On the fourteenth day of the sixth month of 1868 a girl was born in the castle town of Aizu. Her father Oguri Tadamasa was already dead, and the adopted heir Matakichi Tadamichi had lost his life as well. This girl is the person later called Kuniko.
“The only blood of the house of Oguri”
Ōtsubo Motoji's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu records her as “the only blood of the house of Oguri”. By that book her mother was Michiko, daughter of Tatebe Takumi-no-kami Masaatsu, lord of the Hayashida domain in Harima; she was born in the sixth month of 1868 in the castle town of Aizu, and died on 4 August 1929, in her sixty-third year.
The phrase means that Kuniko was the only child of Tadamasa entered in the official genealogy. Records of children who do not appear in that genealogy exist separately: Oaya, who appears almost every month in the household account book of the years 1848–54; Outa, whom Ikeda Kayo counted apart from the lady and the maids when she saw the Oguri household at Gonda; and Oguri Mankyō, the fifteenth abbot of Tōzenji, whom Koyama Tadashi's Oguri Mankyō Den relates to have been the son of Tadamasa and the concubine Uta.
→ The “Oaya” of the account book and the “Outa” of Gonda ／ Oguri Mankyō — the monk said to be the son of a concubine
It was Michiko's first pregnancy. By Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki's Oguri Kōzukenosuke, some fifteen years had passed since Tadamasa and Michiko were married, and Michiko tied the maternity sash on a day of the dog in 1868. On the fifth day of the first month Tadamasa's mother Kuniko went to the Suitengū shrine to pray for a safe delivery. That the child was named Kuniko is taken to be after this grandmother.
From Gonda to Aizu
The road to this child's birth is the flight that followed the disaster to the house of Oguri. By Ōtsubo Motoji, the party that escaped Gonda divided into two. The party centred on the pregnant Michiko had Nakajima Sanzaemon himself as its leader, with his daughter Saiko, Tsukakoshi Fusagorō, Hagiwara Goheiji, Tsukakoshi Genkichi, Nakazawa Kengorō, Ikeda Denzaburō, and Satō Ginjūrō and Tsukakoshi Tomigorō, who were to die in the fighting at Aizu, with Yamada Shuheiji of the village of Iriyama in Agatsuma and others as guides. The other party, centred on Tadamasa's mother Kuniko and the girl betrothed to Matakichi, went disguised as pilgrims to Zenkōji.
Michiko's party went from Iriyama in Agatsuma by side roads, stayed two nights at a hot spring in the mountains, and came by way of Akiyama to Tōkamachi. Sanzaemon sent Tsukakoshi Tomigorō and Nakazawa Kengorō back to Gonda from there with orders to raise three hundred ryō; but Gonda was in the middle of the confusion of Ōne Ryūtarō of the Tōsandō pacification staff withdrawing on the twenty-fourth day of the intercalary fourth month and the troops of the three domains pulling out on the twenty-eighth, and the money could not be got together. The two turned back into Echigo and went straight to Aizu by way of Yashū.
Sanzaemon, waiting at Tōkamachi, gave up the money and set out, joining the other party at the village of Horinouchi. After making ready at Niigata they went towards Suibara in Kanbara district, and the hardships of that road are recorded as beyond description. The story that the lady was put into a grass-cutter's basket and carried is also said to belong to this stretch.
At Suibara contact was made with men of consequence in the Aizu domain, and through the offices of the elder statesman Kajiwara Heima the party entered Wakamatsu castle by the Iron Gate. Soon after they entered, however, word came that the western army was closing in, and an order was given for the women and children to take refuge outside the castle. By Nakazawa Kengorō's gravestone, the party seems to have taken shelter in a farmhouse at Matsukawa outside the castle, and there, on the fourteenth day of the sixth month, the girl was born. She was nursed by Saiko, who had been brought along to stand in for the lady if the worst came. The escorts went to the fighting as the castle came to its crisis, and Satō Ginjūrō and Tsukakoshi Tomigorō, who had followed from Gonda, died in the siege of Aizu.
Minomura Rizaemon's hand
In the ninth month of 1868 the castle of Aizu fell. The party stayed in the north-east until the second month of the next year, and then made their way to Edo. Nakazawa Kengorō's gravestone cuts their straits there in these words.
Not one acquaintance to be found though we sought them; our travel money spent to the last; the retainers all dismissed; five maids and ourselves at a loss …
The hand held out to them here was that of Minomura Rizaemon, who had once come and gone at the Oguri house, had been advanced by Tadamasa and had grown into his abilities, and was by then a manager of Mitsui. Ōtsubo Motoji writes that they borrowed money of him — or rather were given it — and went down the Tōkaidō as far as Shizuoka. Michiko, the infant Kuniko and the mother of the house were able to settle at Shizuoka; Michiko afterwards went up to Tokyo.
That the two men who went back to Gonda for the three hundred ryō returned empty-handed later gave rise to the claim that “the people of Gonda forgot what they owed him”. Ōtsubo Motoji denies it, noting that after her return Michiko kept in close touch with Gonda, and that even a letter of commendation for the escort party of that flight has been found.
The house restored
Kuniko, grown up, took a husband into the family, and the house of Oguri, nearly cut off, continued through this only daughter. The husband brought in was Sadao, a younger brother of the Meiji journalist Yano Fumio (Ryūkei), through the good offices, it is handed down, of Ōkuma Shigenobu (→ Ōkuma Shigenobu and Kuniko). This was in 1889.
Sadao later called at a photographer's in Washington and found among the old photographs kept there one from the time of the embassy to the United States. He brought it back to Japan and went round the surviving families, and it was then established for the first time that the man in it was Oguri Tadamasa.
A short genealogy (the eleventh to the fourteenth heads)
Adding the generations of Matakichi and Kuniko to the eleventh and twelfth heads given in the chapter on his boyhood gives the following.
- Solid line — a connection confirmed in the records
The generations after that are not dealt with on this site, since they concern people who may be living.
Sources: Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957; Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975
→ The “graves of the generations of the house of Oguri” at Zōshigaya cemetery, where Kuniko and her husband lie ／ The family's escape to Aizu ／ Minomura Rizaemon ／ The genealogy in Oguri Mankyō Den ／ Mankyō's brothers and sisters