The twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth of May 1905. From the hill above Ōfunakoshi on Tsushima, Okinoshima can be seen on a clear day. That day “the weather was clear”. The forty-five ships of the Baltic Fleet under Rozhestvensky passed through the Tsushima Strait for Vladivostok, and the Combined Fleet under Tōgō Heihachirō met them. The famous turn in the face of the enemy cut across the Baltic Fleet's advance, and after a fierce gunnery action most of the Russian warships went up in flames and sank, one after another, off Okinoshima.
The man who had been in the same waters forty years before
What is striking is that this came a bare forty years after the Russian warship Posadnik violated Tsushima in the shogunate's last years. In those forty years a modern Japanese navy had been made that could destroy a fleet said to be the strongest in the world.
In the spring of 1861 it was Oguri who went aboard the Posadnik as commissioner of foreign affairs and negotiated with her captain, Birilev. The Russians sat tight with overwhelming force behind them and demanded a direct interview with the lord of the domain, Sō Yoshiyori. Oguri held that off with his own person, but it was no more than a stopgap. If the other side used its strength, nothing could be done. On the nineteenth day of the fifth month Oguri broke off the negotiation on the spot and withdrew to Edo, and soon after offered his resignation as commissioner of foreign affairs.
The negotiation has been judged a failure, then and since. Kaionji Chōgorō writes that “as a matter of the moment, it was a failure”. Oguri himself, in a letter of the fourth day of the seventh month to his senior Mizuno Tadanori, opened his mind: he submitted his views and his superiors carried out not one of them, and at this rate there was nothing left but to resign.
Sakamoto Fujiyoshi sees in this very setback Oguri's “second awakening”. Unless the problem at the root was solved, violations of the same kind would come one after another. What Japan needed now was the strength to make an intruding warship withdraw — that is, military strength and economic strength. After Tsushima, Oguri's energy went all at once into the building of a shipyard, the putting of the finances on a footing, the founding of a trading company, and the teaching of technique, languages and economics that would carry all of these.
Two sources of the Japanese navy
Sakamoto Fujiyoshi sets out two sources of the Japanese navy. One is the line of Katsu Kaishū, who made the naval training station at Kōbe and with his own hand raised a monument there to “the birthplace of the Japanese navy”. The other is the line of Oguri, who pushed past fierce opposition inside and outside the shogunate — Katsu Kaishū's included — to settle on building a shipyard, and fixed its place at Yokosuka.
Many of the Japanese warships that fought at Tsushima were built at the naval arsenal at Yokosuka, which had the newest plant in the world and held the navy's highest command besides. The Mikasa, Tōgō Heihachirō's flagship, is preserved at the quay at Yokosuka still. That a Russian captain's threat of naval force against Oguri should have led, forty years later, to Russia's great naval defeat at the same Tsushima is one of history's ironies.
Tōgō Heihachirō's thanks
Abe Dōzan sets down the following, as told to him directly by Oguri Sadao. After the war with Russia, Marshal Tōgō invited Sadao's son Matakichi to his own house and entertained him, praised the complete victory at Tsushima, and expressed his thanks, saying that the arsenal Kōzukenosuke had built had let the Japanese navy show its strength to the full. He then wrote out the five characters “benevolence, duty, propriety, wisdom, faith” and gave them to Matakichi. The scroll was later given to Abe, and is recorded as preserved at Fumon'in.
Another strange chance
The man who sighted the Baltic Fleet at sea and sent the first, decisive report that it was passing through the Tsushima Strait was Mori Kaku, an employee of Mitsui Bussan. And the chief manager of Mitsui who founded Mitsui Bussan, Minomura Rizaemon, was the man Oguri had picked out and who became a manager of Mitsui. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi adds that this too might be called a strange chance.
The victory at Tsushima cannot of course be credited entirely to the Yokosuka ironworks or to Oguri as an individual. Several causes came together: the building of a system of education, the training of engineers, changes in relations abroad. Yet a shogunal official who tasted helplessness at Tsushima left a shipyard at Yokosuka, and forty years later, in the same waters, the navy that shipyard had raised won — this single line of connection has been taken up again and again by several of the biographies.
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
→ The Tsushima incident — a Russian warship in occupation, and negotiation on a knife edge → Tōgō Heihachirō and Yokosuka → Minomura Rizaemon