The Nagasaki Naval Training Center — The First Step Toward a Western-Style Navy
The arrival of the Black Ships made an island nation keenly aware of its need for a modern navy. To meet that need, the shogunate opened the Naval Training Center at Nagasaki — the place where Japan's Western-style navy was born.
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From the crisis of coastal defense
Before the great steam-driven warships, it was plain to all how feeble Japan's existing sea defenses were. Against a threat closing in from the sea, modern vessels and the people to operate them were urgently needed.
So the shogunate, drawing on the cooperation of the Dutch with whom it already traded, established a naval training institution at Nagasaki. Opened in 1855, the center was a landmark attempt to study Western naval technology in an organized way.
Under Dutch instructors
At the center, Dutch instructors taught. Navigation, gunnery, ship handling, shipbuilding, and the broad range of knowledge a navy requires were imparted.
Among those who studied here was Katsu Kaishū, who would later guide the bloodless surrender of Edo. The experience of learning a Western navy from the ground up became a great foundation for his later work.
The Kanrin Maru crosses the Pacific
The fruits of study at the center soon took shape. In 1860 the Kanrin Maru, accompanying a shogunal mission to the United States, crossed the Pacific by the hands of its Japanese crew.
The main party of the envoys crossed aboard an American warship; separately, the Kanrin Maru's voyage across the ocean under Japanese command was an event that showed the fostering of a Western-style navy was steadily bearing fruit.
Toward a modern navy
The Nagasaki Naval Training Center itself ended its role after a few years. But the people it trained and the knowledge it accumulated were carried forward into Japan's later navy.
Together with the building of the Odaiba, the center's opening was Japan's serious response to the shock of the Black Ships. The effort to modernize the defense of the sea began here.
The course of coastal defense and modernization is explored across Bakumatsu Culture.
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