This fish and chip shop in Fraserburgh, may seem like an unlikely place to begin a video on The Scottish Samurai,
but the man pictured above, the man after whom this this business
is named, is the man, possibly more than any other, responsible for modern Japan.
If you've seen the Tom Cruise film, 'The Last Samurai', if you've heard
Puccini's opera 'Madame Butterfly', the real life person lurking in the
shadows of both, was born here at 15 Commerce Street, Fraserburgh,
on 6th June, 1838. If you're interested
in the people, places and events in Scottish history, then click the subscribe
button at the bottom right of the screen. In the meantime, let me tell you a story.
Thomas Blake Glover, was born into a middle class Victorian North East family, the son of a coast
guard officer, here in Fraserburgh. Now the first time that I came to Fraserburgh
was to visit my future in-laws in 1988, and I'll be honest, it seemed pretty Victorian then,
so God knows what it was like in Victorian times!
Young Tom started school here, but when he was six, daddy Lieutenant Glover was posted to Grimsby,
Grim by name, but three years later they came back
here to the North East and Collieston Phew!
His dad was posted at the coast guard station just round the headland there.
Now they were only here for two and a half years before moving permanently to Aberdeen,
but this seems like a nice place to tell the story for now, eh?.
Tom did his secondary schooling in Aberdeen, before joining two of his brothers in one of
the firms in the town as a shipping clerk. Now as luck would have it, Fate was on the
lookout for adventurous young lads that wanted to see the world,
and at the time, she was recruiting in the Aberdeen area,
so the 18 year old lad from the North East of Scotland, headed
out to Shanghai to work for Jardine Matheson, whose insistence in selling opium to the Chinese,
pretty much started The Opium Wars. Now it turns out that British gunboats
persuaded the Chinese that, in fact, they did want to allow our opium,
permit their markets to be flooded with western goods, and would we like to control
Hong Kong for a bit? How times have changed.
At the time that young Glover was arriving in Shanghai, the opium dust was settling,
and western powers now had their sights set on trade with the last Eastern civilisation that the
west hadn't penetrated ... Japan.
Japan had been closed to the west for 200 years. Its nominal head was the Emperor, and its
military boss was a Shogun of the Tokugawa family. Now to avoid western contamination, an earlier Shogun
had expelled Europeans back in 1648, and executed the Japanese that had converted to Christianity.
Nobody was allowed in or out. If you were a European sailor and
got shipwrecked on the Japanese coast, it was literally a death sentence.
If you were a Japanese sailor who got blown off course and landed on the Chinese coast,
that was where you now lived, because to go back was a death sentence.
Isolation though, brought its own problems for the Japanese.
Whilst they remained in a feudal clan society with nobody allowed to build ships that could
take to sea, the countries of the west had become industrial naval powers.
It was almost like the previous Century's Highland Jacobite conundrum on steroids.
By the 1850s, the Shogun knew that he couldn't resist the military might of the west much longer,
so they agreed to limited trade in three fixed coastal locations.
But not every clan was happy with this barbarian infection, and even those that were,
weren't entirely happy with the way the financial cake was sliced in favour of
the Shogun and his clan, and it was into this mounting
internal and external tension, that a now 20-year-old Tom Glover was sent,
to help the older Scotsman, Kenneth Mackenzie, setting up
Jardine Matheson's trading agency in Nagasaki. It was off wi' the kilts and on wi' the kimonos.
As it was after less than two years, Mackenzie decided that the pickings had been
richer back in China, and he packed his bags, but young Glover threw himself into general
trading and overcoming problems of tea export, by setting up a (tea) drying factory.
More importantly, in the tension and confusion of the will we, won't we deal with the Europeans,
opportunities grew to sell larger ships, and more importantly,
guns to the rebellious Satsuma and Choshu clans, as they prepared to face up to the Shogun. 🎶There may be trouble ahead 🎶
He was still exporting tea, but the real money was the illicit arms trade banned by the
Japanese and British governments alike. Not only that, he was directly intriguing
with these two southern clans in their rebellious activities.
He was hiding rebels in his house that overlooked the port of Nagasaki.
He smuggled five of them on board ships to go back to Britain.
He paid for their transport, accommodation and education in
western methods, industry and engineering. Now, don't forget, this was punishable by death,
but still in his twenties,
Glover was astutely building up allies for the future Japan that he hoped for.
It was Glover who commissioned the first ever custom designed, offshore gunship, that would be
the backbone of the future Japanese Navy. Of course he came to two of his brothers,
still here in Aberdeen, a shipping broker and sea Captain.
The first ship, was followed by a even bigger second, and a third, even bigger than that
all built here in the docks in Aberdeen. There were a whole host of Scottish connections.
It was Scotland's Stevenson family of lighthouse builders that built Japan's lighthouses.
