The Man of Brass and Stars – How the Brilliant Inventor Hisashige Tanaka Thrust Samurai Japan into Modernity
The Man Who Was a Vehicle of the Future
In an era when Japan, still kneeling on its bamboo legs of tradition, first encountered the electric West, a man appeared with a mind full of gears, springs, and stars. They called him the “Japanese Edison.” At the age of eight, he created a secret box with a clever lock; half a century later, every impulse running through the copper wires of the company now known as Toshiba echoed that original click. His karakuri dolls shot arrows, poured tea, and imitated human emotions, because—as he himself would say—a good mechanism should move not only wood and steel, but above all, hearts.
But the talents of Hisashige Tanaka did not stop at the fairground stages of Edo. In his workshop in Fushimi, he received astrologers of the Tsuchimikado clan—the guardians of the imperial calendar—to collaborate on mechanical designs that could measure time. From this alchemy emerged the shumisengi: a cosmological clock in which a miniature sun and moon danced around the copper Mount Shumisen, marking Buddhist eras with the punctuality of a gong. Meanwhile, outside the windows, young rōnin shouted sonnō jōi, rumors of the Black Ships drifted through the air, and Tanaka—a man of blood and brass—felt that the universe he had managed to enclose within a clock was now cracking open above the rooftops of Kyōto.
Yet the Meiji era’s turn toward modernity was not something that frightened Hisashige. He did not wait for modernization—he invented it himself, screw by screw, in the spirit of wakon-yōsai (和魂洋才) —“Japanese spirit, Western knowledge.” From the first domestic steam locomotive to the prototype of a Japanese telephone and the electric lamp, there was no object of daily life he didn’t try to improve. Each of his designs, even one as modest as the pillow clock makura-dokei, had both function and soul. And when his heart stopped beating on November 7th, 1881, his workshop in Ginza continued to tick with the same rhythm by which he had ushered Japan into modernity. Tanaka left behind not only mechanical masterpieces—he left a map for how to transfer dreams from the glow of paper lanterns to the electric wires of the future. His workshop, now known as the Toshiba Corporation, still operates in the twenty-first century—this time working on semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and green energy. Let us now explore his life—from a childhood spent in his father’s workshop polishing turtle shells, through the loneliness of a fairground inventor-artist, to cosmological clocks, government commissions, and the widespread acclaim of a man who turned craftsmanship into a vehicle of the future.
Who Was Hisashige Tanaka?
In the days when Japan still stood behind the closed gates of sakoku, wrapped in the silence of its own traditions and the strict shadow of the shogunate, a man was born who—like a mechanical spring—resisted and pushed forward relentlessly. Hisashige Tanaka, later known as Karakuri Giemon (機巧儀右衛門—almost literally: “Mr. Automatons”), embodied the spirit of ancient Japanese craftsmanship and an insatiable curiosity about the world, sparked by Dutch books from Dejima. He was called the “Japanese Edison,” though perhaps he had more in common with Tesla—a solitary genius with a mind full of gears, springs, and stars.
He created dolls that wept with emotion, clocks that struck not just the hours but the very meaning of existence, lamps brighter than any daimyo’s candles, and eventually, machines that would transform Japan. Without degrees, without university, without government support—a self-taught dreamer who rose from ancient Fukuoka toward the future, taking the first steps down a path later followed by giants like Toshiba. But before industry was born, before the telegraph and steam arrived—there was a boy who did not want to inherit his father’s workshop. He wanted to remake the world from scratch. Let us now come closer to his life.
The Life of Hisashige Tanaka
Kurume, 1799–1819
A Childhood in a Turtle Shell Workshop
At the back of a workshop on Kurume’s main street, where hard, shiny pieces of turtle shell were aired out, the air smelled of warm resin, polished shell, and a hint of charcoal. In this colorful dusk grew a boy named Hisashige—still just Hisa, the son of Master Tanaka. He still walked barefoot, slipping between crates full of raw materials, listening to the steady rasping of files and the soft chime of small craft tools. At first, he merely handed tools to his father; soon, however, his fingers—strangely sure for an eight-year-old—began testing his own ideas.
In the evenings, after the rest of the household had gone to sleep, he would pull from the corner a granite inkstone, mysterious screws, and a piece of dyed cord. From these scraps, he created a miniature box—“a stone inkstone chest with a secret lock.” One had to twist the cord in a precisely designated way to hear a soft click and open the lid. When he brought it the next day to his terakoya (more about Edo-era schools here: Terakoya Schools for the Children of Ordinary People in the Time of the Shogunate – There Are Still Things We Can Learn From Them in the 21st Century), the history teacher tried his luck, then the whole class, and finally the abbot of the neighboring temple; no one succeeded. In the eyes of his peers, Hisa felt for the first time a flash of awe—more addictive than the scent of polished shell.
