One reason the Yokosuka ironworks was more than a factory is that arrangements for training people were built into it from the start. The Seitetsusho Kiritsu Genan, the draft plan for the establishment of the ironworks, which laid down its founding principles, set out the founding of a school alongside the building of the works.
The school the draft plan laid down
The plan set out the school's purpose as follows (the text here in modern Japanese).
The Japanese government shall found a school in order to educate and train Japanese to take over the business of the yard from the French in time to come. There men to become engineers and foremen shall be brought up. Youths of the samurai class shall be selected as “engineer pupils”, and the head of the interpreting department shall apportion the teaching, and have them taught French and the several branches of engineering. … Separately, the French foremen shall select boy workmen as “foreman pupils”, who shall do their own work in the shops every morning and attend the school every afternoon, to be educated and trained in drawing and the other subjects.
Work in the shops in the morning, lessons in the classroom in the afternoon. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi calls this “the first regulation for modern training within an enterprise in Japan”. There were two kinds of pupil: technical trainees, who were to become engineers, and workman trainees, who were to become foremen. The latter were recruited from 1866 on, among boys from the farming villages near Yokosuka and elsewhere; but few villagers applied, and gathering them seems to have been hard.
Behind this policy of training lay a clear deadline. The highest officers among the French engineers were called the “three officers”, and consisted of a chief, his deputy (in charge of steam), a chief of the dock, and an accounting officer. The shogunate's documents ordered that Japanese be trained to take over all of these three offices, and set the date for it as follows.
By the first of February 1869, the Japanese workmen of the ironworks shall all take the work on their own shoulders, without awaiting the direction of the French.
The year 1869 falls in the second year of Meiji. By the time that day came, the shogunate had already fallen.
Verny's plan for a shipbuilding school
On the twentieth day of the second month of 1867 the chief engineer, Verny, proposed to the shogunate that organizing a shipbuilding school was “of the first importance, and to be carried out quickly”. What he proposed was concrete.
Admission to those who had finished a school such as the French language school at Yokohama and passed examinations in French and in elementary subjects
Pupils to be aged seventeen to twenty-one. They might attend from outside or live in, but living in was preferred
The course to run three years, with bookkeeping added in the third year
Pupils to be paid for the periods in which they worked
On graduation, the two highest placed to go to Europe and study for two years more
Verny said the school could open at once with six pupils, four older and two younger, and that three of them — Tanaka Hiroyoshi, Yamataka Nobutsura and Kawai Suekichi — would be given special training. His reason for thinking the time right was plain: “because pupils are graduating from the French training school at Yokohama.” The French language school opened at Yokohama in 1865 thus served as the source of supply for the shipbuilding school.
Verny's first draft curriculum, drawn up in the second month of 1866, ran as follows, in hours of teaching. First year: mathematics 46, geometry 40, technical drawing 10, physics 30, geography 10, French 46, freehand drawing 48. Second year: mathematics 30, geometry 40, mechanics 40, physics 20, chemistry 20, zoology and botany 15, French 29, drawing 48. Third year: physics and the strength of materials 40, buntaihō 20, chemistry 20, and naval architecture 120. The day was close-packed as well: lectures from half past eight in the morning, study from ten, technical drawing from one in the afternoon, lectures until half past four, and from then until six free drawing and questions. It was the first college of science and engineering in Japan.
Where the graduates went
The school kept to a few picked pupils, but after 1868 its graduates scattered into a surprisingly wide range of fields. Yamaguchi Tatsuya, Tatsumi Hajime and Wakayama Genkichi, who made Japanese warship-building fit to stand with the world's. Imamura Yūrin, who became principal of the First Higher School, and Namura Taizō, who became president of the Great Court of Cassation. Inagaki Kitazō, who studied French bookkeeping and was a pioneer of accountancy in Japan. Kawashima Chūnosuke, who translated Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days in 1878 and so made the first translation of French literature in Japan. And Itō Sakae, who laid the foundation of the Papilio cosmetics house. A shipyard's school, it turns out, sent people out into worlds beyond shipbuilding.
Holding on to trained men
As hard as the training was keeping the men once trained. Verny lamented that “Japanese workmen leave one after another as soon as they grow at all skilled in Western industrial technique, and only the unskilled are left. There is much to fear for the future”, and advised Oguri and the others to raise wages and to set up grades, paying more to those who advanced in skill and to those who were keen. The draft plan itself carried a warning: “in engaging workmen, make their terms as long as may be, so that there be no ill of frequent coming and going.” Ten-hour working days, Sunday as a day of rest, monthly wages, and pay by skill and by length of service — this new machinery of working life was also an answer to a practical problem.
What was taught was not technique alone. The shogunate's documents say that “the accounting department shall be headed by a Japanese” and that “the books shall be kept in two versions, Japanese and French”, and an accounting officer was among the “three officers”. From this Sakamoto Fujiyoshi infers that Western bookkeeping was introduced at the Yokosuka ironworks and that Japanese were learning it there. Fukuzawa Yukichi translated Western bookkeeping in June 1873, so if that is right, Yokosuka was the first place in Japan to put it to practical use.
By a document from the time the works passed to the new Meiji government, those employed at the ironworks were forty-four shogunal officials, forty-three seamen and firemen, twenty-two workman pupils and thirty-three Frenchmen engaged (with twelve more at the Yokohama ironworks). That figure of twenty-two workman pupils is what this system of training amounted to in fact.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Tomita Hitoshi and Nishibori Akira, Yokosuka Seitetsusho no Hitobito (the people of the Yokosuka ironworks), Yūrindō; Zōsen Kyōkai, ed., Nihon Kinsei Zōsen-shi (a history of shipbuilding in early modern Japan); Yokosuka Kaigun Senshō-shi (a history of the Yokosuka naval yard)