You may have heard me tell the story of the Scottish
Samurai from a Scottish point of view, but today
I m going to give you some details of his life I haven t done before... and
we re going to do it in Nagasaki So if you re interested in the
people place 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.
A while back I took you to Fraserburgh, Collieston and Aberdeen in the northeast of Scotland
to tell you the tale of the man who became known as the Scottish Samurai.
A lot of people in Scotland commented that they d never heard of him... but here in Japan,
his Nagasiaki home is a visitor attraction. Today I m going to take you there on
a bullet train... AND I also hope to take you
to an Island that s part of his story AND a James Bond film theme location.
This is going to be an adventure. Come with me? The guy we re talking about was
called Thomas Blake Glover. I m not going to go into his whole story,
I made that earlier video and I ll leave a link to that at the end.
This is a particular part of his story. Show me a merchant adventurer and I ll
show you a businessman who has cut a few corners in his time.
Thomas Glover? No different.
I want to focus on one aspect of his story that like him...
is central to the Japan s story. Little symbolises Japanese modernity
more than a Bullet train... but when Glover arrived in Japan
things were different.... He was the first to introduce
ships powered by steam engines... Scottish They needed coal to fuel them... and central
to Japan s industrialisation was one coal mine in particular.
But let me give you a bit of background. Japan had been a closed country for around
200 years When Jesuits
came a converting in the early 17th Century Japanese Shogunate powers decided to clamp down,
shut down and close off to the outside world... with some nasty head choppy stuff along the way.
Nobody was allowed out or in... apart from a single port for trading....
largely with Portugese in Nagasaki..... Two hundred years of stagnating arms
development, an American gunboat and a determined captain later...
and Japan decided to open up... with limitations.
Five ports were identified where westerners could come and live and trade.
Needless to say not all Japanese agreed. There were attacks on westerners,
there was civil war within Japan as different people vied to enforce THEIR power or ideas.
It was the Wild East, but eventually Shogun power was
replaced by the restored Meiji Emperor There was an uneasy symbiosis between those
Japanese who had decided to modernise, and wanted western knowhow,
but without their ownership... and westerners who wanted to make
the most of trade and exploit the commercial opportunities from a modernising Japan.
It seems that there was a particular reluctance to allow foreigners sale of, access to,
or partnership in mineral resources... like coal.... but there was also a Scotsman...
30 year old Thomas Glover had been in Japan for almost ten years.
He d come with Jardine Matheson traders... and did a bit of work
for them... and some for himself on the side.
As well as getting by with setting up a tea factory and other things, Glover had made a
stack of cash by selling steamships and arms to at least one side in the civil war...
but the modernising Meiji were his favourites. He did this from his house
overlooking Nagasaki Bay. It was the first western house built in Japan.
Glover s house in Aberdeen is pretty much forgotten... but his house in
Nagasaki attracts two million visitors a year. From that house he d intrigued with modernisers
and southern clans against the Shogunate... but as the Meiji regime gained the
upper hand, and things settled, that source of income was drying up...
and in 1868, as the country opened,
ports like Kobe and Osaka were becoming economic rivals.
Glover had extended himself with speculative business deals and had a lot of debt.
But Prince Hizen.... the feudal overlord in the area
had burdened himself with debt as well... partly by buying steam ships from Glover.
There was an opportunity for a symbiotic relationship.
Takashima is a small island of about seven miles of the coast of Nagasaki.
It had coal deposits. In fact there had
been primitive coal works there... but western technology could be used to sink a
deep shaft for large scale, modern mining. This made Glover s mouth water...
And it would provide coal to boil the water in Prince Hizen s steam ships.
Glover needed to turn a profit. Hizen needed western knowhow.
The first British-Japanese mining venture was about to begin....
ut neither of them had capital. They needed to borrow from Jardine Mattheson
The deal was that Glover and Hizen would share the costs and profits equally.
Glover would provide the European engineers and technicians.
Hizen would supply the mass labour, officials and policing.
BUUUUUT Glover had to put up the $40,000
capital for Hizen s half of the outlay... AND lend Hizen $43,750 to sweeten the agreement
Soooo in fact, Glover was $150 000 deeper in the hole.
Hizen was putting in no actual cash, but was pocketing 40k in his hipper.
All his costs were to come out of his side of the profits...
that Glover now had to produce in the seven year term of the contract.
Glover s focus wasn t entirely on the job as he juggled other affairs
and spun several plates to keep afloat... and some of the organisation was hap hazard.
The rush to produce earnings to pay down the debt meant that the first
coal shaft was sunk in a hurry, but the first coal was brought
out in January 1870 Money started to flow...
but Glover was still in financial straits. He tried a public share offer of $370,000 of
stock, but the couldn t get interest in Tokyo. He tried to sell to the Meiji government,
but no. He was like a juggler who had been
keeping too many financial balls in the air as they became more and more difficult to control.
Jardine Matheson saw the trouble and decided to call in their debts.
