Episode 463 – The Afterlives of a Samurai

This week is all about a biography of a fascinating figure of the Meiji Restoration: Oguri Tadamasa. But it’s also about much more: about how the present shapes our view of the past, and about how, as a result, the ways we talk about someone long dead can shift and change as well.

Sources

Wert, Michael. Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan

McNally, Mark Thomas. Like No Other: Exceptionalism and Nativism in Early Modern Japan.

Hashimoto, Takehiko. “Introducing a French Technological System: The Origin and Early History of the Yokosuka Dockyard.” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 16 (1999)

Lippit, Seiji M, ed. History and Repetition.

Images

Transcript

On the morning of the sixth day of the 4th intercalary month of 1868–if I’m doing my math right, that’s May 29, 1868, though converting from the lunar calendar is not something I’m great at–a bound up man was taken out of a makeshift prison on the banks of the Kawazu river in the village of Mizunuma, in what’s now Gunma prefecture northwest of Tokyo.

The man’s arms and legs were bound, and he was taken to the banks of the river. That didn’t seem to dampen his spirit much, however–when one of his captors pushed him roughly forward, he called the man a “disrespectful lout.”

Despite his bravado, the man couldn’t do much about being forced to bend over. After being allowed some final words–asking for clemency for his family, apparently–a low ranking samurai drew a sword and decapitated the prisoner. Apparently, it took him three swings before the head came off.

The decapitated man’s name was Oguri Tadamasa, and in his rather violent death he holds a somewhat unique distinction.

You see, Oguri died in 1868, in the midst of the Boshin War that brought about the downfall of warrior government in Japan and the inauguration of a new imperial government–the Meiji Restoration, as it’s often known. Commonly, the conflicts of the Boshin War and the Restoration are talked about in a rather peculiar way in Japan. If you go to Japan today, you’ll notice that commemorations tend to be somewhat…politically agnostic, for lack of a better term.

There are no villains, in other words, or at least very few–and everyone is a hero fighting for their idea of a good future for Japan. The whole thing is very reminiscent of a sort of Shakespearean tragedy, frankly–all these noble figures driven into tragic but inevitable conflict with one another. You’re just as likely (if not moreso) to come across a monument or exhibit or whatnot valorizing someone on the losing side as you are someone on the winning one.

Interestingly, this is also how the civil wars of the old samurai clans during the 1400s and 1500s are often portrayed as well.

But, as the fate of Oguri Tadamasa makes clear, that was not really how things worked in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. It is true that many former Tokugawa retainers, after the defeat of the shogunate and the rise of the new imperial government, were able to find some form of gainful employment: as journalists or businesspeople or even, in some cases, politicians in the new government. Enomoto Takeaki, for example, went from trying to lead a breakaway pro-Tokugawa holdout regime on the northern island of Hokkaido to helping direct the colonization of the island on behalf of the imperial government. Katsu Kaishu went from the guy who surrendered Edo–now Tokyo–to the new government to a member of the emperor’s privy council.

But dramatic rises like that were an exception, not the rule; for most of the Meiji period, a far older tradition of dealing with the defeated held sway. That tradition is best summarized by a phrase that pops up a lot in relation to Japanese history: kateba kangun, makereba zokugun–roughly, if you win, you are the emperor’s army (and thus on the right side) and if you lose, you are bandits.

How did we get from there to here, from Oguri being decapitated for being on the wrong side to this valorization of both sides of the conflict? That’s what today is all about–with a particular focus on Oguri specifically.

But first, we should probably talk about who Oguri Tadamasa was and why he merited such a violent end (at least, merited it in the eyes of those who killed him).

Oguri was a samurai, and thus like all good samurai tales we should start things off by talking about his family. And oh, what a family history it is.

The Oguri were longstanding followers of the Tokugawa samurai clan, and I do mean longstanding–they were loyal to the Tokugawa long before anyone could even have guessed that they were destined to become Japan’s most powerful samurai family.

