4 - François Léonce Verny and the Beginning of the ‘Modern’ Technical Education in Japan

Summary

INTRODUCTION

FRANCOIS LÉONCE VERNY (1837–1908) was a French naval engineer who was ordered to establish a ‘modern’ arsenal in Yokosuka, equipped with dockyards, ironworks and a school of vocational education and training for technical personnel. It was ‘modern’ because the machine tools, such as grinding machines, circular saws, drills, steam engines and steam hammers brought from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France, were of the highest technical standard.

Verny, however, brought not only technical equipment, but also the operating personnel who gave lessons to Japanese learners in a technical school housed in a building named Kōsha (lit. school building, which soon became the official name for the school) at the shipyard developed by Verny. Between 1865 and 1907 this school educated and trained nearly 300 engineers and technical foremen. Some of its first students went on to become specialized engineers, technicians, foremen, and administrators at other shipyards, naval arsenals, and factories in Nagasaki, Ishikawajima and Kure, or teachers at technical institutions. A second school, for foremen, was established in 1872.

According to human capital theory, a country can develop only if its citizens can benefit from education and the vocational training system. Human resources such as ‘engineers’ are the result of higher education and therefore constitute a core factor in a country's development. In this sense, Japan owes much to the contribution of French professionals in the training of the first generation of engineers at the beginning of Japan's modernization.

Verny transplanted the concepts and curricula of schools he had attended in France – the École Polytechnique and the École d’Application du Génie Maritime – into the technical school at the Yokosuka Navy Dockyard. But how far were the concepts from these schools in France transferred into the technical education and training system in the Yokosuka school? This chapter addresses the following questions: First, who was Verny, and how can his concept of technical education at the Yokosuka Dockyard be characterized? Second, how were the technical schools at the dockyard organized? In addition, why were these technical schools the beginning of ‘modern’ technical education in Japan? Third, to what extent did technical knowledge acquired in the Yokosuka Dockyard have an impact on Japanese industrialization?