Following in their footsteps

Published on: 19 March 2025

In April 2024 Rebecca, one of Gallery Oldham’s curators, travelled to Kagoshima (formerly known as Satsuma) to continue our research into historic links between Oldham and Japan. Art Fund’s Jonathan Ruffer curatorial grant programme supported this trip. In this second blog Rebecca tells us a bit more about how she came to find herself 6,000 miles from home and searching for traces of Victorian Oldhamers in the shadow of Japan’s most active volcano…

In the centre of the photo there is a view of a distant volcano, which has smoke coming out of it. In the foreground there is a branch of cherry blossom, which takes up most of the upper half of the image. The lower half of the image shows a traditional Japanese formal garden, with buildings.
Japan’s most active volcano, Sakura-jima, from Sengan-en, April 2024

Many of the Japanese men from the Satsuma Students delegation went on to make huge contributions to Japanese society. This means that there is plenty of information about their lives, both in Japanese and English. The Oldham men played a much smaller role and it was quite routine for engineers from Platt Brothers to travel around the world, therefore it is harder to find out about them.

We wanted to know if there is any information held by Japanese partners about these ordinary working men. Our research volunteer Alison has been working on finding out as much as possible from the Oldham side, and we will do a separate post about this. We also wanted to understand more about the context which led to Oldham being identified as a useful source of information and machinery for the Satsuma domain. Before my visit I made contact with colleagues in the Kagoshima Prefectural Office. They were extremely helpful in introducing me to further contacts and providing interpretation support.

The Satsuma Students Museum

One of the most important locations I wanted to visit was the Satsuma Students Museum. This is on the other side of the peninsula from Kagoshima City, in Ichikikushikino. The museum resembles a ship, on the site of the delegation’s departure for Europe. Today it takes about an hour to drive there from Kagoshima City, but it was easy to see how inaccessible this part of the country would have been 160 years ago. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for the men, who waited for months in the village for the ship which was to take them to Europe.

Photo of outside of museum. It is made of red brick and shaped a bit like a boat, with a deck on the upper floor. It has a mast. A flag pole in front of the building has the Japanese and British flags
The Satsuma Students Museum, Kagoshima Prefecture, March 2024
Sengan-en

The other key location for me was Sengan-en. This is the stately home owned by the Satsuma clan. It is also the site of the house that the Oldham engineers lived in, which is still there today and open as a museum. Today it is a World Heritage Site due to its importance as the birthplace of Japan’s industrial revolution.

Photo of a building built in a mixture of European and Japanese style. It is two stories high, with a balcony running around the upper floor. It has a covered verandah on the lower floor. The walls are cream coloured, and the woodwork is light pink-brown.
Ijinkan, known in English as the Foreign Engineers’ Residence. The Oldham men lived here for a year.

In addition to these key historic sites I visited the massive Reimeikan Museum and the Museum of Meiji Restoration to learn more about the wider history of this period. I also went to Kagoshima City Museum of Art to check out the city’s art collection.

So what did I find?

During my visit I learnt loads about Japanese history and understood a lot more about the context which led to the delegation coming to Europe. I found that we aren’t missing out on information about the Oldham men, since there doesn’t seem to be any in Japan either. Kagoshima had largely burnt to the ground during the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877, destroying most paper records.

I have come back inspired to do more work to make sure as many people as possible know about this fascinating part of our history. This includes developing an exhibition for 2027, which will celebrate our shared history and future, on the 160th anniversary of the opening of the Kagoshima Mill.

I love this piece of our history as in some ways it’s just ordinary men doing their job, and but in other ways everything about the exchange is completely extraordinary. What must it have been like for the young men waiting in Hashima for their ship for months, knowing that they were setting out into the complete unknown? And for the men leaving Oldham did it feel routine, since people were travelling all round the world from Platt Brothers at the time? The journeys in both directions were long and dangerous, and fraught with rough seas, illness and potentially hostile people along the way. In the end though, men from both countries were pioneers who founded a relationship between Greater Manchester and Japan which has continued for 160 years so far, and is still going strong.

The first part of this blog is here.