A story is handed down of Tadamasa at fourteen, around 1840, when he still went by the name Gōtarō. On a visit to the residence of Tatebe Takumi-no-kami Masaatsu, he argued with the head of the house without the least timidity, and was talked about for it.
What sort of house he was visiting
The Tatebe were lords of the ten-thousand-koku domain of Hayashida in Harima. Small as the stipend was, the standing of the house was of another order. In the age of the warring states they held the castle at Mitsukuri in Ōmi, and Tanba-no-kami Masanaga, the first of them to serve the Tokugawa, was a man whom the senior councillor Sakai Sanuki-no-kami Tadakatsu took as a son-in-law. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi calls the Tatebe “a house of note said to descend in the direct line from Yamato Takeru”. Masaatsu's younger sister had married into the Ninagawa, a family of note since the Muromachi period and hatamoto of six thousand koku. The residence stood below Kanda Myōjin.
Masaatsu, the head of the house — who took the name Seikō after he retired — was spoken of as “a warrior with a high reputation for ability”. For a boy from a hatamoto house of 2,500 koku who had not yet made his formal appearance before the shogun, he was no sort of equal, in standing or in years.
Knocking out his pipe as he talked
What astonished those present, though, was the boy's manner. Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki's Oguri Kōzukenosuke describes it in some detail.
Tadamasa is said to have answered without a sign of nerves, and to have gone on smoking throughout: knocking his pipe hard against the tobacco tray to shake out the ash, then filling it again at once. The gestures were a grown man's, and that was not all. He was good at taking up what was said, and good at listening. Once he began to speak himself there was substance in it, and the reasoning held together. His eyes shone as he talked, the book says.
Children who talk like adults belong to every age. In Tadamasa's case, the same book says, what he said had been “made thoroughly his own”. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi likewise reports that he went at Masaatsu thrust for thrust and was never beaten in the argument, and writes that the Tatebe household talked among themselves about what this boy would become.
The boy as Kurimoto Joun described him
The scene fits well with the other judgements of Tadamasa's boyhood that have come down. Ōtsubo Motoji's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu gives, as Kurimoto Joun's recollection, that the young Tadamasa was no different from an ordinary child day to day, but was dogged and headstrong, what people call stubborn. In mischief, though, he stood at the head of the pack, and he held the ringleader's place and had it in him to make the others do as he said.
His refusal to give an inch to older men at the Tatebe house lies along the same line of temperament. The same book records that in this fourteenth year, through his acquaintance with Yūki Keinosuke, an older fellow pupil in gunnery, he came upon the arguments of the day, and that his ordinary manner changed. 1840 was also the year Takashima Shūhan submitted his memorial on coastal defence.
Where the story stands
Fix the date of the story and the weight of it comes clear. Tadamasa went up to the castle for the first time, and made his formal appearance before the shogun in the Black Audience Hall, on the twenty-third day of the third month of 1843, in the spring of his seventeenth year. The scene at the Tatebe house was three years before that. A boy who had not once appeared in public was arguing on equal terms with a daimyo of ten thousand koku.
As a boy Tadamasa read Chinese learning at Asaka Gonsai's school inside the residence, and from about eight he had begun training in the sword, in jūjutsu and in gunnery. At the same school was Kurimoto Sebei (Joun), who became the friend of his life; Tadamasa was five years the younger. The ground of his composure in argument was laid in days like these.
Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki's Oguri Kōzukenosuke adds an inference about the story: if Masaatsu had come away from that day with the impression of an impudent boy, a swollen-headed fellow, the match of later years would never have come about — for Tadamasa took Masaatsu's daughter Michiko as his wife. The reason a scene from a boyhood has been retold so long lies in that sequel.
Sources: Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975; 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