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PREFACE

There is a bridge leading into Nagasaki’s once notorious red-light district of Maruyama which the Japanese call the Shian Bashi or Hesitation Bridge. Further into Maruyama there is a second bridge, Omoikiri Bashi or Made-up-your-Mind Bridge. Presumably when potential patrons of Maruyama’s pleasures crossed this second bridge any problems of conscience had been overcome.

The bridges of Maruyama were there long before the return of Western traders to Nagasaki in the late 1850s. The fortune hunters then came in droves when Japan’s shogun-imposed 200-year isolation from the rest of the world ended and the country was forced into dealing once more with the West.

Among those Western traders was a young man from Aberdeen whose one known weakness was perhaps not pausing long enough at the ‘Hesitation Bridges’ of Japan. Thomas Blake Glover’s arrival in Nagasaki marked the beginning of the rise of Japan from its feudal isolation of the nineteenth century to the economic superpower of today.

Glover arrived in Nagasaki late in 1859 and his rise to fame was a rapid one. He formed his own company in 1861 and took over the highly prestigious Jardine, Matheson & Co. agency in the port at the same time.

The rapid expansion of his newly formed company can be compared with the rise of firms such as Sony and Toyota a hundred years later. But it was the complicated political situation in Japan which provided his first opportunities in business.

Glover was intimately involved in the rebellion of dissatisfied samurai which dominated the 1860s. This uprising brought down the bakufu, the government, nominally led by the shogun, then ruling Japan. He was involved to the extent that in an interview given shortly before his death he claimed for himself the title of the ‘greatest rebel’ in the movement which brought down the last shogun and ‘restored’ the Emperor in 1868.

This rebellion, which ended the Tokugawa family’s 200-year grip on the office of shogun, is a watershed in Japanese history. The first Tokugawa shogun had been helped into power by Will Adams, the English pilot of a shipwrecked Dutch vessel and the model for Blackthorne in James Clavell’s historical novel, Shogun. Two centuries later the last Tokugawa shogun was eased out of power by a young Scottish adventurer.

Glover helped the rebels with money, with arms, and with escape and transport to the West. Supplying arms made Glover rich but there is much more to his story than that.

He helped push Japan into the modern world. His Aberdeen-built slip-dock pioneered the Mitsubishi shipyard complex now sited in Nagasaki, one of the most advanced in the world, containing a dry-dock with a capacity of berthing ships of up to 1 million tons. The coal-mine he developed with imported British technology at Takashima, near Nagasaki, fuelled the industrialisation of Japan and its exports provided much of the crucial foreign currency necessary to pay for it. His ships formed the nucleus of the Japanese Navy and Merchant Marine.

In 1908, aged seventy, Glover was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the man he had helped to power forty years before – Emperor Meiji. The citation for his award lists his achievements for Japan and runs to twenty pages of script.

He died in 1911 at his palatial Tokyo residence. At seventy-three he was a Hero of the New Japan but even to this day he is little known in his own country.

Glover’s personal life was as complicated and dramatic as his public one. He had a string of affairs with Japanese women and there are at least four recorded instances of children he fathered to different mothers while in Japan. An affair with the completely unknown Maki Kaga early in 1870 led to the birth of a son and almost certainly some elements of the Madam Butterfly legend.

No family letters are known to have survived although Glover’s business dealings in his decade as Jardine, Matheson & Co.’s agent are well documented. Yet from all the available sources it is possible to track Glover’s life with some accuracy.

This is the story of a Scottish samurai.