The whole Glover family was involved in the endeavour.
By the time he was finished, all of his brothers had either travelled
to Japan to build the business there, or worked here in Aberdeen in the Scottish
arm of Japanese industrialisation. The network of trade between Aberdeen
and Nagasaki was a Glover family bridge between east and west,
but for Japan to stand on its own resources, he wanted his own construction docks in Nagasaki.
So he had a huge dry dock built as an Ikea style flat pack, here in Aberdeen,
and transported, then reassembled in Nagasaki. In fact, if you go to the museum in Nagasaki
today, you can still see the spare screws and allen keys.
This was the backbone of the post-industrial Japanese shipbuilding industry.
When the Americans dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki years later,
it would be these docks that they were targeting. Over the following years, Glover continued to
intrigue with the Satsuma and Choshu clans. He smuggled more of them abroad to be educated
in modern industrialisation techniques, he continued to supply them with arms,
shipping and any other support he could, whilst using his home in Nagasaki as a safe house,
and his parents home in Bridge of Don as a student hostel come embassy.
If you've seen the Hollywood film 'The Last Samurai', the Tom Cruise character is based on a real life
French military adviser called Jules Brunet, who stayed to fight with the Shogun loyal Samurai,
against these new insurgent rebels. Ultimately the much larger Shogun loyal
forces fail, because they are fighting with traditional old, Samurai technology
against what was modern, military equipment. Now of course, just like Braveheart, you have to
strip out the Hollywood glitz and concertinaing of events, to get to the truth behind the story
but when you do, you find that the modern, military equipment that won the day for
the incoming pro-Western regime was largely provided by Thomas Glover,
and it was his activities in this civil war that earned him the name, The Scottish Samurai.
When the civil war was won, Glover found himself in an influential position,
as he brought industrialisation to the Takashima Coal mine off Nagasaki,
sold the Aberdeen built dock in Nagasaki to the new Japanese Government,
and drove forward the rapid industrialisation of Japan,
but with the war over, he had a problem. The huge income from sales of arms and shipping
couldn't quite be replaced by coal mining, tea export and peacetime activities,
and it was the Japanese government that was now making money from the Nagasaki docks and,
in the economically depressed period after the civil war, the clans struggled to pay back the
loans that Glover had made to them and, slowly but surely,
he struggled to pay his debts. Jardine Matheson pulled the plug,
and Glover & Co ended up bankrupt. But Glover's talents were still in demand,
and he was the most highly respected westerner in Japan.
Now a fledgling shipbuilding company had plans on growing to be the giant of Japanese industry,
and who better to bring on board as a roving consultant to drive its growth than
Thomas Blake Glover, the Scottish Samurai. He moved to the city that we call Tokyo to live in
grand style, as he advised that fledgling company called Mitsubishi.
The young men, for whom he'd risked himself, were now coming back from their western education
and taking the roles as the politicians, academics and industrialists in the new Japan,
and his Tokyo home was the gathering place for those, and such as those in Japanese high society.
Now, I said that Glover's activities had been an inspiration behind the Madame Butterfly story
and, in spite of being the illegitimate child of a western trader and a local Japanese woman,
Glover's son attended a school exclusively for the children of the Japanese Emperor or peerage.
After more adventures than I can cover, in 1908, at the age of 70,
he was, decorated by the Japanese Emperor with The order of the Rising Sun.
The list of his achievements ran to twenty pages of Japanese script, including
the mention of his hidden services to Japan. Some of them are covered in the book Scottish
Samurai, and I'll leave a link in the description. He died three years after this accolade,
his funeral in Tokyo attended by Japanese Government ministers,
The British Ambassador to Japan, the Japanese ambassador to Britain and just about
every luminary you might imagine. Thomas Glover had been the midwife
of Japan's rebirth. In a 50 year period, a boy
from backwater Fraserburgh, had been one of the key players in taking Japan from
a perceived backward feudal clan system, towards the military and industrial giant
whose Aberdeen based navy, defeated China and Russia in successive wars,
and whose industrial might continued throughout the 20th Century.
Now let's be clear, as we know all too well here in
Scotland, that kind of change doesn't happen without people being hurt along the way.
If you re a young lad who goes off to work for an opium selling corporate,
then becomes a gun running intriguer, breaks laws in your host and home countries
to get things done and the mother of your son attempts suicide when you take that son away,
it's probably fair to say that you've got a darker side as well,
but his Nagasaki home that survived the atomic bomb of 1945,
is a major tourist attraction in Japan today, his face has been used as a brand advert
for the biggest selling Japanese beer, as well as fish and chips,
and he's still recognised as the Scottish Samurai.
If you'd like to find out about another Victorian Scotsman who changed the world
then there s a video coming up on screen now. In the meantime
tha mi an dòchas gum bi lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.