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CHAPTER THREE

MACKENZIE’S PARTNER

The official opening date of the Treaty ports of Nagasaki, Hakodate and Yokohama was 1 July 1859. But there were many adventurers among the China-based traders who could not wait until that date and were willing to risk the dangers of working in unknown Japan without any legal protection. Several were operating in Nagasaki by the end of 1858. Kenneth Ross MacKenzie, who had been born in Edinburgh, was one of these. Sent out by Jardine, Matheson’s Shanghai office in the autumn of 1858, he was reasonably well established by the end of the year.

MacKenzie was well aware that his presence in Japan was illegal before the beginning of July. It is unlikely this technicality caused him any concern. He had been running a tea business in China at Hankow – 600 miles upriver from Shanghai and an area not scheduled to be opened to foreigners until 1861 – an equally illegal operation. MacKenzie was in his fifties and highly experienced in trade in the Far East, an understandable choice of agent by Jardine, Matheson & Co. to establish their giant trading concern in newly opened Nagasaki. It says much for MacKenzie’s courage that by the turn of the year he was arranging his first cargoes to the company’s base in Shanghai.

The first arrivals were well rewarded for their efforts. MacKenzie made a small fortune on the export of seaweed to China and silk to Europe, both ventures arranged through Jardine, Matheson & Co., in the spring of 1859; the trading giant traditionally gave its agents a lot of freedom to work on their own account. MacKenzie, exporting 300 bales of Japanese silk in early 1859, took a third interest in these shipments, investing $26,632 of his own, which netted him a profit of $9536. This amount, earned by MacKenzie in three months, was around twenty times the annual salary of £100 of Glover’s father in Aberdeen at that time.

There were real dangers to contend with in Japan. Anti-foreign fanatics were on the loose and a very nervous British captain carrying a load of 200 tons of Jardine, Matheson’s sugar into Nagasaki in February 1859 recalled:

On my left there was a strong fort bristling with brass guns glittering in the sun; not a soul was to be seen. I was in some doubt to whether they might fire upon me, and send the mast over the side; but no, I was allowed to proceed up the harbour unchallenged.

MacKenzie had found premises to operate from and was well established by the time the first British Consul General to Japan, Rutherford Alcock, stopped off at Nagasaki in June 1859. Alcock was on his way to Edo to establish the British Legation there and noted that weeks still before the official opening date, a dozen Britons were trading in Nagasaki and that fifteen foreign ships were lying at anchor in the harbour.

With Alcock was the first acting British Consul in Nagasaki, C. Pemberton Hodgson. Hodgson was accompanied by his wife and two daughters and his wife’s reminiscences of those days, particularly her first trip ashore, show her dislike of the posting in particular and Japan in general. The Japanese were overcome with curiousity at the female ‘barbarian’ and her children who found themselves surrounded by jostling locals:

I believe I was the first lady who had been seen in the town . . . So the curiosity was excessive and eventually distressing. We got so far that we really did not know what to do, and tried to get into a shop, as I was almost frightened to death . . . poor Eva began crying: but the brutes only laughed the more . . .

The lucky few traders in Nagasaki who had struck it rich tried to keep confidential the profits they were making – 100 to 400 per cent was common – but the secret was soon out. Many adventurers decided to move from the China coast to Japan to cash in.

The new arrivals in the main were disappointed. After the official opening date, trade and profits slumped. The rules of the Treaty were now in force. This meant the arrival of new Treasury Guild officials from Edo. The Guild was a shogun-appointed body with power to control trade. Restrictions on the exchange of money were enforced and the highly profitable barter trade of early 1859 stopped.

Yet there was still enough potential in Japan for MacKenzie to be joined by Glover, then aged twenty-one, on 19 September 1859. The most likely explanation for his arrival in Nagasaki is that Jardine, Matheson sent him from Shanghai to assist MacKenzie. It is possible, too, that MacKenzie had come across him while in China, had been impressed and had later sent for him. Whatever the case, Glover would register himself at the newly established British Consulate in Nagasaki the following month as ‘Clerk etc’ to MacKenzie.

