Katori Motohiko — Married to Both of Shoin's Sisters, and the Man Who Built Gunma

One man married both of Yoshida Shoin's sisters. Katori Motohiko — who also built the prefecture of Gunma.

Contents

Who Was Katori Motohiko?

Katori was a Choshu samurai who became a Meiji prefectural governor. He was born Odamura Inosuke.

His life divides three ways.

A relative of Shoin. He married Yoshida Shoin's sister Hisa, and after her death took Shoin's other sister Fumi as his second wife. Fumi was the widow of Kusaka Genzui.

A Choshu administrator. He survived the domain's internal fights, came through the Boshin War, and entered the new government.

The first governor of present-day Gunma. He laid the foundations of its silk industry and its schools, and gave the prefecture its shape.

He was born in 1829 and died in 1912.

Katori Motohiko and the Shoka Sonjuku

Katori was not one of Shoin's students. He was an assistant instructor (joko) at the domain academy, the Meirinkan, lecturing on Confucian texts, and dealt with Shoin more or less as an equal.

He married Shoin's sister Hisa — making the two men brothers-in-law.

After Shoin was executed in the Ansei Purge, Katori became one of the people holding up the family he left.

Shoin's other sister, Fumi, had married his student Kusaka Genzui. Genzui killed himself in the Kinmon Incident of 1864, and Fumi was widowed in her twenties.

Then, in 1881, Katori's wife Hisa died of illness.

On 3 May 1883, Katori married Fumi.

He had married Shoin's two sisters in succession. In part this is a matter of custom: taking in a widow or a household without heirs within the extended family was not unusual. Still, having carried Shoin's family through to the end puts Katori in a particular position.

What Katori Motohiko Did as Governor of Gunma

Under the new government Katori went into provincial administration.

In 1876 he became governor of Gunma. A first Gunma prefecture had existed briefly from 1871 to 1873 and been dissolved; Katori was the first governor of the re-established, present-day prefecture.

He concentrated on two things.

Silk. Gunma was sericulture and silk-reeling country. The Tomioka Silk Mill had started operating in 1872, and raw silk was Japan's largest export. Katori worked on developing the industry and organising its producers.

Education. Founding schools and training teachers. He had been a domain-academy professor. Making education a pillar of administration presumably followed from that.

"Building a prefecture" means work of this kind: grow an industry, put up schools, train people. It does not survive in the dramatic political narrative, but the shape of the prefecture was decided here.

Gunma honours him as the first governor of the prefecture in its present form.

Katori Motohiko's Wife Fumi

Fumi, Katori's second wife, took the name Miwako in the Meiji era.

Her life is Bakumatsu Choshu in miniature. Her brother was Yoshida Shoin, her first husband Kusaka Genzui, and her sister's husband Katori Motohiko.

Her brother and her first husband both died young. She lived into the Meiji era and spent it in Gunma as a governor's wife.

Of everyone born into Shoin's household, she lived the longest and saw the most.

How Katori Motohiko Died

Katori died on 14 August 1912, aged eighty-three.

The Meiji emperor had died on 30 July that year, about two weeks earlier, and the era name had just changed to Taisho. He went out almost exactly with the era.

Hardly anyone connected to the Shoka Sonjuku lived that long. Takasugi Shinsaku, Kusaka Genzui and Irie Kuichi all died in their twenties, and Maebara Issei was beheaded after a rebellion.

Katori was the one who buried them all.

Katori Motohiko Timeline

For his brother-in-law see Yoshida Shoin; for his wife's first husband, Kusaka Genzui.