Just before Oguri Tadamasa was arrested, his wife Michiko, who was with child, escaped from the village of Gonda with his mother Kuniko and their adopted daughter Masako. Their aim was Aizu. What that flight was like is known in considerable detail from the research of local historians who later walked the ground.
To Wakōbara, deep in Kōzuke
The party first took shelter in the house of Yamada Yaheiji at Wakōbara, deep in Agatsuma — now Nakanojō in Gunma prefecture. Yaheiji, born in 1840, was then twenty-nine, a man of spirit and trusted by the people, it is said. His house also had charge of the shogunate's official lanterns.
Michiko arrived on the evening of the eighth day of the intercalary fourth month. With no time to rest from the journey, she offered incense before a memorial tablet for her husband made by her own hands, and did not fail in her prayers for him, in tears, it is handed down. On the evening of the next day, the ninth, Kuniko and Masako's party arrived too, and the three were together again here. Meanwhile Nakajima Sanzaemon, the head of the escort, and Yaheiji were busy gathering porters and arranging food for the road.
Dividing into two parties
From here on the party went in two, in secret. The crossing of the Akiyama-gō pass, the Kenshin crossing, that lay ahead was too hard a road for all of them to go together.
Kuniko and Masako's party set out on the twelfth day of the intercalary fourth month disguised as pilgrims to Zenkōji. They passed beside the Shiriyaki hot spring, went from the village of Nagahira to Yazawahara, crossed the high ground out of sight of Kusatsu, went over the marsh of Yoshigadaira thick with dwarf bamboo and reeds to the Shibu pass, and on by way of the Shiga heights, Yudanaka and Nozawa to Tōkamachi and Horinouchi. The escort came to about fifteen men: Ikeda Denzaburō, Nakazawa Kengorō, Hagiwara Goheiji, Tsukakoshi Fusakichi and others, with guides from Wakōbara. Nakajima Sai, eighteen, who was to have attended Michiko, was told by the local men that the Akiyama-gō crossing was beyond her, and was put into this party.
Michiko's party took the hard road over Akiyama-gō. The chief guide was Yamada Yaheiji. His family came originally from Akiyama-gō in Echigo; his distant ancestors, it is said, were hunters who had followed game from Echigo into this country. The steep Kenshin crossing was, for Yaheiji, the road to his own ancestral place. With him as bearers and porters went Yamada Yōzen (twenty-six), Yamada Shōzō (twenty-one), Yamamoto Yoshigorō (forty-five), Honda Kanjūrō (seventeen) and Yamamoto Saburō (seventeen), and with the ox-drivers the party came to about twenty.
What carried the pregnant Michiko was a mountain palanquin. It had not been made for her: the village kept it to carry the sick and the injured to a doctor. On the steep slopes, it is said, a cord was fastened to the front of the palanquin and it was hauled up.
The spring on the Nozori road, and the blade at the Ōkura pass
The top of the Nozori road is the Benten pass, 1,653 metres up, with about three ri of steep climbing before it. The twelfth day of the intercalary fourth month was 3 June by the present calendar. Walking a mountain path in the new green makes a man thirsty. The party drank at a cold spring that rises along the way, and the people of Wakōbara still call that spring “Oguri's cup of clear water”. Another spring just above it is “Shōzan's cup of clear water”: Sakuma Shōzan had once stayed at the same Yamada Yaheiji's house on a survey of mines and gone over to Akiyama-gō by the same Nozori road.
Stories of the journey survive too, taken down from the guides' descendants. When they had come near the ridge of the Ōkura pass, Yamamoto Yoshigorō, meaning to press for drink money, made as if to turn back, saying he would go home from there; whereupon one of Michiko's retainers suddenly drew his sword. In later years Yoshigorō recalled: “I never had such a fright in my life!”
Passing from the foot of Mount Saburyū close by Shōjimine, Michiko, worn out and strained to the limit, cried from inside the palanquin: “Are we not at Akiyama yet?” “Very soon now.” Half an hour on, again: “Not yet?” “Aye, very soon.” After several rounds of this she drew her dagger at last, crying “Are you goblins?” — so the very men who carried the palanquin left on record.