Discipline at school was strict: calligraphy in seiza position, cold reed canes for every crooked brushstroke, mechanical recitations of the “Analects.” But in a library cabinet, protected from Kyushu’s moisture, lay a freshly imported copy of the Karakuri-zui—an illustrated treatise on mechanical marvels (more on karakuri ningyō dolls here: Karakuri Ningyō of Ancient Japan – Wooden Mechanical Robots That Served Tea, Danced, and Wrote). For most students, it was just a series of strange drawings of gears; for Hisashige, it became a map to a world where the spirit of bamboo dolls came to life through the quiet workings of a spring. While the calligraphy master drew neat rectangles of kanji, the boy in his imagination was already building miniature catapults, rice self-scooping spoons, and dolls that could bow and brew tea.
In summer, the waters of the Chikugo River smelled of algae and sun-warmed silt. At fourteen, while other children splashed in the shallows, Hisa dismantled an old loom and began constructing his own thread-winding mechanism. By evening, when the sky took on the color of ripe kaki, he showed his father a piece of cloth patterned with an intricate design of paulownia leaves—a pattern no one in Kurume had seen before. His father was silent longer than custom dictated, then sighed restlessly: his son would not inherit the workshop; his son would slip past all boundaries of traditional craft.
At night, walking along the path beside the rice fields, the clatter of Hisa’s sandals echoed with imagined ticking of clocks rather than cicadas. He dreamed of machines that could count the stars, of dolls that could write poetry, of lamps so bright they could illuminate the darkest corner of a street. And perhaps it was then, walking in the glow of fireflies, that he decided he would not become a master of shell—he would become a master of motion. Thus began the journey of a boy who wanted to rewrite the world in the language of gears and springs, not yet suspecting that his first step would echo into the age of steam and telegraphs.
1820–1833 MArketpalces and Celebrations
The Wandering Genius of Karakuri
At dawn, as the mist lifted from the Chikugo valley, Hisashige set off on the road with a bundle of gleaming boxes and bamboo tubes tied with hemp rope. With one hand, he pulled a cart; with the other, he held close to his chest a small but heavy casket—the heart of his performances. As soon as word reached him that dignitaries were arriving at a local daimyo’s residence, he would appear like a shadow and silently set up his portable stage.
In the glow of oil lamps, the first rustle could be heard: from behind a painted folding screen emerged Yumi-hiki dōji (弓引き童子), a bow-drawing boy with a porcelain face. Miniature fingers gripped the bow, the string drew taut, and the samurai heads bowed in suspense, breaths held. Three arrows struck the silk fan, the fourth—just as the master predicted—missed by a hair and slipped onto the tatami mat. A silence full of disbelief fell over the room; light and shadow, or perhaps the minds of the spectators, played tricks—it seemed as if a faint trace of sorrow shimmered in the doll’s eyes. Or was she truly saddened by the missed shot? So lifelike... It was then that silver ichibukin coins began to chime in the hands of the audience—coins tossed onto a lacquered tray like a shower of admiration. Pride mixed with trembling knees in Hisashige: he was only twenty-one years old, and already bowing before men in ceremonial armor who could change his fate with a single nod. Or take his head.
After his performances in palaces, he moved on to the bustling fairs of Edo. There, on the open square before the Sensō-ji temple, an entirely different kind of theater unfolded—the scent of grilled squid and smoke from charcoal stalls formed a curtain behind which his dolls took on a different life. Children squealed with delight, shogunate guards burst out laughing, and street vendors offered him bowls of udon noodles in gratitude. In the light of paper lanterns, he realized that a mechanism moves not only wood and springs but also human hearts.
He traveled without pause, from province to province, like a wandering monk—but instead of sutras, he carried faith in moving gears. Every night, before falling asleep on a raised bed in a roadside inn, he would dismantle his dolls, oil their tiny bearings, and listen to the metallic whisper beneath his fingertips—as though checking the pulse of his own dreams.
Osaka, 1834–1836
Pragmatist in the City of Merchants
The fashion for karakuri performances, however, began to wane like the wick of a used candle. The crowds that had left handfuls of coins in Edo expected something more practical than the bow of a painted boy in Osaka. The merchant world of the Dōjima district calculated everything in the neat columns of the abacus: cost of materials, fire risk, price of light. Hisashige sensed the shift in the wind—this was no longer a time for theatrical emotions, but for practical marvels.
