The head of Oguri Tadamasa, beheaded on the riverbed at Mizunuma on the Karasu River on the sixth day of the intercalary fourth month of 1868, was not returned to Gonda. With the head of his adopted son Matakichi Tadamichi, beheaded at Takasaki the next day, the seventh, it was placed in a head-tub, steeped in strong spirit, and sent to Tatebayashi. A year later the peasants of his old holding went to take it back.
The identification, and on to Hōrinji
The Tōsandō general staff was then at Tatebayashi. Iwakura Tomosada, the commander who conducted the identification, was Iwakura Tomomi's third son, still only seventeen; his younger brother, the deputy commander, was a boy of fifteen or sixteen. The identification was a mere formality, a single glance and done. The words “Kōzukenosuke was a man who held office, so treat him with respect” are said to have been added then; by another account it was “deal with it as you see fit; take it away”.
The heads of father and son were handed over to Kyōjun, abbot of Taianji, the temple of prayer of the Tatebayashi domain; but that temple had no graveyard. They were therefore entrusted to Hōrinji at Kahōshi, whose abbot was his friend Okuda Meizan, and buried at the foot of a great cedar in the temple's graveyard. Meizan, it is said, packed the heads in shōchū in a paulownia box and buried it with a dozen or more stones laid on top.
After seeing the lady to Aizu
The people of Gonda put their strength first into protecting the family who had survived. They escorted Michiko, who was with child, and the mother of the house out through the encircling troops, by way of Echigo to the castle town of Aizu-Wakamatsu. They carried out their charge as escorts under fire, losing Satō Ginjūrō and Tsukakoshi Tomigorō on the way, and in the early spring of 1869 came back at last to Edo, delivering the lady to her own family, the Tatebe, and the mother to Shizuoka. Immediately after that return they set about their next task.
One remark Oguri had made in his lifetime, with a bleak smile, is said to have stayed in the hearts of the people of Gonda.
I may be a second act of the Sakurada Gate; but I would rather my head at least did not leave my shoulders.
The head at Tatebayashi, the bodies at Gonda and at Shimo-Saida. That head and body should lie in different places was not to be borne. Nakajima Sanzaemon, who took the lead, called on Hitomi Sōbei, headman of the village of Takahashi in Yashū, straightened his collar and put it to him so. Sōbei answered that he too had made that resolve, but that one man's strength could do nothing, and so it had come to this day; and he agreed on the spot.
The first attempt failed
Sanzaemon dug at the grave alone at first. He could not do what he had come for. Hōrinji found the grave dug open the next morning, reported it to the domain office in alarm, put it back as it had been, and strengthened the watch on the graveyard with defences.
The group then confided the circumstances to Watanabe Chūshichi of the village of Shintōgō in Ōra district, Sōbei's uncle, who knew the town of Tatebayashi well and had the entry of the domain office. Chūshichi was moved by their earnestness and joined them, and also secured the agreement of one Tabei of the town of Tatebayashi. Sanzaemon lay hidden in a room of Sōbei's house to avoid notice, while Tsukakoshi Fusakichi — also written Fusagorō — went into the town of Tatebayashi in disguise to see how things stood.
On that footing the group called at Hōrinji under the pretext of wishing to raise a stone monument to Oguri father and son, met the abbot and made the request. The abbot understood what they meant and applied to the domain for permission. By one account, when they spoke with great feeling of their wish to bring the father's and the son's heads and bodies together, the abbot was deeply moved and turned a blind eye to the theft.
The town of Tatebayashi then was all castle walls, ponds and marshes, with guardhouses at the street corners at its entrances. To pass before a guardhouse at night in strange garb was difficult, it is said.
The night of the first anniversary
The day was fixed as the sixth day of the fourth month, the first anniversary of Oguri's death. Everything was under Chūshichi's direction: avoiding the roads, they broke through a fence and waded a ditch to get into the graveyard of Hōrinji. Sōbei and Inaoka Seigorō kept watch while Sanzaemon and Fusakichi dug.
