Who Oguri Kōzukenosuke was

What Oguri Kōzukenosuke did

Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa (1827–1868) was an official of the Tokugawa shogunate in its last years. He joined the embassy to the United States of 1860 as inspector, and the party became the first Japanese to travel around the world. In the eight years after his return he carried out the building of the Yokosuka ironworks (later the Yokosuka shipyard), the founding of a Western-style army, and the establishment of the first joint-stock company in Japan, the Hyōgo Shōsha. In the first month of 1868, having argued at the council in Edo Castle for fighting on, he was dismissed by the shogun in person, moved to the village of Gonda in Kōzuke province, part of his fief, and on the sixth day of the intercalary fourth month of that year — 27 May — was beheaded on the bed of the Karasu River without being examined. He was forty-two by Japanese count.

He held office in turn as inspector, commissioner of foreign affairs, Edo city commissioner, commissioner of infantry, acting commissioner of the army and commissioner of warships, and was appointed commissioner of finance four times. In a word, he was the man who left behind machinery that would still work after the shogunate fell. His words are on record: “Though the fortunes of the shogunate have a limit, the fortunes of Japan have none” (Dōhōkai Hōkoku, the Dōhōkai bulletin, no. 1, 1896).

“Traitor” is a name that was attached to him after he was killed. The report used as the ground for the execution — that he had raised a fortified encampment and built a battery at the village of Gonda — was examined on the spot by the three domains ordered to act, and they concluded it had no foundation. The beheading was carried out all the same.

→ Chronology — day by day

→ The 2027 NHK drama “Gyakuzoku no Bakushin” and the history

Boyhood — born into a hatamoto house at Surugadai

He was born early on the twelfth day of the second month of 1827, at the family residence at Kanda Surugadai in Edo. His childhood name was Gōtarō. The house of Oguri were direct hatamoto retainers rated at 2,500 koku, which placed them high at a time when most hatamoto held between a hundred and five hundred koku. His father Matakichi Tadataka was not born an Oguri: he was adopted from among the sons of the neighbouring hatamoto Nakagawa Hida-no-kami Tadateru, whose fourth son he was.

The school he attended from 1834 stood inside the row house along the wall of the Oguri residence: the private academy of Asaka Gonsai, one of the first scholars of the day. Here Tadamasa came to know Kurimoto Sebei, five years his senior, later known as Joun. For a boy with no brothers it was the meeting of a lifetime. He learned swordsmanship from Onogai Shimotsuke-no-kami Nobutomo of the Jikishinkage school. His face was covered with smallpox scars, and he was small and short-sighted. Even so, Kurimoto spoke of the young Tadamasa as the ringleader at the head of the neighbourhood children.

In 1847, on the grounds of “diligence in the arts”, he was called out of the household into service and made a member of the library guard of the western keep — the appointment by which able sons of hatamoto families were picked out for advancement. His wife was Michiko of the house of Tatebe, of the ten-thousand-koku domain of Hayashida in Harima. He succeeded as the twelfth head of the house in the tenth month of 1855, and in the ninth month of 1859, the day after he was appointed inspector, he was ordered to accompany the embassy to the United States.

→ Boyhood — from his birth to his succession

The embassy to the United States — the first Japanese to travel around the world

In the first month of 1860, to exchange the ratifications of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States, a party of seventy-seven left Shinagawa under Shinmi Buzen-no-kami Masaoki as chief envoy, Muragaki Awaji-no-kami Norimasa as vice-envoy and Oguri Bungo-no-kami Tadamasa as inspector. The main party sailed in the United States Navy's Powhatan. The Kanrin Maru was a separate ship that went along as escort; she turned back from San Francisco and never reached Washington. On the twenty-eighth day of the intercalary third month they presented their sovereign's letter to President Buchanan, and on the third day of the fourth month they exchanged the ratifications. The instrument names “the envoys and plenipotentiaries of the Tycoon of Japan, Shinmi Buzen-no-kami, Muragaki Awaji-no-kami, Oguri Bungo-no-kami”. Abe Dōzan takes this as proof that Oguri was one of the formal plenipotentiaries.

The balance at the Philadelphia Mint

Oguri had another, heavy charge: the negotiation of the rate of exchange. Abroad, gold stood to silver at one to fifteen; in Japan, by the last years of the shogunate, at one to six. Harris had had one silver dollar fixed at three ichibu-gin, so that merely bringing in silver, changing it for koban and turning it back into silver at home trebled the money. Estimates of the gold that flowed out run from five hundred thousand ryō at the low end to ten million at the high.