MacKenzie would surely have greeted his young assistant as he disembarked, taking his first steps on the soil of Japan and looking up as so many have done at the lush green hillsides cascading into the ship-filled, bustling harbour. Many of the Westerners arriving in Nagasaki around this time commented on the freshness of the air – especially sweet after the stench of Shanghai. Later Tom would learn that the Japanese collected the town’s sewage nightly and brought it to their farms for fertilising their crops. The two Scots would have walked along the waterfront towards MacKenzie’s Oura office, past the stalls of the yelling fishmongers on which were displayed conger eels and mackerel and all kinds of shellfish. And on past the warehouses stacked with and smelling of tea and rice and soya sauce – Tom would have noted, like so many others, the near-nakedness of the Japanese labourers. Yet it would be wrong to think of Nagasaki at the time as some kind of primitive community. On the contrary, the Japanese houses and buildings, in general, were perfectly adequate. Inside they were spotlessly clean. The people appeared well fed and there was little or no abject poverty to be seen in what appeared to be a well-ordered society.

Already Western-style buildings could be seen when Glover arrived – one was being used by a Dutch engineer, Hendrik Hardes, who had begun to teach the Japanese the rudiments of the shipbuilding trades some years before. There were, too, the Dutch buildings and houses on Dejima, then still a separate artificial island at the north end of the harbour. The foreign settlement at Oura on the south-eastern side of the harbour was beginning to rise, these buildings alien to those of the surrounding Japanese.

Glover would have had a day or two to look round his new base. Nagasaki’s opening had turned the town into a giant market place – a very hot and sticky one, even in mid-September. The port was already known for its pretty girls and their giggling curiosity at the appearance of the tall and fair young Scotsman no doubt attracted Glover.

The streets of the native town were narrow and unpaved and the low-roofed wooden houses unpainted. But like many others, Glover would have been struck by the cleanliness of the people, their houses and their clothing. He would have noticed, too, the complete absence of beggars.

In the back alleys were the stalls of the scissor-grinders and lantern-makers and he would have found umbrellas, ink, incense and spectacles for sale. In the countryside surrounding the town he saw village Japan, where on his approach the children scattered, signalling with their fingers in a circle in front of their eyes. They had been well warned by their mothers to keep clear of the round-eyed ketojin — ‘barbarian’ – who would take them away if they were bad. Late September in Nagasaki is a glorious time of year – the sky is a daily sapphire blue and the breeze blowing in from the bay is cooled by the sea and becomes an almost sensual pleasure as it touches the skin. The land round the town he would have noted was rich in produce. There was rice, maize and millet crowding the small fields and orchards full of apples and oranges and persimmon as well as vineyards heavy with grapes. Among the shrubs there were patches of thistle, recalling for him the countryside surrounding his family home in Scotland.

To escape from the autumn heat he could have climbed the well-worn path to the coolness of the peak of Mount Inasa on the west side of the bay and from there viewed the panorama of Nagasaki below. Far off to the south and west it was just possible to see Takashima among the scattering of other volcanic islands guarding the entrance to the harbour. But before long Glover would have had to get down to work. As MacKenzie’s assistant he wrote his first communication to Jardine, Matheson’s Shanghai office on 22 September 1859, three days after his arrival in Nagasaki.

Glover moved into a house in the Dutch settlement at Dejima on the northern end of the harbour. This fan-shaped island had been built by the Japanese on the waterfront of Nagasaki as a place where select ‘barbarians’ could be observed yet kept under tight control during the centuries of exclusion. Dejima had a single street with Dutch houses on one side and a Dutch ‘factory’ – warehouses – on the other. A sea wall surrounded the island. Glover occupied the second floor of one of the Dutch houses while he looked for a place of his own.

By the time of his arrival, the original bonanza in trade had ended. In the six months following the July opening, MacKenzie could invest only one-third as much of Jardine, Matheson’s funds as he did in the previous four months. There were all kinds of problems for the new MacKenzie/Glover team.

