Other avenues of business were also beginning to open up. Harrison’s property expertise now began to show dividends and they were also dabbling in foreign exchange, moving currency between Yokohama and Nagasaki to gain from the considerable swings in the rate between the two ports. This particular enterprise would have been only just within the law. They were young and eager and into many things. Even with the backing of Jardine, Matheson and their regular supply of market prices in Europe and the United States, trading in those days was at times not much more than a form of gambling. Three months or more could pass between shipment in Japan and arrival in the West and wild changes in the price of goods were common.
Life in the port was improving for the foreigners. For example, 1862 saw the opening of an Episcopal church, a Dutch-supervised hospital, a bowling saloon and hotel and a two-monthly overland postal service to Yokohama.
Glover by this time appears to have become a leading member of the community and well settled in Nagasaki. On 12 May Dr William Willis, described as a gentle giant of an Irishman, stopped off at the port en route to take up his post as medical officer at the British Legation in Edo. He stayed at Glover’s home while in Nagasaki and found his host kind and courteous – descriptions of the Scot which consistently recur. Willis wrote of his stay at Glover’s home:
It is surprising the affluence of all good things here . . . the real comforts that are to be found in Nagasaki. It is the custom here to have some eggs and tea early in the morning and a late breakfast at 12 p.m., where all good things of the season and a number of European delicacies are met with, such as can be preserved. Dinner is at 7 p.m. equally good.
Willis became a well-known figure in Japanese and foreign circles during the following years, both as a doctor and a diplomat. Another new arrival at the British Legation in September that year – a student interpreter, Ernest Satow – would have a profound effect on the destiny of Japan. But despite the apparent comforts of Nagasaki in 1862, that year also saw a worsening in the political situation.
The adolescent shogun, Iemochi Tokugawa, had married a sister of the emperor in an attempt by his advisers to placate what was growing into a powerful alliance of discontented samurai of various clans. Some of these samurai were beginning to use the Japanese emperor as a rallying point. But the marriage had little effect. Part of the Tokugawa shoguns’ strengths over the previous centuries had been distrust between rival clans. Now younger and more radical samurai in many of the clans were developing a common cause, a cause which would demand that inter-clan rivalries be put aside.
Two incidents that summer of 1862 brought an already uneasy situation to the boil. In June a marine corporal was killed in another attack on the British Legation in Edo. A second incident in September was even more serious and brought Japan and Britain close to war.
A British party from Yokohama left that Treaty port on a riding trip. Their journey took them through the nearby village of Namamugi. On a road near there they failed to give way to a Satsuma clan procession which was on its way from Edo to Kyoto. Leading the procession was the Satsuma daimyo’s uncle, Hisamitsu Shimazu – the regent and effectively the ruler of the powerful clan. His escorting samurai attacked the Britons, killing one – Charles Lennox Richardson, a merchant based in China – and wounding two others.
The murdered Richardson was no innocent. Earlier a Consular Court in China had fined him for a brutal and unprovoked beating of a Chinese servant. And prior to the attack by the Satsuma samurai he was advised by his friends to respect Japanese custom and turn back or leave the road to the daimyo’s procession. He chose not to. His body was brought to the nearby US Consulate where it lay as the news spread.
The British residents, including the recent arrival, Dr Willis, were furious. They wanted British troops landed to avenge the attack and demanded that the Satsuma give up the guilty samurai for punishment. The clan refused, their argument being that their actions had been traditional and customary, that the punishment for not giving way to the procession of a daimyo was death. They blamed the shogun and his administration, the bakufu, for the whole sorry business, for signing treaties which allowed foreigners into Japan in the first place. The shogun could not placate the British or the most powerful clan in Japan which ironically wanted trade and contact with the West expanded.
The Satsuma withdrew to their stronghold of Kagoshima in the deep south of Japan, leaving the shogun to handle the British fury. Satsuma could not be controlled and the British were making ever more threatening noises. Other potentially rebellious clans watched the developing situation with interest.
By this time various clan lords, including Satsuma, had stationed agents in Nagasaki to make contacts with the foreigners who alone could provide modern arms and ships if civil war broke out.
Tom Glover had been drawn into this twilight world of intrigue and political manoeuvring. Still only twenty-four years old, he was about the same age as many of the idealistic young Japanese rebels with whom he was now in contact. In clandestine meetings in inns and tea-houses, and speaking in faltering Japanese, he listened to their arguments and grew to sympathise with them. Perhaps for the first time he realised that there were many in the clans who resented the restrictions on trade as much as the foreigners did. Some argued that their fight was with the shogun, who monopolised trade, not the foreigners with whom they wished to develop contact. What is certain is that about this time Glover made up his mind to help those samurai opposed to the shogun.
Glover’s motives at this stage are not known. Like the other foreign merchants in Japan he resented the shogun’s stifling of trade in one form or another. It is possible he saw a big future for his own company in a more liberal Japan with the bakufu’s powers reduced and the rebels in positions to make decisions on trade. More than most he must have realised the possible repercussions if he did become involved. Whatever was the case, he now felt strongly enough to risk his own life in the coming struggle to bring down the shogun.
It was a very dangerous game Glover had begun to play. The clan agents would compete for his favour and he would find it difficult to know whom to trust. Efforts were made to kill him – no details have survived but Glover attributed several of these assassination attempts to Gunhei Aoki, a Choshu clan samurai and one of the first of that clan with whom he came in contact. He said of Aoki, ‘He was a bad man, he tried to kill me, more than once.’ Certainly Glover survived these attempts on his life, perhaps saved by his bodyguard. Foreigners were now accompanied wherever they went by an armed guard of samurai – clearly the shogun did not want another incident to embarrass the bakufu and push the foreigners into a war which Japan was not ready or able to fight. Some fanatics were executed but there was no protection from a terrorist who was himself prepared to die in the attack. Glover’s contacts with the clan agents continued.
The shogun’s quandary in 1862 had no solution. He was forced into officially lifting his ban that year on the import of ships – but as well as allowing the clans loyal to him to buy, it also gave the potentially rebellious clans of the south the same opportunity. It was a recipe for disaster and brought civil war even closer – a war in which Glover would be prominently involved.
CHAPTER SIX
IPPONMATSU
Much of the action behind the scenes in the frenetic mid-1860s took place in Tom Glover’s house, the ‘Bungalow’ as he called it, in Nagasaki. Construction of the building by a master carpenter, Hidenoshin Koyama of Amakusa Island near Nagasaki, was completed in 1863. The site chosen was on the most prominent and beautifully situated part of the Minami Yamate, or southern hillside, foreign concession. The waterfronts of Oura and Sagarimatsu were directly below the house, Dejima a little further north and in the panoramic view across the bay Glover could see the western side of the harbour and the mountains beyond. The house was built round a pine tree and became known to the Japanese as Ipponmatsu, or ‘single pine tree’.
It was a fitting place for an up-and-coming young businessman, a place to relax and a place where he could work when required. It was the venue for the talks between Glover and the clan agents where momentous decisions regarding the entire future of Japan would be taken. It was the house where British Ministers and admirals would stay while in Nagasaki and where