The Tsushima incident did not end for Oguri as one piece of diplomatic business. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi writes of the failure of the negotiation with Russia that it “opened his eyes not only in his head but in his very body — a second opening, following the one the embassy to the United States had given him”. The work Oguri took up after this affair is in fact different in character from what went before.
What he grasped at the negotiating table
Oguri stopped Birilev from forcing an interview with the lord of the domain by putting his own body in the way. As a negotiation, that alone might be called a success. But Sakamoto goes on: it was no more than a stopgap. Had the other side used force, nothing could have been done. At bottom, nothing was settled. It was not Oguri's talks but the British squadron in Far Eastern waters, called in by the shogunate, that made the Russian ship leave.
Sakamoto sets out the conclusion Oguri drew from this. Unless the underlying problem were solved, violations of the kind would come one after another, and a patched-up measure would sooner or later fail to meet the case. What Japan needed now was the strength to make even an intruding warship leave. And “strength means military strength and economic strength”.
Four aims
Sakamoto names four things, specifically, towards which Oguri's energy went from this time.
A shipyard the building of a great shipyard, so that ships to match those of America, Britain, France and Russia could be built by Japanese hands
Finance putting the shogunate's finances on a footing that would support it
A trading company the founding of a company to take back for Japanese the profits of trade monopolized by foreigners
Education teaching in technology, languages and economics to make all of this possible
These four coincide exactly with the work Oguri went on to do: the Yokosuka ironworks, the rebuilding of the finances as commissioner of finance, the Hyōgo Shōsha, and the arrangements for training engineers attached to Yokosuka. That the sense of helplessness he tasted at Tsushima stands at the beginning of this series of undertakings is a view common to several of the biographies.
The writer Chikamatsu Shūkō, quoted by Abe Dōzan, goes further. At the negotiating table, Oguri felt “exactly the chagrin of an infant having its hand twisted by a grown man”. And —
That Oguri resolved boldly to build a naval port at Yokosuka at a time when no one else in the shogunate's councils had thought so far — the mortification of this occasion was a powerful motive for it
Chikamatsu Shūkō, “Oguri Kōzukenosuke” (printed in Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden)
Abe Dōzan himself, answering the historians who judge Oguri at Tsushima a failure, writes: “In any age, unless a country's defence, its armament and its economy go forward as one with its diplomacy, that diplomacy cannot be firm enough to put down the other party.” The defence, the armament and the economy that should have stood behind the diplomacy were all of them lacking, and Oguri confirmed that lack in practice at the negotiating table.
The letter to Mizuno Tadanori
His state of mind just after the setback survives in a letter. It was addressed to Mizuno Chikugo-no-kami Tadanori, a senior of his by seventeen years, who had served as commissioner at Nagasaki, commissioner of foreign affairs and commissioner of warships, had just returned to the commissionership of foreign affairs, and had written to Oguri more than once urging him to withdraw his resignation. Sakamoto summarizes Oguri's reply of the fourth day of the seventh month as follows.
He had submitted a good many opinions to his superiors, and his superiors had accepted none of them. They would not carry out a single thing even of what they had called reasonable. In that case nothing remained but to retire. Yet if he retired after a great argument, he would escape responsibility himself and would end by putting the blame on his superiors. Better, and cleaner, that he should take the reproach on himself alone and retire quietly.
A letter of the same kind, printed in the original by Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, has a passage complaining of his health: a chill in the breast, and dizziness with it. Oguri's health seems not to have been good in these months.
The deaths of his seniors, one after another
While Oguri was writing to Mizuno of his dissatisfaction with the shogunate's councils, his senior Iwase Tadanari lay dying. It was Iwase who had concluded the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States and conceived the embassy that would carry its ratification, and who was then shunned by the great councillor Ii and confined to his house. He coughed blood and died on the eleventh day of the seventh month of 1861. Fukuchi Gen'ichirō called Iwase, Mizuno Tadanori and Oguri “the three great men of the last years of the shogunate”.
Sakamoto takes this setback as the point at which Oguri changed: “From about this time Oguri appears to live by carrying his own ideas through, without minding his superiors' views or their criticism. He appears to have given up relying on his superiors and expecting anything of them. Even office is of no consequence; he simply does what is to be done.” That Oguri afterwards never lost a consistent direction, through one dizzying transfer after another, bears this reading out.
The gap seen in America, the limit learned at Tsushima
Oguri had already seen the Washington navy yard with his own eyes on the embassy to the United States of 1860, and had the difference in industrial power from Japan before him. The Tsushima incident brought home that the difference was not only a matter of technology but governed the negotiating table itself. What Sakamoto calls the “second opening” is the point where these two came together.
Tsushima forty years later
The islanders of Tsushima who had resisted at the risk of their lives saw an unlooked-for sight some forty years later. On 27 and 28 May 1905 forty-five ships of the Russian Baltic Fleet passed through the Tsushima strait on their way to Vladivostok, and the combined fleet under Tōgō Heihachirō met them: the battle of Tsushima. Sakamoto writes: “That a Russian captain threatened Oguri with overwhelming naval power, and that this led forty years later to a crushing Russian naval defeat off the same Tsushima — history is an ironic thing.”
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (including its quotation of Chikamatsu Shūkō, “Oguri Kōzukenosuke”); Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975
→ The exchanges with the Russians at Tsushima → Transferred again and again — eighteen times in nine years