The water channel and the house on Kannonyama, and the school he hoped to build

What Oguri Tadamasa began, once settled at Tōzenji in the village of Gonda, was not to arm himself and hold out. He was building a house, bringing in water and trying to found a school for the young men of the village. The stay lasted barely two months, but the works he took up there show plainly where his interest lay.

From the sixth day of the third month, work began on a new house on Kannonyama, about a kilometre down from the temple. For all its name, Kannonyama was a small rise better called a hill than a mountain. The tableland had no water, but Oguri, using French instruments and methods of survey, quickly brought in a channel, opened paddy fields, planted tea and even laid out a riding ground. The channel he surveyed for the neighbouring hamlet of Kodaka was completed after his death and is said to be still in use.

The building was no passing diversion. Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki's Oguri Kōzukenosuke records that on the eleventh day of the third month he gave the village's labourers the order to open up Kannonyama. Even the figures survive: thirty ryō for the work of levelling four hundred tsubo, of which five ryō was handed over in advance. From then on Oguri went to the site almost daily. The words “went over to the works this morning” appear again and again in his diary.

The raising of the roof beam was set for the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month; but before that day came, on the fifth day of the intercalary fourth month, Oguri was arrested.

The other design was a school for the young men of the village. Early in the third month, after the gamblers' attack had been driven off, Oguri told the village officials of the four neighbouring villages who came to apologize that he meant from now on to teach the young what he knew, and that they should send their second and third sons to the temple to study; and “in time I shall produce a grand minister of state out of this valley”, he is said to have told them. Records remain that modern subjects such as foreign languages and mathematics were attempted at Tōzenji, and that the organizing of a peasant militia was planned alongside.

Those words about raising a peasant militia later drew suspicion. The two authors, however, take it to have been not private troops to turn against the new government but a wish to bring up as many men as possible with the spirit to carry the country. It is their interpretation, but set beside the facts that in those same weeks he was designing a school, digging a water channel and planting tea, it is not a forced reading.

At the village of Gonda at that time there were four men, Oguri included, who had been round the world with the embassy to the United States — Oguri, Tsukamoto Masahiko, Arakawa Yūzō and Satō Tōshichi — and also his adopted heir Matakichi, who had studied at the French language school in Yokohama. Had it really begun, it would have been a school of a considerable standard.

Alongside the building, Oguri answered calls from outside the village as well. On the ninth day of the third month officials of the town of Nakanojō begged his help, there being a rumour that gamblers were coming down on them. Oguri at once sent Ōi Isojūrō, Tada Kin'nosuke and Ikeda Den, with two infantrymen attached, in haste. The five returned on the eleventh with word that the gamblers had already fled and nothing was known of where they had gone.

Rewarding the infantrymen who had fought when the attack at Sannokura was driven off also belongs to these weeks. Ginjūrō, an infantryman whom Oguri had always marked as a young man with something in him, was promoted squad leader for his conduct in the fight and given the standing of a middle page. Every one of the infantry was also given a reward of two bu in gold.

The fourteenth day of the third month fell on a day of the dog, and the belt-blessing for Michiko, who was with child, was held quietly. It was her first pregnancy in some fifteen years of marriage. His mother Kuniko and his adopted daughter Masako went to the village shrine. The works, the business of the village and a happy event in the family were all going forward in the same two months.

None of this from the village of Gonda had reached Edo. The Chūgai Shinbun of the twenty-first day of the third month carried an article to the effect that Itakura Iga-no-kami's whereabouts were unknown and that Oguri Kōzukenosuke had been attacked by a rising of the local people near his holding, and what had become of him afterwards was not clear. It went on that Kondō Isami too had fled and was not to be found, and that many a well-known swordsman and student of Western learning had left for other parts.

In fact Oguri was walking to the building site every morning. Seen from Edo he was a man who had vanished; seen from Gonda he was a man digging a water channel. That gap lies behind the way he was dealt with two months later. Seen from a distance, a channel cut into a tableland like a moat, and a building going up on high ground, are not to be told apart from the construction of a position.

The two authors hand on one small story of these weeks at Gonda. In a little hamlet called Ōsawa-mine, on the edge of the village, lived an old blacksmith. Early one morning in the third month, just as he had got his fire going, the sound of hooves came near and a splendid horse such as he had never seen stopped as if to block his doorway. The samurai on it called out that he was sorry to interrupt the work but wished to ask the road. Noticing the metal lining of the man's war hat, the old man prostrated himself in haste.

When he had shown the way to Jinda, the samurai said, “I understand. Thank you,” and touched his horse's flank and went. The old man could not make out the second phrase. He asked Satō Tōshichi, whom he knew, when he passed by later, learned that it was a word of thanks, and the two of them laughed heartily — so the story goes.

There is nothing to confirm the anecdote. It is, however, one picture of how Oguri was seen at the village of Gonda: a man known by the splendour of his horse, before whom a man prostrated himself when asked the way, and who gave his thanks in a foreign language.

Neither the house nor the school was finished. Even so, that a hunted man dug a water channel for the village and was picturing the education of the next generation is a fact not to be left out in understanding him.

Sources: Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975; Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7, and others

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