Kosuge Slip Dock

The dock was the pioneering development and the first Japanese foreign joint venture in a modern ship repair facility. The site includes the first steam-powered and earliest surviving Western-style slip dock in Japan (UK, 1869) and Japan's oldest surviving brick building (hauling engine house, 1869).
Thomas B. Glover went into a joint venture with two of the Satsuma clan, including one Satsuma students who, like the Choshu Five, undertook a clandestine voyage to England. They imported the Kosuge Slip Dock from Aberdeen, Scotland. On the inauguration day of Kosuge in 1869, Glover effortlessly pulled his ship on its cradle out of the water by steam. A large crowd witnessed this momentous event. The engine house is built with the oldest surviving brick building in Japan, built with bricks which a Dutch naval engineering officer, Hendrik Hardes trained Japanese workers to bake for the building of the Nagasaki Ironworks（predecessor of Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard) . The direct import of technology from the West is the second phase of the Meiji Industrial Revolution, the transplant of machinery and technology from the West together with the engineers to show how it worked, and to train Japanese students in these skills. This resulted in a period of major adoption and adaptation by the Japanese themselves.