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 renegades and rebel samurai would hide and plot the downfall of the shogun. The comings and goings at Glover House would be noted by spies and passed on to the shogun.
The house was built as a Japanese thought a Western house should be and is a curious mixture of East and West. The rooms are large, high ceilinged and airy and Tom and Jim Glover would have lived there comfortably, even in the hottest days of summer cooled by the breeze skimming the water of the harbour below. They could have entertained their friends there with some style. This was a decided improvement on the early clapboard, Wild West style of building in Oura which was house, warehouse and office combined – a style the highly skilled Japanese carpenters had copied from outdated pictures of Western architecture.
There are photographs, some captioned as early as ‘Nagasaki 1863’, showing the now familiar honeycomb shape of Glover House shortly after it was built. In one of these Tom and Jim are posing on the steps of the porch in a group containing their partner Edward Harrison with some others. The distinctive ‘rising sun’ windows are visible above the door behind them. Significantly these early photographs also show some of the Westerners carrying rifles. In those days the brothers were still ‘Tom’ and ‘Jim’ – only later would Glover acquire the more stately ‘Thomas’ or ‘TB’.
A croquet green had been laid on the level above the house and the level below overlooked the masts and sails of the many ships lying at anchor. In another of the photographs two Western women are pictured on the croquet green with their partners and it is most likely that Glover House was a favourite gathering place for Nagasaki’s foreign residents.
Much of the social life at this time would have gone on at the homes of the residents. Western women were still at a premium but there was apparently no shortage of local girls. In a Japanese directory of foreign residents in Yokohama, dated 1861–2, thirty of the seventy-nine registered households had a resident musume (literally daughter or girl, at the time the word was taken to mean a mistress). The register lists no musume resident at the homes of married men whose wives were with them in Japan, or at the homes of clergymen, doctors and certain others. In houses shared by two bachelors there were two resident musume. It is safe to presume the same arrangements were in force in Nagasaki.
The four partners in Glover & Co. had plenty to keep them occupied – letters for dispatch by mail steamer to keep Jardine, Matheson happy, bargaining with the tea and silk dealers in an effort to keep up with changing prices, running the tea refiring plant which now employed hundreds – as well as run-of-the-mill problems of thieving by native labourers, crooked Customs officials and belligerent ships’ captains. On top of this, Glover in early 1863 was continuing to keep close and clandestine contact with agents of the Satsuma clan.
Shogun-induced problems with foreign exchange the previous year had eventually been referred to London. Francis Groom was in Britain on Glover & Co. business at this time and gave his version of affairs in Japan to British Treasury officials – perhaps contradicting the views of the British Minister in Edo, Rutherford Alcock.
But currency problems were not the only problems Glover had to face in the early part of that
