Before it was settled that the building of the Yokosuka ironworks should be entrusted to France, a number of choices were weighed against one another. The shogunate then had relations with several countries — the Netherlands, Britain, the United States and France — and which of them to ask for technical help was not a thing to be settled easily. Kurimoto Joun set down in later years, in Hōan Ikō, how the argument went. “Then let us choose whichever country is the right one” — any country would do; let the fitting one be chosen. That was the starting point.
What a Dutch engineer told them
The first they approached were the Dutch, their trading partners since the country was closed. The shogunate sent officials to Nagasaki, who put questions to Dutch engineers. The record of it survives.
They wanted an ironworks, a shipyard, near Edo: would the machinery at the Nagasaki ironworks be enough? The answer: no; with the plant at Nagasaki one could do little more than repair ships. The only countries in the world today with plant that can make anything at all, warships and arms alike, are Britain and France. Not even Russia can manage it. Asked then to come and survey a site near Edo, the Dutch refused: Edo Bay was shoal water and building there was impossible, and they were posted to Nagasaki and could not go to Edo. Pressed further on what one large shipyard would cost and how long it would take, they gave nothing but vague answers — “well, we hardly know”, “we cannot reckon it now”.
That exchange made it plain that the standing the shogunate's councillors had long overrated in the Netherlands was already a thing of the past. It also showed that Britain and France had the real capacity. The shipyards the Dutch named were Toulon and Cherbourg in France, and Portsmouth and Woolwich in Britain. The Yokosuka ironworks was later designed on the basis of two-thirds the area of that port of Toulon.
France, which repaired the Shōkaku Maru in sixty days
What decided it was work actually done. In 1864 the Shōkaku Maru, a ship of the shogunate's own, was damaged. A French warship happened to be in at Yokohama, with engineers aboard. The senior councillors called Kurimoto in and told him to sound the minister Roches out on whether the French engineers could make the repair. Roches agreed at once, and the work was finished in a little over sixty days. The finish astonished Kurimoto when he saw it: it was perfect.
Oguri went down into the bottom of the ship and looked the repair over himself. Stopping Kurimoto on a street corner in Yokohama just afterwards, he got down from his horse and said — so Kurimoto's notes record — “I saw it, I saw it, I saw it well”, and “handsomely done; I admire it.” When Kurimoto confessed how the iron pipe for the repair had come in time — the pipe aboard the French warship was too large, and hearing there was some at Shanghai he had sent for it without leave — Oguri, far from blaming him for ignoring procedure, was delighted: “admirable.” And there and then the question was raised whether a dock could not be built with the machinery presented by the Saga domain. It was the first step towards Yokosuka.
The affair of the American minister
There were two reasons the United States fell out of the running. One was that, in the middle of its civil war, it was in no state to give technical help abroad on any scale. The other was a matter of trust. In Hōan Ikō Kurimoto writes that word had already reached the shogunate of a suspicion that the American minister Pruyn had deceived Inoue Shinano-no-kami, taken an enormous sum in advance, and acted dishonestly over the building of the Fujiyama. That affair did great damage to confidence in the United States.
On Britain, Oguri had seen for himself. On the way home from the embassy to the United States he had looked at the state of the British colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia, and his wariness had grown. After his return he had also to do with the Russian incursion at Tsushima, and that had begun with a British squadron, refused a lease of Tsushima by the shogunate, surveying the waters round it high-handedly. Satsuma, moreover, after the war with Britain, and Chōshū, after the bombardment of Shimonoseki by the allied squadron, were both drawing fast towards Britain. The months in which the shogunate and Satsuma and Chōshū parted ways in earnest were the months around the repair of the Shōkaku Maru.
“France alone is accommodating”
So France was what remained. The words of Oguri that Kurimoto set down ran as follows.
Every country overseas is our teacher, but the rest are arrogant and insolent; they threaten us, take advantage of our inexperience to deceive us, and do nothing but grasp at profit to the full. … France alone is accommodating, and compared with the others its plant can be trusted somewhat; so the work should after all be entrusted to France.
That is to say: every country is Japan's teacher, but the others stand on their pride, threaten Japan, deceive it where it is inexperienced, and only grasp at profit; France alone is modest in manner, and compared with the rest its plant can be trusted to some degree. It was not warm praise but something nearer a judgement by elimination, after comparison.
Oguri took care even so. He went himself to inspect a French warship lying at Yokohama. She was eight years from her building and had never once broken down, and to Oguri's eye — he had sailed in the newest of American ships, the Powhatan and the Niagara — she looked in no way inferior. French warship-building then stood with Britain's at the front of the world.
Once it was settled to go forward on French technique and French financial help, Roches offered that there was a naval engineer, Verny, at Shanghai, a very able man, who could be sent for if they wished. Kaigun Rekishi records: “In 1864 the commissioner of finance Oguri Kōzukenosuke and the inspector Kurimoto Sebei were made to consult the French minister Léon Roches on a plan for the establishment of an ironworks.” This was not a breaking off of relations with other countries. For one large undertaking the terms were compared and France chosen: that is where it stands.
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 (including passages from Kurimoto Joun's Hōan Ikō)
→ Léonce Verny — the engineer who gave his working life to Yokosuka ／ The machinery presented by the Saga domain ／ Kurimoto Joun