Thomas Blake Glover The Last Explorers

You know where you are. Could you imagine anywhere more modern than Tokyo?

Tokyo is a city of around 13 million people

and a global commercial powerhouse.

There's technology everywhere.

Japan is studded with corporations so famous, they've become legends,

celebrities - Sony, Panasonic,

Mitsubishi...

It's a love story, a romance, between Japan and anything new.

This is a nation so entranced by the modern world,

it's hard to believe it was ever anything different.

But it was.

A little more than 150 years ago,

Japan was medieval.

A land of feudal villages

and knights in armour.

But then, on a single day, on the 1st of January, 1873,

Japan declared its desire to modernise,

to synchronise with the West.

On that day, Japan set out on her journey

towards becoming one of the world's most powerful economic and industrial giants.

The architect of that revolution was a unique, intrepid businessman.

He was part buccaneer and part explorer.

He was a Scot and his name was Thomas Blake Glover.

Thomas Blake Glover was one of a small group of explorers

who took the stage as the great age of exploration was drawing to a close.

Many before them sought adventure and fortune,

staked claims to vast territories in the name of God and country.

But the last explorers didn't plant flags.

They planted ideas.

Ideas that helped shape the modern world we know today.

In September, 1859, Thomas Glover was on a Chinese trading boat from Shanghai,

bound for the Japanese port of Nagasaki.

He was a pioneer. Only a handful of foreigners had ever seen Japan.

It was a new frontier, a land of mystery,

closed to outsiders for two centuries.

The Americans had just changed that.

They had sailed in forced the Japanese, at gunpoint,

to open their borders for trade.

Believe it or not,

this is how many Japanese regarded Westerners,

frowning, long-nosed, demons. Almost goblins.

For Westerners, Japan was going to be very strange indeed,

almost beyond foreign.

Japan was a cupboard of yesterdays.

Houses were made of wood and paper.

Its technologies were dated in the extreme.

For over 200 years, Japanese society had stood still,

its leaders fearful that change would diminish their power

and that outside influences would dilute their culture.

But as the first handfuls of foreigners began to reappear on the sacred soil of Japan,

a new slogan appeared everywhere.

It said, "Sonno joi."

"Sonno" means "Revere The Emperor."

"Joi" means "Expel The Foreigner."

To the expanding commercial empires of the West,

sonno joi was an offence.

America and Britain looked at Japan's location

and saw it as an ideal way station for trade in the Orient,

and an almost certainly profitable market in itself.

Cue Thomas Blake Glover,

the perfect blend of buccaneer and businessman.

Glover landed in Nagasaki on September 19th, 1859.

He was working for the Scottish multinational trading company, Jardine Matheson,

founded to exploit the wealth of the empire.

Its agents were trained to be ruthless.

They dealt with high risks and unstable markets.

They got rich quick and got out.

Glover had done well in Shanghai and had been headhunted for a new challenge.

Thomas Glover is a bit of an enigma, in a sense.

He kept no diaries, so we can only guess at his motivations.

He had no business background.

His father was a coastguard in Aberdeen.

His education could not have been more conventional or Victorian.

And yet here he was, at the age of 20,

with a cool business head and an eye for profit,

stepping into a whole new adventure

in one of the most mysterious and dangerous places on the face of the earth.

Nothing could've prepared him for this,

opaque customs, speaking not a word of the language,

one of the first Westerners to try and penetrate a land

notoriously hostile to foreigners.

Now, for my money, that's a brave man.

And this unlikely-looking spot

is where Glover first set foot on Japanese soil.

The Dejima, now the site of a heritage museum,

used to be Japan's only point of contact with the outside world.

In Glover's day, it was a tiny spit of land,

set apart from the mainland by a bridge,

once heavily guarded, but now open for business.

Reclaimed land and the paraphernalia of a modern city now surround it.

Brian, what exactly was the Dejima?

Dejima was an artificial island

that was built specifically

to keep foreigners from mingling with Japanese people.

It wasn't enough to fence off a bit of Japan? It had to be an island?

Yes. I think the idea was, by surrounding it with the ocean,

that they could prevent the intermingling as much as possible.

Brian Burke-Gaffney is a history professor and Nagasaki resident.

He's written about Glover and has offered to be my guide.

So, this was the previously closed world

-that Glover finally penetrated?

-Yes.

-There's a very interesting photograph...

-Great.

..that shows probably this exact location.

