In the eighth month of 1862 the procession of Shimazu Hisamitsu, father of the lord of Satsuma, on its way from Edo to Kyoto, came upon four British riders at the village of Namamugi in Kanagawa. One of the party was a woman, and they were said to be on their way to the Kawasaki Daishi temple. Enraged retainers drew their swords; one of the riders was cut down and died, two were badly wounded, and the rest fled back to Yokohama. This was the Namamugi incident. Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki write that in fact they had not cut across the procession, and that what really happened seems to have been a failure to dismount in courtesy.
A hard case left on the city commissioner's desk
Oguri's offices changed dizzyingly that year. He became commissioner of finance, revenue side, on the fifth day of the sixth month, changed his official title to Kōzukenosuke about the same time, was relieved of the commissionership of finance on the twenty-fifth day of the intercalary eighth month, and was ordered the same day to be city commissioner of Edo. A city commissioner had charge of the courts and the policing of the city's commoner quarters; the Namamugi incident was a hard case already waiting, unsettled, when he took office. Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki write: “In other times this would not have been a city commissioner's business. But the other party were foreigners, and the times were bad into the bargain.”
The question of paying an indemnity arose as a matter of course. The protests of Colonel St John Neale, the British chargé d'affaires, were of the sternest, and the other powers were ready to take strong measures at the same time. “Once again Tadamasa had to rack his brains to find a large sum” — the same book's reading is that whenever the shogunate needed money, the raising of it came down on Oguri's shoulders.
Meeting Yokoi Shōnan at Matsudaira Shungaku's residence
Ōtsubo Motoji's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu records that on the twenty-ninth day of the eighth month, not long after the incident, Oguri conferred on the Namamugi affair at the residence of Matsudaira Shungaku, lord of Echizen. Asano Iga-no-kami, the commissioner at Kanagawa, and others were present. And at that gathering was Yokoi Shōnan, then political adviser to the Echizen domain: a meeting between one of the foremost thinkers of the day, who commanded the respect of Katsu Kaishū and Saigō Takamori, and a young practical official of the shogunate. Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki's Oguri Kōzukenosuke says of it: “It is a melancholy thing that nothing at all is recorded of that hour in which the two men faced each other.”
Oguri's offices went on changing. On the first day of the twelfth month he was relieved as city commissioner and became commissioner of infantry, and five days after that, on the fifth day of the twelfth month, he held the commissionership of finance, revenue side, concurrently. Military reform, finance and a diplomatic case were all in his hands at once.
“This is the final notice”
In the new year, on the nineteenth day of the second month of 1863, Colonel Neale presented the shogunate with a despatch as “the final notice”. Five translators were called at night to the Akasaka residence of Matsudaira Iwami-no-kami Yasuhide, the commissioner of foreign affairs, and by the time they had finished the sky was already light. One of the five was Fukuzawa Yukichi, then in the foreign affairs translation office. The substance of the demands is set down in Fukuō Jiden.
A hundred thousand pounds from the shogunate payment of an indemnity
Twenty-five thousand pounds from the Satsuma domain a separate payment
Execution of the culprits the men who did it to be seized and put to death in the sight of British witnesses
Twenty days to comply force to be used if no answer came
The French minister Bellecourt took the same line, giving notice that when hostilities opened the French would join the British in making havoc with their warships off Shinagawa. In the twelfth month of the previous year Takasugi Shinsaku and others of Chōshū had burned the British legation at Gotenyama in Shinagawa, which had further inflamed Neale. The city of Edo was full of talk that war must be about to begin, and Fukuzawa, living at Shinsenza, went so far as to make ready to flee. The shogunate's councils could not decide whether to pay the indemnity or not, and the deadline was put off again and again, by twenty days and then by ten.
The ninth day of the fifth month: payment at Yokohama on one man's authority
The end came abruptly. On the ninth day of the fifth month of 1863 the senior councillor Ogasawara Zusho-no-kami Nagamichi, who had been in bed until the day before saying he was gravely ill, got up that morning, boarded a warship and left Shinagawa, declaring that he was going up to the capital region. A British gunboat followed him; but Ogasawara, instead of rounding Honmoku, put into Yokohama and paid the indemnity at once, on his own authority. A hundred thousand pounds came to four hundred thousand Mexican dollars at the rate of the day. He handed that silver over to Neale, and for the moment the matter was closed. The very next day came the firing on foreign ships in Chōshū.
Satsuma's side dragged on. By Sakamoto Fujiyoshi's account, Satsuma put up a fictitious person as the culprit and evaded the demand, and in the seventh month of 1863 a British squadron of seven ships bombarded Kagoshima — the Anglo-Satsuma war. The Satsuma domain paid the British chargé d'affaires twenty-five thousand pounds, with money borrowed from the shogunate, on the first day of the eleventh month of the same year. The tangled Namamugi incident reached something like a settlement a year and three months after it happened.
Giving neither pretext nor opening
Of Oguri's part in this business Sakamoto Fujiyoshi writes that “this settlement too had to wait on Oguri's skill”, and that “Oguri gave Britain neither a pretext nor an opening for making further complaint or for using force”. In the Tsushima incident he had learned on the spot that a negotiation with no force behind it would not move to the end. In the Namamugi incident he held, conversely, to the single point of giving the other side no opening at all.
The shogunate's purse, though, was close to its limit. The shogun Iemochi's first journey up to the capital in this period alone cost 163 ōban, more than 635,757 ryō in gold and more than 4,290 kan in silver. On top of that came the indemnity of a hundred thousand pounds and the loan to Satsuma. Oguri was relieved of the commissionership of infantry and of finance on the twenty-third day of the fourth month of 1863, the time when he had opposed the increase of stipend for Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu.
Sources: Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975 (including its quotation from Fukuō Jiden); Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957
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