The Yokohama ironworks — the works that came before Yokosuka

There is a works that is usually passed over when the Yokosuka ironworks is discussed: the Yokohama ironworks. It was built before Yokosuka, built for Yokosuka, and then left in Yokosuka's shadow.

Rather than set to work at once on a large shipbuilding establishment, it would be better to build a small works first, as a preparatory stage — the advice came from Léon Roches, the French minister. The Yokohama ironworks, built in 1865, followed that advice.

It had two tasks. One was to train Japanese engineers. The other was to prepare the equipment needed to build a shipbuilding establishment in earnest at Yokosuka. A works for building the works that would build ships.

The place was Yokohama, around what is now JR Ishikawachō station. Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki's Oguri Kōzukenosuke says that marshland along the bank of the Ōta River was filled in for the site.

While the preparations went forward at Yokohama, the site of the main works was settled on Yokosuka. The reason the joint work gives is the lie of the land: Toulon, the naval port France was proud of before the world, and Yokosuka were strikingly alike in form. To Verny, who knew Toulon on the Mediterranean through and through, the bay at Yokosuka was a familiar shape. The same it could not be, but it could be finished at two-thirds the scale — that, the joint work suggests, is what he thought.

Ground was broken for the Yokosuka ironworks on the fifteenth day of the eleventh month of 1865. Verny came to Japan with some hundred and thirty people — engineers, workmen, doctors and teachers.

The Japanese side had its doubts about Verny at first. By Shibata Takenaka's record, which the joint work quotes, this was the impression at their first meeting in Paris: he was twenty-eight or nine; long and thin in build, short-sighted, with a sparse beard; careless of his dress, and looking like a student just out of university.

Shibata let slip to his attendants that Oguri, Kurimoto and the rest had been taken in by the smooth talk of the French minister and had promised so young an officer the heavy post of director of the Yokosuka ironworks — had they not been rash?

But once the round of Toulon was over and they were living under one roof in Paris, Verny's way of working proved to be out of the common. When it became known that he had the authority to engage engineers and workmen and to order machinery for the Japanese shipyard, letters of request on the strength of some connection came in by the near thousand. Not a few were hard to refuse on feeling. Verny showed Shibata every one of them, and told him that the choice of men and the ordering alike lay with the commissioners, and that he would let no private feeling in.

His choice of men and his orders were exact; his handling of business was decisive and yet close; and he never bent what Shibata said to his own purpose. Shibata was quite won over by him, and the whole party marvelled that a man of Europe could be so quick, the record says. The author of the joint work adds that he cannot remember meeting any piece of writing that blamed Verny.

An anecdote of how Verny worked appears in a special edition of the Hōchi Shinbun dated 27 September 1915. It was told by the head of the Nagashima family, landed men of Yokosuka.

Nagashima Ubei served as village headman until the first years of the Meiji era, and Verny stayed with the Nagashima family under an arrangement to last until his own house was ready. He could not speak a word of Japanese, but he was a very kind man, and even after moving into official quarters he would send at once for “Ubei-san” whenever anything came up.

Asked once what a village headman was paid, Ubei answered that he had no pay at all. Verny was sorry for him and sent a letter to the senior councillors recommending that, since the man was working hard for the ironworks, he be allowed to take the contract for the first dock. Told to put in an estimate, Ubei, with a layman's helplessness, had no notion of the figures and wrote 130,000 ryō at a guess.

Verny took one look and burst out laughing: this was far too much; take it at 80,000 ryō, and you will still make a sure 30,000. Ubei took fright and withdrew. The work went to tender in the end, and was taken at 48,000 ryō. “There, you see,” Verny laughed, the account says.

His feeling for figures draws the outline of the man.

Verny did not return to France when the shogunate that had engaged him collapsed. He went on working after both the Yokosuka and the Yokohama ironworks passed to the Meiji government, and spent eleven years in Japan, until he resigned in March 1876.

The Yokohama ironworks became one of the foundations of the shipbuilding industry that followed. It is spoken of far less than Yokosuka, but it was this works that first took on the plain task of training engineers and gathering equipment. Not to build something large at once, but to begin with a works for preparation — that judgement in itself shows what kind of undertaking this was.

Sources: Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975; Yokosuka City, “The history of Yokosuka and France: the building of the Yokosuka ironworks and exchange between Japan and France”; Hōchi Shinbun, special edition of 27 September 1915 (quoted in the joint work)

→ The man who built the Yokosuka ironworks　／　Why France was chosen　／　François Léonce Verny