-That's the view from this window?

-Yes. You can see that the harbour was right there.

-Look at the view! You're looking out at a huge harbour!

-Yes.

And now there's shops and telegraph poles.

At the beginning, the only Japanese that he would really have made contact with

was the representatives of the Magistrates Office and interpreters

and, to a certain extent, some merchants who were beginning to trade,

and Japanese women.

Thomas Glover's early relationships with Japanese women,

I think, is all part of his lore.

It must've been like a foreign planet,

the world of Japan he encountered would've been so foreign,

in a way that's hard for us to imagine.

In a sense. And full of potential.

"If we can do this, we can do this."

-There was just an infinite...

-Everything must've seemed possible.

And anything was possible for Thomas Glover.

New trade treaties allowed him to buy and export tea and silk

and set up a base on mainland Nagasaki.

But to kick-start his business,

first, he had to find the right palms to grease.

In Shanghai, Glover had learned that the first principle of successful business

was to be streetwise, savvy, keep in with the right people.

But who were the influential contacts to make here?

'He would need to appeal to the mercantile spirit

'he hoped was common the world over...'

Have you been to Scotland?

'..and, of course, which still exists today.'

THEY SPEAK JAPANESE

-It's pasta. It's very good pasta.

-OK.

One minute...

One minute. Very, very fast pasta.

And I could sell this in the UK, in Scotland?

MAN SPEAKS JAPANESE

This is great. This is Thomas Glover-land.

I have now made a contact

where I can sell perfect pasta in Scotland

that this gentlemen makes. That's how it's done.

MAN SPEAKS JAPANESE

Amongst all the other challenges that he faced...

..he had to learn the language.

And he managed to pull off that feat in double-quick time.

I'm going to see if I can learn it before I get to the top of the cable car.

INSTRUCTOR SPEAKS JAPANESE

HE REPEATS JAPANESE PHRASES

INSTRUCTOR: "Where is the station?" INSTRUCTOR SPEAKS JAPANESE

HE REPEATS JAPANESE PHRASES

-INSTRUCTOR: "Please help me."

-Please help me.

But his challenges weren't limited to just learning the language.

Unbeknown to Glover, this was a country in political meltdown.

Although emperors had ruled Japan for hundreds of years,

Glover soon learned that they ruled nothing at all.

It was the head of the military, the Shogun, who held the real power.

His military dictatorship held the country in a vice-like grip.

The emperor was under virtual house arrest at the Imperial Palace in Kyoto.

He had been sidelined,

kept more than 400 kilometres from where the real business of state was happening,

the shogun city of Edo.

It was in Edo that the foreign powers opened their embassies, not Kyoto.

Kyoto was a place for students and artists, monks and nuns,

people who, politically speaking, where merely ornamental.

Like the emperor himself.

Japan was divided into clans,

whose territories spread the length of the country.

the southern clans felt the Shogun's monopoly on taxes and trade

was oppressive and unfair.

They felt caged, unable to move forward and prosper.

Nagasaki was tense.

To Glover, it must've seemed like a lawless frontier town,

the Wild, Wild East.

Everyday was high noon, disputes settled not by gun-slinging cowboys

but by the clans' warriors,

sword-wielding Samurai.

THEY GRUNT

What is it exactly that the men here are practicing cutting?

HE INSTRUCTS IN JAPANESE

The truth is, I'm terrified I'm about to cut my own leg off!

-HE CHUCKLES

-Didn't work very well!

EXCITED CHATTER AND APPLAUSE

I think I've done enough.

Thank you.

MAN GRUNTS

There was a purpose to all this practice.

The Samurai were proud, menacing, sent to intimidate,

and were, above all, driven by complicated notions of status and honour.

I sometimes think the Victorian British men and the Samurai

have certain things in common.

There's a lot of pride, there's a lot of obsession with class and hierarchy,

and it's a shame that they didn't see those similarities in one another.

There was a lot to learn.

Japan was a complicated, fractured place.

The different clan territories were brought together uneasily

under the rule of the emperor and Shogun.

Nagasaki was the domain of a powerful clan called the Satsuma.

It was their samurai that Glover needed to befriend,

although their reputation was fearsome.

The law in Japan permitted the Samurai

to summarily execute anyone who gave them offence.

But the Samurai code of morality and honour, called Bushido, was mysterious.

Giving offence might mean no more than failing to give way to one of them in a public street,

a faux pas that might be solved in Britain with a simple "excuse me".

