Yokosuka Power Spot No. 3 --- The Fatal Price Of Loyalty

Yokosuka's "Verny Park" rightfully ought to be called "Verny-Oguri Park."

"Tadamasa Oguri was a controversial Tokugawa government official whose efforts contributed to the modernization of Japan at the end of the shogunate and the beginning of the Meiji Period and whose insistent calls for resistance against the forces of Satsuma and Choshu would cost him his life."

Good/short biography is here.

In the mid-1860s, Tadamasa Oguri teamed-up with the French naval engineer, Francois Leonce Verny, to build-up the Yokosuka Naval Arsenal.

A real nice bilingual explanation about Verny is here.

So, Oguri, who actually ran the Tokugawa's finances at one point, was a pretty powerful government official, and intensely loyal to the Shogun --- and he used his power to build-up Yokosuka.

And in the central part of Very Park, the busts of Verny and Oguri are displayed together, as such:

  












But, taking a closer look, in the middle and behind the statues is a small rock formation, which looks like this:

It turns out that these stones were taken from a spot along the Karasu River, in Gunma Prefecture, where Ogura was beheaded by samurai from Choshu & Satsuma.  The stones were donated to Yokosuka's park in 1953.

I had walked an jogged past the Ogura and Verny statues for many years, and only recently became aware of these quiet, strange, & powerful stones which lie in the background --- wow!