Yokosuka: Taking a Warship Out of the Water

In 1925, tugs brought the old battleship Mikasa into a place excavated from Yokosuka's shore. The preservation association describes the use of high tide to move the damaged hull into position, where it was fixed with its bow toward the Imperial Palace. The operation was intended to give the ship a permanent address.^[1]

Elsewhere around the same port, stone dry docks had been receiving vessels for decades. Their purpose was almost the reverse. They made it possible to remove water from around a ship, work on it, and send it out again.

The difference joins two parts of Yokosuka's naval history that can otherwise seem unrelated: the industrial shore opposite Verny Park and the memorial battleship beside Mikasa Park. Both required an engineered relationship between a hull and the land. One supported the continuing use of naval power; the other made the ending of military use a condition of preservation.

The industrial establishment at Yokosuka began in 1865, under the Tokugawa shogunate. The official Oguri Tadamasa promoted the project, and the French engineer Léonce Verny helped establish the facilities. The Meiji government subsequently continued its development. In 1871, the establishment known as the Yokosuka Ironworks became the Yokosuka Shipyard.^[2]

The name “ironworks” can narrow the picture too much. The surviving evidence includes docks, heavy forging machinery, and buildings and equipment concerned with making or maintaining ships. These activities needed one another. Bringing a vessel alongside a shore was different from having the facilities to undertake substantial work on it.

A dry dock supplied a particularly demanding part of that capacity. It was a chamber connected to the water but capable of being shut off and emptied. A ship could enter afloat; after the entrance was sealed and the water removed, its lower hull became accessible. Refilling the chamber eventually allowed the vessel to float out again.^[3]

For the navy, that cycle made a shore installation useful beyond a single construction project. A ship completed overseas could still need attention in Japan. A vessel already in service could require work beneath its waterline. The geographical reach of a fleet consequently depended in part on places where it could stop being a fleet in motion.

Yokosuka's first stone dock was completed in 1871. The next followed in 1874 and is now numbered No. 3; the present No. 2 was completed in 1884. Their numbering does not reproduce the order in which they were built.^[4]

The sequence stretches across the change of government in 1868. It also shows a site accumulating capacity over years. No single opening ceremony produced the whole industrial shore. The first dock had to be made workable before later additions could enlarge what the establishment was able to undertake.

Before a dock could be emptied for a ship, its builders needed to control water around their own work. A cost table for Yokosuka's No. 1 dock preserves that less visible part of construction. Recorded in the naval yard's history and reproduced by the architectural historian Nishizawa Yasuhiko, it distinguishes excavation, stonework, labor, drainage, and equipment.^[5]

The entries do not allow the dock to be understood simply as a large quantity of cut stone. Stone dressing was listed at 7,000 ryō, the monetary unit used in the account; setting the stone was another 3,000. The use of drainage pumps during construction was listed at 8,000, and dredging outside the entrance at 2,250.

Together, those two water-related entries amounted to slightly more than the dressing and setting of the stone. The comparison stays within the historical table; it does not require a speculative conversion into modern money. Nor does it make water control the largest expense. Purchasing concrete, for example, was a much greater item.

What the comparison reveals is a substantial demand that a finished dock's walls can conceal. People working on the chamber needed a sufficiently controlled construction site. The eventual entrance also needed a usable approach from the harbor. Excavation, drainage, and dredging made other work possible, rather than merely improving the appearance of a completed structure.

The table separates the dock's construction account from an additional equipment account. The entrance gate was listed at 29,568 ryō. Pump machinery and a building for it followed as separate entries.^[6]

This second grouping identifies a further transition. A completed cavity did not by itself constitute an operating dock. It needed a way to close the entrance and a means of removing the enclosed water. The equipment that made the chamber useful was not identical to the temporary measures that had allowed it to be built.

The surviving figures are not a set of individual workers' wage packets, and they cannot tell us whether every job proceeded as planned. They do make the project's requirements unusually legible. Yokosuka was buying the ability to change the condition of a piece of waterfront repeatedly: water admitted, entrance closed, water removed, work performed, water admitted again.

In the dock type described by Nishizawa, the entrance could be closed by a hollow, boat-like gate known as a caisson. Water inside it supplied weight, while water pressure outside helped hold it against its seating. To reopen the passage, the operators had to alter the water conditions and move the gate away.^[7]

The gate therefore differed from an ordinary door swinging freely on hinges. Its usefulness depended on the relationship between the chamber and the harbor. A dock was both a shaped space and a sequence of controlled changes.