Dozens of old stone monuments had been set upright in the ground as a defence, however, and the digging went much harder than expected. The two of them summoned “the courage of a lifetime”, dug through more than ten feet, and came at last upon the two head-tubs.
Opening the lid in haste, the smell of spirit struck the nose; looking hard by starlight, these were without doubt the heads of Kōzukenosuke and his son. Having been steeped in spirit, they had passed a whole year with nothing but a bluish tinge at the cut, and as they had not decayed in the least they gave off no bad smell
Hayakawa Keison's record (quoted in Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki)
They laid floss silk in a newly made rice tub they had brought, moved the heads into it, wrapped it in a cloth, and Fusakichi and Seigorō carried one each on their backs out the way they had crept in. The three then came out onto the Nikkō highway and hurried away.
What followed
The next morning Hōrinji was in uproar. The grave had been dug open, and the two empty head-tubs had been left on top of it. The abbot Okuda Meizan reported it to the domain office at once. Domain officials came out and examined the place, but no record survives naming who did it. That the people of the old holding had asked permission to raise a stone monument came out when the abbot was questioned, but no evidence was left to fix the culprits.
Meizan was sentenced to a hundred days' confinement for the negligence of letting a grave be robbed within his temple grounds, and when the confinement was over he moved to Daitsūji at the town of Kizaki in Nitta district, and then to Jiunji at Kamitada in Aso district in Tochigi prefecture, where he died in July 1898. Watanabe Chūshichi, who had asked permission to raise the monument, was also summoned on suspicion of grave-robbing and imprisoned; but at his nephew Hitomi Sōbei's entreaty it became clear that he had only asked for the monument and had no part in the theft, and through the good offices of the officers Shioya and Tabei he was released. The domain office too seems not to have pressed the matter far, understanding the feeling of Sanzaemon and Sōbei.
To Gonda, and to Kannonyama
Matakichi Tadamichi's head was carried to the Taguchi house, the headman's at Shimo-Saida, and made one with his body. Tadamasa's head was put on a horse's back and brought all the way to Gonda. At Gonda it was set in the alcove of Nakajima Sanzaemon's house, where only those of the village concerned prayed before it in secret, it is said.
After that, Sanzaemon's visits to Kannonyama began. When an old woman who lived at the foot of the hill and wove cloth asked what he was doing, Sanzaemon showed her red rice and said, “It is an offering for his lordship.” That went on for about six months and then stopped abruptly. Meeting him on the road and asking, she was told, “There is no more,” and he passed by with a laugh. Ōtsubo Motoji takes it that it was about this time that the head was buried under the mound of the body at Tōzenji.
There is another account of where this head went. Abe Dōzan writes that the attendant Mukasa Ginsuke carried the head away in secret and buried it in the graves of the generations of the house of Oguri at Fumon'in at Ōmiya, the family's burial temple. Ōtsubo Motoji denies this, holding that while it is certain Ginsuke ran to Fumon'in to report, there is no proof whatever that he took the head with him, and that Ginsuke, who lived into the Taishō era and became headman of the village of Mimuro, never said a word about it in his life, as his family also relate.
The stone of benevolence and duty together
This whole piece of work was cut into the stone of “benevolence and duty together” in the grounds of Tōzenji. The inscription ends thus.
That, immediately on returning home, they took up their old lord's unfulfilled wish, racked their hearts, and in the end obtained the heads of father and son at Tatebayashi and made the remains whole, is a merit that is not the pride of their own district alone: the single stroke of righteous spirit in the men of Kōzuke deserves to be handed down, unflinching, for a thousand years
Oguri entered Gonda on the first day of the third month of 1868. From the parting of head from body to their coming together again was just one year. The stay had been barely two months, but the trust built in that short time moved the villagers this far.
Sources: Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family), quoting Hayakawa Keison's record and Tatebayashi, Ōra no Rekishi (the history of Tatebayashi and Ōra); Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941
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