In a rented room above a tea shop, he spread out new sketches—not of dolls this time, but of lamps. He experimented with glass from Sakai, long cotton wicks, and a clever air pump designed to intensify the flame. Thus was born the mujin-tō, the “everlasting lamp”: ten times brighter than a candle and protected by a glass shade from mischievous gusts of wind. When he first illuminated an alleyway in Dōtonbori, the light reflected in the canal spread like a golden trail all the way to the Ebisu Bridge—and passersby visibly slowed down, stunned by this sudden nocturnal aurora.
At the same time, he assembled from pieces of brass and steel hinges the kaichū shokudai—a pocket candlestick that could fit into the sleeve of a kimono. A merchant could take it on his journey along the dark paths of the Yodo River; a samurai could light his way to a nighttime guard post; a geisha could brighten her dressing room in the kabuki theater. In a world where every mon (文)—the smallest coin in Edo—had weight, Tanaka was no longer selling spectacle, but safety and convenience.
Despite a certain success, at night—when the chatter of teahouses faded and distant bon-odori drums moaned from the direction of Sumiyoshi—he still heard in his mind the soft “click” of his first little box. He knew that lamps and candlesticks were only the vestibule of the world of invention; already, far more ambitious plans circled in his thoughts. The world was about to spin faster, and he—the son of a turtle-shell craftsman—intended to give that motion the rhythm of ticking gears.
Kyōto / Fushimi, 1837–1853
Clocks, Calendar, and Cosmos
In the southern outskirts of Fushimi, in a wooden house squeezed between sake breweries, Tanaka opened a modest yet proudly named 機巧堂 — Karakuri-dō, “Hall of Automata.” Its masters were no longer dolls, but gears and planets: scattered across the mat were sketches depicting the towering Mount Shumisen above the world, with the sun and moon circling in tiny orbits above it. In the evening light of the mujin-tō lamps, the inked lines resembled a map of a newly discovered sky.
Astrologers from the Tsuchimikado clan—the guardians of the imperial calendar—regularly visited Tanaka in his Fushimi workshop. Dressed in silk robes the color of clouds, they brought scrolls covered with charts of planetary, lunar, and stellar motion. Their knowledge—rooted in centuries-old calendrical tradition—collided with Tanaka’s mechanics and precision, creating a unique dialogue between ancient cosmology and modern engineering. Over bowls of green tea, they debated with Tanaka: did the sun truly need to follow the ecliptic, or could there be a more elegant Western way of measuring time?
The culmination of this alchemy was the shumisengi—a cosmological clock whose miniature sun and moon danced around a copper mountain, marking Buddhist eras and seasons with the precision of a gong strike. Barely a year later, after a thousand hours spent filing parts thinner than a hair, he completed the mannen-jimeishō: an eternal chronometer designed to breathe for twelve months on a single wind. Its lid opened like butterfly wings, revealing a labyrinth of a thousand hand-cut gears.
In the evenings, Tanaka would visit Shinto scholars, who viewed the invention as a kind of technical prayer; in the mornings, he debated theories of Nieuwenhuis with Dutch physicians in merchant residences. But the city pulsed with increasing violence: young rōnin shouting sonnō jōi (more on this here: The Republic of Ezo – A One-of-a-Kind Samurai Democracy) smashed the windows of foreign goods shops. Rumors swirled of black ships and ghostly men in leather shoes. Tanaka, a man of blood and brass, felt that the cosmos he had managed to enclose in a clock was now beginning to open and fracture just above the rooftops of Kyōto.
Saga, 1854–1863
Steam, Steel, and the First Locomotive
In the year when Russian emissary Yevfimy Putyatin anchored his frigate in Nagasaki and, before stunned officials, demonstrated the hiss of steam, Tanaka set off westward to the domain of Saga. There, in the vast Seirenkata complex, heaps of coal, the scent of sulfur, and the whisper of Dutch manuals translated on yellowing washi awaited him. Daimyō Nabeshima Naomasa received him like an alchemist of the future: he gave him free rein and a purse full of silver coins.
In the first courtyard, among steaming crucibles, Tanaka built a model steam locomotive. When the heated water hissed in the brass cylinder and the plate-sized wheels rolled along a cinder track, the workers shouted like children; no one had ever seen metal come alive before. In the second hangar, a reverberatory furnace was taking shape—a furnace whose fiery maw would soon spit out the barrels of Armstrong cannons. At night, in the glow of ruddy flames, hammers beat like taiko drums, and sparks shot into the black sky like swarming fireflies.
