In the years 1848–54 Tadamasa married Michiko, a daughter of Tatebe Masaatsu. Masaatsu was lord of the ten-thousand-koku domain of Hayashida in Harima, with the title Takumi-no-kami — the same house of Tatebe where, by the story handed down, Tadamasa at fourteen argued on equal terms with its lord and was talked about for it.
The house of Tatebe
The Tatebe held the castle at Mitsukuri in Ōmi in the age of the warring states, and Tanba-no-kami Masanaga, the first of them to serve the Tokugawa, was taken as a son-in-law by the senior councillor Sakai Sanuki-no-kami Tadakatsu. The house was also said to descend in the direct line from Yamato Takeru. In Edo they had their upper residence below Kanda Myōjin and a lower residence at Honjo. Michiko's younger sister married into the Ninagawa, a family of note since the Muromachi period and hatamoto of six thousand koku; her son was Ninagawa Arata, the scholar of international law who later pressed the question of how Oguri died.
A former retainer of the Hayashida domain left Ninagawa Arata an account of the scene in which Tadamasa, at fourteen, stood up to Masaatsu: “When he first came to the house as a guest of the Tatebe, his bearing was in every way that of a grown man — his speech clear, his voice ringing, his manner in company dignified; he had already the air of a great man. A boy of only fourteen, he smoked, knocking the tobacco tray hard as he put question and answer to Lord Tatebe Masaatsu, and everyone, astonished at how high he carried himself, talked of what sort of man he would become.” This was in 1841. Michiko was two years old at the time.
The date of the wedding
No source giving the exact date of the wedding has been found. On their ages, too, the accounts differ from source to source.
The case for 1849 Tadamasa twenty-three. On this view the lady Aya, still only eleven, came into the house of Oguri as something like a betrothed bride.
The case for about 1854 On this view it is hard to think Michiko would have married before she was fifteen or sixteen, which puts it when Tadamasa was twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
What is certain is that Tadamasa was born in 1827 and Michiko in 1839, exactly twelve years apart. As it happens, Tadamasa's father Tadataka and his mother Kuniko were twelve years apart as well.
What was happening on Tadamasa's side is known. On the twenty-third day of the third month of 1843, at seventeen, he went up to the castle for the first time and made his appearance in the Black Audience Hall of Edo Castle. In the fourth month of 1845, at twenty-one, he entered the guard as a member of the library guard of the western keep, with a stipend of three hundred bales. On the twentieth day of the tenth month of 1848 he shot before the shogun in the garden of the Yamazatomaru at Edo Castle, hitting the large target with every arrow, and was granted a set of seasonal robes. There is a similar record for the twenty-fifth day of the third month of 1852. Office and standing were in place, and he was coming to the time to settle down.
In the household account book, which begins in the first month of 1850, the name Oaya appears from that very first month, and from then on an allowance of one to two bu is paid out every month. Whether this Oaya was Michiko herself is a point on which researchers have differed (→ Who was Oaya?).
Her beauty, and the name “Sotoorihime”
Michiko is said to have been small and beautiful, and to have been spoken of as a Sotoorihime. The word comes from a legendary beauty of ancient times, and it is taken in two ways: that she was so beautiful that she showed through even the twelve layers of court robes, or that she stood out as far more beautiful than women in full dress even with nothing on at all.
The grace and beauty that earned her the name “the Sotoorihime of Surugadai” were still spoken of after the shogunate fell. There is even a story that, when Michiko was staying at the Minomura residence in Fukagawa after the Restoration, high officials of the early Meiji years pressed their attentions on her to her embarrassment. Husband and wife, it is handed down, were as close as to make mandarin ducks envious.
Tsukamoto Masahiko, who came as her attendant
Michiko was not the only one the match brought into the house of Oguri. Tsukamoto Masahiko — born in Edo in 1832, six years her senior — had served at the Tatebe upper residence in Edo as a page and as Michiko's attendant. Tadamasa asked for the attendant along with the bride, and the Tatebe gave up a retainer they were sorry to lose for their daughter's sake. Masahiko had lost his father early, and he and his mother Maki moved together from the Tatebe house to the Oguri.
Masahiko, whom Masaatsu had marked out and Tadamasa marked out in turn, rose from stipendiary retainer to steward, a post of the rank of house elder. On the embassy to the United States in 1860 he was one of the nine attendants chosen to go with Tadamasa, a stipendiary retainer of twenty-nine. In 1868 he followed the family to the village of Gonda with his own household of six, and lost his life with Oguri. It was Masahiko's mother Maki who tied the maternity sash at Michiko's belt-blessing in the third month of that year. The tie made by the marriage from the house of Tatebe held to the last day.
The account book after the marriage
What tells us how the Oguri lived after the marriage is the household account book. The entries begin in the first month of 1850, and all four volumes survive. The cover reads Ryōnyū Seishutsu Bo — the book for measuring what comes in and restraining what goes out — and beside it stands the name Saiyū Baikadō Shujin, the master of the hall of the few remaining plum blossoms. In the first month of that year Tadamasa had not yet reached his twenty-third birthday. From that one phrase on the cover it is clear that the intention was to manage the household's money, not merely to record it. For a hatamoto to keep his household accounts himself was unusual in itself.
The second volume jumps to 1858. There the entries “one ryō one bu, allowance for Mother” and “one ryō one bu, the same for Omichi” stand side by side — the mother Kuniko's share and Michiko's — and the form does not change as long as the book runs, down to the twelfth month of 1863. From the daily shopping to gifts of congratulation and the costs of the seasonal observances, the actual life of a hatamoto household survives there in figures; the book is designated an important cultural property of Gunma prefecture.
In later years Michiko signed some of the letters she wrote herself “Michi”. She died on 27 March 1885, at forty-seven, and was buried in the Tatebe graves at the Rinzai temple Kaizenji. She returned to the graves of the house she was born into.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family)
→ The great argument at the Tatebe residence, at fourteen ／ Daily life and the household accounts ／ Who was the Oaya who appears every month in this account book? ／ Oguri Mankyō — the monk said to be the son of a concubine