The Oguri family’s rise to prominence is most tied to its fourth generation family head, Oguri Shojiro. Shojiro was a follower of Tokugawa Ieyasu during Ieyasu’s earliest years, when he was a subordinate first of the neighboring warlord Imagawa Yoshimoto and then of the man who conquered Yoshimoto, Oda Nobunaga. Shojiro followed his master Ieyasu into Nobunaga’s service, and in 1570 was present for the Battle of Anegawa, where Ieyasu and Nobunaga faced down against two rival clans–the Azai and Asakura.

Here, Shojiro first came to prominence; he saved Ieyasu from a spearman who had snuck up on him in the chaos of battle, grabbing the spear from the spearman and then striking him down. After the battle, Ieyasu granted the spear to Shojiro, a mark of substantial favor.

When Shojiro continued to distinguish himself in future battles at Mikatagahara in 1573 and Nagashino in 1575 (both against another rival, the Takeda clan), Ieyasu favored him further by granting him a new personal name: Mata’ichi, roughly “once again number one.”

From that point onward, the senior male in each generation of the Oguri family has used Mataichi as a given name in honor of that legacy. The name was used as a kemyo, or assumed name, so they would continue to use their actual given names in other contexts–and I am going to continue to use original given names for Oguri men just to keep things less confusing. If this all seems odd to you, just think of it as a way of honoring the family legacy in each generation by trying to keep the man who brought the family fame alive.

Because oh boy, did Oguri Shojiro set the family up well. He himself would not live to see it; tragically, he died during the literal last battle of his lifetime, the final siege of Osaka Castle in the summer of 1615, when he was struck by a bullet fired from the walls.

However, in the new order that emerged from the chaos of the fighting–one where, through skillful political maneuvering, Tokugawa Ieyasu himself rose to supreme power and had himself declared shogun, the ruler of the country–the Oguri were extremely well off.

The Oguri family was granted hereditary status as hatamoto, or direct bannermen of the shogun who would serve him directly and help him manage his new government. Not only were they hatamoto, in fact, but among hatamoto they were some of the very best off.

The shogun’s direct bannermen had the distinction of receiving actual fiefs with a fixed, regular income (as opposed to lower ranking retainers of the shogun, who were only paid if they had some kind of office with a salary). But even for hatamoto, the pay was not usually amazing. Income during this time was measured in koku, or bushels of rice–even other types of production had to be converted into “rice equivalents”, so to speak, to track taxation value. Most hatamoto families had fairly minor stipends relative to their elite rank–nearly 70% received less than 1000 koku a year in salary.

The Oguri, by comparison, got 2500, placing them among the uppermost levels of the shogun’s direct retainers.

For the next two and a half centuries, the Oguris lived comfortable but reasonably unremarkable lives by the standards of Tokugawa bannermen, dedicated to serving the shogun as needed as well as managing their fiefs (composed of villages dispersed widely over central Japan, not a single contiguous unit of land). That is, of course, until the generation of Oguri Tadamasa.

Tadamasa was the firstborn son of his father, Oguri Tadataka, and his wife Kuniko, born in 1827 in the family’s small complex in the ritzy Surugadai neighborhood just a few blocks north of what was then the palace of the Tokugawa shoguns (now the imperial palace).

Early on in his life, there was very little that would have marked Oguri Tadamasa’s career as different from that of his forebearers. It was not until 1859, four years after Tadamasa’s father died and he succeeded as family head of the Oguri family, that Tadamasa’s life began to take on a distinctive arc all its own.

In that year, Tadamasa was granted the rank of metsuke by the man who was, at that time, the most powerful person in Japan–Ii Naosuke, the tairo, or senior elder, responsible for managing Japan on behalf of the then boy shogun Iemochi.

The role of the metsuke during the age of the Tokugawa shoguns was a rather nebulous one. The title literally means something like “fixing the eyes”, and the role is often described as a sort of censor or inspector. Essentially, metsuke were charged with overseeing daily affairs and reporting back to the shogunal leadership, particularly around issues of corruption or bad administration.

