While the embassy was away across the Pacific, a great political event took place in Japan. On the third day of the third month of 1860, the day of the dolls' festival, the great councillor Ii Naosuke was cut down by rōnin of Mito in the snow outside the Sakurada Gate of Edo Castle — the killing at the Sakurada Gate.
It was Ii Naosuke, of all men, who had sent this embassy out. Ōtsubo Motoji's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu takes Oguri's advancement as Ii's doing, because Ii “fixed on Tadamasa's exceptional quality and judged that he would become a man of consequence in the shogunate”. The same book records that by the time Tadamasa came home Ii had already been assassinated, and that the two never met again. Oguri had sailed from Shinagawa on the eighteenth day of the first month; the great councillor fell a month and a half later.
A Philadelphia newspaper
The party was not entirely in the dark, however. While they were at Philadelphia, Oguri and the others came upon a curious article in an American paper. The headline was “Assassination of the Tycoon”. Tycoon was the word used for the shogun.
The American government was keeping the news from the Japanese embassy. For some reason, though, it had not noticed that the Japanese were reading the American papers. The paper itself carried the line that it was their courtesy not to let the Japanese embassy know of the matter, which makes it a slack sort of concealment.
Oguri did not take the article at face value. He had thought the American papers none too reliable to begin with, and the article contained a plain error: it said the assassination had happened “on the way to the palace”, that is Edo Castle — and the shogun could not be on the way to Edo Castle, since the shogun was in it. That alone shook the article's credit.
To pass uncertain news to the party as it stood would only cause confusion. Oguri judged so and did not spread it. So far as the various diaries show, knowledge of the article stayed within the chief envoy Shinmi Masaoki, the vice-envoy Muragaki Norimasa, the inspector Oguri Tadamasa, and Morita and Namura. Even Morita seems not to have seen the article itself.
Diaries dated “the fifth month of Ansei 7”
Because of the killing the era name had been changed from Ansei to Man'en, but the embassy at sea did not know it. Its members went on writing their diaries under dates in a fifth month of Ansei 7 that did not exist.
Fifth day, fifth month, Ansei 7. Fine. Translated the papers on gold coin. ／ Eighth day, fifth month, Ansei 7. Fine. Went to Perry's residence. Perry already dead … (from Namura's diary)
It is the record of the day they called on Perry's widow and were shown the Japanese hanging scrolls, lacquerware, curious stones and shells displayed in her rooms. “These are all things my late husband Perry brought back from your country,” the widow told them. And the date was written in a year and month that no longer existed in Japan.
No salute off Shinagawa
On the homeward passage the Niagara rounded the Cape of Good Hope and went north by way of Batavia, Hong Kong and Taiwan. At Batavia they were told the news that the British army had entered Peking. Oguri marked how often they met British ships as they drew nearer to Asia, and grew more wary. In four and a half months aboard ship he put together his long report on the exchange negotiation and the currency question.
On 8 November — the twenty-sixth day of the ninth month by the Japanese calendar — Mount Fuji under white snow was in sight from the deck. The next day, 9 November, the twenty-seventh day of the ninth month, the ship entered Edo Bay quietly and anchored off Shinagawa.
The shore was still and silent. Not one gun of the salute that should have been fired was ever fired. The American officers who had brought the embassy home safely had privately expected a warm welcome, and were deeply disappointed by the coldness of the shore — so the American newspaper reporter travelling with them reported home.
Landing at Shinagawa, the members of the party learned for the first time that the uncertain newspaper article had been true, and that there had never been a fifth month of Ansei 7.
The days after the return
After that chilly reception, on the twentieth day of the tenth month Oguri was summoned with the chief envoy and the vice-envoy to the shogun's audience chamber and granted ten pieces of gold and three sets of seasonal robes. The villages of Mori and Kobayashi in Tano district in Kōzuke were later added to his holding; the sources differ on the increase, giving two hundred koku or three hundred. On the eighth day of the eleventh month he was appointed commissioner of foreign affairs. A man who had brought home what he had seen on a voyage round the world was thrown into the practical business of the shogunate with no pause.
Having lost the weight of Ii Naosuke and his strong hand, the shogunate sank further into confusion over the union of court and shogunate and over the expulsion of foreigners. To learn of the death of the man who had advanced him from a newspaper at sea, half believing it, and to have it confirmed at the port he came home to: the second half of Oguri's life began in earnest off this Shinagawa where no salute was fired.
Sources: 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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