Read the history
The Dawn
Up to 1895
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1878
Shozo Kawasaki opens (establishes) Kawasaki Tsukiji Shipyard (Tokyo).
Our company was founded in October 1896, but our shipbuilding business started eighteen years before that. The origin of our company was in 1878, when our founder, Shozo Kawasaki, opened the Kawasaki Tsukiji Shipyard in Tsukiji, Tokyo.
Shozo Kawasaki was born in Kagoshima as the son of a kimono merchant in 1837. At the age of 17, he went to Nagasaki—the only window to western civilization at the time—and accumulated training as a trade merchant. When he was 27, he moved to Osaka and started a shipping business, but had difficult experiences such as his ship being wrecked and sinking with his cargo during a storm.
After that, in 1869, he was employed at a company that handled Ryukyu sugar and had been established by a Kagoshima samurai. In 1873, he was commissioned by the Ministry of Finance to conduct investigations on Ryukyu sugar and sea routes to Ryukyu (currently Okinawa). The following year, he was appointed as vice president of Japan National Mail Steamship Company, and successfully opened a sea route to Ryukyu, transporting sugar to mainland Japan.
During this time, Shozo Kawasaki encountered several sea accidents that influenced his destiny. Through these bad experiences, his trust in Western ships deepened, as they had more spacious interiors and were faster and more stable than the traditional Japanese ships of the Edo period. At the same time, he developed a strong interest in the modern shipbuilding industry.
In 1878, with the support of Masayoshi Matsukata, an older man from the same hometown and the Vice Minister of Finance at the time, Kawasaki borrowed land from the government along the Sumida River, Minami Iida-cho, Tsukiji, (currently 7-chome, Tsukiji, Chuo-ku) in Tokyo. There, he established Kawasaki Tsukiji Shipyard, taking his first step into the shipbuilding industry.
In 1881, he opened the Kawasaki Hyogo Shipyard in Higashidemachi, Hyogo. In 1886, he borrowed the government-operated Hyogo Shipyard (Kobe) and merged it with the Kawasaki Hyogo Shipyard, renaming it Kawasaki Dockyard. He then consolidated the Kawasaki Tsukiji Shipyard in Tokyo with the dockyard in Hyogo.
Founder Shozo Kawasaki