What Oguri took with him was three koban and one balance. Its ivory beam was cut with a scale, and testing showed it not a fraction out. At Oguri's insistence the joint Japanese-American assay ran far past its schedule and was still unfinished the next day. Some objected that no formal order to negotiate had come from the shogunate; Oguri answered flatly.

The responsibility will not fall on you. I take all of it on myself alone.

He did not come home the way he had gone, but in the Niagara, by way of the Cape of Good Hope, Batavia and Hong Kong, entering Shinagawa on the twenty-seventh day of the ninth month by the Japanese calendar. In four and a half months aboard ship he put together a long report on exchange and coinage. After his return his stipend was raised by two hundred koku, and in the eleventh month of the same year he became commissioner of foreign affairs.

→ The embassy and the voyage around the world (thirteen articles)

→ The currency negotiation, and the balance at the Philadelphia Mint

The Tsushima incident — learning the limits of diplomacy with no force behind it

On the third day of the second month of 1861 the Russian warship Posadnik anchored at Imozaki on Tsushima. Her captain was Birilev. She was said to be there for repairs, but her hull was undamaged, and the crew landed and built barracks. In time the Russians proposed leasing the whole Imozaki area in return for a gift of fifty cannon, and on the twelfth day of the fourth month they shot dead an official of the Tsushima domain at Ōfunakoshi.

The shogunate sent Oguri, its commissioner of foreign affairs. He left Shinagawa on the sixth day of the fourth month of 1861, at thirty-four. From the tenth day of the fifth month he negotiated three times aboard the ship, but nothing done on the spot would move a party that sat there by force. He broke the talks off on the nineteenth day of the fifth month, returned to Edo and recommended two things: that Tsushima be brought under direct shogunal rule, and that dealings with Russia go through formal diplomatic channels. The shogunate's councillors would not have it, and Oguri resigned as commissioner of foreign affairs on the twenty-sixth day of the seventh month. The Russian ship left on the twenty-fifth day of the eighth month, after the British squadron in Far Eastern waters had protested.

The negotiation was called a failure at the time and has been called one since. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, though, sees it as Oguri's second awakening. Without the strength to make a warship leave, the same thing would happen again and again. From then on his energy went into the shipyard, into finance, into a trading company, and into the education that would support them.

→ The Tsushima incident — the Russian warship Posadnik at Imozaki

The Yokosuka ironworks — the dock that is still working

It was called an ironworks, but it did not smelt iron. In the language of the time the word meant a general works that handled iron. The thing began to move in the twelfth month of 1864, on a street in Yokohama. Oguri had seen French engineers repair the damaged Shōkaku Maru, a ship of the shogunate's own, in a little over sixty days; he got down from his horse and stopped Kurimoto Joun. Kurimoto was “hearing the word dock for the first time”, but the two of them called at the French legation that same night. What Oguri argued was the cost. A ship once bought will certainly break; carrying it abroad at every failure would be ruinous in cost alone.

On the tenth day of the eleventh month of 1864 the shogunate's councillors decided to build. After a survey of Edo Bay the site moved from Nagaura Bay to Yokosuka Bay next to it. The village of Yokosuka then had twenty-two households and lived by fishing. The water was calm and some twenty metres deep, and the rock was right for a dock. The engineers judged the ground to resemble Toulon at home, and the design took two-thirds of Toulon's area as its basis, with a plan of 2.4 million dollars over four years.

• Twelfth day of the third month, 1865　The site was fixed at 74,360 tsubo. The built area came to 7,805 tsubo in all, and the building cost was estimated at 226,000 ryō.

• Twenty-seventh day of the ninth month, 1865　The ground was broken. The chief engineer was Verny, an engineer of the French navy. By the tenth month of the following year the French employed there numbered forty-three.

• Third month, 1867　Work began on cutting the first dock. In the fourth month of 1868 the works passed to the new government, and in the fifth month the first slipway in Japan was completed.

Opposition swirled around him. When one shogunal official said that for all the money spent, no one could tell what would have become of the shogunate by the time it was finished, Oguri is recorded as straightening himself and answering.

Though the fortunes of the shogunate have a limit, the fortunes of Japan have none. If what the shogunate did serves Japan long afterwards, and people say in time that the work the Tokugawa did succeeded, is that not an honour to the house of Tokugawa? Is it not a profit to the country?

