As a boy Tadamasa went to school — though going there took no walking, because the school stood inside the row house of the Oguri residence. In one corner of a hatamoto residence at Kanda Surugadai was the private academy of Asaka Gonsai, one of the first scholars of the day.
Tadamasa was born in that residence in 1827, the heir of Oguri Tadataka, a hatamoto of 2,500 koku. His childhood name was Gōtarō. The residence stood at Kanda Surugadai, and on the sectional map of 1849 the Oguri name appears at the fifth house going from the bank of the Kanda River towards the foot of Surugadai. Within the grounds of the house where he was born was the school of a scholar known throughout the country — that is where his learning began.
The scholar who opened a school in the Oguri row house
Asaka Gonsai was born in the third month of 1791 at Kōriyama in Asaka district, Mutsu province. His father was the priest of the Asaka Kunitsuko shrine. His given name was Shigenobu, his style Shijun, his common name Yūsuke; Gonsai was his pen name. As a child he studied Confucianism under a domain scholar of Nihonmatsu, and later went to Edo, where he served as a student-servant to Satō Issai and then studied under Hayashi Jussai.
Gonsai is said to have opened his school at the Oguri residence in 1814, thirteen years before Tadamasa was born. His Bunryaku of 1831 made his name, and from then on the school was known throughout Japan.
Of the man himself Sakamoto Fujiyoshi writes that he was imposing to look at and single-minded in scholarship, and that, because poverty did not trouble him, he had his share of hardships — his wife left him among them. As a scholar he belonged to the Zhu Xi school, but in his thinking he was flexible. He had dealings with Watanabe Kazan and Takano Chōei, and did translations from American and Russian books. That a teacher of Confucianism was also abreast of news from beyond the sea is not to be passed over in considering the course Tadamasa later took.
Why he never closed the school
Gonsai's standing kept rising. In 1843 he was taken on as teacher to the lord of Nihonmatsu and moved there for a time. He was soon back in Edo, and in 1850 he was at last made a professor of the Shōheikō, the shogunate's academy. The Shōheikō was the highest place of learning in Japan at the time, and a professorship there carried far more weight than a chair at a national university does today.
What is worth noting is that, for all this advancement, Gonsai never closed the school inside the Oguri residence. He did not close it when Nihonmatsu took him on, and it was left as it was after he became a professor of the Shōheikō. It is said to have been kept up until his death in the third month of 1860.
A reason for it is handed down: Gonsai was deeply grateful for the help the Oguri had given him in his years of poverty. Behind a relation of landlord and tenant that lasted more than forty years lay that debt.
In the third month of 1860, when Gonsai died, Tadamasa was on the far side of the Pacific as inspector with the embassy to the United States. He had entered San Francisco on the eighth day of the third month by the Japanese calendar, and was then beginning his inspection of the mint.
Learning begun at six
Tadamasa is said to have begun at the school in 1834, at six, the year he lost his sister. The teaching the boy received directly, though, is taken to have come not from Gonsai himself but from his senior pupils Morita Teisuke and Kuraishi Tenta. At a large school known across the country, it was usual for the senior pupils to take the youngest newcomers.
What he studied was Chinese learning. While reading it at this school, he learned swordsmanship under Onogai Nobutomo. In letters and in arms alike, he trained under the first names of the day.
Among his fellow pupils was a boy five years older whose home was close by. Kurimoto Sebei was born into the house of Kitamura Kaien, a physician to the shogun, at Urasarugakuchō in Kanda Ogawachō in Edo — a short way from the corner of Surugadai where the Oguri lived. Both boys grew up in the middle of Edo.
Of everything the school gave him, the greatest over a lifetime was probably one friend. At Gonsai's school Tadamasa came to know Kurimoto Sebei, five years his senior — later known as Joun. Sakamoto describes him as imposing in appearance, intolerant of anything crooked, kind, and brilliant. Their friendship began here and never changed. At Tōzenji in Gonda in Kōzuke, where Tadamasa met his end, busts of the two men now stand side by side.
What became of Kurimoto shows well enough that the school was a gateway to learning. He went from Gonsai's school to the Shōheikō, and in 1843, at twenty-two, passed the first grade of the academy examination — the entry examination for shogunal office — and was rewarded by the shogunate with fifteen ingots of silver. Iwase Tadanari passed in the same year. The school in the row house of a residence was also the first step on a road into the heart of the shogunate.
Many others who left their names from the last years of the shogunate into the Meiji era came out of Gonsai's school. Iwasaki Yatarō, who came up to Edo from Tosa, studied at this same school inside the Oguri residence. The fellow pupils are taken up in detail in one of the shorter pieces.
Sources: 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); Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society
→ The fellow pupils of Asaka Gonsai's school | a register of more than two thousand students