The Samurai rebuke was quite a bit sharper.

In September of 1862,

a party of four British merchants, one woman and three men,

left Yokohama on horseback.

They encountered a Satsuma procession

travelling towards the Shogun city of Edo,

failed to clear the road, as etiquette demanded,

and paid the price.

Two men were mutilated

and one other, Charles Richardson, died of his wounds.

The British Government sent messages to both the Shogun and the Satsuma clan leader,

demanding the execution of those responsible

and a payment of 100,000 in compensation.

It threw the trading community into a panic.

Now there was not just the threat of civil war,

but war against Britain, too.

The British would not wait indefinitely for an apology from the Satsuma.

Many foreigners started packing and prepared to flee.

But not Glover.

Within months of Richardson's murder, while tension mounted,

he moved into his first permanent residence in Nagasaki.

It's a huge, imposing place,

testament to the growing success of his business and of his bravado.

By the time he moved in,

he's been living in Nagasaki for three years.

He was only 24.

Brian, do you think, by some chance,

there was something about Glover as an individual that chimed with the Japanese spirit?

Did they seem him as some kind of kindred spirit?

I definitely think there was probably a factor like that.

The British or, more specifically perhaps, Scottish spirit

or personality or something,

being very careful to follow through on promises,

not bragging and sort of a self-deprecating attitude,

making fun of one's self...

-Is that a Japanese characteristic?

-Very much, and I think also British.

Sort of, "It's no big deal!"

In photographs, he's a very striking, handsome individual.

-Do you think just the way he looked and carried himself gave him an advantage?

-Yes.

-Obviously, he was a good-looking man.

-Yes.

You really the impression by everyone gathered around him

that he was the centre of attention and the leader of the foreign community.

As you say, he had this natural leadership,

and it was based partly on his physical bearing,

but also on his personality.

Glover stood out from the crowd in other ways, too.

Unlike his fellow Britons,

he took a distinctly unpatriotic stance

and began to do business with the Satsuma,

against whom the British Government were threatening war.

He became one of the only traders to leave the safety of the foreign district

and ply his trade in the Nagasaki tea rooms

that were on Satsuma turf.

This is a letter from the British Consul in Nagasaki.

"Mr Glover is fluent in the Japanese language

"and is on terms of intimacy and friendship with many Japanese of rank,

"amongst whom he is much esteemed."

A year after Charles Richardson was murdered,

seven of the British Navy's finest ships sailed into Kagoshima Bay

and trained their guns on the southern Japanese town.

Kagoshima was the capital of the Satsuma clan.

Almost a year had passed since the British had demanded reparations, executions and apologies,

and the Satsuma clan had made no sensible response.

It was time for gunboat diplomacy

on a pleasingly uneven playing field.

The British flagship carried new Armstrong Guns

which boasted greater range and greater accuracy,

and the shells themselves were explosive.

And the Japanese?

They had a range of offensive antiques,

cannons, not guns.

The cannonballs were mere lumps of metal.

They carried no explosive charge.

The mighty British fleet expected no resistance at all.

On the day of the bombardment, where was the British fleet?

British fleet, from north to south, they centred on line.

So they were right along the line that we're crossing now.

Yes. And we are crossing the English fleet.

-So, they would've been shelling over our heads.

-Yes!

Pouring fiercely over our heads!

EXPLOSIONS

The Japanese did remarkably well.

Their antique cannons killed 13.

But because the Satsuma evacuated the city in advance,

the British killed only five.

But in terms of destruction, it was a clear British victory.

Much of the wood-and-paper city of Kagoshima went up in flames.

The Japanese reaction was surprising, to say the least.

The Satsuma clan had no choice.

Forced into open rebellion, they vowed to fight for a new Japan,

even if it meant taking on the Shogun.

But in order to succeed, they would need firepower

as mesmerising as the British Navy's.

The Satsuma fell in love.

The ease and the speed of the destruction were ravishing.

They realised at once that they desperately needed modern European weapons

and it would be easy to get them.

All they had to do was sail 100 miles or so in that direction to the town of Nagasaki.

Waiting for them there would be a fearless trader,

an entrepreneur, who might be able to get them anything and everything they wanted,

so long as their money was good.

JAPANESE-STYLE MUSIC

They weren't wrong.

Glover was becoming part of the fabric in Nagasaki,

exploiting newfound friendships and connections.