He put it by way of urisue, the sale of a house with the furniture left in it: “of two such sales, the urisue with a storehouse attached is the better.” Power passes to a new owner of the house; then let it be handed over as a house with a storehouse on it.

Four things set it apart from an ordinary shipyard. It was a general works that could make any kind of industrial product. It was designed from the start to run on steam. From 1866 it had a technical school attached, to train engineers and workmen. And in falling in with the practice of the French engineers, fixed working hours, Sunday as a day of rest, monthly wages and double-entry bookkeeping took root there.

On the fifth of March 1875 the warship Seiki, built here, was launched. Ten years from the breaking of the ground. The man who planned it and the government that ordered it were both gone, and the works remained and produced a ship.

→ The Yokosuka ironworks (fifteen articles)

The Hyōgo Shōsha, the first joint-stock company in Japan, and the building of economic machinery

In the fourth month of 1867, ahead of the opening of the port of Hyōgo, Oguri submitted “A memorandum on the opening of the port of Hyōgo, on the founding of a trading company, and on the prospect for the funds required”. Capital would be raised, a business started, and the profit paid out to those who had put the money in — a joint-stock company, in present terms.

What he objected to was the foreign merchants' practice of control by advances. They bought high at first; as purchases grew they held back and beat the price down; and once the Japanese had been driven into undercutting one another, they advanced funds and had them at their will. Oguri wrote of it that “it appears to be only the loss of the individual merchant … yet it comes to be the loss of the country.” That he was troubled not by the shogunate's profit and loss but by “the loss of the country” shows where this man stood. The word “konpenī” as he uses it here is, Sakamoto Fujiyoshi points out, probably the first appearance of the word in a Japanese official document.

On the fifth day of the sixth month of 1867 the shogunate gathered twenty wealthy merchants of Osaka at an inn in Kyoto, and the Hyōgo Shōsha was founded. Among them were Yamanaka Zen'emon of Kōnoikeya and Hirooka Kyūemon of Kajimaya. Officers were set at three levels — head, promoter and steward — and the rest of the investors made up the membership.

• Who could invest　“It is intended that, without distinction of samurai, townsman or farmer, any with money to spare be admitted to this company.”

• Dividends　“Profit shall be distributed in proportion to the sum invested.”

• Repayment　“Should any investor have sudden need of money, any amount shall be repaid.”

Anyone could invest whatever his rank, dividends followed the sum invested, and the money could be taken back if needed. That is close to the basis of a joint-stock company today. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi placed it as the first in Japan. That the shogunate's side had set up a company organization in earnest shook the Satsuma domain and the Kaientai, and Godai Tomoatsu and others tried to answer it with a “Satsuma company”.

The Hyōgo Shōsha itself was wound up after about half a year, through the return of power to the emperor and the defeat at Toba and Fushimi. The machinery, though, remained. The Tokyo Trading Company, founded in 1869, had officers titled chief head, head, promoter and steward, with the rest as the membership — the Hyōgo Shōsha exactly as it had been.

→ The founding of the Hyōgo Shōsha, the first joint-stock company in Japan

→ The building of economic machinery (ten articles)

A Western-style army, and the French military advisers

On the first day of the twelfth month of 1862 Oguri was appointed the first commissioner of infantry, and five days later was made to hold the finance commissioner's purse as well. Modernizing the army took money, and there was no one else who could find it. What he settled on was the Western system of three arms, built on infantry, cavalry and artillery. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi writes that this became the basis of the army organization of Meiji Japan.

At this stage there was little substance to it: for a manual there was one translated book, Sanpei Takuchīki. Three years later Oguri complained of it himself to Kurimoto Joun — the cavalry were merely doing horsemanship, the artillery and the infantry merely guessing with their noses in a translation. That dissatisfaction led to the opening of the army training school at the Ōta barracks in Yokohama on the nineteenth day of the eleventh month of 1866.

Treating finance and military administration as one thing ends in the heifu levy, under which hatamoto provided both men and money in proportion to their assessed holdings; it was applied in the ninth month of 1867 to houses rated between two hundred and ten thousand koku. Fukuchi Gen'ichirō wrote in Bakumatsu Seijika (statesmen of the last years of the shogunate) that by this Oguri “organized several battalions of infantry, and in the end laid the basis of the conscription system”.

