The first result in which the Yokosuka ironworks showed what it could do as a shipyard was the warship Seiki. Abe Dōzan's Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden copies out, as it stands, the inscription on a photograph of the time presented by the Yokosuka naval district.
First ship built at the Yokosuka shipyard: the warship Seiki
Laid down 10 February 1873; launched 5 March 1875; displacement 897 tons
Abe Dōzan writes of the day as “5 March 1875 — the day to be remembered, when the first warship made in our country was launched”.
Ten years from the breaking of the ground
The road to it is also the chronology of the Yokosuka undertaking. By what Abe Dōzan takes from the records of Ishihara Kaizō, a naval captain, the order was as follows.
Twelfth day of the third month, 1865 The ironworks commissioners fixed on a site of 74,360 tsubo across Mikaho, Hakusen and Uchiura in the village of Yokosuka. The floor area of the shops and other buildings came to 7,805 tsubo in all, and the building cost was estimated at 226,000 ryō.
Twenty-fourth day of the eighth month, 1865 The buildings of the Yokohama works were completed. Oguri Kōzukenosuke and the other commissioners inspected them and ordered the machine tools installed at once.
Twenty-seventh day of the ninth month, 1865 The ground-breaking ceremony on the site of the Yokosuka ironworks.
Third day of the tenth month, 1866 More Frenchmen in the government's employ arrived, bringing the number to forty-three under Verny.
Twenty-ninth day of the twelfth month, 1866 The shogunate appointed Isshiki Settsu-no-kami, of the yoriai rank, commissioner of the ironworks.
Third month, 1867 Work began on cutting the first dock.
Fourth month, 1868 Handed over to the Meiji government.
Fifth month, 1868 The first slipway (dock) in Japan was completed.
The works then passed from the jurisdiction of the Kanagawa court to the ministries of finance, of civil affairs and of public works in turn, was renamed the Yokosuka shipyard in 1871, and only in October 1872 came under the navy ministry. The Seiki was laid down the following year, on 10 February 1873. In April 1869 there were 758 Japanese officials and workmen and 32 Frenchmen here, 790 in all.
Abe Dōzan sums the whole of it up in a line: Yokosuka went through many changes after Oguri's death, but by 1875 it had grown to the point of launching a warship, the Seiki Maru, by Japanese hands alone. Counting from the breaking of the ground in the ninth month of 1865, it was exactly ten years.
The shipyard was raising men along with ships. In the second month of 1867 the chief engineer, Verny, proposed to the shogunate the founding of a shipbuilding school, with a concrete plan: pupils aged seventeen to twenty-one, a course of three years, and the two highest placed to go to Europe on graduation and study two years more. It was the first college of science and engineering in Japan. The year the Seiki was laid down, 1873, was the time when that first generation was growing into the core of the works.
The Hinomaru at the bow
In the photograph Abe Dōzan had in his hands, the Hinomaru flag was flying at the Seiki's bow. He adds a note on it: the Hinomaru flag goes back, as a naval ensign, to the eleventh day of the seventh month of 1855, when “the sun's disc on a white ground” was laid down as the general mark of Japanese ships at the instance of Shimazu Nariakira of Satsuma, so there is nothing strange in this Hinomaru. The naval ensign with its sixteen rays was laid down on 7 October 1889, and raised together on every ship of the navy on 3 November that year, the emperor's birthday. What the Seiki flew was the earlier Hinomaru, without the rays.
Proof of “the urisue with a storehouse attached”
To Kurimoto Joun, who worried about finding the money to build, Oguri said with a laugh: when it is finished at last, even if the shogunate should fall and we hand the whole thing over to a new owner with a bow on it, we shall still be able to leave the honour of “a house sold with a storehouse attached”. The launch of the Seiki showed in solid form that those words were not empty. The government that ordered her was gone and the man who planned her was dead, and the works remained and produced a ship.
Ships went on being built at Yokosuka. By a bulletin issued by the Yokosuka naval arsenal in June 1934, the vessels built there since its founding numbered thirty-five warships alone, and the battleship Mutsu was of this yard too. The Seiki stood at the head of that long line.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (including the records of the naval captain Ishihara Kaizō and the Yokosuka naval arsenal bulletin of June 1934)
→ The Meiji emperor's visit, and his rescript ／ The man who built the Yokosuka ironworks ／ Verny, the chief engineer