He had no qualms about procuring ships for the Satsuma Samurai

to replace those they lost at Kagoshima.

It was more profitable than tea.

But the British Government looked upon the situation quite differently.

The Satsuma were regarded as their enemy.

Sitting on the fringes of the empire, however,

traders like Glover felt they could do business with whomever they pleased.

It seems that Glover dispassionate approach to business

extended to his treatment of women.

During his early years in Japan, he had countless affairs

and fathered many illegitimate children,

always working away from any attachment or obligation.

'But what the Satsuma rebels requested next

'was far more dangerous.

'They put in an order for 3,000 rifles.'

-This is the mini?

-Yes.

'This was a step beyond just trade.'

That's amazing. Very heavy. Very heavy.

What can you say specifically about these two rifles?

Ah, Tower, yes.

Victoria's crown.

Once they had weapons like this,

did it change the way the clans fought one another?

Would you say that Glover had blood on his hands,

given the fact that he was bringing in this kind of weaponry?

This was a significant turning point for Glover.

With no apparent misgivings, he switched from trading tea

to the more profitable enterprise of running guns.

But while no-one died from drinking his tea,

they did in large numbers while facing his weapons.

I think it's unfair to criticize Glover for trading in rifles

because he was a product of his time.

He was a Son of the British Empire.

He lived in a time when...

..Britain's greatest pride was based around a martial culture

of the army and the navy.

The world had not yet seen conflict on the scale of the world wars.

No-one could've foreseen that kind of devastation.

In Glover's day, battles were self-contained, fought by professional soldiers.

Civilians weren't involved.

So I think to see any wrongdoing

in a young man seeking to make a profit from selling rifles here, then,

is just naive.

By 1863, Glover was supplying rifles

not just to the Satsuma,

but to all sides -

to the Satsuma's rival clans and to the Shogun.

Business was business, after all.

But there is evidence that it's now

that Glover makes a momentous decision.

He takes sides.

His friend, Tomoatsu Godai, a Satsuma Samurai,

had written a manifesto for the clan's future

which called for the acquisition of not just guns for the rebel cause

but industrial expertise, too.

Glover could see it made sense.

Glover also realised that the rebel clans would need more than just guns and ships,

they would need an education.

They would need to see for themselves

how the world's leading industrial nation worked.

This was Glover's moment.

He would help smuggle a chosen few to Britain.

In a highly risky operation, the defectors left on one of Glover's ships,

not certain if they would ever return.

They were very young.

The Satsuma 19, as they were known, were some of the brightest students of their age.

The youngest was only 13

and Glover sent him to stay with his parents

and to study at his old school in Aberdeen.

It was all strictly illegal, of course, as no Japanese were allowed to leave the country.

Had the Shogun ever found out, Glover would've been expelled from Japan.

But as it turned out, those young men were one of Glover's wisest investments.

Among the young rebels sent to Britain were not only his friend Godai,

but also Ito Hirobumi,

who would serve no less than four terms as prime minster in the new Japan.

But in June, 1865,

the new Japan seemed very far away indeed.

The British reinforced their support for the Shogun by sending Sir Harry Parkes,

the recently appointed Minister for Japan.

He was an experienced diplomat

who'd already cut a dash during China's Opium Wars.

He was a safe pair of hands whose job it was

to ensure the survival of Britain's lucrative trading relationship

through what appeared to be looming civil war.

The British Government were convinced the Shogun would ultimately prevail,

so Parkes must openly support his regime

and help to preserve the status quo.

He arrived in Nagasaki in June, 1865,

aboard the warship Princess Royal.

Among the British traders heading to the waterfront to meet him was Thomas Glover.

Parkes took the leading British residents out for a very good dinner.

But given Parkes' very British loyalty to the Shogun

and Glover's growing allegiance to the Satsuma,

their meeting was probably frosty.

I'm dining in the Kagetsu restaurant in Nagasaki.

This establishment has been trading for something like...

..375 years.

It's almost certain that Glover would've come here

and it may even have been the meeting for his meeting with Sir Harry Parkes.

Years later, in the only interview he ever gave,

Glover told a historian the following...

"At about one 'clock, when supper was finished,

"everyone left except Parkes and I.

"Parkes said, 'Somehow, I have to help the Shogun for the future of Japan.'

"I said, 'You don't know it yet,

'but today, the power in Japan is in the hands of the rebel clans.'

'Japan's fate depends on them.'

