The sixth day of the intercalary fourth month: the end at the riverbed at Mizunuma

Early on the sixth day of the intercalary fourth month — 27 May 1868 — Oguri Tadamasa and three of his retainers, Ōi Isojūrō, Watanabe Tasaburō and Arakawa Yūzō, who had been held at Zentōin in the village of Sannokura, were taken to the riverbed at Mizunuma on the Karasu River, now Mizunuma in Kurabuchi, Takasaki, and beheaded without being examined. Oguri was forty-two by Japanese count, forty-one by years completed. A man who the day before had been working towards the completion of a house on Kannonyama was hauled to an execution ground overnight.

It had begun with the circular ordering his arrest, issued on the twenty-second day of the fourth month by the Tōsandō pacification staff to the three domains of Takasaki, Annaka and Obata. It rested on a report that Oguri had raised a fortified encampment and was building a battery at the village of Gonda. The building work on Kannonyama, the digging of the water channel, and the French cannon he had brought from Edo looked, to the side fighting the shogunate, like the making of a military position.

The circular carried the words “the rebellion is plain” — that the design of revolt was evident. Around Iwakura Tomosada, commander of the Tōsandō staff, were his staff officers Itagaki Taisuke and Ijichi Masaharu, and also Kagawa Keizō, Nanbu Seitarō, Nishimura Sutezō and Ōne Ryūtarō. No record says who drafted it. But once “plain” had been written on paper, it was treated as a premise needing no confirmation. Behind the fact that no examination was held lie those four words, the two authors consider.

Oguri, who believed he had nothing to answer for, sent his adopted heir Matakichi Tadamichi to the commander's camp at Takasaki, as his diary records, with Tsukamoto Masahiko, Kutsukake Tōgorō and Tada Kin'nosuke to accompany him. Rather than answer with force, he would go and explain. He meant it as submission shown in action.

The four were seized at once, however, and put in the gaol at Takasaki. And there was a man who called even this treatment too mild: Hara Yasutarō, who served under Iwakura Tomosada.

Feeling himself in danger, Oguri got his mother Kuniko and his wife Michiko away to Aizu on the third day of the intercalary fourth month. At his retainers' urging he moved himself for a time to the farmhouse of Ōi Shūjirō at Kamezawa in the village of Gonda.

There Satō Tōshichi appeared. The best course, he is said to have argued, was for Oguri to go to the imperial army's camp himself and make his explanation; otherwise Matakichi's life was in danger, and the lives of all the people of the village of Gonda were at stake too. No record explains why Tōshichi came at that moment.

When he heard that the villagers' lives were at stake, Oguri's mind was made up. He would make ready at Tōzenji and go to the camp at once, he answered. But the moment he returned to the temple, about a thousand troops of the three domains of Takasaki, Annaka and Obata came down on it. The chance to explain was never given him.

Early on the sixth, Oguri was forced down on the bed of the Karasu River. Ōi Isojūrō, Arakawa Yūzō and Watanabe Tasaburō were set in the same place.

The three retainers were killed first. The two authors relate that just before he was killed Isojūrō let fall the word “bitterness”, and that Oguri reproved him quietly.

The man who stood behind Oguri was Hara Yasutarō, a swordsman, then twenty-two. The two authors note, though, that by another account the man who wielded the blade was someone else.

Oguri was made to sit still bound, and an order was given to set wood under both his hands. When a soldier who had picked up a piece of wood from the riverbed came round behind him, Oguri is said to have rebuked him: “Insolent fellow.” The two authors take this for the last rebuke he left in this world. The beheading was not done at one stroke: neither the first blow nor the second, it is written, sufficed.

Having already got his mother and his wife away, he is recorded as having asked for clemency towards the women. There are also accounts giving “be calm” as his last word; but this is not something written in the text of the diary, and has come down in later commentary, which needs noting. It should be taken as an anecdote shaped in later years rather than as last words established as fact.

The execution was ordered by Hara Yasutarō and Toyonaga Kan'ichirō, inspectors of the Tōsandō vanguard staff. After the execution a notice to the effect that “Oguri Kōzuke, his crimes being full to overflowing …” is said to have been put up, as a punishment from heaven. At the same time a proclamation was also issued in the staff's name pardoning the family and retainers who were left; so that the sentence looks less like something resting on a consistent policy than something largely governed by the judgement of the hard-liners on the spot.

Word of the execution reached the village of Gonda at once and is said to have struck those left at Tōzenji hard. The family and retainers, now hunted, had no time to sit with their grief and were forced into flight, each their own way. Of the men who had held high office in the shogunate's councils, Oguri alone was cut down without a fight. At the riverbed at Mizunuma, where he was executed, a stone was raised in later years by the people of the place, and it is visited and prayed before to this day. This sentence was followed the next day by the execution of his adopted heir Matakichi at Takasaki.

Sources: Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975, and others

→ The end of his adopted heir Matakichi　／　The retainers who died on the Karasu River　／　The memorial stone at the riverbed at Mizunuma