The twenty-third day of the fourth month of 1863, when Oguri was relieved of office after opposing the increase of stipend for Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi's Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai cites Dr Ishii Takashi's observation that this same day was “the best day of his life” for Katsu Kaishū. On that day the shogun Iemochi granted Katsu leave to establish the naval training station at Kōbe.
A connection that begins with the sword
The tie between the two men goes back before their service in the shogunate's government. Katsu Rintarō was born in 1823 at Honjo Kamezawachō, four years Oguri's senior. Both were small men, though by Sakamoto Fujiyoshi's account Oguri was very slightly the taller.
The sword connects them too. The school Oguri entered as a boy was that of Onogai Seiichirō (Nobutomo), called the first swordsman of those years, and the line was the Jikishinkage school. Onogai is said to have watched Oguri fence in later years and praised him: “Who would have thought that this man's swordsmanship would reach so fine a point.” Katsu too first entered under Onogai, who was his cousin, and in 1838, at fifteen, moved to the school his fellow pupil Shimada Toranosuke had set up on his own. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi writes that the two men who would move the Japan of those years and come to oppose each other most sharply “may very probably have crossed swords in the same school at some point in their boyhood”, and that “it must be called a strange connection”.
On the embassy to the United States of 1860 Oguri went to Washington in the Powhatan as censor, while Katsu crossed the Pacific as captain of the escorting Kanrin Maru. The Kanrin Maru turned back at San Francisco, however, and Katsu never went to Washington. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi points out that the two have often been confused on this point.
On the eighteenth day of the fifth month of 1862 the shogunate ordered an inquiry into military organization with a view to reform. By Ōtsubo Motoji's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu, eleven men from the heart of the shogunate were chosen, Oguri among them, and Katsu Rintarō was one of them. It is one of the few occasions on which the two sat to the same work.
“When Katsu rose, Tadamasa sank”
While Oguri was without office from the fourth month of 1863, Katsu was promoted commissioner of warships on the fourteenth day of the fifth month of 1864 and appointed Awa-no-kami. When Chōshū was defeated in the affair at the Forbidden Gate in the seventh month of that year, though, the situation turned over. Katsu was dismissed as commissioner of warships on the tenth day of the eleventh month of 1864, on the ground that he was in sympathy with Chōshū. And — as Sakamoto Fujiyoshi says more than once, “strangely enough” — the building of the Yokosuka ironworks, which Oguri had long argued for and recommended, was formally approved on that same tenth day of the eleventh month. The book puts it thus.
When Katsu rose, Tadamasa sank; when Tadamasa rose, Katsu sank. The defeat of Chōshū sank Katsu and brought Tadamasa up.
With Katsu's fall the naval training station at Kōbe was closed. Sakamoto Ryōma, who had headed the school there, was left with nowhere to go, and appeared later, by way of the Kameyama Shachū, as the broker of the alliance between Satsuma and Chōshū.
A secret confided, and where it went
On the twenty-seventh day of the fifth month of 1866 the shogunate reinstated Katsu as commissioner of warships, to persuade the Satsuma domain, and ordered him to Osaka. The day before, Oguri confided to Katsu the secret of the loan from France. Katsu wrote this in Hikawa Seiwa.
Oguri said to me in secret: your going west this time must be on business to do with the Chōshū negotiations. If so, we have such and such a plan, and no doubt you will agree with it; and that, he said, is why I venture to tell you this secret
Katsu said nothing against it at the time — “thinking argument useless, I merely assented”, as Kainanroku has it — but on reaching Osaka he launched a fierce attack on Oguri before the senior councillors in the castle. Kaishū Nisshi records that “the country's treasure being spent to exhaustion, they mortgage the land and borrow money from France”, and the story grew into one in which Oguri was trying to borrow funds from France on the security of Japanese territory. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi takes this story of mortgaged territory to have fixed the image of Oguri from the Meiji era on.
Two sources of the navy
Sakamoto Fujiyoshi sets out two sources of the Japanese navy. One is Katsu's line, which built the naval training station at Kōbe and carried out training there; Katsu raised with his own hands the stone at Kōbe inscribed “birthplace of the Japanese navy”. The other is Oguri's line: overriding opposition inside and outside the shogunate, he decided on the building of a shipyard and fixed its site at Yokosuka. Many of the Japanese warships that fought in the Russo-Japanese war were built at that Yokosuka yard.
Katsu did not deny the whole of Oguri's work, though. In Kaishū Nisshi, naming those who argued in Edo for opening the country, Ōkubo Ichiō stands at the head, and then “next, Oguri Bungo and Okabe Suruga — these three gentlemen”, with Oguri's name among them. In Kaigun Rekishi (a history of the navy) Katsu went further and praised the work at Yokosuka.
Oguri Kōzukenosuke, holding the business of the warship establishment concurrently with the commissionership of finance, read the times well, saw that the navy must be enlarged, and was the first to argue for the founding of a shipyard … that, with the government's coffers empty, he laboured at the management of it and brought these two works into being is deeply to be commended.
The opposition between the two took its decisive form at the great council in Edo Castle in the first month of 1868. That is taken up in detail in the chapter on 1868. On the relation between the two men, see also the page among the people around him.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987 (quoting Hikawa Seiwa, Kaishū Nisshi, Kainanroku and Katsu Kaishū Zenshū vol. 10, Kaigun Rekishi III, and citing Ishii Takashi's observation); Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957
→ Negotiating with Russia, and reforming the shogunate's government (the top of this chapter) → The building of the Yokosuka ironworks