Kanrin Maru was Japan's first sail and screw-driven steam corvette. She was ordered in 1853 from the Netherlands, the only Western country with which Japan had diplomatic relations throughout its period of sakoku, by the shōguns government, the Bakufu. She was delivered on September 21, 1857, by Lt. Willem Huyssen van Kattendijke of the Dutch navy. The ship was used at the newly established Naval School of Nagasaki in order to build up knowledge of Western warship technology. Kanrin Maru, as a screw-driven steam warship, represented a new technological advance in warship design which had been introduced in the West only ten years earlier with. The ship was built by the shipyard of Fop Smit at Kinderdijk in the Netherlands, where the virtually identical screw-steamship with schooner-rig Bali of the Dutch navy was also built in 1856. She allowed Japan to get its first experience with some of the newest advances in ship design.
Three years later, the Bakufu sent Kanrin Maruon a mission to the United States, clearly wanting to make a point to the world that Japan had now mastered western navigation techniques and western ship technologies. On 9 February 1860, the Kanrin Maru, captained by Katsu Kaishū together with John Manjiro, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and a total of 96 Japanese sailors, and the American officer John M. Brooke, left Uraga for San Francisco. This became the second official Japanese embassy to cross the Pacific Ocean, around 250 years after the embassy of Hasekura Tsunenaga to Mexico and then Europe in 1614, aboard the Japanese-built galleon. Kanrin Maru was accompanied by a United States Navy ship, the. The official objective of the mission was to send the first ever Japanese embassy to the US, and to ratify the new treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation between the United States and Japan.
In January 1861, "Kanrin Maru" was dispatched to the Bonin Islands, also known as Ogasawara Islands in Japanese. The shogunate of Japan first claimed the Pacific islands and its multi-ethnical settler community in the face of competing Western empires. The islands had previously been claimed by Britain, and the United States had considered making them a navy base. The flagship "Kanrin Maru" was put to use in a display of military power reminiscent of the arrival of Commodore Perry's black ships in Japan just a few years earlier.
Boshin war
By the end of 1867, the Bakufu was attacked by pro-imperial forces, initiating the Boshin War which led to the Meiji Restoration. Towards the end of the conflict, in September 1868, after several defeats by the Bakufu, Kanrin Maru was one of the eight modern ships led by Enomoto Takeaki towards the northern part of Japan, in his final attempt to wage a counter-attack against pro-imperial forces. The fleet encountered a typhoon on its way northward, and Kanrin Maru, having suffered damage, was forced to take refuge in Shimizu harbour, where she was captured by Imperial forces, who bombarded and boarded the ship notwithstanding a white flag of surrender, and put the skeleton crew aboard to the sword. Enomoto Takeaki finally surrendered in May 1869, and after the end of the conflict, Kanrin Maru was used by the new Imperial government for the development of the northern island of Hokkaido. She was lost there in a typhoon in 1871, at Esashi.
Kanrin Maru today
In 1990, a ship replica twice the size of the original was ordered for manufacture in the Netherlands, according to the original plans. The ship was visible in the theme park of Huis Ten Bosch in Kyūshū, in southern Japan. It is now used as a sightseeing ship to the Naruto whirlpools from Minami Awaji harbour.
