Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa kept the household accounts in his own hand. Four volumes survive, and ten years of receipts and payments can be followed, from 1850 to 1863. Go through the ledgers year by year and one year stands at a different order of magnitude. In 1859 the balance for the year came to 1,563 ryō. It was the year the allowance for the embassy to the United States was handed over, a thousand ryō in one sum, in the twelfth month.
Ryōnyū Seishutsu Bo
The cover of the first volume is titled Ryōnyū Seishutsu Bo — measure what comes in and restrain what goes out; that is, judge the income and hold down the outgoings. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi points out that this is more than a record: it states plainly the purpose of keeping the household in hand. One other thing was written on the cover in ink: Saiyū Baikadō Shujin, the master of the hall of the few remaining plum blossoms. In the first month of 1850, when he began it, Oguri had not yet reached his twenty-third birthday.
Open it and the first entry is the balance carried over from the previous year.
Balance from the past year of the cock: 34 ryō and 982 mon in coin
The Oguri house's stipend was three hundred bales of kirimai rice. The pay from the shogunate came three times a year: a quarter in the second month, a quarter in the fifth, and half in the tenth. Part was handed over as rice and part turned into cash, and the hundred and fifty bales of the tenth month came to seventy-seven ryō in hand. In the first year of the ledger the three terms together made an income of 151 ryō 1 bu. Against that the year's outgoings were a little over ninety-nine ryō, leaving a balance of about fifty.
Years in deficit, years in surplus
The second volume is titled Katteikata Kanjōchō and begins in the first month of 1858. That year closed in deficit.
Balance: short by 1 ryō 3 bu 3 shu and 141 mon in coin
At the end of the next year, 1859, however, even after the previous year's deficit had been set against it, this stands.
Balance in hand: 1,563 ryō 1 shu and 4 monme 9 fun 3 rin of silver
More than fifty times the previous year, and ten times an ordinary year's income. The reason is plain. In the twelfth month “the allowance for going to America, one thousand ryō” was handed over. The embassy sailed on the eighteenth day of the first month of the following year. A round sum for outfitting came into the house just before the departure.
The third volume, Kanjōchō, begins in the first month of 1860, the year of the crossing. It opens: “twelfth day, first month: 89 ryō 1 bu, proceeds from the sale of rice”. The year of the voyage itself ends back at a quite ordinary level, with “61 ryō 3 shu and 123 mon in coin” carried over. The thousand ryō that came in the year before was evidently spent in the course of it.
The next year, 1861, was again in surplus, by 267 ryō 2 bu and 19 mon. That too came of extraordinary receipts: the allowance, among other things, for his journey to the province of Tsushima to treat with a Russian warship. That is the mission on which Oguri crossed to Tsushima over the affair of the Posadnik.
Then the fourth volume. 1862 closed with a large deficit of “532 ryō 1 bu 3 shu”, and 1863 was short by 115 ryō 3 bu 1 shu and 112 mon. Surplus in the years when an extraordinary allowance came, deficit in the years when it did not: how a hatamoto household was built shows in the figures just as it was.
A carefully budgeted life
These accounts were run in something like a monthly-salary arrangement: at the start of each month an allowance was allotted to his mother first, then to himself, to his wife, and to his adopted son Matakichi and his wife. The report of investigation in the Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials calls this “a carefully budgeted way of living”.
The small outgoings survive too.
“200 mon in coin: first-fruits for Atagoyama” (fourteenth day, twelfth month, 1859)
“2 bu: seat money for watching the Kanda festival” (fifteenth day, ninth month, 1861)
“1 bu: sent for the licensed soliciting of alms at Ana Hachiman” (twenty-first day, seventh month, 1862)
The Kanda festival fell on the fifteenth day of the ninth month and was called, with the Sannō festival of the Hie shrine, one of the two great festivals of Edo; its portable shrines alone were allowed inside Edo Castle. The 2 bu of seat money to watch it comes to about fifty thousand yen in Sakamoto Fujiyoshi's conversion. For 1854, the year Perry came again, there are entries such as “his lordship being at the Hama palace, an allowance sent to the attendants” (fourth day, second month) and “duty at the Hama palace: an allowance to the samurai and the attendants” (twenty-fifth day, second month), so that the accounts confirm from their own side that Oguri was on guard duty at the Hama palace when the black ships came as far in as the waters off Haneda.
His father Tadataka died of illness at Niigata on the twenty-eighth day of the seventh month of 1855, only a year after taking up the post. His remains were buried at Hōonji in Teramachi, Niigata, with a portion of the ashes placed at Hozenji in Yokodera-chō, Ushigome, in Edo. From then on the accounts record an offering sent without fail at the midsummer festival and at the year's end, not only to Hozenji in Edo but to Hōonji, far away in Niigata.
Ledgers nearly burned
That these accounts and the diaries survive today comes of something close to chance. After Oguri's death, the man sent out to the place to settle his affairs was Gotō Hachirōemon, who had been given charge of the accounting side by Ōne Ryūtarō, the inspector with the government's army. It is thought that Hachirōemon, grudging to see the diaries and the accounts among Oguri's effects thrown out to be burned with the rubbish, quietly carried them home.
For more than eighty years after that the ledgers slept at the bottom of a chest in the Gotō house at Shibukawa. They were found in 1952. Gunma Prefecture designated them an important cultural property of the prefecture in 1956 and printed them as volume 7 of the Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials.
Here are figures that will never appear in a chronology of political history. In the twelfth month, when the thousand ryō of allowance was handed over, the ledger of a hatamoto house entered it simply as “balance in hand”.
Sources: Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7; Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987
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