Sunday, Dec. 11, 2011

Garden party: The Glover family at the turn of the 20th century. Back row, left to right: Glover's son, Tomisaburo; his brother, Alfred; and Thomas Blake himself. Seated, left to right: Glover's sister, Martha; his daughter, Hana; and Tomisaburo's wife, Waka.

By MICHAEL GARDINER

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Meanwhile, after the slump in his arms trade, Glover also turned to coal mining, putting in increasingly torturous hours on the small island of Takashima, only to suffer bankruptcy in 1870 through a combination of bad luck and desperate accounting. Although the new Dutch owners of the mine kept him on as manager, his big peacetime break came when he was recruited in 1874 by his near contemporary, Yataro Iwasaki, the scion of a Tosa-clan former samurai family in Shikoku who had recently set up a shipbuilding business.

Catching up: After a life of unceasing activity, Glover enjoys a spot of trout fishing in Nikko, Tochigi Prefecture, in his later years.

In 1873, Iwasaki renamed his business Mitsubishi — forerunner of the now-global Mitsubishi conglomerate — and to the enterprise Glover brought not only his expertise but also considerable funds. And of course both men had close connections with the network of former samurai behind the Meiji government that was to stay in place until the Emperor's death in 1912, and who were happy to pass contracts — especially for warships — their way.

Glover's new salaried position, more or less as a shipbuilding consultant, allowed him to bolster his profile and also work on some of the side projects for which he is now sometimes better known. Among these was the apparently impossible business of brewing and selling beer in a country where it was virtually unknown. Nonetheless, it is no mere urban myth that the design of the Kirin beer-label motif to this day features his mustache, since the original sketch was made by his daughter, Hana, and Glover was one of the prime movers and early directors of the Japan Brewery Co. from which Kirin Brewery Co. evolved.

As well, in a Japan now hungry for all the world had to offer, Glover developed interests in telegraphs, trawl fishing and generally oiling the wheels of deals to bring mostly Scottish engineers to mid-Meiji Era projects including town planning, lighthouse-building and railways. Of these, the most celebrated name now is probably that of Aberdeen-born Richard Brunton, who is remembered as "the father of Japanese lighthouses."

Increasingly though, the rise of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the authoritarian turn the state was taking, came to worry Glover, as it did the liberal management of Mitsubishi. Although he never seriously considered returning to Scotland, in the early 1880s he moved with his brother Alex to the new untamed frontier of Washington State for two almost undocumented years.

With Glover gone, the openly Anglophile Ito was worryingly looking to Prussia for a constitutional model, since (despite studying at University College London as one of the Chosu Five) he could find no British written Constitution — unsurprisingly, as no such thing existed or exists to this day.

By the mid-1880s, however, Glover had returned and was settled between Nagasaki and Tokyo with a wife of unusually long standing for the time and a son he had "reclaimed" from a previous partner. From the late 1880s till the failure of his health in the mid-1900s he increasingly spent his time in his opulent house in Azabu, where even in semi-retirement he continued brokering between local politicians and foreign residents at a time when tensions were not only still high, but also sometimes increased by Japan's growing power in the Pacific that culminated in its victory over Russia — one of the established Great Powers — in the countries' 1904-05 war.

Though Glover's free-trading achievements were to figure in an horrific legacy of collateral damage, they did doubtless greatly help to propel the progressive course of Meiji Era Japan and beyond. Whether "progressive" is the same as "good" is a much more complicated question; as is the question of to what extent Glover was just an outstanding but soulless opportunist.

Whatever the value judgments of the man, however, what is certain is that, at a time when traders took self-reliance, laissez-faire and their home countries' gunboat diplomacy for granted, Glover contributed to the overthrow of the shogunate and the establishment of Japan's international relations in quite concrete ways — whether as an arms dealer or a freelance quasi-diplomat.

Man of standing: Thomas Blake Glover poses for a photo that was taken in a studio around 1900. NAGASAKI MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND CULTURE

In this latter regard, his massaging of a Satsuma-Choshu-Britain summit in 1865 was perhaps his single most important accomplishment, since it helped forge a rapport between the clans which, in turn, encouraged the British government not to step in to stop their rebellion or the sale of arms.

Later, too, Glover would be an important "pro-Japan" lobbyist — most notably through the British courtier and politician Lord Charles Spencer, of the Lady Diana line — adding to the impetus behind the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which headed off potential problems for Britain during World War I.

By that time, however, and even more so after the victory over Russia in 1905, Glover — while publicly supporting Japan's imperial ambitions — was becoming privately ambivalent about the speed of the military buildup. Indeed, it was to lead to an expansion which would eventually set the new Empire of Japan against the old Western trading powers and end in the suicide of his own son in post-bombing Nagasaki.

If the Glover story does show how the Foreign Office in London tended to stand back to let traders lead, only to then write those same traders out of the official histories, it also shows clearly how foreign policy operated within the imperial understanding of free trade.

In other words, it lays bare how foreign policy was made an instrument of finance and commerce, with culture then adduced to support it. To see how well that strategy succeeded in Japan, look no further than the many themed balls of the later Meiji Era. Organized by the elites to demonstrate their country's new, outward-looking attitude, these tended to be to slightly parodic imitations of European aristocratic events, even in details of dress. To an extent, Japanese-Western relations have never quite shrugged off these clunky shows of "tradition."

