The Yokosuka ironworks passed to the Meiji government as it stood after Oguri's death and went on working as the Yokosuka shipyard. A great mark in that course was the visit of 21 November 1871, when the Meiji emperor came to the Yokosuka shipyard aboard the Ryūjō. It was the third year after Oguri was beheaded at the village of Gonda.
The round of the works that day
Abe Dōzan's Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden quotes the day from page 456 of Kinsei Kaigun Shiyō (an outline history of the modern navy).
At nine in the morning of the twenty-second, His Majesty rode from his lodging to the shipyard, and having gone round the steel-making, pulley-making, joinery, sawmill and shipbuilding shops and the dock, took his midday meal in the new office building; after which he granted an audience to the Frenchmen in the government's employ, Verny, Kabajī and Chibojī among them, and bestowed a rescript upon them. He then went round the diving work, the new repair yard, the balloon and the heavy-load hoist; at three in the afternoon he cruised within Yokosuka harbour and watched the dredging machine at work; and that done, he returned to his lodging.
The steel-making shop, the pulley shop, the joinery, the sawmill and the shipbuilding shops, and the dock. Then, after the meal, diving work, the new repair yard, a balloon, the heavy-load hoist. In the afternoon he went round the harbour by ship, and saw the dredging machine run. This was not a formal look at one establishment but a full day's programme, going through the works one by one.
The audience for the engineers, and the rescript
That day the Meiji emperor granted an audience to Léonce Verny, the French engineer who had led the building, and to Kabajī, Chibojī and the other “Frenchmen in the government's employ”. The emperor of the new government met in person the foreign engineers the shogunate had invited. And it was then that the following rescript was bestowed on Verny.
The several shops of the shipyard are well ordered, and the undertaking is founded.
Going round them now, We cannot contain Our joy; this is due wholly to the effort you made at the beginning.
We commend it deeply.
The shipbuilding establishments are in good order and the undertaking is up and running; going round them now, he cannot contain his joy; this is due wholly to the effort Verny made at the outset, and he commends it deeply. Abe Dōzan writes of it as “the first rescript ever bestowed on our navy”.
What survived the change of government
It was Oguri himself who had invited Verny as chief engineer. By Abe Dōzan, Oguri engaged him at 13,000 ryō a year. Ishihara Kaizō, a naval captain, writes in Yokosuka Kaigun Kōshō Sōsetsu no Yurai (the origins of the founding of the Yokosuka naval arsenal) that the Yokosuka ironworks took on, besides building and repairing ships, supplying naval stores and training technical staff, also civil engineering, building, and the construction and management of the lighthouses in the waters nearby; and he judged it “less the founding of a shipyard than the founding of a naval port … a great undertaking that was to lay the foundation of the imperial navy”.
The work of a shogunal official who went to his death still treated all but as a criminal had, three years later, grown into an undertaking the emperor himself spent a day inspecting. A place built by a fallen shogunate, which had taken the money and the responsibility upon itself, was visited and commended by the head of the new government. At a time when Oguri's name was still hardly spoken in public, the fruit of his work was acknowledged first.
It took longer still before public praise of the shipyard was spoken together with Oguri's own name. On 27 September 1915, for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Yokosuka naval arsenal, its head, Vice-Admiral Kuroi Teijirō, published an official document setting out how it had been founded, and praised Oguri's achievement as imperishable. As a document issued by the naval authorities, this was the first. It was cut into a copper plate and set before the entrance of the arsenal.
That document sets out how the decision to build was reached. When officials were gathered to debate the founding of a great yard on Edo Bay, many were reluctant on the grounds that affairs of state were pressing and the treasury empty; opinions flew and nothing was easily settled. There Oguri Kōzukenosuke, commissioner of finance and holding the business of the naval office besides, “early saw into the times, set aside the objections with all his strength, and argued that the founding of a yard was urgent”. So Oguri and the inspector Kurimoto Sebei (Joun) consulted Roches, the French minister in Japan, and the minister, taking counsel with Jaurès, commander of the French squadron lying at Yokohama, recommended the French naval engineer Verny as chief of the yard's founding. The rescript Verny received on the day of the imperial visit lay on the line running from that decision.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941
→ The launch of the Seiki, the first warship built in Japan → Léonce Verny → The commemoration of the Taishō years