Why did Ii Naosuke decide to promote Tadamasa to this role, something previously outside the purview of the Oguri family? It’s not quite clear, but we can guess based on circumstances. Ii Naosuke was governing Japan during a time of substantial crisis, when the unequal treaties imposed by Western powers on Japan at gunpoint were driving substantial discontent among the samurai and nobility in Kyoto. His goal was to clamp down on that dissent and strengthen the shogunate, and then use that strength to modernize the nation’s economy and build up its military power in order to eventually confront the West and end the unequal treaties.

Oguri seems to have been extremely sympathetic to that strategy–he viewed the West as a threat to the rule of the Tokugawa shoguns (not unjustifiably), but felt that the way to deal with them was to first shore up the shogunate’s rule at home, and then to concentrate on building up Japan’s economic and military power.

Their shared political sympathies, combined with the fact that Tadamasa was from a “reliable” family–the Oguri, after all, had done well under the Tokugawa shoguns and thus had an incentive to keep the shogunate alive–probably contributed to Tadamasa’s selection as a metsuke.

Not only did Ii trust Oguri Tadamasa as a metsuke, he trusted the man enough to send him on one of the shogunate’s most important assignments–the 1860 overseas mission to America, Japan’s first diplomatic mission abroad since the 1600s. The ostensible goal of the mission was the ratification of the 1858 unequal treaty between Japan and the US, but the senior samurai negotiators–including Oguri–were ordered to also begin conversations around potential revision to the treaty.

This was a pretty important job, and the fact that Oguri was picked for it is indicative of a lot of trust in him. So was his elevation, before he left, to the ceremonial title of Bungo-no-kami, or governor of Bungo province–a title with no actual power, because it was derived from the 1000 year old government system of the imperial court, but one with a fair amount of prestige attached to it.

Oguri was in the US when his patron Ii Naosuke was assassinated in March of 1860 by a radical band of samurai dedicated to imperial loyalism. The loyalists, you’ll recall, were dedicated to the somewhat vague goals of expelling foreign influence in Japan immediately (without any of that building up of strength Ii Naosuke advocated for) and to the “restoration of rule by the emperor”, a somewhat vague idea but one that clearly entailed the destruction of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Ii’s death would see those who shared his views–hardline pro-shogunate leaders who wanted to crush dissent within Japan to strengthen the shogunate’s rule–retreat from political power in favor of moderates, who promoted a less heavyhanded approach and a policy of collaboration with the imperial court to shore up the shogunate’s authority.

In this new environment, Oguri Tadamasa was thus a bit on the outs–he was very much a pro-Ii Naosuke style Tokugawa ruler and a hardliner on the question of the shogun’s authority. Making alliances with the imperial court–a proposition that entailed admitting the shogunate needed the court’s help–was not the sort of thing he would go for.

On the other hand, thanks to his time in America Oguri was one of the Tokugawa shogunate’s most veteran diplomats in terms of handling foreigners. So he couldn’t just be removed from office–he was too useful for that.

Instead, Oguri became one of the shogunate’s point men for putting out fires around the country related to the foreign issue. For example, in March of 1861, the Russian frigate Posadnik, captained by Nicolai Birilev, arrived at the Japanese-held island of Tsushima in the straights between Korea and Japan. Birilev claimed the Posadnik was damaged and needed to harbor at Tsushima temporarily for repairs; in practice, he was hoping to meet with the local ruler, the daimyo of the So clan, and secure a lease for a “repair yard” that would serve as a Russian base on the island.

Oguri was sent to handle the issue, and had a series of very tense meetings with Birilev, blocking the captain from even meeting with the representatives of the So clan face to face on the grounds that foreign diplomacy was strictly a shogunal affair. Supposedly at their last meeting on May 18th, Oguri went so far as to say that since he would not back down on this matter, “if you don’t concur, then you should shoot me as you see fit.”