That sequence explains why the entrance, pumps, walls, and working floor belong to one facility. A strong wall could not compensate for an entrance that failed to seal. Powerful pumps would be of limited use if water continued entering freely. The practical unit was the connected installation, rather than the most imposing component within it.

Size also mattered to the work that could be accepted. A longer chamber provided room, but emptying unnecessary space took effort. Yokosuka's No. 2 dock incorporated an internal division allowing a smaller portion to be used for a smaller vessel.^[8] The additional gate made flexibility a feature of the structure rather than merely a matter of allocating more workers.

The building of that dock involved Tsunekawa Ryūsaku, a Japanese engineer educated at the yard's own school. By this stage, the institution was contributing trained designers to its continuing expansion, alongside the foreign expertise with which it had begun.^[4]

The docks still stand inside the active United States naval base. From Verny Park, the public waterfront faces the sea-facing walls of the old installations; their working interiors are normally restricted.^[9] Continued industrial use has helped preserve the relationship between the chambers and the harbor. It has not turned every part of that relationship into an open museum display.

Two large machines crossed that boundary in the other direction. The steam hammers displayed in the Verny Memorial Museum were removed from their working setting and transferred into public preservation. The museum dates their manufacture in Britain to 1865 and their import through the Netherlands to 1866.^[10]

A steam hammer forges metal by driving a heavy hammer head. It is not a furnace producing iron from ore. At Yokosuka, the machines made parts for ships and other machinery. Their labels—three tons and half a ton—refer to the weights of the hammer heads, not the entire installations.^[11]

The larger machine's working life is particularly striking. It continued in use until 1996, after service under the Japanese navy and then at the American naval repair establishment. The smaller hammer had stopped work in 1971. Both were moved to the museum in 2002.

Those dates put a limit on treating the machines simply as devices from a founding moment. For much of their existence, their purpose was current production or repair. They could continue answering a mechanical need after governments, operators, and the fleets around them had changed.

Their relocation also changes what can be learned from looking at them. The museum preserves recognizable machinery, but not the complete working arrangements that once connected it to materials, power, operators, and the next stage of a job. A particular part could move through those arrangements toward a vessel or another machine. No surviving connection has been established here between these hammers and a named component of Mikasa.

That last boundary keeps two complementary histories distinct. The hammers demonstrate long-lived production capacity at Yokosuka. The battleship brings a different record: a vessel built abroad, serviced in Japanese ports, and eventually removed from use altogether.

Mikasa was built by Vickers in Britain and delivered to the Japanese navy in March 1902. After the voyage east, it arrived at Yokosuka on May 18. The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records describes servicing there before the ship continued toward Maizuru, the naval district to which it belonged.^[12]

This arrival makes the relationship between the ship and the industrial port concrete without making Yokosuka its birthplace. Imported construction and domestic naval support operated within the same undertaking. Buying a completed battleship did not remove the need for places to prepare and maintain it once it had arrived.

The connection also extended beyond one foreign order. A Japanese government document of December 1902, excerpted in the archival exhibition, counted twenty-seven warships ordered from British private firms since 1893. Mikasa appeared among them. The document concerned thanks to the British government for assistance with those orders.^[12]

Yokosuka's growth therefore did not require every part of a fleet to become domestically produced at the same moment. The port could perform useful work on a ship made elsewhere. What mattered operationally was whether the different parts of procurement and support could be joined.

During the Russo-Japanese War, Mikasa served as Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō's flagship. At the Battle of Tsushima on May 27–28, 1905, it carried the command from which orders went to the Japanese fleet opposing the Russian force.^[13] That role later became central to the case for preserving it.

The outcome belonged to a struggle with consequences beyond either navy. In the September peace treaty, Russia recognized Japan's predominant political, military, and economic interests in Korea and agreed not to obstruct Japanese measures there. Other articles provided for transferring Russian lease and railway interests in Manchuria to Japan, subject to Chinese consent.^[14]

The ship's place in that war cannot consequently be reduced to an engineering achievement or a commander's biography. A fleet supported by industrial ports helped produce arrangements affecting other countries. Remembering its service requires keeping that political setting beside the machinery that made service possible.