→ The first commissioner of infantry — bringing in the system of three arms

The parting from Katsu Kaishū — submission or resistance

Katsu Kaishū (Rintarō) was four years older than Oguri; the Katsu stipend was a little over forty-one koku, the Oguri 2,500. Both had ties to the fencing hall of Onogai Seiichirō, and Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, holding it very likely that they crossed swords somewhere in boyhood, called it a strange chance. Their careers change places with odd precision. On the twenty-third day of the fourth month of 1863, the day Oguri resigned, Katsu was given leave to found the naval training station at Kobe; on the tenth day of the eleventh month of 1864, the day Katsu was dismissed as commissioner of warships, Oguri's Yokosuka ironworks was approved.

In the fifth month of 1866, the day before he left for Osaka, Oguri told Katsu a secret of the shogunate: a plan to set up a prefectural system under the shogunate and borrow six million ryō in silver and several warships from France. Katsu did not argue with him then, but on reaching Osaka he attacked Oguri fiercely before the senior councillors. His journal, Kaishū Nisshi, has the line “pledging the land, borrowing coin … from France”. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi holds that this charge of mortgaging the country fixed the image of Oguri from the Meiji era on.

The great council at Edo Castle, first month of 1868

Shogun Yoshinobu, beaten at Toba and Fushimi, returned to Edo on the twelfth day of the first month of 1868. That night the officials were all summoned to the Fuyō chamber, and with men weeping, men raging and men shouting, the argument ran deep into the night. Through it, they say, Oguri alone showed nothing in his face. His diary says only this of the thirteenth: “Went up to the castle past the fifth hour; left at the eighth hour of the night.” He left at two the next morning. Sixteen hours of council.

Not one of the senior men there thought of the other side as an imperial army. They took them for the private troops of Satsuma and Chōshū, so most were for fighting; but no one would set out a case squarely and press Yoshinobu with it. It was Oguri who moved forward on his knees. Open the barrier at Hakone, let the eastern army into Edo, then close Hakone, block the Kiso road as well, and have them in a bag. Hold Suruga with half the warships, strike at the Osaka sea with the other half — the advice came with a specific plan of operations.

Yoshinobu, who had decided on submission while still at Osaka, rose to withdraw to the inner rooms. Oguri took hold of the hem of his trousers and would not let go. On the fifteenth day of the first month he was told of his dismissal. A document kept by the Tsukakoshi family of the village of Gonda records that “in the two hundred and sixty years of the shogunate, he alone was relieved of office by the shogun's own word.”

Which of them was right is not something this site decides. Katsu too wrote of Yokosuka, in Kaigun Rekishi (a history of the navy), that it “is also deeply to be commended”.

→ The great council at Edo Castle in the first month of 1868, and the dismissal

→ Katsu Kaishū — the same school of the sword, a different road

Settling at the village of Gonda — the last sixty-four days

Thirteen days after his dismissal, on the twenty-eighth day of the first month, Oguri submitted a petition to settle at the village of Gonda in Gunma district, Kōzuke province, where his fief lay. He asked to return his holding, settle there, and raise a peasant militia as his small service to the state. The answer came the next day, the twenty-ninth. He was ordered to settle, the raising of the militia was allowed, and the return of the fief he had offered himself was waved aside as unnecessary. At a time when many shogunal retainers were losing their holdings, it was unusual treatment.

The village of Gonda was assessed at 375 koku. His fief also held land such as the village of Takahashi in Ashikaga district, Shimotsuke province, assessed at 1,354 koku and easier of access. Why the remote hills? The third volume of Gunma Kenshi (the Gunma prefectural history) carries what he is said to have told Shibusawa Seiichirō of the Shōgitai on the eve of leaving Edo. Even if the northeastern domains were gathered together to fight, there was no just cause and no prospect of winning. What was to be feared was that once the fighting had settled, the strong domains would quarrel among themselves and foreign countries would come in through the gap.

Before he left Edo, Minomura Rizaemon called four times at the Oguri house. By Ninagawa Arata's Ishin Seikan (a true view of the Restoration), Minomura offered him a chest of a thousand ryō and urged him to take refuge in America. Oguri declined, and is said to have answered that if in later years the women and children of the house came to hardship, he asked that they be looked after then.

They set out on the twenty-eighth day of the second month, lodging at Okegawa, Fukaya and Takasaki, and reached Tōzenji in the village of Gonda on the evening of the first day of the third month. The party was some thirty in all, family and retainers, with ten boxes of household goods. They carried cannon, rifles and ammunition too. From that day to the sixth day of the intercalary fourth month, when he was beheaded, is sixty-four days.

