Alongside the building of the Yokosuka ironworks, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa had begun on the rebuilding of the shogunate's navy itself. One sign of it is the affair in which, on the pretext of taking foreigners aboard a warship, he had the ships cleaned and their discipline set right at a stroke. Kurimoto Joun recalled it as “a pleasure at the time”.
Vermin in the warships
The shogunate's warships were then in a state that could not by any flattery be called clean. Kurimoto Joun's Hōan Ikō has this.
In all the warships our country has held until now the regulations are not yet in order. The officers are idle in the extreme, and the men under them wilful and unruly, with no discipline; so every ship is filthy and foul, the paintwork flaking off, leavings of rice and soup heaped here and there, and a strange smell striking the nose.
Leavings heaped up here and there, a bad smell striking the nose, the paint flaking off. More than that, ships such as the Chōyō Maru and the Kankō Maru had bred vermin of an unknown kind. It was a sort of noxious louse called “andorosu”; a bite raised a rash and the itching was past bearing. The creature itself was too fine to be seen.
When Kurimoto and the others asked aboard the French ship, the answer came back as follows. The creature does appear now and then in merchantmen sailing the Indian Ocean, but it has never appeared in a warship and is never allowed to. Merchantmen carry mixed cargo and so are never free of a rank smell, while a warship is washed and swept every day and so breeds nothing. This holds not of French ships alone but of the warships of every country.
Told as much, the Japanese ships, their captains first of all, would not hear of it. Orders issued by superiors went unobeyed. Such was the shogunate's navy then.
The pretext of taking a foreign minister aboard
Oguri, then commissioner of warships, took another road. Samurai who had never been trained would not move for any number of orders; but let it be a matter of disgrace before foreigners, and a samurai would move at the risk of his life. Oguri knew that rhythm.
It happened that the French minister, the admiral and the captain of the warship Sémiramis had to be taken round to settle the site of the Yokosuka ironworks. Bringing a foreign ship into an unopened place was forbidden, but there was nothing against taking them aboard a Japanese warship for a cruise. Oguri set the Junkō Maru to this service, and issued an order to the officers and men of the whole fleet that, since the captains of foreign warships had asked to see the inside of a Japanese warship in the next few days, they were to clean their ships for the honour of Japan. It was the first time a foreign minister or admiral was to be taken aboard a Japanese warship, he told them, so they were to be most careful to invite no ridicule.
The warship men were half at a loss and half aghast. And they set to washing and furbishing day and night until the appointed day, Kurimoto records. From this affair on, the cleaning of the ships was thoroughly done, and all trace of the noxious louse disappeared from Japanese warships. Abe Dōzan calls it “Oguri's cunning”.
The same thinking carried into Yokosuka
About the time this cruise was made, the site of the ironworks was fixed on Yokosuka. It was in the last ten days of the twelfth month of 1864. The depth was taken again and again with a lead, and the place was decided on as combining fine scenery with a defensible position and as closely resembling the ground of the Toulon shipyard in France. Yet at the very end of that year Oguri was dismissed from the commissionership of finance and moved to acting commissioner of the army.
The idea of thoroughgoing cleanliness passed straight into the rules by which the Yokosuka ironworks was run. The detailed rules of employment set out a clause on “cleanliness and good order”.
The Japanese foreman of each manufacturing department is answerable for having the machines and tools in his charge cleaned after work ends at five in the afternoon
Any department found unclean of an evening is reprimanded by the senior staff
A man late at roll call without reason is given no work that day; at the third offence he is dismissed
All workmen wear the same working dress, and foremen wear a galon at the cuff
Work began at half past six in the morning in summer and half past seven in winter, with a break from eleven until one in the afternoon, and ended at five in both winter and summer. Working hours were fixed at ten a day, emergency work excepted. Holidays, though, were to follow Japanese custom, and the Japanese rest days then were not Sundays but the “one-and-six holidays”, the days of the month bearing a one or a six. That is why it was the French engineers who had to come in on Sundays.
How do you move someone who will not take orders? Oguri's way began not with the content of the order but with working out what people will take seriously.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (quoting Kurimoto Joun's Hōan Ikō); Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987