Bold words, and they did quiet Birilev. But ultimately, the shogunal authorities in Edo chose to ignore the advice Oguri was sending back home–that the shogunate should dispatch some of its own small fleet of Western built ships to scare off the Russians, leaving the So clan of Tsushima (a very strategic island) in the shogunate’s debt.

Instead, the shogunate asked the British to intervene against the Russians–which they did, chasing off the Russian ship. But in the offing, the shogunate missed the chance to bolster its own position instead of relying on outside help.

Oguri would ultimately refuse to continue working as a foreign envoy for the shogunate in the aftermath of the crisis on Tsushima, but was too loyal to go into full retirement. He would instead spend the next few years by turns working on reforming the shogunate’s own military–beginning the process of arming and reorganizing some of its samurai into Western-style infantry as well as helping to set up a military shipyard at Yokosuka. He even went so far, in the second case, as to leverage his personal connections to the very wealthy Mitsui merchant family–yes, as in the Mitsui group that’s still a major corporation today–to help cover the costs.

Ultimately, however, he’s best remembered for the positions he took starting in 1866. Oguri was, by 1866, one of the shogunate’s leading military men–deeply involved as well at this point in its finances, thanks to his Mitsui connections. As a result, when the military fortunes of the shogunate began to turn in a series of reversals starting in 1866, he was one of the ones trying to figure out how to respond.

Those reversals, briefly were: first, the first defeat of shogunal forces in over 200 years when the shogunate’s armies were sent against the domain of Choshu (which had defied a series of shogunal edicts) and roundly beaten, second the death of the shogun Iemochi in the early fall, and third the death of the shogunate’s vocal backer emperor Komei in early 1867.

There was not a lot of agreement among the Tokugawa leadership on how to respond to these problems; ultimately, the man chosen to take over as shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, decided to accept defeat and give up his titles and power. Oguri, however, was absolutely unwilling to do this; he remained unbending in his support for a military solution to the shogunate’s problems.

Even as Choshu forces–now allied with other anti-Tokugawa fiefdoms like Satsuma–marched on Kyoto to ‘liberate the emperor’ and ‘restore imperial rule’, and even as this newly minted ‘Imperial Japanese Army’ defeated another Tokugawa force sent to resecure Kyoto in early 1868, Oguri remained unwavering. He ordered shogunal forces to attack the mansion of the Satsuma domain lord in Edo (still full of Satsuma samurai), an action that probably helped precipitate all out war where peaceful negotiations between the Tokugawa and imperial loyalists had still been a possibility.

And Oguri was actually among the small crew who argued for an all out battle to hold on to the shogunate’s capital at Edo, pushing for the core of the Tokugawa military to try and hold the imperial forces at the passes leading into the Kanto plains where Edo was situated. Once pinned in place, Oguri argued, the imperial forces could be blasted to bits by shore bombardments from the Tokugawa fleet–the one area the shogunate still had an advantage.

To be fair, it’s not impossible that this would have worked. But it also probably would have destroyed huge swaths of eastern Japan and possibly Edo itself if the fighting moved out of the passes.

Ultimately, Oguri was overruled; to be fair, he was not particularly diplomatic about his views, grabbing one recalcitrant hatamoto by his clothing at one point and shouting “what will your cowardice accomplish?!” in his face.

Views on his plan were mixed among the opposition, as well. One of the leaders of the Imperial Army, Omura Masujiro, is said to have remarked that Oguri’s plan would have absolutely defeated the imperial forces. However, one of his colleagues, Eto Shimpei, had a somewhat different assessment: “Oguri was that kind of an ass; that’s why they didn’t buy into his plan.”

Oguri was dismissed from his office shortly after these debates, and by the end of the first lunar month of 1868 had retired to one of his fiefdoms–the small village of Gonda in Kozuke province (now more or less Gunma Prefecture).

