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CHAPTER SIX

IPPONMATSU

Much of the action behind the scenes in the frenetic mid-1860s took place in Tom Glover’s house, the ‘Bungalow’ as he called it, in Nagasaki. Construction of the building by a master carpenter, Hidenoshin Koyama of Amakusa Island near Nagasaki, was completed in 1863. The site chosen was on the most prominent and beautifully situated part of the Minami Yamate, or southern hillside, foreign concession. The waterfronts of Oura and Sagarimatsu were directly below the house, Dejima a little further north and in the panoramic view across the bay Glover could see the western side of the harbour and the mountains beyond. The house was built round a pine tree and became known to the Japanese as Ipponmatsu, or ‘single pine tree’.

It was a fitting place for an up-and-coming young businessman, a place to relax and a place where he could work when required. It was the venue for the talks between Glover and the clan agents where momentous decisions regarding the entire future of Japan would be taken. It was the house where British Ministers and admirals would stay while in Nagasaki and where renegades and rebel samurai would hide and plot the downfall of the shogun. The comings and goings at Glover House would be noted by spies and passed on to the shogun.

The house was built as a Japanese thought a Western house should be and is a curious mixture of East and West. The rooms are large, high ceilinged and airy and Tom and Jim Glover would have lived there comfortably, even in the hottest days of summer cooled by the breeze skimming the water of the harbour below. They could have entertained their friends there with some style. This was a decided improvement on the early clapboard, Wild West style of building in Oura which was house, warehouse and office combined – a style the highly skilled Japanese carpenters had copied from outdated pictures of Western architecture.

There are photographs, some captioned as early as ‘Nagasaki 1863’, showing the now familiar honeycomb shape of Glover House shortly after it was built. In one of these Tom and Jim are posing on the steps of the porch in a group containing their partner Edward Harrison with some others. The distinctive ‘rising sun’ windows are visible above the door behind them. Significantly these early photographs also show some of the Westerners carrying rifles. In those days the brothers were still ‘Tom’ and ‘Jim’ – only later would Glover acquire the more stately ‘Thomas’ or ‘TB’.

A croquet green had been laid on the level above the house and the level below overlooked the masts and sails of the many ships lying at anchor. In another of the photographs two Western women are pictured on the croquet green with their partners and it is most likely that Glover House was a favourite gathering place for Nagasaki’s foreign residents.

Much of the social life at this time would have gone on at the homes of the residents. Western women were still at a premium but there was apparently no shortage of local girls. In a Japanese directory of foreign residents in Yokohama, dated 1861–2, thirty of the seventy-nine registered households had a resident musume (literally daughter or girl, at the time the word was taken to mean a mistress). The register lists no musume resident at the homes of married men whose wives were with them in Japan, or at the homes of clergymen, doctors and certain others. In houses shared by two bachelors there were two resident musume. It is safe to presume the same arrangements were in force in Nagasaki.

The four partners in Glover & Co. had plenty to keep them occupied – letters for dispatch by mail steamer to keep Jardine, Matheson happy, bargaining with the tea and silk dealers in an effort to keep up with changing prices, running the tea refiring plant which now employed hundreds – as well as run-of-the-mill problems of thieving by native labourers, crooked Customs officials and belligerent ships’ captains. On top of this, Glover in early 1863 was continuing to keep close and clandestine contact with agents of the Satsuma clan.

Shogun-induced problems with foreign exchange the previous year had eventually been referred to London. Francis Groom was in Britain on Glover & Co. business at this time and gave his version of affairs in Japan to British Treasury officials – perhaps contradicting the views of the British Minister in Edo, Rutherford Alcock.

But currency problems were not the only problems Glover had to face in the early part of that year. He was in trouble with his own Consul for apparently taking the law into his own hands.

Okoobo Bungonokami, Nagasaki’s governor, wrote his letter of complaint to Morrison, the Consul, on 21 February 1863. In it he accuses Glover of ‘having seized a number of coolies’ whom he suspected of stealing silk he was shipping and of binding them with cords ‘besides painting the faces of seven of them with tar’ before handing them over to the Japanese police. The Consul in reply said that it was not Glover but Edward Harrison who had been involved and that he was at present absent from Nagasaki but would be punished on return. The governor would not accept this, insisting that Glover was also involved and that both Britons should be punished for breaking the Treaty rules. He went on to say that the ‘coolies have since been examined’ and that only one had stolen the silk while another had attempted to do so – both of these had been punished according to Japanese law and the remainder set free.

According to the Consular records, Glover and Harrison were ‘severely reprimanded’ by the Consul and Harrison fined ten dollars.

But as the cherry blossom season approached and the cool of Nagasaki’s early spring was replaced with the warmer air of April, much more serious events were occupying the Consul’s mind.