The site of the house on Kannonyama, and the Odaka water channel

3584 Gonda, Kurabuchi-machi, Takasaki. A tableland some seven hundred metres east of Tōzenji, and a historic site designated by the city of Takasaki, “the site of the Oguri residence on Kannonyama”, designated on 1 April 1982. The city's cultural property information records that “the water channel is still in use, and the foundation stones remain at the site of the residence”. The remains of a building that was never finished and a channel that was finished and goes on working stand together on the same hill.

It is a hill rather than a mountain. Below the rock face on the south is a cave, and in that cave stands a shrine holding a gold image of Kannon an inch and a half high. The image is said to have been the guardian deity of “Gonda Kurige”, the favourite horse of Kumagai Jirō Naozane in the days of the Genpei wars, and from it the hill above came to be called Kannonyama. The summit is broad, with a wide view.

The hill was woodland the Oguri owned. One reason Oguri chose Gonda out of a fief divided among eight places, when he gave up his house in Edo, was that he had land here he could do as he liked with. To the representatives of the three domains who came on the first day of the intercalary fourth month with the headquarters' warrant of arrest, he explained that Kannonyama had long been his own woodland, and that if he built a house on field land the land tax would be reduced by that much.

Work began on the sixth day of the third month. On the sixteenth the drawings for the house were handed to the carpenters and an estimate of the timber asked for; the main building was to be twelve ken across the front and seven and a half deep, and three buildings were planned. The summit was broken up for about five tan of field, a pond was dug, a riding ground was even laid out, and tea was planted. Water was brought up to the summit from the head of Itarizawa, using the surveying instruments he had brought back from America with the embassy.

In the fifty-odd days from the sixth day of the third month to the early part of the intercalary fourth month, Oguri climbed Kannonyama thirty-nine times to oversee the work. His mother and his wife Michiko went up several times too. When the foundation stones and the stones for the walls were being gathered, he is said to have kept Tenpō coins in a bag and handed over one for every stone brought up. The people of the fief vied with one another in carrying heavy stones up from the Karasu River at the foot of the hill.

The ridgepole of the main building was raised on the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month, the fifty-second day counting from the sixth day of the third month. Oguri went up to the site again that afternoon. It was the last day he climbed Kannonyama. About the time the second building's ridgepole was to be raised, the Tōsandō headquarters' arrest circular had begun to move. The main building, whose ridgepole had been raised, was later taken down and moved, and the memorial society's records say it survives as a dwelling house at Sōja-machi.

→ The water channel and the house site on Kannonyama, and the dream of a school　／　The first day of the intercalary fourth month: the parley at Tōzenji

Odaka, next to Kannonyama, depended on rainfall, and in a dry year the rice could not be planted. Hearing of it, Oguri at once surveyed the ground, had a channel cut and the water brought in. The Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries) has, under the thirteenth day of the third month, “in the morning went over to Odaka, went as far as the weir to inspect the water course, home after nine”, and under the fourteenth, “after noon went to Odaka to inspect the place for the work on the channel, home in the evening”. The channel was finished after Oguri's death, and it is still in use.

Satō Ryūsaku, an infantryman of Odaka, left his newly married wife and joined the escort of Oguri's wife when his lord's position became dangerous. He is the man who later made the trouble at Gonda into a “chobokure” ballad.

His lordship used the Western art of surveying to bring water to the land at Odaka, where the rice could not be planted unless the rain came, and so accomplished for us what the villagers had wanted these hundreds of years

Four men went from Odaka on the road to Aizu, among them Yamada Unomatsu, then fifty-five and the oldest of the escort. Oguri came to Odaka twice. Stories of how he was given a rolled omelette when he rested, said it was “a rare thing”, ate it and praised the taste, and of how he walked with a Western umbrella, were handed down from an old woman born at Odaka to her grandchildren.

The memorial stone at the site of the house was raised on 2 May 1968, the hundredth year after the execution. The unveiling was held on Kannonyama from nine in the morning on the day of the centenary. It was done at the particular wish of Makino Sōichirō, a native of Nagai who ran a hospital in Tokyo; the title “Shisei Tai-kō” was written by Ii Naoyoshi, a great-grandson of Lord Ii, who had chosen Oguri for the embassy to the United States, and the text was composed by Ōtsubo Motoji. The title was printed on hand towels and given to those who came, as keepsakes of the ceremony.

Oguri used to say, the old people of Gonda report, “one of these days I will see a chief minister of state come out of this village”. Neither the school nor the house ever took shape.

Going round from Kannonyama up the Aima River, the Kannon of the sisters stands below the rock face at the pool called Tōrazu-no-fuchi. It is an image in mourning for the two small daughters of the steward Tsukamoto Masahiko, about five and three years old, who were drowned in the river during the escape from Gonda. The carving was done by Hagiwara Yoshio and the lettering and the setting by Hachisu Shinjirō, both of them almost without payment. The image was consecrated on 4 December 1993. It stands near 19-1 Iwagōri, Kurabuchi-machi, Takasaki. The memorial tower for the grandmother and the elder sister was raised at the Jizō pass in May 1983.

It is some seven hundred metres east of Tōzenji, but there is a steep slope to climb to the site of the house. The novelist Ibuse Masuji climbed it at eighty-three, sketched the ranges round about from the summit, and wrote afterwards: “I thought Kannonyama quite splendid.”

City of Takasaki, cultural property information: “the site of the Oguri residence on Kannonyama”　／　City of Takasaki tourism site: “Historic sites connected with Oguri Kōzukenosuke”

Sources: 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 Oguri Kōzukenosuke Memorial Society; Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7; Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957; the city of Takasaki's cultural property and tourism pages. Information about the site changes. Please check the official pages before you visit.

→ The list of the places　／　Tōzenji — the temple where Oguri Kōzukenosuke lies　／　The riverbed at Mizunuma — cut down in this place without crime　／　The family's escape to Aizu