Tōzenji on Mount Suwa, a Sōtō Zen temple, at 169 Gonda, Kurabuchi-machi, Takasaki, Gunma prefecture. Oguri Kōzukenosuke lived here for sixty-four days, but the temple's connection with the house of Oguri goes back much further. The memorial graves of father, son and retainers are at the top of the stone steps on the approach; the grave itself is near the summit of Mount Suwa, on the hill behind.
A temple founded in 1633
The old people of the district say that what came before the temple was a small hermitage at Miyahara in Kawaura, across the Karasu River. Men of the village took counsel, built the hall on high ground where it now stands, and in 1633 invited Enshitsu Zonsatsu, the second abbot of Chōshinji at Takahama in Haruna-machi, the former village of Kuruma, as its founding priest. Enshitsu Zonsatsu came of the Seki family of the village of Mizunuma, known as the Yamaroku.
The “ekō zōshi”, the book used at morning service, which escaped the fire — written by the eleventh abbot, who died in 1835 — gives two names in religion as founding patrons: Dōan Shuso, and Kōyaji-den Eizan Ryōketsu Koji. The second is the name in religion of Masanobu, the fifth of the house of Oguri. Gonda became Oguri land in 1704, seventy-two years after the temple was rebuilt, so a man from before the land came to them stands as a founding patron. Of the memorial tablets of the generations, Masanobu's alone was given the title “den”, and it is especially large and kept in a shrine case. On one tablet the names in religion of Masanobu and of his heir Nobukatsu, who died young, are cut side by side. The tablets from Masanobu, the fifth, to Tadamasa, the twelfth, all survive.
The inner room of twelve and a half mats
They left Edo on the twenty-eighth day of the second month of 1868, lodged at Okegawa, Fukaya and Takasaki, and reached Gonda a little after seven in the evening of the first day of the third month: family and retainers, some thirty people, with ten boxes of household goods, twenty muskets and ammunition. What was given them for temporary quarters was the inner room of twelve and a half mats on the east side of the main hall, the best room in the place, which a Zen temple calls the shitchū no ma.
It was into this same room that, on the morning of the first day of the intercalary fourth month, eight representatives of the three domains of Takasaki, Annaka and Yoshii were shown, carrying the Tōsandō headquarters' warrant of arrest. The domain troops were held at the gate.
→ The first day of the intercalary fourth month: the parley at Tōzenji ／ The petition to settle, and the road to Gonda
Oguri's room was set about with six obido panels on which Hokkyō Ukawa, a nanga painter born in the village, had painted large Chinese lions. They were carried out during the fire, and they remain to this day.
Burned down, and built again
On 10 May 1937 sparks from a house at Uenokubo in Gonda burned the main hall and the priests' quarters to the ground. The firemen set their pump below the gate and played water on the great roof, but the water supply was poor; the ropes of the ridge burned through and the roof slid away on all four sides. Many of the old documents went to ashes then; the Oguri relics and the temple's own things were carried out.
On 10 August of the same year a room in the priests' quarters was made a temporary main hall and the principal image installed there. The rebuilding of the main hall began in September 1941, and the ridgepole was raised on 18 September 1943. The abbot died suddenly while the work was going on, and the shortage of materials and hands in wartime drew the work out, so that the ceremony of installing the Buddha came only on 19 March 1948 — the eleventh year after the fire. The hall is seven and a half ken across the front, five ken deep, and forty tsubo in floor area: a little more than half the sixty-eight tsubo of the hall that burned, which was ten and a half ken by six and a half.
Most of the garden trees burned too, but the old northern Japanese hemlock and red pine at the top of the approach, and the old plum in the front garden, survived half burned.
What is in the grounds
The graves Here lie Tadamasa's body, the three retainers cut down with him at the riverbed at Mizunuma, two infantrymen of Gonda who fell guarding the wife and her party on the way to Aizu, and the mother and child of the steward Tsukamoto Masahiko. There are also gravestones for the adopted heir Matakichi and three retainers, who were cut down at Takasaki and buried at Shimosaida. The stones for the three retainers were put up for the centenary in 1968.
