The stone foundations of the Satsuma cotton spinning mill stand on the road between downtown and Sengan-en. Shimazu Tadayoshi built it in 1867 using machines bought in Manchester and seven British engineers smuggled in to operate them — at a time when the shogunate still forbade foreigners to live in the country. It was the first mechanised cotton mill in Japan and ran for almost thirty years before fire destroyed the buildings.
What remains is the engineer's house — the so-called Ijinkan, the oldest surviving Western-style building in Japan — and the low stone walls of the mill itself. The site is part of the same UNESCO Industrial Revolution inscription as the Shoko Shuseikan at Sengan-en next door, and the two are best visited together.