He lived there in seclusion until the fourth lunar month of 1868, when the imperial army itself when it arrived in Kozuke; the local daimyo, by this point smelling which way the wind was blowing, largely capitulated to the advancing force–the Tosando Army, as it was known, ostensibly led by the son of the aristocrat Iwakura Tomomi, though in practice the younger Iwakura was a teenager much beholden to the advice of his actual commander, Itagaki Taisuke.

After arriving in Kozuke and stabilizing the province, the Tosando Army leadership issued an order on the 22nd day of the 4th lunar month ordering Oguri arrested. The order read: “Recently Oguri built a fort on his fief (Gonda Village) and has set up a gun battery. He is planning something evil, and reports from various sources are difficult to dismiss. We are certain that he is planning a rebellion. He has wicked intentions towards the emperor and wants to return [Tokugawa] Yoshinobu to power. We are calling on the domains to arrest him….We will send several units to destroy him in one swift motion.”

The order alludes to two bits of evidence of Oguri’s ‘treason’–his possession of a cannon and his construction of a fortress. To take the second first, Oguri was building atop a mountain near Gonda–he was building a family compound, which like all samurai compounds was walled but not exactly strongly fortified. He did also own a cannon–it arrived in Gonda from his home in Edo, where it had been a decorative piece, early in the 4th lunar month. But it was largely a decorative piece; I am unclear whether he had ammunition for it or if it could even fire.

But that sort of thing was not important, honestly–Oguri was arrested less because of what he did and more because of fear that he could become a rallying point for anti-imperial army discontent. When imperial forces showed up in Gonda he was cooperative and argued his innocence against the charges of planning a rebellion, but he was ultimately unsuccessful. Oguri was arrested and, as already said, beheaded–followed by his adopted son and many retainers, though the rest of his family was allowed to leave in peace.

What I find really interesting about Oguri, however, is not so much his life and death (though these are fascinating) as his transformation over time since.

Because you see, here’s the thing about the history of conflict–really any conflict. There’s the fighting itself, which represents one battle, but more or less as soon as the dust settles a second and far longer battle starts. That’s the battle over memory, over how the conflict will be commemorated, and that conflict–despite what might appear to be lower stakes–is actually tremendously important. It’s the one that shapes our view of the past, and thus, in a sense, our view of the present.

Almost as soon as the Meiji Restoration ended, battle lines were drawn in this new conflict over memory. On the one side were historians and scholars operating with the official backing of the new Imperial government, which was in turn very invested in shaping a specific historical narrative about Japan’s past–one in which warriors like the Oguri family were usurpers who had seized power from their rightful overlord, the emperor, and overturned the natural order of things.

In this telling, the restoration represented both a return to the correct order of things and a casting off, in the form of the shogunate, of old and useless traditions in favor of all that was modern (read: Western).

On the other were former retainers of the Tokugawa shogunate who had survived the conflict, and who resented being painted as either usurpers or as backwards feudal remnants trapped in a benighted past, or as disloyal traitors to the throne.

Both sides fought a substantial war of words intended to “correct the record” about “what really happened”–though in both cases, of course, the necessities of convincing everyone their interpretation was right took precedence over petty trivialities like “the facts’ and “things that actually happened.”

Oguri Tadamasa and his legacy were caught up almost immediately in this war of words, with the imperial government striving to justify his execution and the remaining Tokugawa believers out there trying to cast doubt upon it. Witness, for example, one Fukuchi Genichiro, also a former samurai in service of the shogunate who, after it collapsed, took up publishing a newspaper allied the Kouko Shinbun to critique the new order of things and defend the legacy of the shogunate. Here’s what he had to say about Oguri’s execution: “Oguri was a resolute person who put public affairs before his own. He faced all the problems of the nation and never gave up. However, he was stubborn and did not get along well with others. Still, hearing about his death, I feel that the imperial nation lost someone important. Moreover, they did not investigate his crime, they just slaughtered him and I do not know why….”