Three days after they arrived, a rumour went about that Oguri had brought in military funds in miso barrels, and a crowd calling itself the Oguri expedition came down from Sannokura. On the fourth day of the third month Oguri, with his adopted heir Matakichi, divided more than a hundred men — retainers, infantry and village hunters — into five parties and met them. The attackers came from three sides, some two thousand of them. They set fire to Kamijuku and to the ground before the shrine, but scattered before the skirmishing tactics learned at the training school. It was the last fight commanded by a man who had held high office under the shogunate.

Two days after the fight, Oguri began the building on Kannonyama. He levelled four hundred tsubo and went over the line by which water could be brought from the Koitatsu valley. Of the three thousand ryō he had brought, he put 1,060 into the work on this house. He spoke, too, of founding a school. The ridgepole of the first building was raised on the fifty-second day, the twenty-eighth of the fourth month, and Oguri went up to the site that afternoon. It was the last day he climbed Kannonyama.

→ The petition to settle at Gonda, and the journey from Edo

→ Driving off the mob at Sannokura — a hundred men in five parties

The riverbed at Mizunuma — a beheading with no examination

On the twenty-second day of the fourth month the headquarters of the Tōsandō expeditionary force issued a circular to the three domains of Takasaki, Annaka and Yoshii ordering Oguri's arrest. The order was written on the premise that he had raised a fortified encampment and built a battery at the village of Gonda. In it stood the four characters “the treasonous plot is manifest”. Once “manifest” is written on paper, it is handled as a premise that needs no checking.

On the twenty-ninth day of the fourth month the three domains sent out troops, against their will. On the first day of the intercalary fourth month their representatives met Oguri at Tōzenji. What he answered is on record. Kannonyama had long been his own woodland, and what he had built was a dwelling to keep off rain and dew, no more; he would have them shown round at once, to see it with their own eyes; and would a man harbouring a conspiracy open fields around his house to make a living from in later years? When grounds were asked for, Oguri handed over the one cannon and twenty-one rifles he had by him. The inspection found no encampment, no battery, and not one trace of rebellion.

The next day, the second, Matakichi set out for Takasaki to put his case to the headquarters directly, and on arriving on the fourth was shut up in Sekijōji. On the night of the third day of the intercalary fourth month, Oguri got his mother Kuniko, his wife Michiko, six months pregnant, and his adopted daughter Masako away to Aizu. He was urged that he had no course but to go to the camp and answer for himself, since otherwise the lives of Matakichi and of all the villagers were at stake, and he made up his mind. But as he returned to Tōzenji, about a thousand troops of the three domains came down on the temple.

On the sixth day of the intercalary fourth month — 27 May 1868 — Oguri Tadamasa was led out to the riverbed at Mizunuma on the Karasu River with his retainers Ōi Isojūrō, Watanabe Tasaburō and Arakawa Yūzō, and beheaded without a single examination or hearing. Oguri was seated, still bound, and an order was given to put a block under his hands. When the domain soldier who had picked up a piece of wood from the riverbed came round behind him, Oguri is said to have rebuked him as insolent. The man who stood behind him was the swordsman Hara Yasutarō, twenty-two. Another account holds that it was someone else who wielded the blade.

On the afternoon of the seventh, at the jail at Takasaki, Matakichi and three others including Tsukamoto Masahiko were beheaded. They were brought out to the gravelled court, but only kept waiting; there was no examination. When Tsukamoto Masahiko protested that “to pronounce rebellion manifest with no examination of us at all, and not one hearing, is beyond reason”, Matakichi is said to have checked him: at this point there was no use in words. Matakichi was twenty-one. Of the men who had held high office under the shogunate, Oguri is the only one cut down without fighting.

→ The sixth day of the intercalary fourth month: the end at the riverbed at Mizunuma

→ The arrest circular, and the inspection by the three domains

After his death — what became of the family, and the road to rehabilitation

The family left Gonda in two parties, travelling in secret. The party of the mother, Kuniko, crossed the Shibu pass disguised as pilgrims bound for Zenkōji; the party with the pregnant Michiko took the Akiyama-gō route over the Benten pass, the way called the Kenshin crossing. Michiko was carried in a mountain palanquin the village kept for taking the sick to a doctor. The two joined up at Horinouchi in Echigo, ran out of travel money, went by way of Niigata and up the Agano River, and so to Aizu. On the fourteenth day of the sixth month of 1868, a girl was born in the castle town of Aizu. This was Kuniko, the one Ōtsubo Motoji recorded as “the only blood of the house of Oguri”.

