In April 2024 Rebecca, one of Gallery Oldham’s curators, travelled to Kagoshima to continue our research into historic links between Oldham and Japan. Her trip was funded by Art Fund’s Jonathan Ruffer curatorial grant programme. In the first of a series of blogs, Rebecca shares some of the background which led to her making this trip….
This project began in 2015, when the Embassy of Japan in the UK invited Gallery Oldham to be part of the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Satsuma Students arriving in the UK.
Like all parts of history, there are many events which led to this point, but I will summarise them briefly here:
In 1865 Japan was closed to the “West”, that’s to say the government in Edo (now Tokyo) had severely limited trade with other countries. Very few foreigners were allowed in, and hardly any Japanese citizens were allowed to leave. By the 1800s not all of the regional rulers were satisfied with this arrangement though. The Daimyo (roughly equivalent to a British Lord) of the Satsuma domain was a progressive and forward-looking ruler, who felt strongly that Japan needed to modernise. He felt that they needed to learn from other countries to do this. He secretly assembled a delegation to send to Europe to study various industrial process and arms manufacture.
Arrival in Britain
The group of 19 men arrived in London in July 1865 and enrolled at University College London. They subsequently became known as the Satsuma Students. From here they travelled to other parts of the UK to learn about industrial processes.
Three of the men, Godai Tomoatsu, Niiro Hisonobu and Hori Takayuki, travelled to Oldham and Manchester. Their mission was to learn more about industrialised cotton manufacture. At the time Oldham was at the global forefront of the textile spinning industry and the students’ needed to gather as much knowledge as possible before returning to Japan. They spent a number of months at Oldham firm Platt Brothers, then purchased textile machinery to take back to Japan with them. When they returned to Japan they were accompanied by seven men from Platt Brothers, whose lives we will explore in a later post.
You can find out more about their journey here.
Read the next part of this blog here.