All the balls were about to fall... Then, at the last minute he managed
to persuade the Netherlands Trading Society in Osaka
to take on the debt Jardine Matheson were calling in.Phew!
They were now the only safety net should Glover fall from the tightrope he was walking.
Walking tightropes, spinning plates, juggling...
this guy was a one man walking circus ... but in the spring of 1870 a debtor called in
$35,000 Glover owed for making and supplying a gunboat.
In August 1870 Glover went into liquidation. His debts stood at $564
000, his credits $220,000... plus his share in the Takashima mine.
The Dutch were going to operate that to recover its debts.
Bizarrely the fact that he was no longer juggling commitments meant he could now
give the mine the attention he hadn t before. He was now an employee of the Netherlands Trading
Society... and his own estate in bankruptcy at the same wage he would have earned as a clerk
newly arrived from Scotland. The
next year the Netherlands Society also installed a specialist mining engineering manager.
In September 1872, with things stabilising the Meiji government sent folk to negotiate the
purchase of the mine. Ya dancer!
The end of the tunnel was coming... but no.
They opted not to. Dammit! Then three months later Hizen,
along with a bunch of the other feudal princes surrendered his estates to the government.
Was that a light Glover could see in the distance?
No He, and the Netherlands
Society, now had to deal with the government. But the government had taken on a bunch of British
civil servants to act on their behalf, and you know what these gits are like.
They were harder to deal with than the Japanese had been...
challenging accepted rights and questioning undertakings given, dotting I s and crossing t s
Then, in January 1874 the Japanese government bought
the mine from the Netherlands Trading Society.
Hurrah ! By September 1872
most of Glover's debt was cleared. By 1877 he was out of bankruptcy.
The government had no intention of operating the mine themselves but, as was their policy,
to privatise it by sale to a Japanese national. Goto Shojiro was a middle ranking samurai who had
played a big part in the Meiji restoration AND
Once saved two high level British officials by chopping off the head of an assailant.
Whilst he d been in the first provisional Meiji government in 1868 he d fallen out of favour
and passing the mine over to him was a kind of sweetner to keep him quiet...
but the story s not about him so lets just say he soon lost interest and went back to Tokyo
and the mine was run by Jardine Matheson... with occasional interference
from the long distance Goto That s Takasihma island behind me
Over the years the mine was a microcosm of the industrialisation story.
Industrial disputes, demands for higher wages, cashflow crises leaving wages unpaid,
riots; employees destruction of equipment, heavy handed policing causing deaths of mine workers;
armed miners causing British engineers to barricade themselves in with rifles,
killing some and wounding others; a rebellion against the Tokyo regime
meaning miners were diverted to become fighters; a cholera outbreak leading to a total of 163 dead,
and Japan s first industrial accident The road wasn t smooth.
I hate to skip over the detail, but there s only so much time.
In 1881 the mine was taken over by Japan s first powerhouse industrial company.
Mitsubishi shipping needed coal for its steam ships, just as Hizen had,
and they were essential to Japan s growth and industrialisation.
Buying this coal island was its first diversification from shipping.
Some of the coal would supply Mitsubishi s ships and the rest would be sold on the Shanghai and
Nagasaki markets. Who did they
bring in as the commercial sales manager? Thomas Blake Glover. He was back in the game
In truth he d been back in the game since 1876. Employed by Mitsubishi, reportedly on
a higher salary than the chairman. The rebels he d backed much earlier in life were
now high fliers in the Meiji government, and he lived life in style.
But this is the place we ve come to see.
You might know it from the James Bond film Skyfall.
You may know it as Hashima. You may know it as Battlefield Island.
Coal was first discovered on the island around 1810.
Mitsubishi bought THIS place in 1890, building on their mining operation on Takasihma Island,
and extracting coal from undersea. Land has been reclaimed,
seawalls have been built. Four main mine-shafts,
some reaching down a kilometre, with one connecting to that other island.
It s all built on the legacy of what Thomas Blake Glover started.
Most of what s here was accommodation for the mine workers who lived in this,
the most densely populated part of the planet at one time.
The coal is dug out and the island is now abandoned.
It s a tourist attraction, a film location and a UNESCO world heritage site.
But it s also the site of forced labour. From the 1930s to the end of World War two
Koreans and Chinese prisoners of war were forced to work in the mines.
When you come here you see human achievement AND human suffering
engineering success AND barbarity; the heart of Japan s near miraculous
industrial transformation... and their heartless treatment of others.
I m not pointing the finger at Japanese specifically.
They re just part of the wider family that carries the human disease...
with the competing virus and antibodies of hope and hate, generosity and greed,
co-operation and corruption.
Japanese, Scots and any other nationality you care to name.
The Bond film that came here revealed some of the complexities of his inner character...
and maybe that s appropriate. It's easy to look at characters
and places in our history as either good or bad, selfish or altruistic, a force for good or evil.
The truth is they re seldom one thing... and often they re both.
I made a video about the wider background of Thomas Glover in
the north east of Scotland and it s coming up on screen now.
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