Aizu castle fell in the ninth month of that year, and the escorts Satō Ginjūrō and Tsukakoshi Tomigorō died during the siege. The party stayed in the northeast until the second month of 1869, when at last they reached Edo. The man who put out a hand to them there was Minomura Rizaemon, who had risen from a casual hand at the Oguri house and was by then a manager of Mitsui. The heads of father and son, held at Tatebayashi, were also recovered on the night of the sixth day of the fourth month of 1869 by Nakajima Sanzaemon and others from Gonda and the old fief.

As for the house, Komai Teishirō, a younger brother of Matakichi, was allowed in 1869 to succeed to the family name as the thirteenth head, and on the tenth of December 1887 Kuniko, twenty by Japanese count, took Yano Sadao as her husband. The match was made by Ōkuma Shigenobu and his wife.

Rehabilitation began forty-seven years later

Meiji schooling left Oguri's work out of the textbooks. A shipyard built by the shogunate does not fit a story in which the modernization of Japan begins after 1868. When the Meiji emperor visited the Yokosuka shipyard in the eleventh month of 1871 and issued the first imperial rescript in the history of the navy, the name of the man who conceived it appeared nowhere.

• Twenty-seventh of September 1915　For the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Yokosuka naval arsenal, its head, Vice-Admiral Kuroi Teijirō, published an official document setting out the origins of the yard. As a document issued by the naval authorities, it was the first. Forty-seven years had passed since the execution.

• Fifth of May 1932　A memorial stone at the riverbed at Mizunuma, the place of the execution. Its text, “A great man, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, cut down in this place without crime,” was composed and written by Ninagawa Arata, the scholar of international law who was a nephew of Oguri's wife Michiko.

• Twenty-seventh of September 1952　The unveiling of a bust at Shiomi Park in Yokosuka. The French ambassador and the commander of the American base attended, and it was held with the honours of a French naval guard. It was the first unveiling conducted with international ceremony after the peace treaty.

In the summer of 1912 Tōgō Heihachirō invited the family to his own house and thanked them, saying that the complete victory at Tsushima had been possible because Oguri had built the Yokosuka shipyard beforehand, and he gave them a scroll with the words “benevolence, duty, propriety, wisdom, faith”.

→ The flight of his wife Michiko — over Akiyama-gō to Aizu

→ Kuniko, “the only blood of the house of Oguri”, born at Aizu

→ Commemoration — the course of his rehabilitation (seven articles)

How Oguri has been judged

In his lifetime the judgment was plain. Fukuchi Gen'ichirō set him beside Iwase Tadanari and Mizuno Tadanori as one of the three great men of the last years of the shogunate, and wrote that after the embassy came home “Oguri alone, with no deference to anyone, explained what was superior in American civilization … and astonished the senior councillors.”

The picture that spread after his death is another thing altogether: a narrow man with nothing in view but the house of Tokugawa, a traitor who would sell Japan to France, a miser who had buried the Tokugawa treasure at the foot of Mount Akagi — these were the labels attached to him. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi gives as one cause “the view of Oguri Tadamasa that his political enemy Katsu Kaishū spoke and wrote, well on into the Meiji era”. Oguri died at forty-two; Katsu lived to seventy-seven and went on talking.

The arguments that now rate Oguri highly run along two lines. One is the fact that the shipyard, the company system and the organization of the army were taken over and used as they stood, across the change of government. Ōkuma Shigenobu's reported remark that the modernization of the Meiji era was little more than a copy of what Oguri had designed points to that correspondence. The other is the reach of his thinking: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi called his plan to do away with the domains and adopt a prefectural system a match for Ryōma's eight-point plan drawn up aboard ship.

There is no answer, though, to the question of what would have happened had Oguri's argument for fighting carried. The Hakone operation was specific, but it is a plan that was never carried out.

→ Ninagawa Arata — “a single blow struck with one pen”

→ How the legend of treasure buried on Mount Akagi arose

Frequently asked questions

→ Books and sources — which to read first

→ The tradition of a concubine and children who do not appear in the official genealogies (not the accepted account)

→ Visiting the places

Sources: 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; Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957; Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975; Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7; Kurabuchi Mura-shi (the Kurabuchi village history); Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family); and Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society. Kurimoto Joun's words are from Hōan Ikō (his posthumous papers), Fukuchi Gen'ichirō's from Bakumatsu Seijika (statesmen of the last years of the shogunate), and Katsu Kaishū's from Kaishū Nisshi (his journal) and Kaigun Rekishi (a history of the navy).