Pockmarks and short sight — the boy Oguri as he was

Oguri Tadamasa was born on the twelfth day of the second month of 1827, at the family residence at Surugadai in Edo. His first name was Gōtarō. His father Matakichi Tadataka was in the pages' corps and was thirty at the time; his mother Kuniko was the eldest daughter of the previous head, Matakichi Tadakiyo. Ōtsubo Motoji's chronology sets beside that year the completion of Rai San'yō's Nihon Gaishi (an unofficial history of Japan), and notes that Saigō Takamori, who became his political opponent, and Nakahama Manjirō, who was to have a part in the embassy to the United States, were born at about the same time.

The grown Tadamasa's face was covered with pockmarks, from smallpox. No record says at what age he caught it. Smallpox was then a disease that killed; he came through it, but it left marks that never faded.

Sakamoto Fujiyoshi describes his looks: small, short-sighted, pockmarked, and even in the later photographs no one could flatter him into a handsome man. A broad forehead — which looks like a receding hairline, though Sakamoto takes it that it was not, and that his face had been like that since boyhood.

The face is there in records from his adult years as well. Lieutenant Johnston of the United States Navy, who accompanied the embassy of 1860, set down this of Oguri at thirty-four.

“Oguri Bungo-no-kami was certainly the ablest and the most practical man in the party. … He was about forty years of age and a small man, but, judged by phrenology, a man of fine intellectual powers. His slightly pockmarked face shone with intelligence and understanding.”

That a man of thirty-four was taken for “about forty” may have had something to do with the face as well. A man who saw Oguri at the shogunate's councils in those years gives the same picture: “a small dark-skinned man with pockmarks, of no great presence, but his eyes glittered and went through you, and the moment those lips, set in a straight line, opened, the voice rang out and the argument came in order.”

Few stories survive of Tadamasa's boyhood, but the make-up of the family is clear. At six he lost his only sister. That was in the first month of 1834. There were no other children.

From that same year Tadamasa began going to school — a school that stood in the row house of the Oguri residence, kept by Asaka Gonsai, one of the first scholars of the day. It was here that Gonsai's name became known throughout Japan, and even after he was made a professor of the Shōheikō he did not forget what the Oguri had done for him in his years of poverty: the school inside the residence stayed open until his death in 1860. Among its pupils were Kurimoto Joun, Kawaji Toshiakira, Takasugi Shinsaku, Iwasaki Yatarō, Nakamura Keiu, Kanda Takahira and Fukuchi Ōchi. The teaching the young Tadamasa received directly, though, seems to have come from the senior pupils Morita Teisuke and Kuraishi Tenta.

At this school Tadamasa came to know Kurimoto Sebei, five years his senior, later known as Joun. For a boy with no brothers it must have mattered a great deal. Their friendship never changed as long as either lived.

His training in arms began at about the same time. For the sword he studied under Onogai Shimotsuke-no-kami Nobutomo of the Shinkage school, and afterwards under Fujikawa Seisai. For gunnery he studied under Tamura Kazue of the Japanese school.

Kurimoto Joun left this account of Tadamasa as a boy.

From his early years he seemed sickly by constitution and was not like other children, but he was what people call stubborn. For all that, in mischief he stood at the head of the pack, and as their ringleader he had it in him to make the others do as he said.

Kurimoto Joun's recollections, as given in Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa)

Not strong in body, small, short-sighted, his face pockmarked — and still at the head of the pack of children. From the few stories that survive Sakamoto Fujiyoshi reads a temperament that was single-minded, quick to understand and unusually curious, and, perhaps because he was small, unwilling to lose, and adds to that: “and yet he did not cling to things.” The dislike of saying more than was needed shows in the diaries, where the daily entries run to two or three lines and no more. His offering his resignation again and again in later years was probably the same lack of attachment, Sakamoto says.

Ōtsubo Motoji's chronology hands on one story of Tadamasa at fourteen, in 1840. Invited as a guest to the house of Tatebe, the ten-thousand-koku domain of Hayashida in Harima, he sat facing the lord of the domain, smoked with him and argued, beating the tobacco tray as he talked, to the astonishment of the domain's retainers. A hatamoto's son of fourteen, not letting go of an argument with a daimyo of ten thousand koku. It was from this house of Tatebe that Michiko — Oaya — later came as his wife.

The same chronology records that an older fellow pupil in gunnery, Yūki Keinosuke, brought him into contact through their acquaintance with what was being argued about the country at the time. It was in that year that Takashima Shūhan submitted his memorial on coastal defence; the affairs of the Bansha persecution followed in the next, and the famine of the 1830s and Ōshio's rising were still fresh in memory.

On the twenty-third day of the third month of 1843 Tadamasa, seventeen, went up to the castle for the first time, presenting a sword, a list of gifts, silver and horse money in the Black Audience Hall at his first formal appearance. On the sixteenth day of the fourth month of 1847 he was called out of the household into service on the grounds of “diligence in the arts”, entered the library guard of the western keep in the company of Akita Awaji-no-kami, and was granted a stipend of three hundred bales of rice. It was the appointment by which able sons of hatamoto families were picked out for advancement. From here the pockmarked ringleader set out on his course as an official of the shogunate.

Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (including its quotation from Johnston's journal)

→ Asaka Gonsai's school　→ Training in swordsmanship, jūjutsu and gunnery, and the Oguri school　→ The marriage arranged from the Tatebe house　→ Kurimoto Joun