The silence was broken forty-seven years after Oguri's execution, on 27 September 1915. The date has a meaning. On the twenty-seventh day of the ninth month of 1865 the ground was broken for the Yokosuka ironworks in the hills of Uchiura. Fifty years later to the day, the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Yokosuka naval arsenal was held.
The official document of Kuroi Teijirō, head of the arsenal
For that celebration, “An outline of the origin and development of the founding of the Yokosuka naval shipyard” was published in the name of the head of the arsenal, Vice-Admiral Kuroi Teijirō. As a document published by the naval authorities, it was the first to acknowledge Oguri's achievement squarely. It was later cut into a bronze plate and set up before the arsenal's entrance.
The founding is set out in it thus.
At that time the country's business was manifold and the treasury empty, and many objected on that ground; opinions came thick and no decision was easily reached. It happened that Oguri Kōzukenosuke, being commissioner of finance, also had charge of the business of the naval establishment; he had early seen through the times, and, setting aside all objection with his utmost strength, argued that the founding of a shipyard was an urgent necessity. The shogunate at length accepted it and ordered Kōzukenosuke and the inspector Kurimoto Sebei to consult the plenipotentiary minister of France resident in this country, Roches … This was on the tenth day of the eleventh month of 1864.
It goes on to record that Verny arrived in the first month of 1865; that eight men were appointed commissioners of the ironworks — Oguri, Kurimoto, Kinoshita and Asano, with Yamaguchi Suruga-no-kami, Shibata Hyūga-no-kami, Ishino Chikuzen-no-kami and Masuda Sakuemon added; and that the ground-breaking of the twenty-seventh day of the ninth month was “the commencement of the work of building the Yokosuka naval shipyard”, and “truly fifty years before the present”. The document ends with this sentence.
Now, on the occasion of holding the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding, we set down in brief the origin of this arsenal's founding, and so transmit it for ever.
27 September 1915. Head of the Yokosuka naval arsenal, Vice-Admiral Kuroi Teijirō
Sakamoto Fujiyoshi calls this almost the only official document to have praised Oguri's achievement since 1868. There had been words of gratitude from people who owed Oguri something, in various places; but those were expressions of private feeling. This document acknowledged, in the name of the responsible head of a public body, the navy, the achievement of a shogunal official counted at the Restoration as being on the rebel side.
His name was absent from the speeches
The celebration itself, however, was not all unreserved commemoration. By the record of it, the only one among the ranks of dignitaries and high officials whose congratulatory speech touched on Oguri Kōzukenosuke was the prime minister, Ōkuma Shigenobu, and even he mentioned him only in passing. Of the absence of Oguri's name from the other speeches, those who looked into it in later years wrote that they “cannot help a strange feeling, and a dissatisfaction”.
The arsenal's own efforts, on the other hand, were thorough. It published material introducing Oguri's character and his deeds, quoting from the writings of Kurimoto Joun, Fukuchi Gen'ichirō, Seta Tōyō and Tsukakoshi Teishunrō, and worked at the commemoration. Tsukakoshi Teishunrō came from Iwahi in the village of Kurabuchi, joined the Min'yūsha and wrote vigorously for the Kokumin Shinbun; his Oguri Kōzukenosuke Matsuro Jiseki Hosei (corrections to the record of Oguri Kōzukenosuke's last days) was distributed as a memento of this celebration.
The papers moved too. The Hasshū Shinbun carried on 20 September “The fiftieth anniversary celebration of the opening of Yokosuka / on Oguri Kōzukenosuke, the first man of merit in the opening”; the Tōkyō Nichinichi Shinbun on the twenty-sixth “The Yokosuka commemoration celebration: fifty years of the arsenal's founding”; and the Yomiuri Shinbun on the twenty-seventh “A celebration in memory of fifty years: looking back on the founding of the Yokosuka naval arsenal and its opening” — all under large headlines, reporting the achievements of Oguri Kōzukenosuke and Kurimoto Sebei (Joun) as the benefactors of the founding. A name that had gone unspoken in public for half a century leapt into the newspapers within those few days.
“If a statue of Verny is to be raised, then a statue of Kōzukenosuke first”
A story survives that shows Vice-Admiral Kuroi's attitude. Among scholars who owed Verny a debt in engineering, a movement arose to raise a bust of him in gratitude, and it was Dr Sakurai Jōji who brought the matter to Kuroi. Kuroi pointed out the error in it at once.
The arsenal as it stands was certainly not opened by Verny. It was done by Oguri Kōzukenosuke's decision; Oguri, through the French minister Roches, merely engaged Verny, who was then at Shanghai. If a statue of Verny was to be raised, the proper order would be to raise a statue of Kōzukenosuke first, and his afterwards. Abe Dōzan records that he heard this account directly, more than once, from Kuroi himself and from Oguri Sadao. The bust was in the end made in 1922, with a grant from the empress — later the dowager empress Teimei — by the hand of Asakura Fumio.
As the starting point of the commemoration movement
The commemoration of 1915 is the formal starting point of the course of his rehabilitation. That half a century had passed since Yokosuka was opened, and that the men now at the centre of the work were of a generation that had neither opposed the building nor known the circumstances at first hand, is not to be overlooked as a background to the change. For engineers doing the practical work, a man who had built works still in use after fifty years could be an object of respect separable from political position.
The commemoration went on from there. In November 1928 Ninagawa Arata's Ishin Zengo no Seisō to Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shi was published and went through nine printings within a few years. In 1934 a huge stone for the summoning of his spirit, with the calligraphy of Tokugawa Iesato, was raised at Fumon'in, the burial temple at Ōmiya, and the prime minister, the navy minister, the education minister and the foreign minister each sent a representative to its unveiling. The man who arranged the raising of that stone was the same Kuroi who had published the official document in 1915.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941; Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family), and Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society