Shinagawa Station in about 1897, with a train pulling away from the platforms on Japan’s first commercial railway line, opened in 1872. Shinagawa was the first stop after leaving Shimbashi (later Shiodome) Station in Tokyo, followed by Kawasaki, Tsurumi, Kanagawa and finally Sakuragicho Station in Yokohama. The loco is one of the ten J150 tank engines imported from the Vulcan Foundry in England, by this time slightly modified.
Part 1 of 2
FOR over two centuries, Japan isolated herself from the rest of the world, a policy vigorously pursued by the Tokugawa Shogunate that had sidelined the Emperors.* But from 1853, zealous American, Russian and British merchants and their modern wares were grudgingly admitted into selected Japanese ports.
During a visit to Nagasaki that year, Russian admiral Yevfimiy Putyatin wowed Japanese officials with a live-steam model locomotive,* and American naval captain Matthew Perry showed off his own miniature railroad in Yokohama.* In 1865, Nagasaki resident Thomas Glover, a Scottish shipbuilding and coal-mining magnate working for Jardine Matheson, dared to set up two hundred yards of narrow-gauge railway on the city’s waterfront.* But the Shogunate was unmoved.
Change was on the way, however, and Tom Glover was key to it. He had already supplied guns and even a steamship to Nagasaki rebels keen to restore their Emperor as a British-style constitutional monarch, and smuggled twenty pro-Imperial samurai out on Jardine Matheson’s ships to London, for a British education.*
The Tokugawa Shoguns (military dictators) ruled from 1603 to 1868, the Emperor having nominal authority but no more than a ceremonial function in practice. The ideal of isolation (‘sakoku’, literally ‘closed country’) was keenly felt: see our post The Bearded Foreigner.
On how the British brought the first railways to Russia, see our post Russia’s First Railway. Admiral Putyatin’s model engine, together with a well-thumbed Dutch textbook, were used by Japanese engineer Tanaka Hisashige as a template for building his own working model steam locomotive in 1853: see a picture at Wikimedia Commons. It was the first working steam locomotive made by a Japanese person. The company Tanaka (his surname) founded subsequently became known as Toshiba.
Miniature railways are alive and well in Japan today: see the Shuzenji Romney Railway in Niji-no-Sato (Rainbow Park) in Izu, Shizuoka, which has close ties to the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway in Kent and the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway in Cumbria.
It was 2’6” in gauge, the same as the Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway; the engine, named ‘Lord Wellington’ and nicknamed ‘The Iron Duke’, was imported from England via China, where it had been on display for an Exposition in Shanghai. See ‘Scottish Samurai’ by Alexander MacKay, and ‘At the Edge of Empire’ by Michael Gardiner; some of the details differ from those on Wikipedia.
These samurai were typically naval cadets, who had attended naval training schools such as that established in Nagasaki in 1855 – the Shogunate was supported in this by the French, supplying arms and expertise. Like more modern opponents of capitalism and industrialisation, the Shoguns made an exception for their military.
Précis
In 1853, Russian, American and British visitors to Japan all demonstrated live-steam railway locomotives. The authorities of that time, the Shoguns ruling in the Emperor’s name, were strongly opposed to allowing their country to be industrialised by foreigners, but railway enthusiast Thomas Glover, a Scotsman who had made Nagasaki his home, secretly aided rebels to overthrow them. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
A bust of Thomas Blake Glover in the Glover Garden near his home in Nagasaki, Japan. Glover took a Japanese partner, Awajiya Tsuru, and they had a daughter named Hana. He also adopted a British-Japanese boy, Kuraba Tomisaburo. Despite his dizzily fluctuating financial fortunes, Glover always seemed to survive, and founded companies which later became known as the Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan, and the Kirin Brewery Company. For more on Tom Glover, see ‘Thomas Blake Glover’ (Undiscovered Scotland), and ‘Nagasaki City Mayor visits north-east Scotland’ (Japan Local Government Centre, CLAIR).
IN 1869, the Boshin War ended in victory for the British-backed Imperial Court over the Tokugawa shogunate. Distrust of foreigners remained high, but Harry Parkes, British Minister to Japan, convinced Emperor Meiji that railways would unite the kingdom, kickstart trade, and prevent rice shortages such as the one Japan was currently experiencing.
That December, the Imperial government commissioned Japan’s first full-scale commercial railway, a 20-mile stretch of 3’6” track connecting Shimbashi Station in Tokyo with Sakuragicho Station in Yokohama. Surveying began in April 1870, and though Inoue Masaru,* one of the ‘Choshu Five’ Glover had smuggled into London,* was appointed Director of Railways, responsibility for construction rested with Edmund Morel, a British civil engineer with long experience in New Zealand, Australia and latterly Borneo.
Ten tank locomotives, fifty-eight carriages and almost 300 railwaymen were brought from England, and on October 14th, 1872 the Emperor himself made the historic Opening Day trip from Tokyo to Yokohama – a 35-minute declaration of intent for the whole nation.
Inoue Masaru (Inoue is his surname) studied railway and mine engineering at University College, London. Fellow student Ito Hirobumi, at this time Assistant Vice Minister of Finance, later drafted the Meiji Constitution in the 1880s, turning to Britain rather than America for his model of constitutional government. To this day, despite almost universal Americanisation a feeling that Japan has a greater affinity with Britain persists.
Tom Glover’s ‘Choshu Five’ and the fifteen other students whom Glover smuggled out of Japan (strict controls were then in place) were not ideological westernisers. They believed that the threat posed by westernisation was severe, but also that it could be managed if Japan were united under her Emperor, and if she understood enough of western culture to pick the sweet fruits and leave the bitter.
Précis
Glover’s campaign to help pro-Imperial rebels was rewarded in 1869, when the Emperor regained power, and immediately gave the go-ahead for the building Japan’s first railway, from Tokyo to Yokohama. It opened in 1872, a symbol of a new era in Japan’s industrial progress, and of the peculiarly British character of her constitution. (51 / 60 words)
