The Oguri were a hatamoto house whose founder, by its own tradition, was Oguri Matakichi Tadamasa, a warrior in the service of Tokugawa Ieyasu; Kōzukenosuke was the twelfth head of that line. Abe Dōzan's Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy) has it that the Oguri were originally Mikawa warriors of the Matsudaira name, kin of the Tokugawa, and that they took the surname of the maternal line and called themselves Oguri.
Two battles appear in the stories of the founder's feats of arms: Anegawa and Nagashino. It is not that one of them must be the right one; they have been handed down as separate events, at different points in Matakichi's life.
Anegawa — “worth as much as the first spear”
The Kansei Chōshū Shokafu (the Kansei-era revised genealogies of the houses) records that he entered Ieyasu's service as a page in 1567, at thirteen. By that count Matakichi served Ieyasu for forty-nine of his sixty-one years.
As Abe Dōzan has it, the event belongs to the battle of Anegawa, in 1570, when Matakichi was sixteen. Enemy troops fell suddenly on Ieyasu's position, and there was a moment when Ieyasu himself might have taken a sword cut. Matakichi, the boy page at his side, caught up the Nobukuni spear that lay there and fought the enemy off. While he did so their own men came up and destroyed the attackers, and Ieyasu's life was saved.
Ieyasu praised the deed highly, in words the Shokafu sets down.
Tadamasa's quick-witted work should count as much as the first spear.
The Nobukuni spear itself was given to him with the praise. He is said to have won the first honours in every fight afterwards, and for that Ieyasu gave him the name Matakichi. It is from this that the heads of the house of Oguri took the name Matakichi in each generation. Kōzukenosuke used it himself until 1861, and thereafter, to avoid sharing a name with a member of the shogun's council, he called himself Kōzukenosuke alone.
The list of surviving possessions in Ōtsubo Motoji's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu includes “one fine spear by Nobukuni, in its box”, and notes the tradition that Matakichi won the honour of the first spear in his first battle at sixteen and was given one of the ten spears Ieyasu kept by him. It is counted the one heirloom of the house of Oguri, and is kept at Tōzenji.
The banner with the five-element stupa
Matakichi is said to have gone into battle with a small banner flying at his back, a five-element stupa drawn in black on white — the five elements being earth, water, fire, wind and void. The enemy are said to have shaken at the sight of him coming on behind it and, as the white ground reddened with blood while they watched, to have been too afraid to go near him.
Nagashino — the promise to Amemiya Jūbei Ietsugu
The other story Abe Dōzan hands on belongs to the battle of Nagashino, in the fifth month of 1575, five years after Anegawa. Matakichi went out under Sakai Tadatsugu and, urging his men on, took the enemy stronghold on Tobinosuyama.
That evening, in light rain, Matakichi saw a single mounted warrior coming towards him from the shadow of the hill. He held his men back and went forward alone, and the man gave his name: “I am one called Amemiya Jūbei Ietsugu.” They fought with spear and sword and then grappled, and Ietsugu, his strength gone, asked one thing of Matakichi before he was killed: he had left a son at home, a boy not yet come of age, and he wished the sword at his own waist to be given to him. Matakichi said yes, and took his head.
Three years later, in the spring of 1578, Matakichi marched into Kōfu. Nothing had been heard of Amemiya's family since the battle, but it was said that the son had taken orders at Erinji, a Zen temple at Kōfu, and was praying for his father. Matakichi went to the temple alone, heard the circumstances from the abbot, met the son and gave him the sword as his father had asked.
All this is recorded in the entry for Oguri Tadamasa in the Kansei Chōshū Shokafu.
He grappled with Amemiya Jūbei Ietsugu, a warrior of the Takeda, and killed him at length, for which he received his lord's commendation and the gift of a sword. When Ietsugu was about to be killed he commended his son to Tadamasa, asking that the sword he wore be given to the boy, and Tadamasa consented. Later, when the lord's forces entered Kōfu, the boy was at Erinji; Tadamasa sought him out, delivered the dying words and handed the sword over. When this was reported, it was said that he was the son of a man of valour, and he was taken into the lord's service as a retainer.
The story reached Ieyasu, who was moved by Matakichi's conduct; holding that the Amemiya boy was likewise the son of a man of valour, he allowed him to leave the priesthood, raised him to samurai standing and took him into his service. In an age that measured men by feats of arms alone, Abe Dōzan writes, the affair was talked of on both sides. This Erinji at Kōfu is also the temple that appears in the “Manshin Oshō” volume of Nakazato Kaizan's Daibosatsu Tōge.
The grave that survived at Fumon'in
Matakichi died of illness in Edo on the eighteenth day of the ninth month of 1616, at sixty-one. By his will he was buried at Fumon'in, a Sōtō Zen temple in the village of Ōnari near Ōmiya in Musashi, part of his holding, and the temple was made the burial place of the house of Oguri thereafter. Fumon'in had been founded by Kaneko Suruga-no-kami, but Matakichi, holding Ōnari, put his weight behind the temple, and by his efforts it was granted ten koku of land under vermilion seal. He counts as the second founder of Fumon'in.
Kōzukenosuke revered this founder all his life. Even when the business of the shogunate was at its heaviest, the old people of the place said, he never failed to ride to the grave on the eighteenth day of the ninth month, the anniversary of the death, and to kneel before it in prayer. As evidence of it, a pair of stone lanterns stands before the grave, dedicated in the name of Oguri Tadamasa and cut with the date the eighteenth day of the ninth month, 1848.
Chance played one more part at this grave. After Kōzukenosuke was beheaded in 1868 and the word traitor was put about, the imperial army's hand reached the neighbourhood of Fumon'in too, and more than twenty graves of the Oguri family were thrown down. Matakichi's gravestone, though, carried no character of the name Oguri: only the posthumous Buddhist name Genshitsu Sōhon Zenjōmon, the date — the eighteenth day of the ninth month, 1616 — and the words “respectfully, the donor”. At the temple it had long been held to be the grave of Kaneko Suruga-no-kami, the founder. For that reason the founder's grave alone escaped destruction.
Abe Dōzan writes of the two men, Matakichi and Kōzukenosuke of the twelfth generation, that something runs through both alike in character and in spirit.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (including its quotations from the Kansei Chōshū Shokafu); Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957
→ His birth, his family home, and the line of the house of Oguri → The crest of the house of Oguri → Daibosatsu Tōge and Oguri Kōzukenosuke