At the end of June 1935 the prime minister of the day, Okada Keisuke, and the minister of communications, Tokonami Takejirō, came together to pay their respects at Fumon'in at Ōmiya. A serving prime minister went in person to a temple where the stone for the summoning of his spirit had been raised only the year before.
A lecture in the main hall, and how the papers treated it
Okada Keisuke gave a lecture in the main hall on Oguri as a builder of the navy. For Okada, who came from the navy and had risen to admiral himself, the estimate of the man who had built the Yokosuka ironworks is likely to have carried a weight of real feeling beyond a ceremonial visit. The title of the lecture is handed down as “the benefactor of our navy”.
The day's report appeared in all the capital's newspapers. It was thought so remarkable that it was carried in the national editions across three and five columns with photographs, and it astonished the public. Oguri Kōzukenosuke was the father of the navy — from here visitors began to come from every quarter, the abbot of the time recorded.
Tokonami Takejirō's words
The visit stood on a course that had begun two years earlier. In 1934 the unveiling of the stone for the summoning of Oguri Kōzukenosuke's spirit was held in the grounds of Fumon'in. Through the offices of Admiral Kuroi Teijirō, the title on the stone's face was in the hand of Prince Tokugawa Iesato. On the day, the prime minister, the navy minister, the education minister and the foreign minister each sent a representative and offered congratulatory words. One passage of Prime Minister Okada's message runs thus.
“In this sense it would truly be no exaggeration to call Oguri Kōzukenosuke the father of our country's navy”
And the next year the prime minister came himself. Tokonami Takejirō was at that time spoken of by the public as the deputy prime minister. With the two of them appearing together, it is no wonder the temple was told that “now it has really become the genuine thing”.
It is recorded that this Tokonami said to the abbot: his coming to the grave that day was at Itō Chiyū's urging; Oguri had been so loyal a man and had carried out great works for the state, and yet had met that miserable end at the hands of Satsuma and Chōshū; it had been an error of the moment, and yet that is still not thoroughly understood by the public, which is much to be regretted. The prime minister alone would have done, but it was in that sense that he came along; that is, today they had come to apologize — so he said, smiling as he spoke.
Mementoes of the visit still stand in the grounds. Beside the stone for the summoning of his spirit is a laurel planted by Prime Minister Okada's own hand, and on the other side a laurel planted by Minister Tokonami's hand. Inside the temple gate is a gun presented by the Yokosuka naval arsenal, and before the stone were set the anchor and the floating mine of the warship Sakaki, officially granted by the navy ministry.
Those who came before and after
In this period men from politics, business and journalism came to Fumon'in often. Two years before the prime minister's visit, in May 1933, the critic Tokutomi Sohō and his wife came to the graves of the house of Oguri, guided by the chief of the Ōmiya police. In a piece Sohō wrote afterwards for the evening edition of the Tōkyō Nichinichi Shinbun, there is this.
“The writer is a pupil of the venerable Katsu Kaishū, who differed from Kōzukenosuke in political standpoint; and yet, Kōzukenosuke having been resolute and bold, firm in what he believed and loyal in what he served, I pity and grieve over his wish, at the founding of the dock at Yokosuka, that he might at least leave a house for sale with a storehouse attached”
It is a piece in which Sohō, having stated for himself that he was a pupil of Katsu Kaishū, still mourned Oguri. The pine planted by his hand on that occasion had grown more than ten feet within a few years. Tōyama Mitsuru, Itō Chiyū and others also showed their goodwill, and the admirals of the navy continued to visit and offer prayers for him as a benefactor of their beginnings.
The argument the visits brought on
The visit, however, also lit a certain controversy at the same time. Fumon'in is the temple where the commemoration went forward on the understanding that Oguri's head was buried there. With the news that a serving prime minister had come to pray, the local historian Toyokuni Kakudō took up squarely, in Jōmō oyobi Jōmōjin no. 220 (August 1935), “the question of where the head is truly buried”, and asked why the people of Gonda kept silent. The wider the commemoration spread, the more the establishing of the facts came to be demanded.
Even so, the fact that a serving prime minister spoke of Oguri's achievements, and gave a lecture at that, does not move. Some twenty years after the commemoration at the naval arsenal in 1915, it showed that the estimate of Oguri had passed beyond one organization, the navy, and reached the centre of politics.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (the book has a strong period colour in its praise of the navy and its statements cannot be taken at face value, but as material showing how far the commemoration had spread at the time it is valuable); Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family), and Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society
→ The commemoration movement of the 1930s — the stone at Fumon'in and the bust ／ The first international ceremony after the war: the unveiling of the bust after the peace treaty