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FOREWORD

February 2012

I am delighted Canongate are re-issuing Scottish Samurai. There has been recent interest in Glover in the UK by, among others, the BBC and in Japan by its equivalent, NHK, and the book has been out of print for some time. It expresses much of my non-academic excitement at having discovered Thomas Glover in the early 1970s. It had come about almost by accident. While engaged in looking for oil in the Sea of Japan I lived and worked in Japan for almost a decade and married a Japanese girl in 1973. We visited Nagasaki on honeymoon. The book, which had bubbled inside me for years, was written in the years after my permanent return to the UK in the mid-1980s.

This is not a new edition. I must therefore point out that in the years since first publication, extensive scholarship, principally by my good friend Professor Brian Burke-Gaffney of Nagasaki, has shed much more light on the origins of the Glover—Madam Butterfly story and those wishing to pursue this particular aspect should access his work on the subject. More details of Glover’s son, Tomisaburo, have also emerged but the basic details and the story remain exactly as I wrote them in this book.

Alexander McKay, Edinburgh, February 2012