STORIES

Was there a concubine? — the “Oaya” of the account book and the “Outa” of Gonda

A woman paid regularly every month, and a woman seen at Gonda in the year of the execution.

The household accounts of the Oguri for the 1850s survive. The ledger is titled Ryōnyū Seishutsu Bo, and it is an unusual record: the life of a hatamoto of 2,500 koku can be followed down to the mon. Beside the money for eel and the gift to the monkey showman, a woman's name, “Oaya”, appears in it almost every month.

“Two bu, Oaya's portion”, “money for Oaya's clothes”, “money for Oaya's palanquin”. Even the cost of presents brought back from a trip to Honjo is entered in detail. The sum is sometimes one bu, sometimes two, according to the month, but the payment itself never breaks off. For this person there is no entry of wages. A servant would appear in the wage column for her rank, so she seems to have been treated as one of the household itself.

That single line has kept the question of whether Oguri Kōzukenosuke had a concubine open for nearly a century.

Ōtsubo Motoji gave no answer

The first to notice “Oaya” was Ōtsubo Motoji, who put together the genealogy of the Oguri house (Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu, 1957). Ōtsubo first considered whether she might be the same person as Ayako, who became Ōkuma Shigenobu's second wife — an adopted daughter the Oguri had taken in from relatives — and set that aside as “impossible to think anything but a different person”. He wrote this.

If she was another person, had Tadamasa already a concubine in keeping?

What is worth noting is that Ōtsubo leaves this in the form of a question. Having written once that “there are many even now who warmly defend Tadamasa, insisting that he was decidedly not such a man”, he does not step as far as a conclusion. Putting the marriage of Tadamasa and Michiko at about 1854, he goes on: “that being so, what this woman Oaya was to the house of Oguri becomes harder still to understand.”

He raises the view that she may have been a concubine of his father Tadataka. The dates work. But Ōtsubo set it aside himself — “to see it so would settle everything on all sides neatly, but it could hardly escape the charge of suiting one's own convenience” — and laid down his pen without giving an answer.

Later accounts sometimes sum this up as “Ōtsubo concluded that Oaya was Tadamasa's concubine”, but the text itself does not say so much.

Sakamoto Fujiyoshi read her as his wife Michiko herself

Thirty years later Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, a historian of business, offered a different reading (Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai, 1987). His conclusion was that Oaya was his wife Michiko herself. He gives three grounds.

First, that in neither the accounts nor the diaries is there any period in which “Oaya” and “Omichi” appear at the same time. Oaya begins with “two bu, Oaya's portion” in the first month of 1850 and disappears in the ninth month of 1854; from the next ledger, which opens in the first month of 1858, only “Omichi” appears in the same place. Second, that the jump in the sum from one or two bu to one ryō one bu is accounted for by his father Tadataka's death in the interval and Tadamasa's succession to the house. Third, that the places Oaya went to were Honjo and Myōjinshita — both places where the Tatebe house, his wife's family, had residences. “To send a concubine to the wife's family home,” Sakamoto writes, “is unnatural however one looks at it.”

It cannot be said that the payments stopped

Reading Oaya's disappearance in the ninth month of 1854 as the putting away of a concubine, however, calls for care. The first volume of the ledger itself ends in that month. The next volume jumps to 1858, and the two and a half years between are blank. Whether the payments stopped or only the record broke off cannot be told apart from this ledger.

The ledger for 1858, as it happens, has one lone entry left in it: “tea money when Oaya went over to Mukōjima”.

The “Outa” who was at Gonda

Directly after arguing that Oaya was Michiko, Sakamoto added this.

That does not mean, however, that I have the least intention of asserting that Oguri had no concubine.

The woman Sakamoto named as a candidate was “Outa”. The source was an account taken down from Ikeda Kayo of the village of Gonda. Kayo was the daughter of Ikeda Tamikichi, an infantryman of the Oguri house, and in the spring of 1868, at seventeen, she went to Tōzenji to help. In the autumn of 1943 Ōtsubo Motoji took the account down from Kayo, then ninety-one, and it was later printed.

Her ladyship was tall and slender-faced, a wonderfully beautiful person, the very image of a princess on the stage; then there was one called Outa, twenty-two or twenty-three, and about three maids

Two things in that short sentence are clear. That a woman called Outa was there. And that she is counted separately from the three maids. To the eyes of Kayo at seventeen she stood in a place that was neither her ladyship's nor a maid's. What the words of a witness carry is that much and no further. Kayo herself put in the caution that “I cannot really remember clearly”, and the account was taken seventy-five years after the event, when she was ninety-one.

Having given the name, Sakamoto writes: “there is indeed a woman of whom one might think it possible, but the examination of this matter goes beyond the purpose of this book, and I shall wait for another occasion.” Sakamoto, who read Oaya as Michiko, still left open the possibility that Oguri had a concubine, and set down Outa's name as the candidate.

Two things, then, can be confirmed so far. That a woman called “Oaya”, who received no wages, appears every month in the household accounts of the 1850s. And that at Gonda in the spring of 1868 a woman called “Outa”, twenty-two or twenty-three, was counted apart from her ladyship and from the maids. Who each of these two was, and in what position, has not yet been written.

No researcher, however, has ever asserted from the sources that Oguri had no concubine. Ōtsubo Motoji left the question in the form of a question, and Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, having stated plainly that he had not the least intention of asserting it, left Outa's name on record. The accounts and the spoken testimony have carried this open question down to the present day, along with the figures of a household's life.

Sources: Ryōnyū Seishutsu Bo, in 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, pp. 22–27; Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975, pp. 346–347. The quotations follow the wording of the originals.

→ The eighty years the diaries lay unread　／　The “grave of the generations of the house of Oguri” at Zōshigaya cemetery

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