty-ninth day of the sixth month of 1867 has this.
Of the five hundred ryō borrowed in the past year of the rat from the lending office at Bakurōchō, on ten yearly instalments, three hundred and sixty-seven ryō two bu of principal and interest together have now been repaid in one sum; accordingly Masahiko was sent with it to Bakurōchō and the bond exchanged
In the year of the rat — 1864 — five hundred ryō had been borrowed from the lending office at Bakurōchō on ten yearly instalments. The remaining three hundred and sixty-seven ryō two bu, principal and interest together, was now repaid in one sum. So the retainer Tsukamoto Masahiko was sent with the money to Bakurōchō and had the bond exchanged.
Principal and interest repaid together in yearly instalments, and the bond exchanged if the debt was cleared early. The earthquake loan was money running on the same machinery. It might be granted free of interest or at a low rate, but a debt was a debt, and whoever was head of the house and whatever office he held, it had to be paid into the treasury on time. That is why the same line went on being entered in the ledger every year from 1858 to 1862.
The years in which these repayments stand in a row fall just where the allowance for the embassy to the United States came in and the household was much the better off. In a year of large receipts, too, the earthquake debt was paid into the treasury as before. The economy of the Oguri house as the ledgers show it is made of such rises and falls, and of obligations that did not change.
Sources: Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7 (the household accounts and the diary for 1867); Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987
→ The year the accounts went well into surplus on the embassy allowance ／ His father Tadataka's death, and the succession