"Parkes didn't agree with me. We talked till dawn.

"Parkes couldn't decide whether he should support the Shogun or the rebel clans."

It was quite common for traders like Glover,

operating on the empire's frontiers,

to pass on local knowledge to Foreign Office officials.

But Glover had more than just local knowledge.

He'd already made friends with the enemy.

There's no written evidence for what happened over the next six months,

of how hard Glover worked behind the scenes.

But in early 1866,

Lord Shimadzu, head of the Satsuma clan,

asked Glover to pass on a message to Sir Harry Parkes.

It was short and sweet.

It read, "We were once at war with each other, now we want friendship with you.

"Please come to Kagoshima at once."

Glover accompanied Parkes

and they were met with lavish hospitality.

They were treated to a ceremonial dinner,

which a London newspaper recorded involved an extravagant 40 courses.

This was the Satsumas' chance to impress upon the British minister that the Shogun were finished

and that a new, modern Japan was the way forward.

The current Lord Shimadzu is the great, great grandson of the clan leader who met Parkes.

He's recreated for me that famous dinner from 1866.

Given that these dishes are from 150 years ago,

are they, in any way, unfamiliar to you

or is this still the kind of food that you are accustomed to?

Is this lamprey?

I'm going to dip that in there. I don't know if that's the right thing to do.

It's a minefield, a culinary minefield.

-Kanpai.

-Kanpai.

'The food must've been good, because by the end of the dinner

'they were toasting a new and important political reality.'

I wasn't ready for that!

The British minister no longer supported the Shogun,

and the Satsuma had tacit approval to start a war.

And a bloody civil war did come.

The Boshin War began in the Year of the Earth Dragon.

100,000 troops were mobilised.

After three years of fighting

and barely a decade since Japan opened its doors to the West,

the old order was toppled.

The rebel clans defeated the Shogun with rifles and shells,

modern weapons of war that Glover had gladly sold them.

Then they set about change.

They renamed the Emperor's reign The Era of Meiji, or enlightenment.

They moved the emperor to Edo, the centre of power.

Even the city was given a new name. Tokyo.

Japan's borders would indeed be open at last

for all manner of commercial initiatives.

It was the progress that Glover and the Satsuma had been hoping for.

And then, on the 1st January, 1873,

the Satsuma abolished the past.

European-style clocks were to be used.

"We have no history", one of the Japanese elite commented at the time.

"Our history begins today."

Here was the new Japan that Thomas Glover had worked for,

complete with the present tense,

but not without its challenges.

Unlike Britain, that already had a century and more of industrial revolution,

here was an almost medieval country,

with few ships, no railways, no modern means of communication,

no ways of manufacturing its own goods, no infrastructure.

It was going to be a truly Herculean task

to drag Japan fully into the 19th century.

When Glover arrived in Japan,

was there any trace of the modern world there or was it a blank canvas?

I think it was quite,

you know, quite backward at the time.

We were not exposed to Western technology for two centuries.

We knew how to use an abacus,

but sine, cosine, the steam engine,

physics, Western science, geology,

map measuring, machinery,

we were not exposed at the time.

And all of a sudden,

all the Western technology and information came

when we opened the door,

and at the time, Glover was there to help.

We are a manufacturing country

and that foundation is built in...

..from 1850s to 1920, 1930,

that period of time they built the foundation,

and Glover was a crucial contributor

for the transformation

of this society and economy.

'With no industrial infrastructure in place,

'Glover's task was daunting.

'But he realised the first steps to modernisation

'lay right under his feet.'

It's like something from Willy Wonka!

HE LAUGHS

Glover was like a time traveller.

His basic knowledge of British industry and invention

was light years ahead of the Japanese.

He knew that industrial progress demanded endless supplies of coal.

So when he visited the primitive mineworkings around Nagasaki that dug very near the surface,

he saw the future.

He saw his own future, in fact, as a very rich man indeed.

Glover realised that with British technology,

he could reach further underground and find richer seams of coal.

For Glover, this knowledge was money in the bank.

He'd buy a mine and lead the way.

Takashima Mine, on an island near Nagasaki, would be his.

It would make him more than a trader,

it would make him an owner.

The next step in Glover's plan was to kick-start the industry that most needed his coal.

Why is this dock special?

This is the oldest slipway in Japan

and it's been designated an important historic site by the Japanese Government for that reason.

Thomas Glover established this slipway in 1868

and it was revolutionary at the time because it used machines and steam engines

to pull ships up on the slipway in order to repair them.