Critiques like this did not go unanswered; one of the government’s first directives in 1870 banned all newspapers that didn’t have official recognition, and Fukuchi was jailed shortly thereafter for subversion. The 1870s in general were a fairly dangerous time to criticize Japan’s new government–this was the period of consolidation against samurai and peasant rebellions, when the foundations of the state were still shaky, and thus when anyone critical of the government had to walk a pretty fine line lest they find themselves on the wrong end of the law.

However, as politics began to stabilize in the 1880s, anti-government critics like Fukuchi were able to return to work. In particular, Fukuchi began to write a series of popular histories–On the Decline and Fall of the Shogunate and Statesmen of the Bakumatsu were his two most popular ones–intended to rehabilitate the image of the shogunate and attack the new government all the more.

In Fukuchi’s telling, the Tokugawa shoguns were not backwards usurpers but brilliant rulers who had stabilized and secured Japan–and who, by issuing commands in the emperor’s name, had increased reverence for the imperial throne among the masses.

Oguri Tadamasa, meanwhile, played a special role in Fukuchi’s narrative–Fukuchi pointed to Oguri’s obsession with strengthening the bakufu using foreign technology, and drew an explicit connection between that and the priorities of the new imperial government, which was after all in the midst of rapidly Westernizing the country. Oguri’s ideas were thus triumphant–he might have been branded a traitor and then killed, but the government was still following his vision for strengthening Japan.

Fukuchi was not the only one pushing this line, to be clear; at the same time that he was publishing these works, another former Tokugawa retainer, Tsukagoshi Yoshitaro, wrote a biography of Oguri–the first one ever published, actually.

In Tsukagoshi’s telling, Oguri was a national hero who had transcended narrow loyalty to the pro- and anti-shogunate sides of the 1860s and instead done what he had felt was best for Japan as a nation. Here’s an actual quote from the biography that pulls no punches: “Sure, Oguri was the strongest supporter of the shogunate, and he amassed foreign debt to defeat Satsuma and Chōshū, but he was nothing less than a patriot of the times. Unlike the small, close- minded patriots who, focusing their loyalties on the court, advocated expelling the barbarians, Oguri was a patriot who worked for the long- term good of Japan. . . . He did what he could within his position, and understood the meaning of “civilized patriotism.”

These views represented a challenge to the official interpretations of history presented by the government, but those orthodox views still tended to predominate. There’s no better example than the history of Yokosuka, the town where Oguri had helped set up Japan’s first naval shipyard–though the yards themselves were not finished until 1871, a few years after his death.

Still, Oguri was central to getting them started; yet despite that accomplishment he himself was largely written out of the history of Yokosuka. For example, a history of the Imperial Japanese Navy published in 1905 spent less than a page on him, devoting far more time to subordinates who had the good sense to defect to the new imperial government–and who were thus more politically acceptable. 1916 saw a 50-year celebration of the Yokosuka shipyards, which Oguri had begun and were now a centerpiece of national naval strategy; Oguri (as well as his patron Ii Naosuke) were celebrated by the locals as foundational figures, but as a result pretty much every major politician of late Meiji Japan, normally happy to rush to any military-related event, stayed away.

But even here, the winds of change were already beginning to show. By the start of the 20th century the conflicts of pre-1868 Japan were already beginning to recede into memory, and felt far less contested and loaded than they once had been. After all, the issue was, fundamentally, settled–the shogunate itself was long dead, and there were newer enemies–socialists and communists, for example–to draw the ire of the state.

Which made Oguri more acceptable, for lack of a better word. For example, at those Yokosuka celebrations, the foremost guest was the man of the hour: Togo Heihachiro, the admiral who 11 years earlier had led Japan to its heroic sea victory against Russia and thus sealed victory in the Russo-Japanese War. And in his speech, Togo more or less directly credited Oguri Tadamasa for Japan’s victory, saying that the Yokosuka yards had been essential for the construction of a fleet strong enough to defeat Russia and naming Oguri as the visionary behind them.

