On the sixth day of the intercalary fourth month of 1868, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa was beheaded with three of his retainers on the riverbed at Mizunuma on the Karasu River. There was no examination at all. The next day, the seventh, his heir Matakichi Tadamichi was beheaded at Takasaki with three attendants, and on the eighth his retainer Tsukamoto Masahiko and his mother killed themselves. Within three days the house of Oguri had lost both its head and its heir.
From this point it was forty-seven years before Oguri's name was spoken of in public. What happened in that time is followed here from the side of those who were left.
The night of the third day of the intercalary fourth month
With the western army closing in, Oguri got his family out of the house on the night of the third day of the intercalary fourth month. Three had to be got away: his wife Michiko, six months pregnant, a daughter of Tatebe Takumi-no-kami, lord of the Hayashida domain in Harima; his mother, a daughter of his grandfather Tadakiyo; and his adopted daughter Kusaka Ikiko, then a girl of sixteen, who had been brought to Gonda to be married to Tadamichi.
At the last consultation, with the village officials and those who owed him favours gathered, the man whose sincerity and nerve marked him out to be entrusted with what to do if the worst came was Nakajima Sanzaemon, later Honda Sanpeiji. The escort included Tsukakoshi Fusagorō, Hagiwara Goheiji, Tsukakoshi Genkichi, Nakazawa Kankichi, Ikeda Denzaburō, Satō Ginjūrō, Tsukakoshi Tomigorō, Yamada Shuheiji of Iriyama in Agatsuma, and Sanzaemon's daughter Saiko.
The party divided into two. Their object was Niigata, where Oguri's father Tadataka had served as commissioner and where part of his remains was buried. The lady's party had Sanzaemon himself as leader; it forced the hard road called “the Kenshin crossing” from Iriyama in Agatsuma, stayed two nights at the hot spring at Wayama and came out by Akiyama to Tōkamachi. It is to this stretch of road that the story of the lady being carried in a grass-cutter's basket belongs.
The travel money ran out on the way. Sanzaemon sent Tsukakoshi Fusagorō and Nakazawa Kengorō back to Gonda with orders to raise three hundred ryō, but Gonda was in the middle of the confusion of Ōne Ryūtarō withdrawing on the twenty-fourth day of the fourth month and the troops of the three domains pulling out on the twenty-eighth, and nothing could be done. The two went straight on to Aizu by way of Yashū. Unable to wait longer at Tōkamachi, Sanzaemon pressed on, and at the village of Horinouchi at last joined the party of the mother and Ikiko, who were travelling disguised as pilgrims to Zenkōji.
A child born in a hospital at Aizu
The party made ready at Niigata and got into contact with men of consequence in the Aizu domain at Suibara in Kanbara district. In the sixth month of 1868 Michiko gave birth to a girl in a hospital in the castle town of Aizu. She was named Kuniko — the child who would become the only blood of the house of Oguri.
In the ninth month of that year the castle of Aizu fell. Satō Ginjūrō and Tsukakoshi Tomigorō died in the fighting during the siege. With nowhere to go, the party spent the time until the second month of 1869 under the cold skies of the north-east, and at last reached Edo. Nakazawa Kengorō's gravestone cuts their state then 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 man who held out a hand to a party with nobody to turn to was Minomura Rizaemon, once a casual hand of the Oguri household, whose abilities had grown through Oguri's advancement of him and who was by then a manager of Mitsui. With money advanced by Minomura the party went further, down the Tōkaidō to Shizuoka. There Michiko and the infant Kuniko, the mother of the house and Ikiko were at last able to settle.
At Shizuoka, unwilling to see the house of Oguri die out, they had Hokushirō, Matakichi Tadamichi's younger brother, succeed to it. In the sixth month of 1869 he was permitted to inherit the name, with a stipend for four and duty in the guard of the second bailey. Hokushirō's formal name was Tadayoshi.
Taking back the head
As soon as he had delivered the lady to her own family, the Tatebe, and the mother and Ikiko to Shizuoka, and got back to Gonda, Nakajima Sanzaemon set about his next task: taking the heads of Tadamasa and his son, which had been left at Tatebayashi. He went forward with the plan together with men of spirit from the old holding at the villages of Takahashi and Saida.
At the beginning of the third month of 1869 two men stood at the gate of Hōrinji at Tatebayashi. One was Watanabe Chūshichi of the village of Shintōgō, known to the abbot. The other was dressed as a peasant but carried himself as a man with something in mind. They met the abbot and made this request.
I am a man of Oguri Kōzukenosuke's holding, and as I hear that my former lord's head is buried here, I should like at least to raise a stone monument
With Chūshichi to vouch for them, the abbot took them to the place as men of admirable feeling, arranged matters with them and went back. When he saw the graveyard dug open some days later he was astounded, and had it filled in again thoroughly, packing in even old stone monuments, it is said.
On the night of the sixth day of the fourth month of 1869 the seizure succeeded. Tadamasa's head was buried at Gonda, Matakichi Tadamichi's at Shimo-Saida. From the day they received Oguri in the third month of 1868 to the making whole of his remains, exactly one year had passed. This act is recorded on the “stone of benevolence and duty together” in the grounds of Tōzenji.
The works that went on running with his name concealed
While the family and the people of the old holding were doing all this, the works Oguri had built went on operating with his name concealed.
On 21 November 1871 the Meiji emperor visited the Yokosuka shipyard in the imperial ship Ryūjō. He went round the steel-making, pulley-making, joinery, sawmill and shipbuilding shops and the dock, took his midday meal at the new government building, and then granted an audience to the Frenchman in service, Verny, and others, and gave them an imperial rescript: “The shops of the shipyard are well equipped, and this industry is founded. I cannot contain my joy in going round it now. This is due wholly to your exertions from the beginning.” It was the first imperial rescript granted to our navy. It was the third year after Oguri's death.
The name of the man who had conceived the shipyard and, through the French minister, engaged that Verny appeared nowhere that day. Abe Dōzan laments again and again that those who wrote the history of the Restoration recorded only Katsu Kaishū and Fukuzawa Yukichi of the three men the embassy to the United States produced, and left Oguri out; and he writes that “at least until the end of the Meiji era, the first of those in this adversity was Oguri Kōzukenosuke”.
The silence was publicly broken on 27 September 1915, when, at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Yokosuka naval arsenal, the head of the arsenal, Vice-Admiral Kuroi Teijirō, published an official document setting out the origin of the shipyard's founding. As a document published by the naval authorities, it was the first of its kind. Forty-seven years had passed since the execution.
Sources: Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941
→ The rehabilitation of 1915, fifty years since the opening of Yokosuka