The hot spring at Akiyama-gō, and the sword she left behind
Where the party arrived was the hot spring at Wayama. Akiyama-gō then had no inn with tatami and trays, of course: only an open bath of water rising from the riverbed, walled with stone and wood, and a hut of posts thatched with reeds, with a straw mat hung at the entrance. It was a country with no land to open as paddy, and the food was millet rice or barnyard-millet gruel, river fish grilled with salt, and cakes baked from horse-chestnuts or millet flour. Michiko stayed two nights here, and presumably eased her tired body and her pent-up heart a little.
On leaving she gave Yamada Yaheiji a house sword of one shaku three sun in a plain scabbard, with the signature of Kamakura Norimitsu.
You have done a great deal for us. This sword is a keepsake of my husband Kōzukenosuke, and I should like to give it to you as a token of thanks. But I am, as you see, with child; should a boy be born, I beg that you return it to me.
The child was a girl, and so the sword stayed with the Yamada family. After the defeat in 1945, however, the police ordered Japanese swords to be handed in, and it never came back once it was given to the officer, as Yaheiji's grandson Yamada Mamoru relates. The mountain palanquin that carried Michiko, on the other hand, was kept in the village hall, was presented to Tōzenji in 1968, and is still there. Yaheiji went on telling his grandchildren that “she was a fine lady”.
Why by way of Niigata?
The two parties met again at the village of Horinouchi in Echigo. There, however, the travel money they had brought ran out. Nakajima Sanzaemon sent Tsukakoshi Fusakichi and Nakazawa Kankichi back to the village of Gonda to ask the headman Kanbei and Ikeda Chōzaemon to raise three hundred ryō. He added: “If you are delayed, call at the residence of Yokoyama Chikara at Aizu-Wakamatsu.”
From Horinouchi to Niigata is about twenty-five ri, a hundred kilometres. For an aged mother, for Michiko with her confinement forty or fifty days off, and for Masako at thirteen, it was a heavy burden in body and in mind. Even so the party left Horinouchi and reached Niigata on the second day. The house that took them in was that of Fujii Chūtarō, a kendan — a chief headman — of Niigata and a paper wholesaler. The Fujii had once served the commissioner at Niigata.
There was a reason for going to Niigata at such risk: Kuniko's deep wish to visit her husband's grave. Tadamasa's father Oguri Tadataka had gone to Niigata as commissioner and died of illness at his post, and his body was buried at Hōonji at Minami-bori in Niigata. Hunted though they were, the party went into the port town for that visit to the grave.
From Niigata to Aizu the road went up the Agano River as far as Tsugawa and then overland — the road the Aizu domain used to carry its supplies. And at Aizu there was a reason to receive the house of Oguri. When the Aizu domain sent Yokoyama Chikara and Ebina Gunji to the international exhibition in Paris, Oguri, as the shogunate's officer in charge of its exhibits, had looked after them. The help of the elder Yokoyama Chikara rested on that connection.
Those who went to Aizu, and those who stayed at Gonda
On the fourteenth day of the sixth month of 1868 Michiko gave birth to a girl in the castle town of Aizu. This child, later named Kuniko, is Tadamasa's only child entered in the official genealogy.
The names of those who made for Aizu survive as a list: his mother Kuniko, his wife Michiko, the adopted daughter Masako, the attendant Nakajima Sai, and seventeen escorts. A record on the Gonda side tells of someone who does not appear in that list. Ikeda Kayo, who saw the Oguri household at close quarters, said that besides the lady and the maids there was a woman of twenty-two or twenty-three called Outa. Koyama Tadashi's Oguri Mankyō Den relates that Kikunosuke, the son of Tadamasa and the concubine Uta, did not go to Aizu but was sheltered at Honda Sanzaemon's house and at Chōnenji in Shimo-Muroda, and later became Oguri Mankyō, the fifteenth abbot of Tōzenji.
→ The “Outa” of Gonda and the “Oaya” of the account book ／ Oguri Mankyō — the monk said to be the son of a concubine ／ Ikeda Kayo
Sources: Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family); Tatsunami, the journal of the Oguri Kōzukenosuke memorial society (including survey on the ground and accounts taken down from Yamada Mamoru, Honda Daizen and others)
→ The list of the seventeen escorts who went with them to Aizu ／ Kuniko, “the only blood of the house of Oguri”, born at Aizu ／ Honda Sanzaemon