Oguri Mankyō — the priest said to be a concubine's son

Oguri Mankyō was a Sōtō Zen priest, the fifteenth abbot of Tōzenji at the village of Gonda in Gunma district, Kōzuke province — now Gonda, Kurabuchi-machi, Takasaki, Gunma prefecture — and later the twenty-fifth of Zentōin at Sannokura. His name as a child was Kikunosuke. He was born on the tenth day of the fourth month of 1857 at Surugadai in Edo, and died at Maebashi on 9 June 1921.

Tōzenji is the temple where Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa passed his last two months, and where he was beheaded and buried. This priest took over that temple ten years after Tadamasa's death.

Oguri Mankyō Den, the booklet Koyama Tadashi, Mankyō's third son, left behind in 1975, holds Mankyō to be a child of Tadamasa and a concubine named Uta.

He was born on the tenth day of the fourth month of 1857, at the residence at Surugadai in Edo. Oguri Mankyō Den records that for a time, as circumstances required, he was put in the care of the branch house of Oguri Niemon, and that the main house took him back later and brought him up. The Niemon house had a stipend of 750 koku and came of the second son of Tadamasa, the first of the line.

In 1860, when Tadamasa came back from the embassy to the United States, he was given a toy of glass tubing as a present. A highly volatile liquid is in the lower part; put a hand to it and the liquid expands and pushes up an object shaped like an insect inside. The thing itself is in the Haruna Museum of History and Folklore, Takasaki (item no. 4-10-16).

He went to the school every day with an attendant, it is said. At seven he began training with the sword.

One day Tadamasa gave him a new sword, and to try its edge he cut down a dog. He told his attendant to say nothing, but the man told on him, and Tadamasa reproved him.

To cut down something that has done no wrong is conduct unworthy of a samurai. A man who does so should cut his belly

Kikunosuke did cut his belly. Tadamasa, startled, had a doctor attend to him. A scar some ten centimetres long remained on his belly, and from then on, it is said, he wore a blunt sword as a matter of course. Tadashi, who wrote the book, grew up seeing that scar.

On the twenty-eighth day of the second month of 1868 the household gave up the residence at Surugadai, and on the first day of the third month they entered the fief at the village of Gonda. The Oguri Nikki has “the twenty-eighth … set out” and “the first day of the third month … arrived at Tōzenji in Gonda”. Kikunosuke was twelve by the old count, his sister Shige three. The household took Tōzenji as its temporary quarters for a while.

On the fourth day of the third month, when the gamblers came down from the direction of Sannokura, the women and children withdrew into the hills towards Uenokubo.

Once the building of the house on Kannonyama began, Kikunosuke went now and then to the site to play; he is said to have cut at the brushwood until he bent his blade so that it would not go back into its scabbard, and put the carpenters to trouble.

On the fifth day of the intercalary fourth month Tadamasa was taken, and on the sixth he was cut down at the riverbed at Mizunuma. As he was being led away by the government troops, Kikunosuke made to run to him and turned back because Tadamasa checked him with a look, so the story goes. His father often said, well into later years, that the sorrow of that moment still came back to him — so Tadashi, who wrote the book, sets it down.

→ The end at the riverbed at Mizunuma　／　The sixty-four days at the village of Gonda

The family was closely investigated after the execution. Kikunosuke was first hidden at the house of a former retainer, Nakajima Sanzaemon, later Honda Sanzaemon, and, feeling himself in danger, moved to Chōnenji at Shimomuroda. His sister Shige and their mother were hidden at a temple called Rengein in the village of Mizunuma, it is said.

After that, he became a disciple of the priest Ehaku, the fourteenth abbot of Tōzenji, entered the priesthood and took the name Mangyō.

His master Ehaku's first name in religion was Akuhaku. He was born in 1820 at Hachimanyama-chō in Kodama district, Musashi province. In 1868, because he was keeping the key to the Oguri strongbox, he was tortured almost to death. He was also the man who, beside himself, begged the captors for the life of the young Mukasa Ginsuke after he was bound.

