The retainers who died on the Karasu River

Those beheaded with Oguri Tadamasa on the riverbed at Mizunuma on the Karasu River, on the sixth day of the intercalary fourth month of 1868, were three men: Ōi Isojūrō, Arakawa Yūzō and Watanabe Tasaburō. They were not mere attendants. Through the two months and more after the move to the village of Gonda they did the actual work of defending the village, and they did not leave their lord's side from the arrest to the execution ground.

Ōi Isojūrō came from Kamezawa in Gonda. He was not a hereditary retainer who had come from Edo but a man of a village of the holding, taken into the Oguri infantry. He was outstanding in arms and had steady nerve, it is handed down. A photograph survives of him beside Oguri Matakichi Tadamichi, head of the shogunate's martial arts academy in Edo, and he is recorded as having become a senior retainer later.

When the body of gamblers gathered at the village of Sannokura threatened the village of Gonda in the third month, it was this Isojūrō whom Oguri sent out as his special envoy for the talks. Oguri Nikki records that, the village officials' talks getting nowhere, “I sent Ōi Isojūrō, whereupon they said this and that unreasonable thing”. The rioters' headquarters was Zentōin, a Zen temple at the Sannokura station; at the crossroads at Ishizu and Nurui on the way, men with bamboo spears, matchlocks and swords sat round fires in the drizzle, and the approach to the temple grounds was packed with men in a murderous mood. Isojūrō went in there alone, and came back with the talks broken off.

The day after the negotiation failed, the village of Gonda was attacked. Oguri formed about a hundred men, hunters and able-bodied villagers together, into five bodies and set about the defence. How the fight went is in the diary too: “Ikeda Den and Ōi Isojūrō cut down some five men.” When he heard that gamblers had come down on the town of Nakanojō, Oguri sent Isojūrō, Tada Kin'nosuke and Ikeda Den with two infantrymen; the mere rumour that they were coming sent the rioters off.

Arakawa Yūzō was given the hill side in the same fight. The diary has “as it looked as though Yūzō's and Tōgorō's bodies could well hold them” — that is, as the bodies under Yūzō and Kutsukake Tōgorō looked likely to hold well enough — and that was the ground on which Oguri decided to send troops to another quarter. It was this body too that drove off the enemy in the direction of Uenokubo.

On the first day of the intercalary fourth month, when the representatives of the three domains came under the Tōsandō general staff's orders to inspect the charge that he had “raised a fortress”, it was Arakawa Yūzō who showed them round Kannonyama. The representatives saw the place, confirmed that there was no design of rebellion, understood Oguri's real intent and withdrew. The next day, the second, when the adopted heir Matakichi was asked to go with them to Takasaki, those who followed him were Tsukamoto Masahiko, Arakawa Yūzō, Watanabe Tasaburō and two men of the village of Gonda. Arakawa and Watanabe, that is, went as far as Takasaki and came back to Gonda again.

On the fifth day of the intercalary fourth month a body under the inspector came at Tōzenji from the front while the troops of the three domains came in from the hill behind. The records of the time describe the inside of the temple as “still, as though no one were there”. Going in, they found Kōzukenosuke and the three others sitting composed, showing their submission. There was no posture of resistance. The party bound master and men with the cords of their swords and took them to the house of Totsuka Heiemon, headman and wholesaler of Sannokura. With no examination of any kind, and no treatment due to a former commissioner of finance, they were shut up bound in one room.

The next day, the sixth day of the intercalary fourth month, at half past the fourth hour, eleven in the morning. Before the execution the inspectors had trays of rice in tea brought to the room where they were held and offered them a last meal. Master and men would not take up their chopsticks. It was not that they could not eat before death, it is handed down, but the decency of fighting men, who would not have what they had eaten burst from the cut when their heads were struck off and show a disgraceful sight to the people.

The execution ground was the riverbed at Mizunuma. A hole was dug in the middle of the waste ground beside the road, a straw mat laid beside it, and master and men were seated upright with their hands still bound behind them. Kurabuchi Mura-shi sets the scene down from the accounts of old people of the place.

In the order Arakawa Yūzō, Ōi Isojūrō, Watanabe Tasaburō, they were seated before the hole and their heads struck off. At this point the bold Ōi Isojūrō glared at the imperial troops and said:

We have done no wrong. To be cut down without one word of examination — it is bitter!

Kōzukenosuke reproved him quietly, in the tone of a man setting another right.

Isojūrō! It is unbecoming to cling to life at this hour!

When Isojūrō drew his neck in despite himself just before the blow, the executioner's breath was thrown off as he raised the blade; and Kōzukenosuke watched it with a quiet smile. The villagers who saw it, the account goes, said that this was Lord Oguri indeed: a man who had held high office in the shogunate had courage and nerve.

Beside the three exposed heads a notice board was set up.

These men, having gone along with their master's wickedness and joined in treachery with him, this being manifest, are put to the punishment of heaven and their heads exposed

The headless bodies were received by the villagers of Gonda, led by the headmen Satō Tōshichi and Ikeda Chōzaemon, and carried away on door boards. At night the villagers went back to steal the exposed heads, but the guard was strict and they could not. So they negotiated with the head of the guard and bought them for five ryō. The guard commander reported to the imperial army's quarters that they had been stolen in the dark without his knowing.

By then, however, Kōzukenosuke's head had already been carried off to Tatebayashi. The three heads were made one with their bodies and buried at the foot of the western hill in the grounds of Tōzenji, and Kōzukenosuke's headless body was buried on the hillside some tens of metres above them. The arrangement still to be seen at Tōzenji, with the lord's grave above his retainers', comes from the way they were buried that day.

Not many sources give the careers of these three men, who lost their lives without examination, in any detail. Even so, the order of what the records do hold — taken from a village of the holding into the infantry, sent as an envoy, commanding a body of men, going to Takasaki and back, and at the last sitting before the hole — tells what kind of retainers they were. The next day the adopted heir Matakichi met the same fate at Takasaki.

Sources: Kurabuchi Mura-shi (the Kurabuchi village history); Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family); Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957

→ The end of his adopted heir Matakichi　／　Holding off the attack from Sannokura　／　The first day of the intercalary fourth month: the explanation to the envoys　／　The suspicion over Kannonyama