In this sense, the timing of Glover's stay is crucial: The year of the Restoration, 1868, also saw the floodgates open to Enlightenment ideas, as well as the publication of Charles Dilke's influential imperial tract "Greater Britain," which argued for an Anglophone empire based on language and culture rather than military power alone — and was itself a reaction to the expense of maintaining imperial power after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865.

A glance at the spread of the new Meiji Era universities, many evolved from English schools, and later highly mimetic fashions, also shows how this shift was registered in Japan — and by mid-Meiji Era editions of "Greater Britain," Japan had been included.

This was the moment Glover inhabited; he grasped how it worked and played skilfully within its parameters. More widely, his success fell within a period when the universalizing of certain specific values was normal.

Universalist Scottish-Enlightenment modes of progressive thought were particularly welcomed by an ambitious new Japan around the time of opening, from Nakamura Masanao's 1872 translation of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" to Nishi Amane's rationalist and encyclopaedizing "Seiji Jijo" (1866-70) and Fukuzawa Yukichi's "In Praise of Knowledge" (1872-76).

View from on high: Nagasaki seen today from "Ipponmatsu," the home with a beautiful garden that Glover had built, and which is now called Glover House.

In fact, much of what was taken as axiomatic following the Meiji Restoration originally belonged to the Scottish Enlightenment, and was transmitted at a time when imperial free trade had given Scotland a means of expression within the British state.

As such, the globalizing choices faced by Glover's Japan had been faced by Scotland around a century before, and both countries in their turn came to see that they had to compete aggressively within, or through, empire to avoid being swallowed up by a new order.

In the case of what historians term the First Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith and David Hume brought philosophical skepticism and free-trade ideals; in the case of the Second Scottish Enlightenment, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill added individual responsibility, heroism, and freedom. Both were imported enthusiastically around the time of the Meiji Restoration, and both fed into the heroic, ethnic, trade-based empire-building Japan embarked upon.

Most assessments of Glover, nevertheless, fail to address the importance of the outward push of empire and of social class that he so effectively ushered into the corridors of Meiji Era power.

Firstly, the British Empire had demanded a typology of race (Brits on top; others in need of civilizing, benevolently or otherwise) that would be drawn on by Meiji conservatives as if it were natural and universal. In due course, this was to amplify Japan's sense of an Imperial civilizing mission, while following the humiliation of World War II it would again resurface to amplify a face-saving myth of Japan's separateness.

This conception of race had largely been invented in Edinburgh (the famed medical school's anatomy was key) in the 1840s and '50s, and was typical of a peripheral region that had been humiliated and had lost government power (following failed rebellions in 1715 and '45) and was after new universalizing, rationalist, managerial guidelines — the Scottish Enlightenment — to help them spread into empire. Imported at a very rapid pace in the Meiji Era and, translated into samurai terms, this typology became a principle for the free-market civilizing mission that was the Japanese empire.

Additionally, in terms of social class, the Meiji opening of their country was attractive to Glover's allies in part because it allowed for the easy translation of an existing caste system in which samurai were on top as if by divine right, to a class system in which the same samurai ruled as by managerial merit. To this day, indeed, there remains in Japan a powerful mix of finance and officialdom — just as in fragmenting Great Britain.

In such ways, Enlightenment Japan did indeed mirror Enlightenment Scotland — and the pioneering Glover did indeed define a particular form of progressivism despite his modus operandi being virtually that of today's rogue finance traders who stretch and endanger their institution to the point they are left virtually acting alone.

In a fundamental sense, though, was Glover ever really pushing the envelope of free-market mercantile morality very far? After all, he owed his position as a pioneer trader to Jardine Matheson, a company that was able to flood China with opium and arms with little resistance, one that lobbied for the Opium Wars and was at the center of what would in the 20th century be called a military-industrial complex.

And as for the "free" in free-market morality, of course it was bogus as it relied on British military might and the all-powerful Royal Navy in particular.

In this respect it may be that part of Glover's contemporary significance stems from that desire he personifies — to free markets from a state-sponsored investment thinking which simply draws money to money — and turn them instead toward serving freely chosen interpersonal exchanges of goods. This is significant in our own environment, where bubble economies continue to prevail.

However, there's an anomalous legacy of Glover and his ilk, too, thanks to the persistence of a mid-Victorian typology of discrete ethnicities with which he would have felt quite at home. Hence, in the received wisdom of today's Japan, Glover's fame has slipped far below that of the Tosa revolutionary Sakamoto Ryoma, despite the latter quite likely having been less influential in bringing about the Meiji Restoration. But Sakamoto is now better remembered, not because of Glover's dubious dealing, but because he is imagined to better encapsulate the modern Japanese spirit.

Yet more anomalously, if there is such a thing as a modern progressive Japanese spirit, the course of Glover's pragmatic and flexible career would be a fairly good example of it — accepting vested power for what it is, while acting like a militant liberal quite often.

In this form, that spirit takes in the attitudes of samurai like Sakamoto, Ito and Godai in the same way Glover was as power-driven and as dismissive of weak will and empty bureaucracy as those of samurai stock whose company he shared.

And just as Glover's aggressive free-trading came with a sense of destiny and a civilizing mission, so too did Japan head off on that route — a route that these days tends to follow the course of globalization in competitive, strategic and unequal modes.

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