The burial mound, on the summit of Mount Suwa On a natural stone shaped like a seated Daruma are cut, at the top, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Minamoto Tadamasa and Oguri Matakichi Minamoto Tadamichi; a little below, Satō Ginjūrō and Tsukakoshi Tomigorō; and on the lower part the names of the infantrymen of the escort, with Honda Sanzaemon Kageshige in the middle, set one step higher.
Two busts The bust of Oguri by Asakura Fumio, set up at Yokosuka in 1922, was given to the village of Kurata when the city of Yokosuka had a new one made; it was lacquered and dusted with copper powder to finish it like bronze, and unveiled on 6 May 1954. Beside it stands a bust of Kurimoto Joun, given under the will of a former head of the navy ministry's construction bureau.
→ The commemoration movement of the 1930s — the stone for the summoning of his spirit, and the bust ／ Kurimoto JounThe stone “benevolence and duty together” A natural stone set in 1956 under the old plum beside the graves. It is not a stone for Oguri himself but for the people of Gonda, who guarded his family as far as Aizu and later took back the heads of father and son from Tatebayashi.
→ Ninagawa Arata and the two stones ／ Nakajima SanzaemonThe relics hall On show are the pocket watch he bought on the embassy to the United States; the obido panels with the Chinese lions; a Western plate with a blue-violet flower pattern and an ivory comb, left as thanks at a house that sheltered them; a Bizen Kanemitsu short sword that Tsukamoto Masahiko's wife carried; and a brass lost-child tag, oval like a koban, five centimetres by three, with “Oguri” and “Tsukamoto” on the face.
Stone images The “furoshiki Kannon”; a stone image whose head was struck off in the anti-Buddhist movement of the early Meiji years; and the Oguri Kannon, which is prayed to by touching it with the hand. A few stone images and lanterns from the third abbot's time also remain.
When the district and village histories were compiled by order of the prefecture, the section on tombs in the Gonda village history was written thus: “Oguri Kōzukenosuke … the government troops took him and cut him down at once; his offence is not known; being the former lord of the land, he was buried at Tōzenji.”
The Oguri Festival
Ōne Ryūtarō of the Tōsandō pacification headquarters, who came into Gonda after the execution, gave Tōzenji twenty-five ryō as condolence money. The temple held the yearly service out of the interest on it; and after 1885, when the headman's house, the Satō, who held the money, went bankrupt and left the village, it was kept up by contributions from the parishioners.
From the ninetieth anniversary in 1957 the village took it up and it came to be called the “Oguri Festival”. It is now held by the Oguri Kōzukenosuke Memorial Society. The date changes from year to year.
City of Takasaki, Kurabuchi branch office: on the Oguri Festival
If you go
The graves in the grounds are a historic site designated by Gunma prefecture, “the grave of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa”, designated on 25 August 1953.
There is no direct bus from Takasaki station to Gonda. Take the Gunma bus as far as Muroda and change there, or use the city of Takasaki's Gururin bus. By taxi it is about fifty minutes from Takasaki station, or about twenty minutes from Annaka-Haruna station on the Hokuriku Shinkansen, which has no bus service. By car, the temple is on National Route 406, and there is a car park. There is no convenience store or eating place near the temple. The entrance to the priests' quarters has a ramp, and an indoor wheelchair can be made ready if you telephone in advance.
City of Takasaki, cultural property information: “the grave of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa”
Sources: Tatsunami, the journal of the Oguri Kōzukenosuke Memorial Society; Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki (the tragedy of the Oguri family); Kurabuchi Mura-shi (the Kurabuchi village history); 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 ／ The riverbed at Mizunuma ／ The site of the house on Kannonyama, and the Odaka water channel ／ Hozenji — the family temple in Edo