Victory did not carry Mikasa directly into safe retirement. On September 11, 1905, a magazine explosion sank it in Sasebo harbor, with many casualties. The following day's naval report, summarized by the archival exhibition, left the cause of the fire unresolved pending recovery and examination of the ship.^[15]

The immediate report is important for what its categories had not yet settled. It included dead, injured, and missing people. Those preliminary figures cannot all be converted into a final death toll. The wreck had created an urgent task of finding people and establishing damage, not just an engineering problem of recovering valuable material.

The ship was raised the following year and eventually returned to service. This earlier recovery had a military purpose: restore a damaged vessel to usefulness. It also meant that the object later proposed for preservation already incorporated a history of damage and repair.

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 damaged the hull again, leaving it grounded near Yokosuka. When the preservation project eventually moved it into its permanent berth, it was dealing with a vulnerable material object, not transporting an untouched survivor of one famous battle.^[1]

The crucial change was in the required result. Recovering Mikasa after the 1905 explosion had been compatible with making it a warship again. Keeping it in the 1920s would require authorities to demonstrate that this return could no longer happen.

The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 limited the capital ships—the navies’ large gun-armed warships—that its signatories could retain. Its rules for disposing of vessels began with a functional requirement: a ship designated for scrapping had to be put beyond combatant use. Calling it retired was not enough.^[16]

The treaty then separated the stages and methods of disabling it. The first stage addressed weapons, ammunition, fire-control equipment, wireless installations, and other components required for warlike service. Final disposal could involve sinking, breaking up, or narrowly specified alternative uses.

The detail reveals how a ship's military character was being defined. Removing ammunition alone left a vessel capable of receiving more. Removing guns left other parts of the fighting system. The treaty dealt with connected capacities because a warship was not reducible to a painted name or one conspicuous weapon.

Mikasa's preservation required a particular agreement rather than an automatic right under a general museum exception. The surviving diplomatic file includes petitions seeking permission to keep it. The archival exhibition describes a January 1925 decision allowing preservation on condition that it could not return to active service. Combat equipment was removed or made unusable, and major work fixed the hull to Yokosuka's shore.^[17]

That condition gives the berth its historical importance. The ship had to cease being available for the cycle that the nearby dry docks supported. Its position could not simply be a temporary pause between two periods afloat. Permanence was part of what made preservation acceptable.

The association's account gives the movement a ceremonial orientation as well as a mechanical one: the bow was fixed toward the Imperial Palace. The vessel could retain a relationship to imperial commemoration while losing its capacity to sail and fight. Its material treatment and symbolic treatment were different operations performed on the same hull.

The preservation works were completed in November 1926. A document dated November 12 transferred responsibility from the Yokosuka naval authorities to the preservation association.^[18] Ending military usefulness therefore produced a new practical responsibility. Somebody still had to care for the object, but care was no longer justified by preparing it for its next deployment.

Here the port's familiar engineering purpose had been reversed. A dock emptied around a ship so that work could lead back to the sea. The memorial installation kept the ship on shore so that its historical identity could outlast the end of that possibility.

After Japan's defeat in 1945, occupation authorities required the removal of Mikasa's guns, bridge, masts, and other upper works. The restoration completed in 1961, supported by donations and American naval assistance, returned a recognizable battleship outline to the site. It did not return an operational ship to the navy.^[19]

That distinction affects how the vessel can be read. A reconstructed bridge can explain where command activities were concentrated without being the untouched platform of 1905. The surviving hull has a different material history from the structures recreated above it. Neither becomes more intelligible by assigning the entire object one date.

Around Yokosuka, three forms of survival now stand beside one another. The old dry docks remain working infrastructure. The steam hammers preserve machines after their productive lives have ended. Mikasa preserves a ship whose permanent incapacity was deliberately built into its memorial setting.

These are different answers to the question of what should continue. For the docks, useful operation has endured. For the hammers, the machines have become available to inspect apart from their former workplace. For the battleship, preservation has required both permanent withdrawal and later reconstruction.

The shore makes those differences physical. It could receive a foreign-built vessel, expose a hull for repair, or give an obsolete warship a place it would never leave. Yokosuka's naval history lies in those decisions about capacity as much as in the ships seen moving through the harbor.