Set Oguri's career out by year and month and it becomes clear that the periods in which he stayed in one post were the shorter part. Abe Dōzan's Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden prints a table of Oguri Kōzukenosuke's appointments and dismissals near the front, and counts eighteen appointments and dismissals in a mere nine years, from his appointment as inspector in the ninth month of 1859 to his dismissal in the first month of 1868. On average a warrant came every six months.
Up to his being called into service
The road up to that was rather the ordinary advancement of a hatamoto. By Ōtsubo Motoji's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu, on the sixteenth day of the fourth month of 1847 Oguri, then twenty-one, was called out of the household when his “diligence in the arts” came to his lord's ears, entered one of the two guards — the library guard of the western keep, in the company of Akita Awaji-no-kami — and was granted a stipend of three hundred bales. Ōtsubo Motoji explains it as “the system by which able sons of hatamoto families were picked out and taken into service: the gateway to advancement”.
On the fifth day of the seventh month of 1853 he was ordered to serve on the gifts staff, moving from the western keep to duty in the main keep. Perry had arrived at Uraga a month before, on the third day of the sixth month. In the seventh month of 1855 his father Tadataka died of illness at his post while serving as commissioner at Niigata, and on the twenty-second day of the tenth month of the same year Oguri succeeded to the house and took the name Matakichi borne by its heads. He became messenger of the shogun on the eleventh day of the first month of 1857, and was given hoi rank, corresponding to the junior sixth, on the sixteenth day of the twelfth month of the same year. On the twelfth day of the ninth month of 1859, at thirty-three, he was appointed inspector of the main keep, and on the twenty-first day of the eleventh month was given the junior fifth rank, lower grade, with the title Bungo-no-kami.
1862: five warrants in ten months
He became commissioner of foreign affairs on the eighth day of the eleventh month of 1860, was relieved of the post on the twenty-sixth day of the ninth month of 1861, and was without office. The turning point is 1862. The warrants issued in that one year, gathered from Ōtsubo Motoji's short chronology, run as follows.
Third month Ordered to be captain of the pages' corps
Eighteenth day, fifth month Ordered to the inquiry into military organization (eleven men from the heart of the shogunate were chosen, Katsu Rintarō among them)
Fifth day, sixth month Appointed commissioner of finance (revenue side), and changed his title to Kōzukenosuke
Twenty-fifth day, eighth month Relieved of the commissionership of finance, revenue side, and the same day appointed city commissioner for south Edo
First day, twelfth month Relieved as city commissioner of Edo and appointed the first commissioner of infantry
Fifth day, twelfth month Appointed concurrently commissioner of finance (revenue side)
He had been commissioner of finance for only about two months and twenty days. Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki's Oguri Kōzukenosuke reports that the cause of the dismissal seems to have been the following outburst at a gathering.
At a time when the country has much on its hands and the finances are in difficulty, it is useless to pay high stipends to spineless samurai; such payments ought to be cut. And though a thing be old precedent and ancient form, useless officers and useless offices ought to be abolished.
Even so, the same book says, he was too good a man to lose, “so then — city commissioner”; relieved of that, the next was commissioner of infantry, and “on the fifth day after it he was ordered again to hold the busy commissionership of finance, revenue side, as well”. Once a reform of the military system was begun, money came first, and there was nobody else who could be given both.
Four terms as commissioner of finance
After he was relieved of both the commissionership of infantry and that of finance on the twenty-third day of the fourth month of 1863, the coming and going went on. He returned to the commissionership of finance, revenue side, on the thirteenth day of the eighth month of 1864, was dismissed on the ninth day of the twelfth month, became commissioner of warships on the eighteenth day of the twelfth month, resigned as commissioner of warships in the second month of 1865, and on the fourth day of the fifth month of the same year was commissioner of finance, revenue side, once more. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi's Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai says of this return: “The dismissal had lasted a mere three months. This time too it was the commissionership of finance, revenue side. There was no one but him who could manage the hard-pressed finances.”
In the eighth month of 1866 he held the post of acting commissioner of the navy as well, and in the twelfth month of 1867 that of acting commissioner of the army, his main office remaining the commissionership of finance. Counted up, he held the commissionership of finance, revenue side, four times in his life. For a hatamoto it was the highest office that could be reached. Fukuchi Gen'ichirō left it on record that, while the chief posts of the shogunate went by family standing, “the commissionership of finance alone, because it required men versed in the circumstances of the people”, always had one or two men of real promotion among its establishment of five.
The exaggeration of “more than seventy times”
It was commonly said that Oguri's appointments and dismissals ran to “more than seventy”, and even encyclopedias recorded it so. Abe Dōzan dismisses this — “it is said in the world that Kōzukenosuke was appointed more than seventy times, but this is not the fact” — and gives the correct figure as eighteen in nine years. Even so the frequency remains exceptional. At Edo Castle the attendants joked about another change of post for Oguri, Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki's Oguri Kōzukenosuke records.
Why did he move so much? Abe Dōzan takes it that Oguri's policies were not centred on the shogunate but were “a Japanese policy of renewal, in touch with the movement of the world”, and that the shogunate's leading men therefore regarded him as heterodox. Elsewhere he writes that the councillors had no able men about them, and that it “came of their jumping to the conclusion that Oguri was a man opposed to the shogunate”. Either way, he had to take hold of the practical business of a new post at each appointment, and left work behind him in finance, in military government, in justice and in diplomacy alike.
Sources: Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941; Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975; Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987
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