There was no time for awe: in the workshop, he was simultaneously sketching the plans for the steamship Ryōfu-maru, the design of a portable telegraph, and notes on a flexible wire for signal transmission. Tanaka absorbed everything, flipping through the pages of Dutch books: the impact force of a piston, the length of a rocker arm, the secret of a thread that could withstand the greatest pressure.
In the winter of 1863, when frost made the snow on the castle roofs crackle, the first steel cannon barrel emerged from the furnace; on the test range, the roar tore through the silence of the rice fields, and the echo carried all the way to Ariake Bay. Tanaka stared into the smoke and saw not just a cannon, but a distant horizon—a nation that would soon need all the power of steam and electricity to survive the storm of foreign fleets. The samurai lowered their swords in a gesture of respect, and he, trembling from exhaustion, instead of resting, opened another sketchbook: the future ticked in his mind like a clock that could not be stopped.
Kurume, 1864–1872
Return Home and Weapons of a New Era
As civil war began to smolder in distant provinces, Hisashige returned to his hometown of Kurume as though entering a forge of memories. But instead of the scent of polished shell from his childhood, he was greeted by the heavy odor of gunpowder and hot oil. In the old warehouse where his father's workshop once stood, he set up a carpenter’s bench on which he laid his latest fascination: a needle gun, dismantled down to the last screw. He lined the walls with wool blankets to muffle the echo of test shots—though neighbors later recalled the sound of “steel striking steel” echoing through the alleyways like a dry proclamation of modernity.
At night, when his mujin-tō lamp cast faint amber circles across the tatami, Tanaka bent over sheets of washi paper. His brush, dipped in ink as thick as tar, traced the lines of firing mechanisms, drew striker springs and tiny gas nozzles intended to make the weapon lighter, faster, more deadly. Beside them lay notes on an improved fire pump and sketches for a new field lamp—always two eras within one mind: destruction and utility.
During those years, he took in a boy with keen eyes, the son of a local goldsmith. Daikichi, later known as Hisashige II, observed his stepfather in silence, handing him files and pliers, just as young Hisa had once passed them to his own father. Amid the clatter of hammers and the creak of springs, not only weapons were born, but a legacy: Tanaka already knew that the clock of the future could not stop with his final breath. It had to keep ticking.
Tokyo, Meiji 1873–1881
Telegrams from Ginza
The train pulled wagons full of coal and dreams to the capital, where the streets pulsed with new words: “steam,” “capital,” “telegraph.” The Ministry of Industry welcomed Tanaka as a treasure trove of ideas—so he moved to Ginza and set up his workshop on the second floor of a rented temple building in Roppongi. Between the fragrance of incense and the dampness of tatami, he arranged lathes, a drafting table, and a spool of lacquered wire. Soon a wooden plaque appeared above the door: 田中製作所 — Tanaka Seisakusho.
The days passed to the rhythm of Morse signals: ton-ton-tsū (“tick tick tiiiick”)—silver sparks leapt between contacts, and Tanaka recorded the vibrations in a small notebook. At night he laid out brass tubes, receivers with parchment membranes, and experimented with a voice trapped in wire—a telephone prototype that chirped like a cricket. In another corner of the workshop, a hōji-ki was taking shape—a mechanism designed to transmit time signals (jihō 時報) directly to government offices and railway stations; the main spring coiled with a soft click, as if an invisible clock of Japan ticked inside.
Outside, Ginza blazed with gas lamps, ricksha drivers in gleaming happi jackets called to customers, and telegraph wires sang in foreign tongues cast across the ocean. Tanaka, hunched over his latest spring, once again listened to the hum: he knew that every spark in a copper wire was one more step toward the world he had dreamed of as the boy with the secret box. When his heart stopped beating on November 7, 1881, the clocks in his workshop still ticked quietly with the same rhythm. Outside, the ring of ricksha bells already echoed like the fanfare of a new era, and telegraph wires carried a name that would soon grow into legend—Toshiba.
The Legacy That Became a Corporation
From Tanaka to Toshiba
After the inventor’s death, the workshop near the Roppongi temple was inherited by his adopted son, Daikichi, who by then signed his name as Hisashige II. Over time, the small studio began receiving larger orders from the Ministry of Communications, and in 1904 it was renamed Shibaura Seizōsho—the Shibaura Engineering Works, after the coastal district of Tokyo where a new factory for generators and engines was established.
