The return of power to the emperor, and Oguri's case against it

On the thirteenth day of the tenth month of 1867 the shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu gathered the senior men of the domains then in Kyoto at Nijō Castle, told them of his intention to return power to the emperor and asked their opinions. The next day, the fourteenth, he submitted the memorial to the court. The political rule of the shogunate, which had lasted 265 years since 1603, ended there.

What Oguri Tadamasa, then commissioner of finance, was thinking at the time survives in fragments in a number of books. Set side by side, they give a figure different from the textbook “supporter of the shogunate who argued for fighting on”.

The shortest statement of Oguri's design is a single phrase recorded in Shibusawa Eiichi's Tokugawa Yoshinobu Kō Den (the life of Prince Tokugawa Yoshinobu).

Make the realm into prefectures, and the shogun its president

Break up the domain as a unit, institute a system of prefectures with officials sent out from the centre, and set the shogun up as president; the court would be, so to speak, the symbolic presence of the country, an object of reverence and affection. It was a third design, different both from the argument for a council of the domains' representatives and from the old shogunal order.

That this was not Oguri's notion alone appears from another record. Matsudaira, the senior assistant minister of the treasury, testified in Zoku Saimu Kiji as follows.

It cannot be said that there was no such argument. While I held the office of president I myself heard the two of them, Sakai (Hida-no-kami Tadamasu, junior councillor) and Oguri, argue to the same effect.

A man who had held the office of president in the shogunate's councils is saying that he heard Oguri and the junior councillor Sakai Hida-no-kami arguing to the same effect. Shibusawa Eiichi, for his part, dismissed arguments of this kind as “the wild notion of hearing something of the Western polities at second hand and wanting to institute a republic in Japan”. Judgements were divided, but the existence of the argument is on record in more than one place.

Katsu Kaishū relates in Hikawa Seiwa, as something Oguri told him directly:

Oguri … planned to set up a system of prefectures under the shogunate, and, through the introduction of the French minister Léon Roches, made an agreement to borrow six million ryō in silver from France, with several warships on annual instalments; no more than four or five people knew of it, Lord Yoshinobu and the senior councillors among them.

The design was not a drawing on a desk; it went forward with the money arranged alongside. Katsu went about arguing that he was absolutely against it. He allowed, even so, that the system of prefectures was not in itself a bad idea. If it was really to be done, the shogunate should first “bring itself down and cut itself back” and then set about it; his criticism was that the order was wrong.

One who shared Oguri's enlightened way of thinking and admired him was Fukuchi Gen'ichirō (Ōchi), a shogunal official who later became a journalist. Fukuchi, who had been abroad twice, confessed the swing of his own thinking: he had begun as a pure supporter of the shogunate, hating the court's interference and the domains' obstruction. What he saw and heard during his stay in France, however, was a fierce argument for liberty and popular rights, which moved him greatly, and he came to read works on British and American politics and histories of Britain and France with pleasure. “The first, extreme conservatism, and the second, extreme progress, were always colliding within me” — and in the middle of that came the return of power to the emperor.

The conclusion Fukuchi reached was clear. What had been surrendered could not be recovered. In that case the Tokugawa should rather come forward and take the centre. To look on as things stood would mean only that the Tokugawa shogunate fell and a “Satsuma-Chōshū shogunate” was set up in its place. The shogun himself should therefore go to the court, institute a system of councils of nobles, lords and domains, and become president and direct it himself. If that would not work, then, as Napoleon had done in France, he should hold dictatorial power in fact under the name of president.

Fukuchi put this into a document and took it to Oguri, who of all men should understand it. Expecting agreement at once, he asked that, if Oguri agreed, he himself be sent as the messenger to Kyoto.

Oguri's answer was neither agreement nor refusal.

Your thinking is of the first order. But, first, what the shogun himself thinks of it is not known. Second, the senior councillors in Kyoto and the other “spineless officials” there could never carry it out. And if this argument is put forward, there is a danger of giving Satsuma and Chōshū their opening.

It was a question not of ideas but of what could be done. Fukuchi wrote that “inwardly I was very dissatisfied with Oguri's view”. With no one else to take the matter up, he gave it up with regret. And yet, he goes on —

Thinking it over afterwards, I saw that Oguri's words showed he had seen through the situation in the capital region from far off in Edo. Had my own view been accepted and had I gone to Kyoto, the state of things there would never have allowed it to be carried out.

Abe Dōzan's Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden records another tradition. By that account Oguri remonstrated with Yoshinobu directly and recommended that the shogunate should return power to the emperor by its own hand and set up a thoroughly renewed government. He was not opposed to the surrender itself but to the manner of it and to the polity that was to follow; read so, the two records agree.

Sakamoto Fujiyoshi judged the design “almost worth setting beside Ryōma's eight-point plan written aboard ship”. The court of the day had next to no one who could deal with foreign countries, while the shogunate's side had a small number of able, enlightened officials. A presidential system, in his view, was therefore not necessarily an unrealizable fancy. He adds that under the absolutism of the emperor system after 1868 a republic with a president was regarded as a wild notion not worth discussing, and so it has remained to this day.

The direction itself — breaking up the domains as units and gathering them into the centre — was realized four years later, in 1871, in the form of the abolition of the domains and the establishment of prefectures. It was carried out by the side that had cut Oguri down.

Even after power was returned to the emperor, Oguri went on arguing for fighting with the shogunate's army at its head. That stand reached its height at the great council in Edo Castle soon after the new year.

Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987 (including its quotations from Shibusawa Eiichi, Tokugawa Yoshinobu Kō Den; Zoku Saimu Kiji; Katsu Kaishū, Hikawa Seiwa; and Fukuchi Gen'ichirō, Kaiōjidan, recollections of things past); Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941

→ The great council at Edo Castle — the one voice for fighting on　／　The chronology for 1868　／　The negotiation of a loan from France