Until he became fluent in the language, it would have been necessary for Glover, like Keswick in Yokohama, to pick up a smattering of Japanese and use an interpreter only when required. But it is certain Glover realised even this early the importance of direct communication with the Japanese; he made up his mind to master the language.
Trading in those early days meant trudging through the mud or dust of Nagasaki to deal directly with the Japanese selling the products he could export profitably. It meant following MacKenzie and becoming familiar with the older man’s methods and with his contacts. It meant haggling with the Japanese and in the early days, at least, dealing with shopkeepers rather than merchants.
In China Glover would perhaps have been accustomed to inspect a sample of merchandise for his company before ordering a shipload for Europe. But in Japan in the beginning only frustratingly small amounts of goods could be ordered. And the Japanese merchants he did deal with in many cases had to borrow from him before they could purchase the goods they were able to sell. But clearly Glover felt there was a future for him in Japan.
It is clear, too, that during his first year he began to grasp the complicated political situation in Japan. Alone among the foreigners Glover appears to have quickly had his finger on the Japanese political pulse.
Tom Glover in 1860 was a normal, fit and healthy young man. He was tall and fair skinned, hair long and waved. His very appearance would have made him an object of curiosity to the available girls of Nagasaki most of whom had never seen a European. Another attraction would have been his generosity which is mentioned in most surviving descriptions of the man. He was reportedly ‘endowed of a fine physique and a courtly manner that captivated Japanese and foreigners – men and women alike’. It is no surprise then to find him at the end of his first year in Japan seeking and finding some feminine company.
In September 1860 he went through a form of marriage with a Japanese girl, Sono Hiranaga. It is said that Sono was the daughter of a poor samurai. This was almost certainly not the first time Tom had some kind of relationship with a Japanese girl. And it was certainly not the last, but it is the first recorded.
Little is known in detail of the marriage, but temporary marriages of convenience between lonely Western bachelors and Japanese women were then becoming common in all the newly opened Treaty ports. Quite simply there were no available Western women in these ports which were considered dangerous places in which to live.
Nagasaki, in particular, was famed for its local girls, said to be not only the prettiest in Japan, but also the easiest to live with. Glover was a resident and a gentleman and his arrangement with Sono bears no comparison with the rough-and-ready red-light trade indulged in by visiting seamen.
The usual routine for the respectable foreigner in these cases was to be taken to a certain tea-house by a go-between. These go-betweens were often Customs officials, people with whom Tom would have been in constant contact. The suggestion for taking a ‘wife’ may well have come from one of these officials. The tea-house was probably a two-storey, balconied building in Maruyama and Tom most likely crossed the ‘Hesitation’ and ‘Made-up-your-Mind’ bridges to reach it.
Inside the tea-house, Tom would have been seated on a tatami mat in the twinkling light of a paper lantern. Drinking sake from thimble-sized cups, he would have listened to the melancholy strumming of the samisen and the swish of silken kimono. These tastes, sounds and atmosphere are uniquely Japanese.
He would have viewed various pretty girls and after a while selected the one most pleasing to him. He would have promised ‘marriage’ and it was the go-between’s job to arrange this, an accepted union in Japan. A house to rent for the couple would often be part of the deal. It was normal for the girl to live with the foreigner as long as he stayed in Japan, or in some cases until he got bored or a baby was on the way. When he did decide to leave, for whatever reason, the marriage dissolved itself. There was a poignancy about these inevitably sad affairs which would in time grow into the Madam Butterfly syndrome – the faithful Japanese woman betrayed by the golden-haired scoundrel.
It was normal for the new wife, in many cases the daughter of a respectable but poor family, to stay in the house her husband provided, as was the case anyway with most Japanese wives. Glover’s wife, Sono, would not normally have taken part in the social life of the foreign community in Nagasaki. She would have remained in the company of her family or with other Japanese wives in similar circumstances when not with her husband.
Tom and Sono had a son whom they named Umekichi. He died as a baby of four months in the following year. The marriage did not last – Glover and Sono ‘divorced’, amicably it would seem, for Tom is said to have provided the finance for her to travel abroad to study some years later.
This early affair of Glover is worth looking into even with the scanty facts which have survived. For the period he appears to have conducted this affair with unusual sensitivity and respect. In later years another liaison of his would follow much more closely the Madam Butterfly theme.
Glover was only one of many Westerners who took a Japanese wife at this time. George Smith, the Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong, on a ten-week visit to Japan in 1860, was outraged at the number of foreign bachelors with native wives. He thought it tantamount to government approval that Customs officials could be involved in such scandalous matters. The Bishop failed to mention that no Western women were available.
The Bishop wrote a book on what he had observed on his Japanese visit. He reckoned that it was ‘sad indeed the temptations to which young Englishmen are exposed who take up their residence in Nagasaki . . . after 9 p.m. nearly half the population [of Nagasaki] are inebriated’.
Nagasaki’s newspaper, a four-page sheet which began publication in the summer of the following year, 1861, called the Bishop’s remarks a ‘libel’. In its review of the Bishop’s book the writer thought that ‘the mother, the sisters and friends of young bachelors would be led by these [the Bishop’s] expressions to believe that these were as the cities of old, peculiar for their vice, and, horrors, we deny it.’
It is not known what Tom’s mother, sister or friends in the Bridge of Don would have thought of these remarks if they had read them. Aberdeen was a world away.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE PHANTOM AND THE FANATICS
In an otherwise mundane business report to Shanghai from MacKenzie and Glover in January 1861, a very significant change in Japanese trade was noted. At the end of an account of a cotton-marine product barter, MacKenzie mentions that the Japanese Satsuma clan had bought the British steamer England. This fast, screw-driven ship of 1500 tons had been purchased in defiance of the shogun’s ban on such imports. Ostensibly it had been bought for carrying the clan’s products from the remote Satsuma capital of Kagoshima in the far south of Japan to the markets of the heavily populated north of the country. The England was not new but it was modern – at the time most transatlantic crossings were still being made by smaller paddle-steamers – and it was important because an example had been set for other potentially rebellious clans. There were some in the Satsuma clan who were not at all happy with the shogun’s impotence to prevent the foreign presence on the sacred soil of Japan. Others felt that much could be learned from the Westerners and wanted to encourage and promote trade with them – but they, too, resented the shogun. The divisions in the Satsuma clan were beginning to appear in the other powerful clans of south-west Japan. The general situation was one of confusion with the hotheaded anti-foreign fanatics the most dangerous faction of all.
Ships such as the England would be vital in the event of civil war breaking out among the rival factions in Japan. In a country with virtually no system of roads, transport of troops by sea would be crucial in a conflict. There was the chance, too, that guns could be mounted on the ship at a later date. Another major point to be taken from the purchase of the England by Satsuma was that the shogun’s monopoly of steamships then in Japan was over, another sign of the underlying weakness of the bakufu.
Glover shrewdly noted the price paid by Satsuma for