In 1939, Shibaura merged with Tokyo Denki, a specialist in incandescent lamps originating from Hakunetsu-sha, a pioneer of electric lighting in Japan. From this union was born Tokyo Shibaura Denki—a name soon shortened by employees and clients alike to the softer-sounding Toshiba (東芝, combining the characters “Tō” for Tokyo and “Shiba” for Shibaura).
The postwar decades brought rapid development: from Japan’s first washing machines and televisions, to nuclear reactors and large-scale power systems, and eventually semiconductors and laptops that brought the Toshiba brand into millions of homes in the 1990s. However, the 20th century ended with a series of turbulences, and the 21st fared no better: the collapse of Westinghouse, a major accounting scandal (2015), and a forced sale of several divisions.
In 2023, a plan to restore stability was approved by a consortium known as Japan Industrial Partners, which purchased 78.65% of Toshiba’s shares for USD 14 billion and delisted the company from the stock exchange. Since September 2023, Toshiba has operated as a private entity (TBJH Inc.), preparing for a restructuring outlined by the new management in a letter dated December 2023. The company emphasizes that the year 2025 marks exactly 150 years since the opening of Tanaka’s original workshop.
The new leadership is focused on green transformation technologies—steam turbines for hydrogen power plants, SCiB lithium-ion battery storage systems, and silicon carbide semiconductors developed in collaboration with automotive industry partners. Simultaneously, research is underway on quantum photonics in laboratories in Cambridge and Kawasaki, conducted under the motto: “creating things that do not exist.”
Thus, the spring once set in motion by the hand of Karakuri Giemon still ticks—today in server rooms powering smart energy grids and inside magnetic trains. Whatever the next century brings, every impulse running through Toshiba’s copper wires is an echo of the secret box that eight-year-old Hisashige Tanaka once opened amid the scent of turtle shell.
The Masterpieces on Which Japan Climbed Toward Modernity
Hisashige Tanaka was not merely an inventor—he was a creator of an era. Each of his works contained not only a mechanism, but also a worldview: a world of precise gears that simultaneously stirred the soul. His karakuri—such as Yumi-hiki dōji, shooting arrows straight into the hearts of spectators, the Moji-kaki doll that wrote poetry, or Chahai-dōji serving tea with the grace of a geisha—were not mere entertainment. They were meditations on what it means to be human in the presence of the machine.
At a time when most clocks measured European linear time, Tanaka created the shumisengi, a clock that accounted for the unequal lengths of Japanese hours through the seasons—a tribute to the cosmic order of the Buddhist universe (more about timekeeping in Tokugawa Japan here: The Hour of the Rat, the Koku of the Tiger – How Was Time Measured in Shogunate-Era Japan?). His mannen-jimeishō was not merely a mechanical calendar—it was a philosophical treatise cast in metal. Every one of his inventions, even something as modest as the makura-dokei (pillow clock), had both function and soul.
Yet he was not a prisoner of tradition. The pocket candlestick kaichū shokudai and the mujin-tō—a lamp that could burn for hours without maintenance—were answers to the needs of everyday life. Tanaka understood people, their limitations and desires. Even his Unryū-sui (“Cloud–Dragon Water”) water pump was, above all, a way to save crops—only secondarily a feat of engineering.
When the era of steam and steel arrived, he did not hesitate. He built Japan’s first steam locomotive, founded a cannon foundry, and contributed to military modernization. But shortly thereafter, he returned once again to tools of peace: telephone prototypes, domestically manufactured light bulbs, electricity-free refrigerators, rickshaws, irrigation pumps, and bicycles. It seemed there was no object of daily life that Tanaka would not try to make more human.
Philosophy of Work and the Spirit of Modern Japan
His credo could be summed up in one phrase: Wakon-yōsai – Japanese spirit, Western knowledge. It was not about copying the West, but about transplanting ideas into soil he knew well. For Tanaka, there was no conflict between loyalty to one’s own tradition and openness to the world. He believed that “inventions exist to serve people”—not for profit, not for ambition, but to make life simpler, lighter, more dignified.
Tanaka embodied the Meiji no seishin—the spirit of the Meiji era. He didn’t wait for modernization to come to him. He invented it himself, step by step, screw by screw. He was not a politician, nor a general. He was a master who turned his workshop into a forge of the future.
And perhaps that is precisely why his story has endured. Because it is not a tale of triumph over others, but of the victory of imagination over time. Because every clicking gear in his machines was the quiet voice of Japan learning to speak a new language—without losing its own soul.
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"Strong Japanese Women"
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未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
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