As these things go,

-was this slipway state of the art when it was completed?

-Yes.

Thomas Glover, through his brother Charles, who was living in Aberdeen at the time,

arranged for the construction of all these materials,

and they were built at a company called Hall Russell & Company.

Everything was carried on a ship, again, built in Aberdeen, specifically for that purpose.

-This was made in Scotland?

-Everything is made in Scotland,

all those railings, the steam engines.

It continues to this day, kind of a silent testimony to Scottish-Japanese relations.

By the time Glover's people were installing this,

Britain had had 100 years to get used to this.

How can you drop a technology like this onto a people

and expect them to, you know, maintain it, operate it?

It shows the ability, I think, of the Japanese people.

Even the very early visitors commented on the curiosity of the people.

They're so eager to learn things.

This is exactly Thomas Glover's contribution.

He didn't just sell the equipment to Japan,

he provided the expert tutelage, or supervision.

He would bring the equipment, but also bring the experts to teach the Japanese.

His investment wasn't just business, it was also in education, it was in the future.

I think the Japanese people looked to Britain in particular for guidance

and as a model for the way that they should proceed.

So Glover was the right man,

at the right time, in the right place.

And from then on, everything snowballed.

Glover brought in experts to build lighthouses,

revolutionised communications,

and introduced new ways of manufacturing everything, from beer to banknotes.

No wonder, then, that with the help of Glover,

Japan's Industrial Revolution would last only 50 years,

a third of the time it had taken in Britain.

Japan would sprout an infrastructure of roads,

railways, manufacturing, a postal system,

schools and universities,

and become economically self-sufficient -

all in Glover's lifetime.

Glover introduced the idea of the railway to Japan

by importing and installing a model steam train.

The Japanese were so inspired that they effectively made it their own.

They had been without the influence of modern technological advances for two centuries

and so the idea landed like a seed on fertile ground.

They didn't just copy the idea of the train,

they made it their own and made it something new,

like this, Shinkansen, the Bullet Train.

By 1885, Glover had settled down.

He'd gone through a form of marriage with a woman named Tsuru.

She later gave birth to their daughter, Hana.

Tomisaburo was Glover's abandoned son from a previous relationship.

The couple officially adopted him in 1888.

Glover still had other sidelines as far as sex was concerned,

but this was the family he would stand by for the rest of his life.

Years later, rumours would circulate

that Giacomo Puccini's world-famous opera Madame Butterfly

was based on the life of Thomas Blake Glover.

The opera is the tragic story of a young Japanese girl

who falls in love with an American called Pinkerton.

She bears his son and is then abandoned by him.

Its message is clear -

there are hidden dangers in two very different cultures colliding.

SHE SINGS ARIA FROM "Madame Butterfly"

By the time of the opera's release,

Glover's son was a man uncomfortably wedged between two worlds.

He'd gone so far as to sail back to Aberdeen

to visit the rest of his father's family.

There are photographs -

he perches at the edge of the Glover family group

in thoroughly British tweeds and cap, teacup and saucer in hand.

But he still looks completely Japanese.

Beyond his son, the resemblance to Pinkerton ends.

While Pinkerton was bewitched by a 15-year-old geisha girl,

Glover's life was bound up with a quite different tragic romance -

that of Japan's obsession with modern means of destruction.

With Glover's assistance, Japan had become something new.

With the opening of its borders, Japan had started to measure itself

against other nations and their achievements.

On the world stage, what better role model was there than Britain?

After all, Japan was also a small island nation with grand ambitions.

So between 1894 and 1945, Japan set out to build an empire of its own.

And Glover, like an imperial godfather,

helped set them on their way.

Japan defeated the Chinese in 1895.

After China came Russia's capitulation.

By 1905, Japan's Navy was the third biggest in the world.

The Japanese flagship at the Battle of the Sea of Japan,

the Mikasa, is now a memorial ship here at Yokosuka.

The Japanese Navy captured or destroyed

almost all of the 38 Russian ships deployed against them.

A British commentator described it

as the most complete and decisive naval victory in history.

Credit for the Russian fleet's final collapse

went to Admiral Togo Heihachiro,

a Satsuma whose first experience of battle had been 40 years before

as he watched the mighty British Navy

burn his home town of Kagoshima to the ground.

He embodied the changes in the Japanese military

that Glover had enabled.

