What the embassy went to see was not only establishments that showed the nation's prestige, such as warships, arsenals and the mint. The voyage diaries show that places supporting the weak among ordinary people — schools for the blind, schools for the deaf, orphanages, hospitals — were among them as well.
The institutions of welfare, set down with surprise
The party visited schools for children who could not see and schools for children who could not hear, and left a record of their admiration that such places were provided by the state and by the local community. It was the same with the orphanages and the hospitals: that children without family, and the sick, were looked after within a public arrangement was not a thought Japan had at the time.
Japan then had its own customs of relief through temples, shrines and charitable men, but there was no established system that took in the blind and the deaf in the form of schools giving them a proper education. That a place was publicly provided where people with a difficulty of sight or of hearing could learn reading, writing and a trade as others did — the sight of it was in itself, it may be supposed, a surprise to the embassy.
What the shogunate was putting in place in those years was machinery to raise the country's strength itself: the reform of the military system, the building of the ironworks. The arrangements for welfare that the embassy saw abroad were a measure of something else, of how far a society had matured. For Oguri too, whose post as inspector put him in charge of the party's records as a whole, such visits cannot have been mere sightseeing; they must have been material for thinking about the shape of a modern state.
After his return Oguri put his effort into arrangements touching the lives of working people as well, at the Yokosuka ironworks: fixed hours, Sunday as a day off, pay by the month. To take his interest in the welfare and the social arrangements he had seen abroad as running beneath those ideas would not be off the mark.
In records of the embassy where warships and factories take the eye, that visits to such institutions of welfare were properly set down in the voyage diaries shows in itself how wide the party's observation ran. From these few lines it comes through that they had an eye both for the strength of a nation and for how it looked upon the weak in its society.
The attendants who wrote down the arrangements
That the embassy's interest went beyond the establishments to the systems themselves can be seen in the records of those who went. Oguri's attendants were young on the whole: besides the youngest, Tommy — Tateishi Onojirō — there were Mimura Keizaburō at seventeen and Fukushima Yoshikoto and Miyoshi Gonzō at nineteen. Among them Kimura Tetsuta, who was thirty-one, kept a close record, probably on Oguri's orders.
One of the tables Kimura Tetsuta drew up was a table of the ranks and the pay of the Powhatan's American crew. By Sakamoto Fujiyoshi's account he noticed that the ranks aboard were clearly set out, with the fields of responsibility and authority plainly divided, and noted further, finding it interesting, that America had three ways of paying: by the year, by the month and by the day. This table, with the titles and the sums ranged from captain down to musician and stoker, is a record of an attempt to copy not a ship's strength but the machinery by which men are set to work.
The same thing happened at San Francisco. The first thing Oguri did on landing was to visit the mint. Masuzu Shunjirō, who went with him, wrote of his admiration for the speed of the machine that struck silver and copper coins, which finished as many as seventy-two in a minute; and Morita Kiyoyuki, after giving the place, the kinds of coin and the stages of manufacture in full in his Akō Nikki, wrote: “in this mint no human labour at all is spent; steam machines are used, water is drawn up to the second, third and fourth floors by leather [pumps], and for fire everything is taken from gas. There is no saying how convenient and how quick it is.” His eye goes less to the machines themselves than to the ordering that carries water and fire through the whole building without human labour.
Kimura Tetsuta's table of pay and Morita's description of the works are alike records of an attempt to copy not the strangeness of what they saw but the rules that made it work. That the embassy's interest ran to the arrangements of a society can be confirmed from such fragments as these.
Source: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987