Scottish Samurai. Alexander McKay
had recently and reluctantly been opened to the West. Among Lord Elgin’s mission was another young Scot – Laurence Oliphant – with whom Glover would become involved over the years.
To the north-east of Shanghai, a week’s sail across the Yellow Sea, lay the mysterious islands of Japan. Japan at the time was the last Eastern civilisation untouched by the West and its imminent opening to foreign trade would have been the main topic of conversation in the offices and clubs of the China-based expatriates. The image of Japan held by many of the Europeans of Tom’s day was that of a very dangerous place – but there was also a romantic, almost magnetic fascination for the country as well as the assumption in the trading world that fortunes were there to be made once the door was open. The hereditary military ruler of Japan was the shogun, in Glover’s time better known as the tycoon. The Tokugawa family had held the office of shogun for more than 200 years. The Japanese emperor, or Mikado, was little more than a powerless figurehead virtually held in austere custody in Kyoto.
Japan had been all but sealed off from the world since 1638. At that time the then shogun, fearing the spread of Western influence, had expelled all Europeans from Japan and executed all the Japanese he could find who had become Christians. A severe exclusion policy, called sakoku, or ‘chained country’, had been strictly enforced for over 200 years and was even then being maintained by the fourteenth Tokugawa shogun. A Japanese fisherman blown by bad weather on to the shores of mainland Asia could not return to Japan – the penalty for breaking the exclusion order was death. Any foreign seamen shipwrecked on Japan were imprisoned or killed. A small Dutch colony had been allowed on the man-made island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay. Here some limited trade and exchanges of information were allowed but the Dutch contingent were closely guarded and controlled.
Despite the apparently settled state of Japan there was in some quarters deep and serious resentment against the shogun’s rule. The daimyo were the feudal lords of Japan, each ruling his clan and domain as he saw fit but still under the overall command of the shogun. There were more than 250 of these clans, or han, and their domains were spread throughout the Japanese islands. To enforce his authority the shogun made the clan lords in turn spend part of every year in his stronghold of Edo (modern Tokyo). When the lords returned to their domains, their families remained in Edo, virtual hostages of the shogun. The most powerful and resentful of the lords were located in the south-west domains, principally the clans of Satsuma and Choshu. These clans did not have the family ties that bound many of the other daimyo to the shogun. But even in and between these potentially rebellious clans there was distrust.
As the nineteenth century had progressed, the great naval powers had become more than a little restless with the attitude of the Japanese governments of successive shoguns. They wanted coaling, watering and trading facilities for their ships and guarantees for shipwrecked seamen. The Japanese found it hard to argue, their country had stagnated technically and militarily during its long seclusion. All of the shoguns had forbidden any ship to be built larger than that required for inshore fishing. Most of the technical advances of the West had completely bypassed Japan.
In the early 1850s, the push by the Great Powers could no longer be resisted by the Japanese. Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy and his ‘black ship’ squadron visited Japan in July 1853 and returned in February 1854. Anchored in Edo Bay, the size and armoury of the American ships quite clearly shocked many of the Japanese. The message from the West was clear – open up the country voluntarily or have it opened by force.
The first reaction of the majority of the Japanese clan lords was that, despite the obvious might of the West, Japan’s total exclusion policy had to be maintained at all costs. But as the 1850s progressed the Japanese became more and more aware of the powerful navies beginning to clamour at their doorstep, particularly that of the British, now with a free hand because of the ending of the Crimean War. The majority view now swung in favour generally of the shogun’s policy – allowing limited trade with the ‘barbarians’, though only as a means of preventing war with them – at least until Japan could fight on equal terms. There were active minorities, in about ten clans out of the more than 250 in Japan, who disagreed entirely with this policy. They began to criticise the shogun and his advisers for allowing the foreigners access to Japan at all. Old and deep resentments against the shogunate now had an opportunity to resurface.
The shogun was in a quandary, wanting rid of the foreigners but not knowing quite how to go about it. All the indications were that the Japanese emperor, still powerless in Kyoto, did not want the foreigners either.
The shogun now came under severe pressure and eventually gave way to further foreign demands. Basically, the Japanese were playing for time. Trading treaties with the Western Powers were signed. The Westerners, in general, were unaware of the explosive and complicated political situation in Japan or of the unrest in some of the clans. In the beginning some even thought that the shogun was, in fact, the emperor. To complicate matters even more the shogun did not have the dictatorial powers that many of the Westerners assumed him to have. Over the years the once all-powerful shogun had become in many cases simply a figurehead. The real power in Japan for a long time had been in the hands of the roju — a group of four or five leading councillors of the bakufu, the central administration of the shogun. Later the Westerners assumed that, like a European monarch, the Japanese Mikado reigned from Kyoto and that his prime minister or perhaps generalissimo, the shogun, ruled the country from Edo.
In any case, agreement was finally reached on the opening up of, initially, three Japanese ports. There foreign traders could be based and, within certain agreed limits, protected. The ports were Nagasaki, Kanagawa (later to become Yokohama) and Hakodate, and these three ports would come to be known as the Treaty ports.
Lying on the west coast of Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu, Nagasaki was the country’s nearest port to mainland Asia and had been the centre of Japanese Christianity before the Europeans had been expelled two and a half centuries before.
The deep, natural and protected harbour of Nagasaki with its narrow entrance was the port’s main asset. Thick woods of lush greenery pushed down the steep hillsides and surrounded the town which crouched round the harbour’s edge. Nagasaki’s disadvantages to the West were its size – a population of only around 50,000 – and its distance from the seat of government and the heavily populated areas of Japan far away to the north-east in central Honshu. Many of the incoming Westerners thought that they could establish themselves in Nagasaki until the really rich pickings – in Osaka and Kobe and Edo itself – were available. The treaties signed with the British, Americans, Russians and Dutch in 1858 contained agreements to open several more ports in the coming years.
But the disadvantages of Nagasaki to the traders were seen as major pluses by the shogun – this was a place where the ‘barbarians’ could be kept at bay, remote from his capital and stronghold of Edo. Of course, Yokohama, too, was opening and this swampy fishing village was close to Edo, but it was hoped that this new settlement could be cut off as effectively as Nagasaki. The third port, Hakodate in the northern island of Hokkaido, was naturally isolated by weather and surroundings. It was then of little importance to the shogun. He was attempting to buy time.
At one time an entirely Christian town where no Buddhist temple was even allowed to be built, Nagasaki had long since been under the direct control of the shogun. A daimyo could not be trusted apparently to hold this still strategic port which was close to the lands of the powerful Satsuma and Hizen clans. It was the natural melting pot for agents of the various factions then beginning to form in Japan, pro- and anti-foreign.
Young Tom Glover had been in China for just over a year when the first Western traders began to leave for Japan, to the Chinese the land of the ‘Rising Sun’.
CHAPTER THREE
MACKENZIE’S PARTNER
The official opening date of the Treaty ports of Nagasaki, Hakodate and Yokohama was 1 July 1859. But there were many adventurers among the China-based traders who could not wait until that date and were willing to risk the dangers of working in unknown Japan without any legal protection. Several were operating in Nagasaki by the end of 1858. Kenneth Ross MacKenzie, who had been born in Edinburgh,