One man not to be left out in speaking of Oguri Kōzukenosuke's rehabilitation is the scholar of international law Ninagawa Arata. He was head of the Ninagawa, a hatamoto house of five thousand koku, and was related by marriage to Oguri's wife Michiko. Michiko was the eldest daughter of Tatebe Takumi-no-kami Masaatsu, lord of the ten-thousand-koku domain of Hayashida in Harima; her younger sister married into the Ninagawa, and Ninagawa Arata was that sister's son. Ōtsubo Motoji calls him “the beloved nephew of the lady of Lord Oguri of Kōzuke”.
Ishin Zengo no Seisō to Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shi
In 1928 Ninagawa brought out Ishin Zengo no Seisō to Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shi (the political struggle around the Restoration and the death of Oguri Kōzukenosuke). It argued Oguri's execution not as the mere purging of a shogunal official but as something set in the middle of the political struggle around the Restoration. It went through printing after printing within that year, and Ninagawa himself wrote that “the book has already gone to a ninth printing, I hear”.
In the same year of 1928, with the enthronement of the Shōwa emperor in view, Ichikawa Motokichi, headman of the village of Kurata in Gunma district, submitted to the governor of Gunma prefecture a recommendation that Oguri be granted a posthumous court rank. The rank was not granted that time either. To Headman Ichikawa, who wrote to him of his regret, Ninagawa sent the following letter, dated 23 November 1928.
That a man put forward by the people as one who served the country, a man approved even by the dowager empress, should be blocked by officials of the imperial household ministry or the cabinet so that the people's object is not attained, is a way of treating the people as fools. It would be well, I think, to appeal the opinion of your villagers to the whole country.
To call loyalty to the throne something belonging only to those who opposed the shogunate is already not right. The country is what matters; not to honour those who served the country is a great error.
Since the land became the possession of Satsuma and Chōshū there have been many false arguments in the world. They call only their own fellows loyalists and men of spirit. It is wicked.
On the posthumous rank itself he was dismissive: “We do not regard the granting of a rank as a very weighty thing; seeing the worthless people who have been granted ranks, I do not hesitate to say so.”
The stone at the riverbed at Mizunuma (1932)
The first of Ninagawa's writing to be cut in stone was at the place of execution itself. In 1931 men of spirit of the villages of Kurata and Kurabuchi formed a committee for raising a stone, with the former headman of Kurata, Ichikawa Motokichi, as its chairman, and collected subscriptions inside the villages and beyond. The stone was finished and unveiled on 5 May 1932, at the riverbed at Mizunuma on the bank of the Karasu River, the place where Oguri and his men were beheaded. Both the composition and the calligraphy were by Ninagawa Arata, who used the name Gakunan, and the characters cut were these.
A great man, Oguri Kōzukenosuke
cut down in this place without crime
Ninagawa had in fact written two and sent both to the village. The other read “the place where Oguri Kōzukenosuke, great man of the last years of the shogunate, met his end”. Which to take was left to the village, and the committee chose the first. The one not chosen was mounted as a scroll and still hangs in the headman's room at the Kurabuchi village office.
The phrase “cut down though he had done no wrong” amounted to a public statement that the imperial army had carried out a lawless execution, and might be thought wanting in propriety; a man involved in raising the stone relates that stern guidance to that effect came from the authorities at the time. Ninagawa later told a visitor to the stone: “Headman Ichikawa Motokichi did well to stand firm and have it raised in those days. In fact I was on friendly terms with Tanaka Giichi, the general who was prime minister; I had the title of adviser to the reservists' association, and Tanaka knew the circumstances well, so it never became an issue.”
The stone was washed away in the great flood of September 1935. It was found undamaged during the river improvement works that followed and was re-erected in its present position in May 1937. On that occasion, on 15 May of the same year, the seventieth anniversary of his death, the “society for the preservation of Oguri Kōzukenosuke's remains” was formed.
The stone of “benevolence and duty together” at Tōzenji (1956)
Separate from that is the stone of benevolence and duty together, raised at Tōzenji in Gonda. It differs from the stone at Mizunuma in place, in year and in purpose.