The main problems were bakufu inspired – they were doing all they could to hamper trade and discourage foreigners. Within weeks of his arrival Glover could have begun to develop a resentment against the shogun, the recognised leader of the government. The Treasury Guild officials sent from Edo had made it difficult for Westerners to obtain local currency. In the beginning the only money available was a kind of note made from a slab of bamboo with a Japanese figure on one side and an equivalent in Dutch florins on the other. These slabs were withdrawn and replaced regularly. The foreigners could not always get their hands on the bamboo money to buy the silk and other goods they could export profitably. The Japanese traders were not allowed to accept the only international currency of the day in the Far East – Mexican silver dollars. The purity of the Mexican silver dollar was recognised and unquestioned all over the world, but when approached to exchange their bamboo money the Japanese made hand signs to indicate their heads being cut off or of being whipped by a split bamboo – standard and well-used forms of punishment on the China coast.

Another early problem for the Scotsmen was communication with the locals – Dutch was virtually the only foreign language spoken by the Japanese. When the first British Consul in Nagasaki was negotiating with Japanese officials for land in June 1859 he required a Dutch interpreter.

Dispatching the goods they could buy was not easy and they had to push hard to organise shipments. The Nagasaki tides allowed only three hours a day for loading and unloading cargo. The goods were moved in open boats which often overturned or were soaked in rainstorms. Much was lost through stealing. MacKenzie was experienced and shrewd enough to recoup some of these losses by claiming against the Japanese Treasury Guild.

Most serious of all was the problem of the anti-foreign fanatics. Following the murders of two Russian seamen in the same month of Glover’s arrival, the safety of foreigners in Japan became a major issue. On 6 November a British national was attacked and killed by samurai outside Jardine, Matheson’s office doorway in Yokohama. A lantern had been pushed into the face of the victim while he was run through from behind.

Yokohama’s British Consul, F. Howard Vyse, in reaction to this killing notified all British subjects to remain armed. But the Consul-General, Alcock, now based in his Edo Legation, withdrew this notice as being over-reaction. He told Vyse that the Japanese were surprisingly tolerant in the face of foreign provocation.

Alcock’s view may well have been true of the vast majority of Japanese – but it was certainly not true of some of the samurai who were not hiding their feelings towards the newcomers.

Perhaps Alcock quickly regretted his own advice. Soon after he was jostled by some samurai while out riding, forcing him to write to London and plead for, among other things, a Royal Navy warship to be assigned to protect the British citizens resident in Japan.

The residents of Yokohama were taking the brunt of the anti-foreign feeling but Nagasaki did not escape entirely. The British Consul, George Morrison, complained in December 1859 of the destruction by fire of two foreign-owned warehouses. The Japanese had offered no help to put out these fires but had saved, it was claimed, the adjacent property owned by a Japanese clan lord. It was the third fire of that year in the foreign quarter.

Yet despite all these difficulties and dangers, more than fifty British cargo ships alone had arrived in Nagasaki in 1859 and Jardine, Matheson, and others, were convinced that Japan would prove profitable in the end. MacKenzie and Glover wanted to develop, in particular, the export of high-quality silk. This was potentially a very big money-spinner but was desperately slow to pick up after MacKenzie’s bonanza of the early months. Most of their problems came from the constant interference in trade of an increasingly unhappy bakufu.

Perhaps the Japanese had good reason to be suspicious of the newly arrived ketojin. With the sudden influx of hundreds of foreign seamen in Nagasaki – and these seamen would have been the roughest in the business – trouble was inevitable. They roamed the streets of Maruyama looking for women and in many cases also for an excuse to fight with the locals.

The British and Americans had both established Consulates in Nagasaki in 1859. The British employed a full-time career diplomat, George Morrison, who had taken over when C. Pemberton Hodgson and his acerbic wife moved to Hokkaido in the late summer of that year. The American Consul was a part-time job, filled normally by an American citizen/trader in the port. John G. Walsh was Nagasaki’s first US Consul. Incredibly it would seem, Kenneth Ross MacKenzie was temporarily serving as Nagasaki’s French Consul at this time. The story behind MacKenzie’s appointment is not known. Certainly it was not uncommon for a trader to act as Consul for his own country. But for a major power such as France to appoint a Scot as Consul was not usual, even as a temporary measure. The Consuls of the various nations had to deal with many of the cases of violence involving sailors on leave in the port as well as normal diplomatic business.

