His birth, his family home, and the line of the house of Oguri

Oguri Tadamasa was born early on the twelfth day of the second month of 1827, at the family residence at Kanda Surugadai in Edo. His childhood name was Gōtarō. His father was Oguri Matakichi Tadataka; his mother was Kuni, written in some sources as Kuniko. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi gives the father's age at the time as twenty-nine and the mother's as seventeen. Ōtsubo Motoji's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa) makes the father thirty; the details differ. For the day of birth too, besides the records giving the twelfth day of the second month, there are records that give the twenty-third day of the sixth month — 16 July.

Ōtsubo Motoji adds to his short chronology a note of what else fell in that year of 1827. It was the year Rai San'yō completed his Nihon Gaishi (an unofficial history of Japan), and the year Saigō Takamori, later his political opponent, was born in Kagoshima and Nakahama Manjirō in Tosa.

The house is said to have stood where the Shufunotomo-sha building now is, in what is today Kanda Surugadai. On the Ogawachō Kiriezu (the sectional map of Ogawachō), printed in 1849 by the publisher Owariya Seishichi, a sloping road runs up from the bank of the Kanda River towards the foot of Surugadai, and the Oguri residence is a samurai house fronting on it, the fifth counting from the riverbank.

On the older Shōhō map, printed in 1644, the road that runs between Suidōbashi and the aqueduct towards Hitotsubashi is named Oguri-zaka, Oguri's slope, and the Oguri residence stands on it. On the Kanbun map of 1670 and the Enpō map of 1679, though, the name Oguri does not appear anywhere in the district. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi conjectures that the house burned in the great fire of 1657 — the Furisode fire, which broke out at Hongō Maruyamachō, burned eight hundred blocks and left more than a hundred thousand dead — and moved elsewhere, returning to Surugadai afterwards.

There is a reason, too, for the name Surugadai, the Suruga heights. From this tableland at the top of the slope of Kanda hill, Mount Fuji in Suruga was beautifully in view, and the Suruga Dainagon was granted a residence here. Many of the houses belonged to Tokugawa retainers who had come from Suruga, and so, with no one in particular to name it, the place came to be called Surugadai. To have been given a residence here was itself a mark of standing as an old retainer of the Tokugawa.

The household account book and the diaries carry entries such as “seat money for viewing the Kanda festival”. Kanda Myōjin stands just across the Kanda River, and the family went there fairly often.

A good deal about the distant ancestors of the house of Oguri is still unsettled.

Ninagawa Arata, a relative of the family and the scholar who knew the house of Oguri best, wrote in Ishin Zengo no Seisō to Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shi (the political struggle around the Restoration and the death of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, 1928) that “the house of Oguri is of the Seiwa Genji…”. Of the accounts handed down in the family, this is the one that has long been told.

Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, for his part, holds that so far as research goes today the Oguri are to be taken not as Seiwa Genji but as descendants of the Taira, and cites a paper by Tsukakoshi Shin'ichi in the sixth issue of Tatsunami, the journal of the Oguri Kōzukenosuke memorial society. By that account the Oguri name descends from Yoshimochi, fifth in descent from Emperor Kanmu, who changed his name to Kunika, was appointed daijō of Hitachi and prospered in the Kantō. The name of “Oguri Gorō” Shigeie appears in the genealogy of that Hitachi daijō line, and the last of the line, Yorishige, is said to have fought Ashikaga Mochiuji together with his father Mitsushige in 1423, to have been defeated, and to have fled to Mikawa.

The third is a line within the Matsudaira. It runs through Tarōzaemon-no-jō Nobuhiro, eldest son of Matsudaira Yasuchika, and his son Tadayoshi; Tadayoshi's son Yoshitada is said to have taken the name Oguri, the surname of the maternal kin, by Ieyasu's order. As matters stand, the family tradition, the work on the genealogies and the Matsudaira records all stand side by side, and no one of them can be settled on.

The Oguri were direct hatamoto retainers rated at 2,500 koku. A count of 1722 gives 5,205 hatamoto and 17,399 gokenin. Most hatamoto held between a hundred and five hundred koku; those above five hundred were called o-rekireki, and those above a thousand go-taishin. At 2,500 koku the Oguri stood high among them. The stipend was not that from the beginning: until 1633 it was 550 koku, was raised to 750 koku in the third month of that year, and later became 2,500. In Tadamasa's own time it was raised by a further two hundred koku on his return from the embassy to the United States in 1860, to 2,700 koku.

The fief was not in one piece but scattered in several places. The largest part was the village of Takahashi at Ashikaga in Shimotsuke, now Tochigi prefecture. The village of Gonda in Gunma district, Kōzuke — now Gunma prefecture — where Tadamasa was to meet his end, was one of these scattered holdings. The title Kōzukenosuke comes from this holding in Kōzuke.

Tadamasa's father Tadataka was not born an Oguri. When Tadakiyo, the tenth head of the house, took to his sickbed in 1813, the house had no legitimate son. Tadakiyo noticed that Tadataka, fourth son of the neighbouring hatamoto Nakagawa Hida-no-kami Tadateru, was a serious and likeable young man, took him in as his adopted son and married him to his own eldest daughter, Kuni. Tadataka succeeded to the house on the third day of the tenth month of that same year.

As it happened, Tadakiyo, who was supposed to have no son, was given a boy just after his own death. The child was registered as Tadataka's younger brother — a practical arrangement, in an age that cared more for keeping the name and the office of a house unbroken than for blood.

Tadataka was called into the pages' corps in 1826, and Tadamasa was born the following year. He went on steadily: messenger of the shogun in 1843, inspector of the western keep in the same year, with promotion to hoi rank, then keeper of the castle in the shogun's absence and captain of the gunners, and in 1854 he was appointed commissioner at Niigata. Niigata was a place of consequence throughout the Edo period; the shogunate held it as its own domain and stationed a commissioner there.

When Tadamasa was six, a younger sister, Sadako, was born, but she died in infancy. His mother Kuni took the religious name Kyōjuin and died on 15 January 1874.

In the house of Oguri the head was known in every generation as Matakichi. Tadamasa was Matakichi, his father Tadataka was Matakichi, his adopted heir Tadamichi was Matakichi. The name goes back to a feat of arms by the founder of the house, Oguri Matakichi Tadamasa.

The two generations named so far are set out here in a simple diagram. Every solid line is a connection that can be confirmed in the records.

How Tadamasa's own marriage came about is taken up in a later article. First, the traditions about the founder of the house.

Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987 (including its quotations from Ninagawa Arata, Ishin Zengo no Seisō to Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shi, and from Tsukakoshi Shin'ichi's paper in the sixth issue of Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society); Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957

→ The founder Oguri Matakichi and the legend of his feat of arms — Anegawa, or Nagashino?　／　The crest of the house of Oguri, a standing wave in a circle　／　His father Tadataka's death, and the succession