Kuraba Tomisaburo: A Man of Nagasaki

Kuraba is not your typical Japanese surname; in fact, it was most likely made up by Thomas Blake Glover, a Scottish trader, to accommodate his son, Thomas A. Glover, aka Kuraba Tomisaburo*, who was born in 1870 to a woman named Kaga Maki in the cosmopolitan Japanese city of Nagasaki. His Japanese mother raised him until he was six years old, at which time, Glover and his new wife Tsuru adopted him and raised him in the best cosmopolitan 19^th century tradition, giving him an education at the illustrious Gakushuin (the Peers' School) in Tokyo and sending him to an American university for further studies.

At the Gakushuin, Tomisaburo was taunted for his mixed race, so he never truly fit in with the Tokyo elite. He attended the University of Pennsylvania in 1890, the same school as Iwasaki Hisaya (son of Mitsubishi founder Iwasaki Yataro and later the corporation's 3^rd president ), and the two were most likely friends. Kuraba left after a couple of years at the college, as Hisaya had graduated, and it seemed America did not suit the young Tomisaburo. The elder Glover and the Iwasaki family shared a long friendship, and Tomisaburo stayed with members of the family during his various studies abroad and in Tokyo. But his heart was in Nagasaki, the city that gave him birth and infused him with its cosmopolitan character.

Nagasaki was unique in Japan, being the only port of call for a select few Dutch and Chinese traders for over 200 years, until just before the Meiji Restoration, at which time, its merchant-friendly setup drew business and pleasure visitors from the new treaty-allowed countries of Britain, France, America and Russia flocked to Nagasaki to get in on the trade boom. Western-style buildings sprang up around the trading centers of Nagasaki. Thomas Blake Glover came to Nagasaki in 1859 with the trading firm, Jardine, Matheson and Co.. There he traded goods, but also engaged in arms deals and helped to smuggle young Japanese samurai to the West, where they would learn about the industrial and governmental processes of the European countries. His efforts were instrumental in the Satsuma-Choshu-Tosa victory over the Shogun's forces, which brought about the Meiji Restoration in 1868. In 1863, Glover built a mansion atop Minami-Yamate hill overlooking Nagasaki Bay. Other western businessmen lived in the area as well, often taking Japanese wives (although technically they were not allowed to marry them). This was the era of rapid industrialization in Japan, when technological leaps of centuries were made in only a few years.

The young Tomisaburo found his niche in the bustling merchant and emigre culture of Nagasaki, returning from his American collegiate studies in 1893 to enter the employment of Holme, Ringer & Co., a trading firm established in 1868. His status as both a Japanese national named Kuraba Tomisaburo and a half-Scottish gentleman named T.A. Glover allowed him an easy camaraderie with both the foreign and native contingents of the city; his own soft-spoken, yet friendly manner endeared him to both groups. Tomisaburo truly felt at home in the multicultural Nagasaki.

He married a woman of similar background, Nakano Waka, daughter of British merchant James Walker and a Japanese woman named Nakano Ei. Together, they lived in the Glover mansion, along with the senior Thomas Glover and his family, pursuing a successful and innovative career in fisheries and business. He employed artists in a Herculean life's work entitled "Fish of Southern and Western Japan," commonly referred to as the "Glover Fish Atlas," which contained painstakingly accurate watercolors of the hundreds of species found near his home.

The Glover Fish Atlas Online at the University of Nagasaki Website (in Japanese)

He and Waka had no children, but they continued to live a quiet life in Nagasaki, occupying the Glover mansion, which, after the overwhelming success of Puccini's opera "Madame Butterfly," also became known as the "Madame Butterfly House." There is much debate over who the "real" Cho-Cho-San was, but the fact that the senior Glover's wife Tsuru wore a butterfly-crested kimono suggested to some that she might have been a model for the tragic heroine. Careful research would suggest this is probably not the case, but the Glover House continued to draw attention as the "Madame Butterfly House."

In the late 1930's, Tomisaburo was in his 70's, and his hillside home, with its birds'-eye view of Nagasaki Bay, began to draw the wrong kind of attention. The war had come, and so had the brutalities and inhumanities associated with it. The Japanese special police, the Kempeitai, continually harassed Tomisaburo because of his known Western heritage, and the quiet life he and Waka once shared in their close-knit and friendly community became painful isolation. Most of his Western friends and associates had fled to Shanghai in hopes of escaping the ultranationalist regime. Many of them were interned in Chinese prison camps when war broke out between Japan and China in 1937. None of Tomisaburo's remaining friends would speak to him for fear of drawing the eye of the Kempeitai.

When the giant warship Musashi began construction in Nagasaki Bay in 1938, huge curtains were erected to hide the work from the rest of the city; at this time, Tomisaburo was persuaded to sell his lifelong home on the hillside and move to a home without such a spectacular view of Nagasaki Bay. It is speculated that Mitsubishi was told to buy the home to prevent a possible spy from occupying a favorable surveillance position. Even though Tomisaburo had been a Japanese citizen all his life, he was still considered an outsider, reminiscent of the way the Nisei (second generation) Japanese-Americans were considered potential security risks in the U.S during World War II.

His wife Waka did not survive this difficult period. She died in 1943, leaving Tomisaburo truly alone in a city that had become hostile to him. He was several miles away from the atomic bomb blast that hit the northern part of the city, but his house still suffered broken windows and other outer damage. Despite the fact that he survived the devastation of the atomic bomb, the war took its toll on him all the same. In the hours before the morning of August 26. 1945, as rumors floated around Nagasaki of American occupying forces about to enter the city, Kuraba Tomisaburo, aged 74, hung himself in his lonely house. Nagasaki's longtime link with the Glover family, intimately associated with the transition from the Edo period to the modern Meiji period, was utterly severed. Tomisaburo's beloved Nagasaki was in ruins, and nothing would ever be the same again.

*Note: Japanese names are written surname first. "Kuraba" is the family name, and "Tomisaburo" the given name.