That sort of discussion of Oguri presaged a fundamental shift in how his legacy was talked about, one that was indicative of a broader change in how the Meiji Restoration and the Tokugawa period were remembered during the early 20th century.

By this time, obviously, the sides of the conflicts during Oguri’s lifetime were a bit less charged, for a lack of a better word. Support for the shogunate was not quite as much of a black mark against someone now that said shogunate had been dead for half a century and was obviously not coming back. With some historical distance, the conflicts of the 1860s started to look less like “good supporters of the emperor vs bad opponents”, and more of a “heroes on every sides” type of story.

Oguri was well-situated for this kind of treatment given how closely his politics hewed to the policies of the Meiji state–his concern with national power and prestige fit well with the goals of the imperial government.

Still, he was never as popular as other figures more directly associated with the winning side–your Ito Hirobumis, your Yamagata Aritomos, and so on–but he did have at least one thing going for him. He was a military hero, a father of the modern navy, and surely there’s no way that could ever make him look bad.

Except, of course, until 1945 came around. Because interestingly, the end of the Second World War is kind of the pivot point for assessments of the “losers” of the Meiji Restoration.

Which makes a certain kind of sense, of course. Defeat in the Second World War represented, in a certain sense, the defeat of the entire dream of the Meiji Restoration–of making Japan a Western-style imperial power that, like Britain or France, could assure its power and security through military and economic might. Now, instead, Japan was a shattered country occupied by a foreign power.

And that change in circumstance led to a re-evaluation of historical “heroes” and a reconsideration of what had made them heroic. Previously, heroism had been defined in large part as loyalty to the emperor and imperial throne–even government critics and defenders of Oguri during the Meiji Era had gone to great pains to show how Oguri was not disloyal to the emperor by supporting the shogunate. They had also pushed to make him a figure in the founding of the navy. And suddenly those two things were a lot less popular than they once had been.

And as a result of the shift in the public discourse after 1945, there’s been an interesting change in how Oguri is remembered in Japan. Some, like the historical novelist Shiba Ryotaro or, well, pretty much any historian writing on the era, described him as a reactionary whose adherence to outmoded feudal values and obsession with military strength had been a negative influence on Japan. Others, particularly historians from Gunma Prefecture where most of his fiefdoms had been and where he was killed, held him up as a local icon–someone who, unlike most Japanese government figures since, actually cared about a mountainous, not particularly wealthy interior area like Gunma. To this very day, Tozenji, a Buddhist temple in Gunma, holds a yearly commemoration of Oguri’s execution–during which he is valorized still as a hero. A local manga artist, Kimura Naomi, even created a manga based on his life.

Oguri’s legacy remains a complicated one, bound up not just in his life but in all that has happened since. He’s a local hero, and an icon of Japanese patriotism who stood up for what he believed in (and who, conveniently, is not tainted with all that loyalty to the emperor stuff that, as we know, didn’t really end well in 1945). He’s also a reactionary, a feudalist who was more interested in power for his liege lord than anything else. He’s a militarist, or a patriot looking to defend his country against the foreign threat.

Oguri’s legacy is not settled, because the legacy of Japan’s past is not settled. Even today, there’s an interesting historical debate in Japan around reassessing the legacies of the Edo period–once portrayed in both pro- and anti-government histories as a backwards time cast into the dustbin of history (it’s really only on what came next where there was disagreement). Now, the Edo period is increasingly looked at as a time of prosperity that gave birth to much of what we think of as modern Japanese culture–and men like Oguri, who were very much of that time, are getting a second look as a result.

This, ultimately, is the thing about history–in a certain sense, it isn’t really about the past. History is about making sense of the past in light of the present, about organizing the past into a story that helps us explain who we are and how we got here using rules of evidence and logic. That process never ends because the present never ends–and so reinterpretations of the Edo period, the Meiji Restoration, and Oguri Tadamasa are with us to stay.