The plan for the Yokosuka ironworks is bound up with a complete set of steam ship-repairing machinery presented to the shogunate by the Saga domain. It is said that the Japanese navy began in Saga, so early and so hard did its lord, Nabeshima Naomasa (Kansō), press the adoption of Western technique. The domain had Nagasaki as its window on the outside world, and warships, arms, a reverberatory furnace and establishments for scientific research besides.
A purchase of 120,000 ryō that outran the domain
In the early 1860s Nabeshima Naomasa laid out some 120,000 ryō to buy a complete shipbuilding plant from the Netherlands. But when the goods arrived and it came to installing them, it turned out that that alone would cost tens of thousands of ryō. Setting this against the domain's finances, he saw that it could go no further, and the device he hit on at last was to present the plant to the shogun.
By the recollections of Sano Tsunetami, a notable of Saga who was later made a count, the sum first spoken of was to be about 30,000 ryō in gold; but on arrival 125,000 ryō in silver was demanded, and with the enormous cost of installation on top of it they were taken aback and at a loss what to do.
On what the machinery consisted of, the recollections of Aoki Kyūshichirō, who had the run of the Nabeshima house, survive.
Among them was that machine for hauling ships up that they call the tororaheroppu, included in the set. There were as well the machines for making cannon and for boring out the inside, all complete. We had the whole of it landed at the Nabeshima ironworks, and found that the cost would be no light matter; so the question was raised, and in the end it was arranged that it should be presented to the shogunate.
It was, then, a complete set for a naval port and shipyard proper — from gear for hauling a ship up on land to a boring mill for cutting the bore of a cannon.
The presentation was made in the sixth month of 1864. The Nabeshima records tell that on the twenty-third day of the sixth month that year, for the gift of the iron machinery and the cannon, a sword and thirty sets of seasonal robes were bestowed with the words “goods needed at this present time, which will serve at once, and with which we are well pleased”; and that for the balance still owing an unusual order was issued, repayment over seventy years. The Saga domain, that is, had paid only part of the money down, and the greater part was taken over by the shogunate.
The failure at Mujinagayatsu in Sagami
The shogunate, having received it, found it more than it could manage. Two-thirds of the machinery stayed in a coal store at Yokohama, the other third at the port of Nagasaki. The year before, there had been a plan to use this machinery to build a dock and an ironworks at Mujinagayatsu Bay in Sagami; officers in charge had been appointed and the survey completed, but it was dropped “since there was, after all, no one accustomed to the work”. The machinery was there, but no one who could install it and run it — that was where the trouble lay.
It was Oguri who saw what this idle machinery might be. In the twelfth month of 1864 — the author of Oguri Kōzukenosuke suspects a mistake for the eleventh month — on a clear day with a fierce wind, two riders came up at a gallop in a cloud of dust behind Kurimoto Sebei (Joun), who had left his office and was on his way home. “Well done, Sebei — I admire it, I admire it.” He looked round: it was Oguri Kōzukenosuke and his servant. The talk began with a word of praise for Kurimoto's good management of the repair of the Shōkaku Maru, and then Oguri brought it out as though it were nothing: what if the machinery presented by Saga were carried to Mujinagayatsu, and the French engineer Dorōtoru, who had mended the Shōkaku Maru, were put to a little trouble over it?
Kurimoto's answer shows the level of technique in that day. By his own written account, he was in the state of a man who “was hearing the word dock for the first time”, let alone knowing what an ironworks might be. Even the foremost of the shogunal officials versed in Western learning heard the word “dock” then for the first time.
What the French engineers' examination showed
That evening the two went together to the French legation. The minister, Léon Roches, knew little of technical matters and could not judge whether Dorōtoru was the man for it, so word was sent on to Admiral Jaurès. The admiral's answer was that Dorōtoru was young and his learning had not yet reached that level, so new construction was beyond him; as soon as Jinsorai, first engineer officer of the Sémiramis, was back from Shanghai, he would have him examine the machinery and then give a definite reply.
When that Jinsorai came from Shanghai and examined the machinery, the result fell short of their hopes. The word sent through the minister was that the machinery was “on the small side throughout and accordingly not strong in horsepower, serving only for small repairs to ironwork”, and would not do for building a dock and taking on large work; the machinery they had would be of most use set up somewhere near Yokohama to provide for small repairs.
On this finding Oguri's and Kurimoto's judgement swung the other way, and wider. Once a country has warships, damage is in the nature of things; without a place to repair them, one breakage makes a ship useless at once. To send a ship abroad at every breakage would cost an extraordinary sum in the passage alone. Then let them engage an engineer of real skill, choose a suitable site at a port nearby, and build in earnest — and so a matter that had begun with machinery that was not enough turned into the building of a great shipyard at Yokosuka. As to whom the work should be entrusted, France was chosen on the judgement that, while every foreign country was a teacher, the others only took advantage of Japanese inexperience to grasp at profit, and France alone could be comparatively trusted.
On the tenth day of the eleventh month of 1864 the shogunate's councillors accepted Oguri's argument, and in the names of the senior councillors Mizuno Izumi-no-kami, Abe Bungo-no-kami and Suwa Inaba-no-kami decided to build two works, a shipyard and an arsenal. The machinery presented by the Saga domain was gathered at Yokohama first, and the building of the Yokohama ironworks began. Verny, who came from Shanghai in the first month of 1865, broke ground the month after and had Jinsorai examine the whole of the machinery. What had rusted was polished up and used, it is said. It was on this site that Japanese engineers and workmen first laid hands on Western machinery and learned how to handle it.
There is a sequel. When the new government took the Yokosuka ironworks over from the former shogunate on the first day of the fourth month of 1868, the chamberlain who attended was Nabeshima Naohiro — the eldest son of Naomasa, that is, of Kansō. An undertaking that had begun with machinery too much for the domain, and so handed to the shogunate, was taken on by his son on the side of the new government.
Sources: Kurimoto Joun, Hōan Ikō (his posthumous papers), in Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941; Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975; Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987
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