What is handed down as the moment the plan for the Yokosuka ironworks began to move is a talk in the street at Yokohama between Oguri Tadamasa and Kurimoto Sebei (later Joun), in the middle of the twelfth month of 1864. It started from the repair of one warship.
The damage to the warship Shōkaku Maru
The Shōkaku Maru was built in America and came into Yokohama in the eleventh month of 1863 as a ship of the shogunate's own, but before long she would not move. The charge was properly Katsu Kaishū's, as commissioner of warships; but Katsu was then setting up the naval training station at Kōbe in Hyōgo and gathering masterless samurai from all over the country, and to the senior councillors it was not clear what he was about. Leave it to Katsu and the cost would mount and the repair be too much his own way — that, it is said, is very likely how they saw it.
A French warship happened to be in at Yokohama, with engineers aboard. The senior councillors called Kurimoto in and told him to sound Roches, the minister, out on whether the French engineers could make the repair. When Kurimoto asked, Roches took it on willingly, as though he had been waiting for such an opening.
In a little over sixty days the repair was done. The finish astonished Kurimoto himself: it was perfect. The engineer's name was Dorōtoru (Torōtoru), the man who would later serve as director of the Yokohama ironworks.
What this repair meant went beyond one ship. About a year before it, in the seventh month of 1863, seven British warships had bombarded Kagoshima, and Satsuma was beginning to draw closer to Britain. Two months before the repair began, in the eighth month of 1864, the allied squadron of Britain, the United States, France and the Netherlands bombarded Shimonoseki, and Chōshū too deepened its relations with Britain. Britain drew Satsuma and Chōshū to itself by force of arms; France won the shogunate's trust by repairing a shogunal warship. The months in which the shogunate and Satsuma and Chōshū parted ways in earnest were the months around the repair of the Shōkaku Maru.
On a street corner in Yokohama
It was just after the repair was finished. On a clear but windy day, as Kurimoto was on his way back from the Shōkaku Maru through the customs house to his official residence at Honmoku, two horses came up behind him at a gallop, kicking up the dust. As he was about to turn into a side street, a loud voice called out.
“Sebei! Sebei! Well done — I admire it, I admire it!”
He looked round: it was Oguri and his retainer. Oguri got down from his horse, handed the reins to the man and came over. What was this about, Kurimoto asked. The repair of the Shōkaku Maru, said Oguri.
Oguri had come to Yokohama that day to deal with the British Oriental Bank. The errand was one a subordinate could have run, but “for fear it would come to nothing, I came myself”, he said. The business done early, he had gone to the Shōkaku Maru to see Kurimoto, found him away, and gone down into the bottom of the ship and looked her over himself. “Handsomely done. I admire it. But that the iron pipe should have come in good time!”
Kurimoto's answer is as characteristic of the pair as the question. The pipe aboard the French warship was too large. Hearing there was some at Shanghai, he had sent for it by the first ship available. An order from abroad properly needed the approval of Oguri's office, but “with a council on this and a council on that the time would have gone by and it would not have come in time, so I resolved to treat it as the final account of work done under contract, and settled it without leave. I ask your understanding.”
Oguri's answer to that was one word: “admirable”. The temper that thought nothing of ignoring procedure comes out plain. After this exchange, what Oguri brought up, “as casually as that”, was the steam-powered iron- and shipbuilding machinery the Saga domain had presented to the shogunate and that was being left to rust. The plan for the Yokosuka ironworks begins here.
→ “I had not even heard the word dock” — Kurimoto's surprise
From physician to shogunal official
Kurimoto Joun was born in the third month of 1822 at Urasarugaku-chō in Kanda Ogawa-chō, Edo, the third son of Kitamura Kaien, a physician to the shogun's household. It is a stone's throw from the Oguri house at Kanda Surugadai. He was five years older than Tadamasa, and as boys the two sat side by side at Asaka Gonsai's school in the row house along the wall of the Oguri residence.
He went on to the Shōheikō, and in 1843, at twenty-two, passed the kōshi kōka, the examination for appointment as a shogunal official, and was rewarded with fifteen ingots of silver. Iwase Tadanari passed in the same year. But in that same year he fell foul of the rules of the Shōheikō and was expelled; and later, while serving as a physician in the shogun's inner attendance, a secret trial ride on the shogunate's warship Kankō Maru angered his superiors, and he was driven out of Edo and posted to Ezo.
That demotion told later. Kurimoto spent six years at Hakodate, laying out a medicinal herb garden among other things, and there met Cachon, a French Jesuit priest. Kurimoto taught him Japanese and learned French from him. After four years of this Cachon was called back to France; but when Kurimoto — by then a group head under the Hakodate commissioner, recalled to Edo, risen from superintendent of the Shōheikō to inspector and given charge of foreign affairs — was sent to Yokohama on the impossible errand of negotiating the abrogation of the treaties that had opened the country, it was that same Cachon who stood as interpreter beside the newly arrived French minister, Léon Roches. The two took each other by the hand, it is said, and rejoiced at the chance of it.
That the repair of the Shōkaku Maru could be asked of Roches, and that the negotiations with France moved at all, rested on these connections. On the tenth day of the eleventh month of 1864 the shogunate ordered Oguri and the inspector Kurimoto Sebei to consult Roches on a plan for setting up an ironworks. Kaigun Rekishi (a history of the navy) 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.”
Kurimoto was not, however, of one mind with Oguri throughout. When opposition among the shogunate's councillors to the building of the shipyard grew strong, even Kurimoto, the right arm of the plan, is said to have urged him to give it up. Their friendship was unchanged for all that, and after 1868 Kurimoto flatly refused to serve the new government and became a reporter for the Yūbin Hōchi Shinbun. At Tōzenji in Gonda in Jōshū, the place of Tadamasa's death, busts of the two men now stand side by side.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, “Hyōgo Shōsha” o Tsukutta Saigo no Bakushin: Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the last shogunal official, the man who created the Hyōgo Shōsha: 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
→ Kurimoto Joun — from Ezo to the shogunate's councils, a lifelong friend