First published in Great Britain in 1993 by Canongate Press Ltd.
Second (enlarged) edition published in 1997 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EHI ITE
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2012
Copyright © Alexander McKay 1993, 1997
All rights reserved. The right of Alexander McKay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988.
eISBN 978 0 85786 730 8
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Polmont, Stirlingshire
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.
To Sachiko, Emi and Mari
CONTENTS
4 The Phantom and the Fanatics
8 In the Land of the ‘Barbarians’
21 Jekyll, Hyde, Brunton . . . and Yoshida
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.