Payments to the monkey showman come up again and again in the Oguri accounts. He was a street performer who went from house to house having his monkey do tricks, and in the Edo period he was welcomed as a bringer of luck for the new year by samurai and townsfolk alike.
The accounts held in the Oguri Nikki (Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7) were originally in four volumes. The first is a ledger about the size of a paperback with Ryōnyū Seishutsu Bo written on the cover, covering 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 to the fourth volumes cover the six years from the first month of 1858, after the succession, to the twelfth month of 1863. 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 throughout (how these ledgers came to light).
The payment to the monkey showman is entered in every one of the five years from 1859 to 1863, which can be followed through year by year. The wording is not fixed: “monkey showman”, “money for the monkey showman”, “to the monkey showman”, “sent to the monkey showman”, and “first-fruits for the monkey showman”, varying from one time to the next.
Three times in a year, some years
Nor was it only once. In 1859 and in 1860 it is entered three times in the year; in 1861 twice, and in 1862 and 1863 once each. It was plainly not a matter of one call at the gate at the New Year and no more.
1860 is the year that catches the eye. That year Oguri, as inspector to the embassy to the United States, sailed from Shinagawa in the Powhatan on the eighteenth day of the first month and did not reach Yokohama again until the twenty-eighth day of the ninth month — more than eight months away from Japan. Even so, the ledger for that year records the payment to the monkey showman three times, as in other years. While the head of the house was on the far side of the earth, the year's fixtures went round in the same way at the Surugadai residence.
One of the entries for 1859 stands in the same month's ledger beside “expenses for the first horse day”. The hatsuuma is the festival of Inari held on the first day of the horse in the second month. It suggests that the monkey showman was not a sight of the New Year alone but was set into the round of the year's festivals.
That it is written “first-fruits”
That the entry for 1863 reads “first-fruits for the monkey showman” is not to be passed over. Hatsuho-ryō is the term for a thank-offering made to the gods and the buddhas, and is a different thing from a tip or coins thrown for a performance seen. In the Oguri house the monkey showman was received not as an entertainer but as one who had come to pray.
Other first-fruits payments stand in the same ledger: first-fruits for Togakushiyama, first-fruits for the Funabashi palace, first-fruits for Kyōkōbō, and expenses for the Inari festival and “cost of re-covering the Inari drum”. Condolence money and sutra fees for Hozenji, the family temple at Ushigome, and an offering to Fumon'in at Ōmiya come in the same ledger too. The payment to the monkey showman was set down in the same even manner, as one item among the costs of the year's prayers and festivals.
Amounts are written in the manner “one item, 2 shu”, “one item, 1 bu”. The reckoning of the day was one ryō to four bu, one bu to four shu, one shu to four hundred mon. Take the ledger for 1853: Oguri's own pocket money ran at 2 bu a month and his wife Aya's at 1 bu, so a shu or two paid out in first-fruits or as a gift was a small sum in the life of the house — but one that went out without fail every year.
It was a house that kept horses
The monkey was held to be the guardian of horses, and samurai houses, it is said, often received the monkey showman with the thought of praying for the safety of the stable. The Oguri accounts fit that explanation well.
“Expenses for the horses” appears in the ledger again and again, and “money for horse medicine” is entered repeatedly too. “Expenses for the horses, to the groom” will be payment to the man who looked after them. There is an entry for “horse gear, various”. Beyond that, items such as “money for the riding horse and expenses for the training ground” and “money for the riding horse and silver paid out for the training ground” come up a number of times. For the training ground the names are written out separately — Yoda, Tatsuke, Kubota, Chiba. The silver paid out for attending practice in the military arts and the costs of the horses stood side by side in the same ledger, year after year.
Later, as commissioner of infantry and commissioner of the army, Oguri pushed on with the Western system of three arms, and had Arabian horses sent from France to improve the stock. In 1868, when he gave up the Edo house and went down to the village of Gonda, he is said to have ridden that Arabian along the road. For close on twenty years before that, the ledgers of this house had carried, side by side, the money for horse medicine and the first-fruits for the monkey showman who guarded the stable.
Behind the great events — the stories of the embassy, the reform of the shogunate's government — the household went on year by year giving first-fruits to the monkey showman, dosing the horses, and having the Inari drum re-covered. It is the feel of a life that survives precisely because the ledger that held it was a plain one.
Sources: Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7 (the Oguri household accounts); Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family), and Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society
→ The year-end payment, and the rule of giving by rank → A liking for eel, as the accounts show → Arabian horses and silkworm egg cards