The principal crest of the house of Oguri is a standing wave in a circle: within a ring, a wave that rolls in and draws back, worked into a design. The crest was settled upon when the family changed its surname from Matsudaira to Oguri.
From the three hollyhock leaves to the standing wave
The Oguri were a branch of the Matsudaira. The genealogy has it that from Tarōzaemon-no-jō Nobuhiro, eldest son of Matsudaira Yasuchika, the heads bore the name Tarōzaemon-no-jō in turn — Nagakatsu, Katsushige, Nobuyoshi — and that they adopted Chikanaga (Iwatsu Tarō), eldest son of Chikatada of the main line, as heir. His son was Tadayoshi, and Tadayoshi's son Yoshitada; in Yoshitada's time, it is said, the family took the surname of the maternal kin, Oguri, by Ieyasu's order.
The maternal kin means the mother's house. By the line Ōtsubo Motoji worked out, Matsudaira Tarōzaemon Nobuyoshi, the first of them, held the castle at Iwatsu; being in poor health he first adopted Chikanaga, a son of Matsudaira Sakyōnosuke Chikatada, and then took as his wife a daughter of Oguri Sakyōnoshin Masashige, lord of the castle at Tsutsuhari in Mikawa, by whom he had Jirō Tadayoshi. After his father's death Tadayoshi's mother fell out with Chikanaga, and the boy grew up in her own family's house, the Oguri of Tsutsuhari in Mikawa; he called himself Shōjirō and entered the service of Tokugawa Ieyasu. From Yoshitada in the third generation onwards the family bore the surname Oguri.
While the name was Matsudaira the crest was the three hollyhock leaves familiar from television drama. After the change to Oguri, the standing wave in a circle came into use. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi states this plainly. A change of crest was also a sign that the standing of the house itself had changed.
Ōtsubo Motoji's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu records the crests of the house in more detail.
The principal crest is the standing wave in a circle
The alternative crests are the cherry blossom and the five-three paulownia
The crest on the curtains is the standing wave in a circle as well
Two alternative crests, and the same principal crest on the curtains: an arrangement of crests fitting the standing of a hatamoto house. There is also a record, from later years, of a man with no connection to the family appearing before the Oguri graves in formal dress bearing the standing wave in a circle, to the indignation of those present. A crest was the mark of a house, and people then understood well what it meant to wear one.
The tradition that “it was once a five-element stupa”
Another tradition runs differently. Abe Dōzan's Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden states that the principal crest of the Oguri was originally a five-element stupa, altered in later generations into a standing wave. The five-element stupa is a memorial form that piles up earth, water, fire, wind and void — from the bottom a cube, a sphere, a pyramid, a half-moon and a jewel. How that form passed into the design of a wave is not set out there.
The standing wave flying at Yokosuka
Nakazato Kaizan wrote what the crest could do in the last years of the shogunate into the seventh volume of Daibosatsu Tōge, the “Ocean” volume. A party is sounding the depth of the water at the village of Yokosuka, and a squad leader under the commissioner of warships comes down on them, borrowing the authority of Katsu Awa-no-kami. The leader cannot make out the standard flying over the work.
“What is that standard? Take a good look and tell me what it is.”
“Is it not the crest of the Takasaki domain?”
“Just as you say, sir — it looks like a standing wave in a circle.”
Then he is told that the work is being done with the consent of the commissioner of finance. He looks up again at the flag, and there it is — a standing wave in a circle, unmistakably the crest of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, commissioner of finance. Only then, it is written, did the squad leader feel fear.
Of all the volumes, this was the only one given an English title. Abe Dōzan remarked that “one feels this volume was written almost for Oguri's sake”, and quoted the following passage from Nakazato Kaizan.
For the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, the name of Oguri Kōzukenosuke is one that ought to be forgotten less than any other name; and yet, since the Restoration, it is a name that has been forgotten past all forgetting.
A measure for telling the genuine from the false
A crest can also serve as a measure for judging whether a relic is genuine. In recent years a portrait and a piece of calligraphy signed “Oguri Tadamasa” were found among the effects of Nakaiya Jūbei, a raw-silk merchant of the last years of the shogunate. The portrait is a half-length figure of a samurai, finely coloured and of dignified bearing, and the seal carries Jūbei's art name. The members of the memorial society who examined it, though, stopped there.
The crest on the figure resembled a wood sorrel with swords. The crest of the house of Oguri is the standing wave in a circle, and no wood sorrel appears among its alternative crests either. The inscription on the portrait, moreover — “a great lord of surpassing power, whose art of fire reaches the divine” — does not read as a phrase a man would set down about himself. For such reasons they held back from any conclusion on the spot, photographed the piece and left it to later examination. One point, a crest that did not match, was enough to make the handling of the material careful.
The crest that gave the memorial society's journal its name
The crest has left a name in the present day as well. When the Oguri Kōzukenosuke memorial society came to publish a journal, the title was thought of by Ichikawa Yasoo, a member of the cultural properties survey committee of Kurabuchi. Since the crest of the house of Oguri was a standing wave in a circle, he proposed, Tatsunami — standing wave — would do, and that became the title. Each issue of Tatsunami notes where the name came from at the end of the volume.
The wave crest raised in place of the hollyhock when the surname changed from Matsudaira to Oguri at Ieyasu's order. It flew as a flag at the water's edge at Yokosuka, and it survives now as the title of the memorial society's journal.
Sources: Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957; Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941; Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society
→ The founder Oguri Matakichi and the legend of his feat of arms — Anegawa, or Nagashino?