The Yokosuka ironworks — the beginning of modern industry in Japan

At Yokosuka there is a dry dock still in service. It was built in the 1860s. Equipment made nearly a hundred and sixty years ago has gone on working — that one fact shows what kind of work Oguri Kōzukenosuke's was.

It was called an ironworks, but it did not smelt iron. In the usage of the time the word meant a general works that handled iron. It came later to be called the Yokosuka shipyard.

First among Oguri's works stands the Yokosuka ironworks, begun in 1865. It was called an ironworks, but it did not smelt iron. In the usage of the time the word meant a general works that handled iron. It came later to be called the Yokosuka shipyard.

Why it was needed

The shogunate and the domains had already begun buying and using Western ships. But at every breakdown there was nothing for it but to tow the ship abroad for repair, at a cost in time and in money. Without a place at home to build and to mend, nothing could be done — and Oguri, as commissioner of finance, won the others over by saying that he would find the money on his own responsibility.

Four things that set this works apart

Four things made Yokosuka something other than an ordinary shipyard.

How the site came to be Yokosuka

There was a set of Dutch-made iron and shipbuilding machinery that the Saga domain had presented to the shogunate. Oguri wondered whether it could be put to use, and with his friend Kurimoto Joun consulted Roches, the French minister. When French engineers examined it, the machinery proved small and not enough for a dock in earnest. So marshland at Ishikawachō in Yokohama was filled in first and the Yokohama ironworks built there, for Japanese to learn the techniques.

Oguri then proposed building a shipyard on a larger scale, and on the tenth day of the eleventh month of 1864 the shogunate's councillors decided on it. A survey of Edo Bay on the twenty-sixth of the same month moved the site from Nagaura Bay, the first choice, to Yokosuka Bay next to it. The village of Yokosuka then was a small fishing village of twenty-two households.

The mouth of the bay faced north and the water was calm; the shape of the inlet was good; the water was some twenty metres deep; and the clay rock suited the building of a dock. The French engineers judged the ground much like Toulon at home, and recommended it.

The words “the urisue with a storehouse attached”

Opposition swirled around the project: Japan could not do it; it was too early; leaving it to France was risky; the place was far from Edo; there was no money. When one shogunal official said that for all the money spent, no one could tell what would have become of the shogunate by the time it was finished, Oguri is recorded as straightening himself and answering as follows.

Though the fortunes of the shogunate have a limit, the fortunes of Japan have none. If what the shogunate did serves Japan long afterwards, and people say in time that the work the Tokugawa did succeeded, is that not an honour to the house of Tokugawa? Is it not a profit to the country?

Dōhōkai Hōkoku, the Dōhōkai bulletin, no. 1, 1896

He put it by way of urisue, the sale of a house with the furniture left in it: “of two such sales, the urisue with a storehouse attached is the better; to say that after us the place may go to seed, and take ourselves off, will not do.” Power would pass to a new owner of the house before long; then let it be handed over as a house with a storehouse on it. It was also an Edo man's joke, keeping clear of grand language.

Once the building was settled, Oguri resigned the post of commissioner of warships, which he had only just taken up. Standing down himself appears to have been a way of getting ahead of the opposition. He stayed on the commission for the building of the ironworks, however, and went on driving the work in practice. For chief engineer, François Léonce Verny, an engineer of the French navy trained at the École Polytechnique, was invited.

On to the Tomioka silk mill

The techniques of Yokosuka spread across the country. The timber-framed brick buildings of the Tomioka silk mill, now a World Heritage site, were designed by the French building engineers then at work on the Yokosuka shipyard, under a condition of “fifty days”. The engineer Bastien was sent to Tomioka, and a dozen or more Japanese carpenters from Yokosuka went with him. The drawings were in French and the measurements metric. At Tomioka too, as at Yokosuka, fixed working hours, Sunday as a day of rest, monthly wages, pay by length of service and pay by skill began.

→ The Washington Navy Yard, where this plan began　／　Visiting the places at Yokosuka

The Yokosuka ironworks is set out at greater length in the articles below: how the idea arose, episodes from the building in the last years of the shogunate, the course it took after 1868, and what came of it later.