The Kanrin-maru: How Katsu Kaishū Built Modern Japan's Navy

In 1860 (Man'en 1), Katsu Kaishū commanded the Kanrin-maru across the Pacific with a Japanese crew. It was the first time Japanese had crossed the Pacific under their own power, and a symbolic event in the founding history of Japan's modern navy. Katsu Kaishū's life — from study at the Nagasaki Naval Training Center, to the Kanrin-maru voyage, to the foundation of the Kobe Naval Training Center, to his post-Restoration tenure as Minister of the Navy — was itself the founding process of the modern Japanese navy.

The Nagasaki Naval Training Center

In 1855 (Ansei 2), the shogunate established the Naval Training Center at Nagasaki, bringing in Dutch naval officers as instructors. Katsu Kaishū entered with the first class and spent about four years systematically studying Dutch-style navigation, surveying, and gunnery. His classmates included Nagai Naoyuki, Kimura Yoshitake, and Araki Saizaburō — figures who would become the core of the shogunate's navy. The studies at Nagasaki went beyond pure technical training to the understanding of Western science, thought, and the international situation. The foundation for what later contemporaries called Katsu's status as 'one of the first shogunal retainers to understand the West' was laid here.

The Kanrin-maru Voyage to America

In 1860, for the exchange of ratification documents for the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce, the shogunate dispatched a delegation to the United States. The main body crossed on the U.S. Navy's USS Powhatan, but the Kanrin-maru, under Katsu Kaishū, sailed alongside as her escort. The Kanrin-maru was a Dutch-built three-masted steam-sail vessel, and the voyage was the first attempt in history of a Japanese officer-and-crew Pacific crossing. The roughly month-and-a-half voyage included encounters with storms in which assistance from U.S. Navy officers was required, but in the end the Japanese crew sailed the ship into San Francisco. Fukuzawa Yukichi was aboard as a translator, and the experience became the origin of his later understanding of the West.

The Kobe Naval Training Center

In 1864 (Genji 1), Katsu Kaishū established the Naval Training Center at Kobe. It was a strikingly original attempt for the period — to gather young men from across the domains, beyond the bounds of the shogunate, and train them in naval affairs. Among those who came were Sakamoto Ryōma, Mutsu Munemitsu, and Itō Sukeyuki. The Katsu-Ryōma meeting of this period became the prologue to the later Satsuma-Chōshū Alliance and the restoration of imperial rule. The Kobe Naval Training Center was short-lived under political pressure, but the human network Katsu cultivated became the foundation of the post-Meiji navy and diplomacy.

As Meiji Minister of the Navy

After the Meiji Restoration, in 1872 (Meiji 5), Katsu Kaishū was appointed Vice Minister of the Navy of the new government, and the following year in 1873 became Councillor and Minister of the Navy. It is a rare case of a former shogunal retainer taking the top post of the Meiji navy, and shows how essential Katsu's naval knowledge and network were to the new government. The naval system Katsu built across the fifteen Bakumatsu years became the starting point of the Meiji-era navy. Contemporary naval-history scholarship locates the origin of the Meiji navy that distinguished itself in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars in Katsu Kaishū.

"The navy is the power of the nation. A nation without power cannot stand alongside other nations."