By Ōtsubo Motoji, this stone was raised as a natural stone under an old plum tree beside Oguri's grave at Tōzenji on 6 May 1956. In the memorial society's records, the “unveiling of the stone of benevolence and duty together (the peasant militia stone)” was part of the programme of the eighty-ninth anniversary observance held on 13 May of that year, on which day the unveiling of a bust of Kurimoto Joun and a memorial service for the peasant militia were also held.
The four characters for “benevolence and duty together” were written by Ninagawa Arata, then eighty-three. The composition was by Ōtsubo Motoji and the writing by the abbot of Tōzenji of that time. The inscription reads thus.
On the sixth day of the intercalary fourth month of 1868, Oguri Kōzukenosuke and his son, master and men, fell by the poisoned blades of the officers of the Tōsandō pacification staff. At that time men of spirit among the people of the Gonda holding rose boldly, took the lady and the mother of the house under their protection and broke out through the encircling troops, and over mountains and rivers made their way far off by Echigo to the castle of Aizu-Wakamatsu; and amid the smoke of guns and the rain of shot they fought bitterly, and though they lost Satō Ginjūrō and Tsukakoshi Tomigorō they carried out the great charge of the escort from first to last, so that the line of the house of Oguri was preserved. Then, immediately on returning to the capital, 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: a merit that is not the pride of their own district alone, for the single stroke of righteous spirit in the men of Kōzuke deserves to be handed down, unflinching, for a thousand years. Here we recall that time and record the honoured names of those who gave themselves to the work, to leave them to later generations
This stone, then, is not a stone for Oguri himself. It is a stone cut with the work of the people of Gonda, who guarded Oguri's family as far as Aizu and afterwards took back the heads of father and son from Tatebayashi. On the back it reads: “The title on this stone is in the hand of Dr Ninagawa Arata, the beloved nephew of the lady of Lord Oguri of Kōzuke; it is erected by the particular wish of Mrs Taiko, widow of the late Sanjūrō, grandson of Honda Sanzaemon. The Oguri Kō memorial society.” Honda Sanzaemon is the name taken by Nakajima Sanzaemon Kagechika, the leader of the escort party. The wish to raise it came from the house of his grandson.
Fixing the names to be cut was hard work. Ōtsubo Motoji compared the sixteen names in the material Ninagawa had gathered with the names cut jointly on the mound of the body on the hill behind Tōzenji, but both lists left out such people as Ikeda Denzaburō and Honda Saiko, and Ninagawa's material gave given names without surnames. In those days a man commonly had three or so names besides his real one, and discrepancies piled up: Tsukakoshi Fusagorō appears as Jugorō on the mound of the body and as Jirōsaburō in another source. The register of deaths at Tōzenji has unreliable places too, and Ōtsubo went round the surviving families house by house, finally fixing twenty men as the direct escort.
“I struck a blow with a single pen”
Ōtsubo Motoji set down what Ninagawa said when they first met, about 1937 or 1938.
History repeats itself. The Satsuma and Chōshū men paid back the grudge of Sekigahara by force of arms at the Restoration. Great fellows they were. I struck a blow with a single pen, and I cannot tell how much I lost by it. But from the people of Aizu and from those on the eastern side, I was thanked from the heart.
From the book of 1928 to the title cut in 1956, he faced the same subject for nearly thirty years. If “cut down in this place, though he had done no wrong” at the riverbed at Mizunuma is a protest against the execution, then “benevolence and duty together” at Tōzenji is a letter of thanks to the people who took up what followed.
Sources: Tatsunami, the journal of the Oguri Kōzukenosuke memorial society (Ichikawa Yasoo, “Digging out buried wood — the course of the commemoration of Oguri Kōzukenosuke”); Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975; Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957
→ The commemoration movement of the 1930s — the stone for the summoning of his spirit, and the bust → The family's escape to Aizu → The Satsuma biwa song “Lord Oguri of Kōzuke”