He had gone from sword-wielding boy

to the captain of the most deadly warship of its day.

During his 50-odd years in Japan, Glover had introduced the country

to modern warfare, modern shipping, modern docks, modern currency,

modern manufacturing methods, modern mining.

Glover even founded the country's first brewing company,

and the company, Kirin,

still sells most of the beer drunk in Japan today.

One day in 1908, Glover paid a visit to the Imperial Palace

of the Emperor Meiji in Tokyo.

There he received the Order of the Rising Sun, 2nd Degree,

for his services to the empire.

The document justifying the award listed the services.

It was 20 pages long.

This is the formal document asking the Emperor

to confer the decoration to Mr Glover.

How unusual was it for a man like Glover, a Westerner,

to receive this level of honour?

It was very exceptional

for the foreigners to receive such high honours,

and Glover's decoration is all the more exceptional

because it does refer to his contribution

that he made when Japan had modernised its country,

because during the days of samurai, Japanese warrior,

the most precious commodity was honour.

So his former friends accorded him with the highest honour.

In 1910, Glover gave his one and only interview to a historian.

He concluded the interview by saying,

"I've thought about this for a long time

"and of all the rebels who fought against the Shogun,

"I was the greatest."

He thought of himself as a Scottish samurai.

And after that, it was time to die.

Death had started to take his rebel colleagues in the last few years.

It took Glover on 16th December, 1911.

He was buried back home in Nagasaki,

and this is his grave.

He died on 16th December, and on 16th of every month,

the local authorities here place fresh flowers on his grave

and they set down a can of Kirin beer as a mark of respect

or a sign of affection.

This is Sakamoto International Cemetery,

because after all, his was a foreign body,

and this was the proper place for it.

But that's not the end of the story of Thomas Blake Glover.

Glover's enthusiasm for weapons had already infected Japan,

and his death did nothing to halt its viral spread.

Construction began on some of the largest battleships ever built.

Every rivet and weld helped build their new empire.

And of course, vast amounts of coal were required

to fuel Japan's shipyards and armaments factories.

Glover's mine on Takashima Island soon ran out,

so the new owners, Mitsubishi, turned to the other islands nearby.

On the island of Hashima, Mitsubishi went after coal

as devotedly as Japan went after military technology.

During the early years of the 20th century,

its outline began to change

until the shape resembled that of a battleship

being built for the Japanese Imperial Navy.

The locals changed its name to Gunkanjima - Battleship Island.

In 1941, just 30 years after Glover's death,

coal production peaked and Battleship Island became

one of the most densely populated places on earth.

Its infernal tunnels were packed with miners from Korea

enslaved by the Japanese.

It was the same year Japan attacked Pearl Harbour.

What would Glover have made of Hashima

and aggressive Japanese moves on the world stage?

Would he even have recognised

the Frankenstein's monster he helped create?

But then, on 9th August, 1945, at 11.02am,

Japanese aggression suddenly ceased,

as did production on Takashima Island.

The light of 1,000 suns forced the Koreans

and their Japanese Guards to look up at the sky.

The atom bomb was released over the city of Nagasaki,

and in an instant, the northern part of the city simply ceased to be.

Two thirds of the population were killed or injured.

A few days later, the people of Japan turned on their radios

to hear Emperor Hirohito announce the complete capitulation of Japan.

The Emperor spoke in an ancient form of Japanese, a ceremonial language

that only those with a samurai background could understand.

The Emperor might have been speaking from 1863

after the bombardment of Kagoshima.

He might have been saying what the British had expected

the Satsuma samurai to say as they watched their city burning.

"Your weapons are better than ours. We surrender."

It was the end of the affair begun by Thomas Blake Glover.

Its militaristic ambitions may have been thwarted,

but there are permanent reminders

of the changes that Glover introduced to Japan.

For Glover, his relationship with Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun,

had been something like a love affair.

And now, a century after his death,

Japan remains in love with everything he stood for -

progress, industry, modernity.

His efforts paved the way for Japan's most famous corporations -

Sony, Panasonic, Mitsubishi.

Glover set Japan on a journey of lightning speed

whose destination even he would not have recognised.

How could he begin to imagine today's technology-hungry Tokyo

that feels not just modern, but futuristic,

a science-fiction film set of a place

that shines as brightly by night as it does by day?

Right here is the heart of a nation whose progress to the modern age,

thanks to Thomas Glover, was faster than any other country on earth.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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