The powder works at Takinogawa that never was

Among Oguri's plans for the economy and for industry was one to build the first Western-style powder works in Japan at Takinogawa in Edo. It is one of his works less known than the Yokosuka ironworks.

Sakamoto Fujiyoshi's Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai, listing the plans for modernization that Oguri pressed forward on the strength of his handling of finance, puts first among them “the building of the Takinogawa powder works and a reverberatory furnace”. In the same list follow the improvement of the Yushima foundry, the building of the Koishikawa gun factory, the organizing of the “three arms” — cavalry, infantry and artillery — and the strengthening of army education; and then the Hyōgo Shōsha, the plan for a central bank, the shoshiki kaisho exchange for sundry goods, the French school, the plan for a newspaper, and the proposals for gas lamps, post, telegraph and railway. The powder works held one corner of this body of plans.

Oguri did not pursue this plan alone. It began as an undertaking of the two men, Oguri and Takeda Ayasaburō, and Sawa Tarōzaemon is said to have joined somewhat later. Takeda is known as the designer of the Goryōkaku fort, and Sawa was a man well versed in the technique of Western warships.

Abe Dōzan's Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden names Nakazato Kaizan's novel Daibosatsu Tōge as what made this plan known, and quotes the following from its chapter “Dōan and Bora-hachi”.

About that time, near a water-mill shed belonging to one Jinbei of Takinogawa, officers came out from the authorities and began staking out the ground. It appeared that they had some purpose in putting up a building on this land. In particular the plan seemed to be to follow the river and make use of the flow of the water.

The purpose of the staking out leaked, in the novel, through the mouths of workmen such as Isaburō the carpenter and Manzō the scaffolder: “the authorities have a design to build a powder works near Takinogawa”. Kaizan writes that this works was to be “not the making of powder as it had been done before, but the first Western-style powder works to be built in Japan”, and that the plan was an undertaking of the two men, Oguri and Takeda Ayasaburō. It is a novel, but Abe Dōzan weighed the passage heavily, saying that Kaizan was the first to write of this manufacture of powder.

Abe Dōzan finds the reason for the site in transport. Use the Arakawa to carry the powder and it could go at once to Edo or to Yokosuka — a place, on his reading, that reached both the ironworks and the army. The description in Daibosatsu Tōge of a spot near a water-mill shed also shows that the plan was to use the flow of the water for power. Of the site he writes that “some say the grounds of the present school of foreign languages are where it stood”.

Ōtsubo Motoji's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu has the building of a great powder works begun in the fifth month of 1867, and records that the man in charge was Akita Toyosaburō, whom Tadamasa had picked out. In the fourth month of that same year the building of the Hyōgo Shōsha was submitted for approval; in the seventh the plan of the Franco-Japanese joint-company scheme (the Société Générale) went forward; and in the ninth the system of office allowances was proclaimed. The powder works was begun in the year when Oguri had the greatest number of undertakings moving at once.

In the same novel Nakazato Kaizan wrote that “this powder works too was, it need hardly be said, one of the preparations against the great new power rising in the west”, and that “to the men of the western domains who cried for the restoration of imperial rule, it was only natural that the plan for this powder works should not be passed over as an ordinary thing”. His reading is that from the Satsuma and Chōshū side it must have looked like a threat.

Abe Dōzan answers that “to see this as done in order to resist the power of the west makes it far too small a thing”, and holds that, judged from what Oguri said to Kurimoto Joun at the founding of the Yokosuka shipyard, it is better read as being for the defence of the Japan that was about to be born. The same fact read as a guard against a hostile power, or as the laying of a national foundation — the character of the plan shows in the division of the judgements.

With the collapse of the shogunate the works never came into operation. Even so, that he was reaching out beyond shipbuilding and iron into the making of munitions, drawing specialists in as he went, shows the breadth of the “Western-style industrial foundation” Oguri had in mind.

Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941; Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957

→ The Yokosuka ironworks — the beginning of modern industry in Japan　→ Daibosatsu Tōge and Oguri Kōzukenosuke　→ The Hyōgo Shōsha