Thomas Glover — The Scottish Merchant Who Armed the Restoration

A Scotsman who took part in Japan's revolution by selling weapons. Thomas Blake Glover, the merchant remembered through Glover Garden in Nagasaki.

Contents

What Glover Did

Glover was a Scottish merchant who operated in Bakumatsu Nagasaki.

His work divides into two periods.

The Bakumatsu — selling arms. He sold ships and guns to the anti-shogunal domains, Satsuma and Choshu among them. He supported the overthrow of the shogunate as a business.

The Meiji era — building industry. Shipbuilding, coal mining, beer, railways. His hand is present across the industries of modern Japan.

Born in Scotland in 1838, he came to Japan in his early twenties and set up a firm in Nagasaki.

The Arms Dealer

Glover arrived not long after Japan opened.

His largest commodity was weapons: rifles, cannon, and ships. Bakumatsu Japan was a time when domains raced to modernize their arms, and there was enormous demand for Western weapons.

Glover met it — above all for Satsuma and Choshu, the domains that would lead the overthrow of the shogunate.

Here lies the delicacy of his position. Choshu was then a domain treated as an enemy by the shogunate, and selling it arms ran against shogunal policy. Glover did not shrink from such risky trade.

Glover did not deal only with the anti-shogunal side; he traded with the shogunate too. What drove him was first of all commerce, and no source establishes that he was betting on a particular political outcome. What is certain is that his weapons ended up strengthening the side that overthrew the shogunate.

The Link to Sakamoto Ryoma

Glover is said to have had dealings with Sakamoto Ryoma.

The Kameyama Shachu (later the Kaientai), which Ryoma was involved in, was an organization for trade and shipping across domain lines. In dealing in arms and ships, Glover's firm is thought to have had contact with it.

The famous case is Choshu buying weapons under Satsuma's name — arms the enemy domain could not purchase directly, obtained through Satsuma. Ryoma and others were involved in brokering this, and behind it stood Glover.

That said, primary records of a concrete relationship between Ryoma and Glover are scarce, and how directly the two were connected should be treated with caution.

Into Meiji Industry

With the shogunate overthrown and the Meiji era begun, Glover's business reached a turning point.

Demand for arms fell with the end of the fighting, and Glover's firm ran into difficulty and failed.

But Glover himself did not leave Japan. He found a new place inside the industry of Meiji Japan.

He worked in shipbuilding and supported what became Mitsubishi's enterprises. He was involved in running the Takashima coal mine, and in one of the earliest beer ventures, a company that fed into what became Kirin. The man who had armed a revolution supported the country afterward through industry, and was decorated late in life for it.

Glover Garden

The house Glover built in Nagasaki is known as among the oldest surviving Western-style wooden buildings in Japan.

Around this former residence in the Minamiyamate district, gathering other Western houses nearby, Glover Garden was laid out — a leading Nagasaki attraction that preserves the trace of Westerners living in the city in the Bakumatsu.

He kept a household with a Japanese woman, Tsuru. Glover's son, Kuraba Tomisaburo (accounts of his birth mother differ), grew up in Japan and lived involved in Nagasaki's fisheries and society. Glover's line continued as Japanese.

Timeline

For the Japanese side of the period see Sakamoto Ryoma; for the opening of Japan, the Black Ships.