The Tōzenji household register of 1872 carries the names of Ehaku, aged fifty-three, and his two disciples, Mango and Mangyō. Mangyō is given as born in 1857 and aged sixteen.

In 1874 master and disciple settled on surnames together. Akuhaku took his from Mount Suwa, where the temple stands, and became Suwa Ehaku; Mangyō became Oguri Mankyō.

→ Mukasa Ginsuke — the young man said to have guarded his lord's head

About 1878 Ehaku died, and Mankyō became the fifteenth abbot of Tōzenji.

On 4 November 1880 he married Etsu. Etsu was the third daughter of Kageyama Masasuke, pen name Gorō, of samurai family, of Nishi-Daikan-chō in Koga, Shimōsa province — now Koga, Ibaraki prefecture — and was born on the first day of the second month of 1860. Masasuke was a teacher at the Koga domain school, the Eikadō.

About 1881 or 1882 a former retainer, Ikeda Denzaburō, came to Tōzenji. He greeted Mankyō with ceremony — “Master Kikunosuke, it has been a long time” — and talked of the trouble with the gamblers, and of serving as a corporal of the Kumamoto garrison in the Satsuma rebellion of 1877 and being shut up in the siege, before he left. Ikeda had escorted Tadamasa's mother and wife on their flight to Aizu, and afterwards crossed to Hakodate in the Kaiyō Maru and fought at Goryōkaku.

About 1902 or 1903, Uta, Tadashi's grandmother, stayed a long while at the temple at Gonda. In the grounds of the Suwa shrine halfway up the temple hill she would bundle up dead cedar needles and throw them down the high stone steps, and clap her hands with pleasure to watch them bounce like balls down to the road below. Tadashi's mother and his elder sisters often spoke of such a day.

The Kōzuke no Kuni Jiin Meisaichō, the detailed register of temples in Kōzuke province, carries the signature “Oguri Mankyō, probationer”.

On 28 October 1908 Takatsu Nakajirō, lodging at an inn in Gonda on his way to inspect the water source for the hydroelectric works on the Karasu River, called at Tōzenji, met Mankyō and asked him about Oguri Kōzukenosuke's deeds. The Takatsu Nakajirō Nikki (his diary) has: “met Oguri Mankyō, abbot of Tōzenji, and asked about the deeds of Oguri Kōzukenosuke”. Mankyō was fifty-two, in his twenty-seventh year as abbot.

In 1921 he became the twenty-fifth abbot of Zentōin at Sannokura. The list of Zentōin's abbots in Kurabuchi Mura-shi (the Kurabuchi village history) has “the twenty-fifth, Etsuō Mankyō”. The twenty-fourth, Kōgaku Shūhō, died on 24 January 1921, so he held the twenty-fifth seat for a few months at the very end of his life. That the lines of abbots at Tōzenji and at Zentōin overlap appears to follow the practice of holding both at once.

Mankyō's memorial tablet and gravestone remain at Zentōin. Manshitsu Zen'ei, the twenty-sixth, who came after him, also bore the name Oguri, and transferred from being the sixteenth of Tōzenji.

His wife Etsu died on 26 July 1920. The next year, on 9 June 1921, Mankyō died at Maebashi. He was sixty-five by the old count. His name in death was Etsuō Mankyō Daiwajō. The headship of the family passed to his second son, Yoji.

The sixteenth seat at Tōzenji and the twenty-sixth at Zentōin passed to his adopted son Zen'ei.

Sources: Koyama Tadashi, Oguri Mankyō Den (a life of Oguri Mankyō), facsimile edition — the facsimile is held by the National Diet Library, call number Y93-R10737, and is introduced on the books and sources page; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Katsu Kaishū no Raibaru: Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (Katsu Kaishū's rival: the tragedy of the Oguri family), Asao-sha; Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa); Kurabuchi Mura-shi (the Kurabuchi village history); Kōzuke no Kuni Jiin Meisaichō (the detailed register of temples in Kōzuke province); Takatsu Nakajirō Nikki (the Takatsu Nakajirō diary)