Very early in 1860 the American Consul, Walsh, was writing to his Secretary of State in Washington regarding compensation for an injury done to a Japanese by a petty officer from the US steamer Mississippi. Walsh was aware that it was not normal for the Consulate to pay such expenses but that he had examined the case and felt it proper for the Consulate to compensate the victim in this particular instance. The result of the attack on the Japanese was horrific – the loss of both eyes.

Incidents like this would not have helped in developing trust in those very early days and would have been played on by the fanatics. And, of course, the rules of the Treaty did not allow the ‘uncivilised’ Japanese to administer Japanese law on the foreigners. There was some justification for this. Japanese law allowed summary executions and quite horrific tortures – so the agreement was that Consular Courts would handle foreigners charged with an offence in Japan. This became a particularly sore point with the fiercely proud Japanese and these extra-territoriality laws would remain a festering grievance for many years.

William Keswick was Jardine, Matheson’s agent in Yokohama and was having a lot more luck than MacKenzie and Glover in Nagasaki at this time. Keswick had apparently picked up a little Japanese and could communicate directly to a certain extent with the locals. Educated in Edinburgh, Keswick in later years would become the Jardine, Matheson & Co. taipan. MacKenzie did not hesitate to use his position as French Consul to help company communications. He wrote to Jardine, Matheson in Shanghai offering to use his right as a Consul to send an overland messenger to Yokohama to pass on to Keswick any company business ‘of importance’.

But they were a good team, the older and highly experienced MacKenzie balancing the enthusiasm and optimism of the younger man from Aberdeen. MacKenzie was about the same age as Glover’s father and clearly served as his mentor. By early January 1860, Glover was confident enough to be signing his own name to the regular letters sent by them to Jardine, Matheson in Shanghai.

The foreign settlement was nearing completion in 1860 and the two Scots had to settle for a less than prominent allotment at Oura 21. Oura was a prime waterfront area on the eastern side of the harbour and a cluster of foreign buildings now began to straddle the Oura river. The complicated rules for application for land by partnerships meant that Glover and MacKenzie’s plot was at the rear, two streets back from the harbour front.

Their building would have been sparsely furnished, at least initially, as was the Japanese way. It is likely to have been built in the style of Westerners’ houses in China, with offices and perhaps a warehouse on the ground floor and living quarters above. They would have engaged local servants.

Many of the foreign arrivals in Japan at this time were struck by the differences between China and Japan. The discipline and eagerness to learn of the Japanese was startling. Everything in Japanese society was ordered. Every 5 May, for example, the population en masse began wearing their summer kimono. On 9 September winter clothing was put back on – again by everyone. Every action of the people was supervised and the shogun’s spies were everywhere and knew everything. Instant and utter obedience to Authority was expected.

Glover’s first year in Japan was spent looking for and arranging export of cargoes to the China coast. Seaweed, a delicacy in both China and Japan, and silk dominated this export trade. Imports were a problem with Jardine, Matheson feeling strongly that their expensively chartered ships should carry a full load both ways. It was essential for Glover to find Japanese markets for the goods they had to import, mainly Chinese medicines, cotton and sugar.

Until he became fluent in the language, it would have been necessary for Glover, like Keswick in Yokohama, to pick up a smattering of Japanese and use an interpreter only when required. But it is certain Glover realised even this early the importance of direct communication with the Japanese; he made up his mind to master the language.

Trading in those early days meant trudging through the mud or dust of Nagasaki to deal directly with the Japanese selling the products he could export profitably. It meant following MacKenzie and becoming familiar with the older man’s methods and with his contacts. It meant haggling with the Japanese and in the early days, at least, dealing with shopkeepers rather than merchants.

In China Glover would perhaps have been accustomed to inspect a sample of merchandise for his company before ordering a shipload for Europe. But in Japan in the beginning only frustratingly small amounts of goods could be ordered. And the Japanese merchants he did deal with in many cases had to borrow from him before they could purchase the goods they were able to sell. But clearly Glover felt there was a future for him in Japan.

It is clear, too, that during his first year he began to grasp the complicated political situation in Japan. Alone among the foreigners Glover appears to have quickly had his finger on the Japanese political pulse.

Tom Glover in 1860 was a normal, fit and healthy young man. He was tall and fair skinned, hair long and waved. His very appearance would have made him an object of curiosity to the available girls of Nagasaki most of whom had never seen a European. Another attraction would have been his generosity which is mentioned in most surviving descriptions of the man. He was reportedly ‘endowed of a fine physique and a courtly manner that captivated Japanese and foreigners – men and women alike’. It is no surprise then to find him at the end of his first year in Japan seeking and finding some feminine company.

In September 1860 he went through a form of marriage with a Japanese girl, Sono Hiranaga. It is said that Sono was the daughter of a poor samurai. This was almost certainly not the first time Tom had some kind of relationship with a Japanese girl. And it was certainly not the last, but it is the first recorded.

Little is known in detail of the marriage, but temporary marriages of convenience between lonely Western bachelors and Japanese women were then becoming common in all the newly opened Treaty ports. Quite simply there were no available Western women in these ports which were considered dangerous places in which to live.

Nagasaki, in particular, was famed for its local girls, said to be not only the prettiest in Japan, but also the easiest to live with. Glover was a resident and a gentleman and his arrangement with Sono bears no comparison with the rough-and-ready red-light trade indulged in by visiting seamen.

The usual routine for the respectable foreigner in these cases was to be taken to a certain tea-house by a go-between. These go-betweens were often Customs officials, people with whom Tom would have been in constant contact. The suggestion for taking a ‘wife’ may well have come from one of these officials. The tea-house was probably a two-storey, balconied building in Maruyama and Tom most likely crossed the ‘Hesitation’ and ‘Made-up-your-Mind’ bridges to reach it.

Inside the tea-house, Tom would have been seated on a tatami mat in the twinkling light of a paper lantern. Drinking sake from thimble-sized cups, he would have listened to the melancholy strumming of the samisen and the swish of silken kimono. These tastes, sounds and atmosphere are uniquely Japanese.

He would have viewed various pretty girls and after a while selected the one most pleasing to him. He would have promised ‘marriage’ and it was the go-between’s job to arrange this, an accepted union in Japan. A house to rent for the couple would often be part of the deal. It was normal for the girl to live with the foreigner as long as he stayed in Japan, or in some cases until he got bored or a baby was on the way. When he did decide to leave, for whatever reason, the marriage dissolved itself. There was a poignancy about these inevitably sad affairs which would in time grow into the Madam Butterfly syndrome – the faithful Japanese woman betrayed by the golden-haired scoundrel.

It was normal for the new wife, in many cases the daughter of a respectable but poor family, to stay in the house her husband provided, as was the case anyway with most Japanese wives. Glover’s wife, Sono, would not normally have taken part in the social life of the foreign community in Nagasaki. She would have remained in the company of her family or with other Japanese wives in similar circumstances when not with her husband.

Tom and Sono had a son whom they named Umekichi. He died as a baby of four months in the following year. The marriage did not last – Glover and Sono ‘divorced’, amicably it would seem, for Tom is said to have provided the finance for her to travel abroad to study some years later.

This early affair of Glover is worth looking into even with the scanty facts which have survived. For the period he appears to have conducted this affair with unusual sensitivity and respect. In later years another liaison of his would follow much more closely the Madam Butterfly theme.

Glover was only one of many Westerners who took a Japanese wife at this time. George Smith, the Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong, on a ten-week visit to Japan in 1860, was outraged at the number of foreign bachelors with native wives. He thought it tantamount to government approval that Customs officials could be involved in such scandalous matters. The Bishop failed to mention that no Western women were available.

The Bishop wrote a book on what he had observed on his Japanese visit. He reckoned that it was ‘sad indeed the temptations to which young Englishmen are exposed who take up their residence in Nagasaki . . . after 9 p.m. nearly half the population [of Nagasaki] are inebriated’.

Nagasaki’s newspaper, a four-page sheet which began publication in the summer of the following year, 1861, called the Bishop’s remarks a ‘libel’. In its review of the Bishop’s book the writer thought that ‘the mother, the sisters and friends of young bachelors would be led by these [the Bishop’s] expressions to believe that these were as the cities of old, peculiar for their vice, and, horrors, we deny it.’

It is not known what Tom’s mother, sister or friends in the Bridge of Don would have thought of these remarks if they had read them. Aberdeen was a world away.