Dejima, Nagasaki, Japan Nostalgic
Journeys:
Part I
Sadakichi Hartmann
(1867-1944) and Tomisaburo Kuraba (nee Thomas Albert Glover 1871-1945)
Nostalgia is a condition of constructed
reality built from memory observed at a distance. At least that is how I see
it. Put more simply, the nostalgic journey is a trip back to spirit. I embarked on journey of creating
nostalgia for home similar to that followed by Sadakichi and Tomisaburo, the
subjects of this paper. I made a construct of home, a memory, by creating a
memory of it in Japan. I became a ryugakusei.
And so what we make of the facts
of our separate biologies, not the facts themselves, is what is implied by
nostalgia. Perhaps with my own nod to the siren call of confession, I want to
talk about two men from Nagasaki whose biographical details, aas well as what
they made of them, are indeed
central to who they were. The works they have left behind are all particularly
informed by a sense of genetic code, of identity imbedded in their works and
deeds. Both men are of mixed Japanese and European blood. Both men by virtue of
their parentage had already completed a nostalgic journey in just being born.
That is the difference between them and me. They contained the foreign within
the familiar. Both men opened their eyes in the international settlement area
of Nagasaki, within several years of each other; both were the offspring of
European merchantmen and their Japanese paramours. I don't think their fathers
ever met; Carl Herman Oscar Hartmann, Prussian, with Thomas Blake Glover
(1838-1911), from Aberdeen, Scotland. Both had found their way to Nagasaki in
the free-wheeling decade of 1855-1865, before Japan’s Meiji Era, yet after the
commercial treaties allowing free trade had been signed with Tokugawa authorities.
Both heard about the opportunities awaiting them in Nagasaki from sources in
Shanghai where business was booming.
Their sons Sadakichi and
Tomisaburo were born with equally inescapable good looks that led them to
project the Japanese part of their heritage as their main identity, though, in
fact, it was dual.
My intention in this paper is to
trace how identity in these two men depended on their choice of the Japanese
side of their mixed blood heritage. One of them, Sadakichi, was swept away in
his youth and never returned, while the other, Tomisaburo, made his life in the
lively expatriate community of Nagasaki and almost never went abroad save for a
brief period of unhappy education in the United States.
Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944),
born in Nagasaki to Carl Oscar Hartmann and a Japanese mother, Sada, died
shortly before the end of World War II in Florida where he was visiting one of
daughters. He had lived in Banning, California, in a shack of his own making,
apparently, where he spent the last years of his life as neighbor to his
daughter Wistaria Linton, on the edge of the Morongo Indian reservation. 1
Sadakichi in his last days had
been hounded by agents of the American FBI for being of suspect genetic
heritage, German and Japanese. There had been many happier days between the two
World Wars, however, when Sadakichi had been feted as a great, romantic, exotic
Oriental.2
By the age of ten (c.1877), after
Sadakichi had been repatriated to Hamburg in Germany, he was enrolled in a
military school for boys. Both in Japan and in Germany in these days, the model
young boy would have been dressed in a military uniform.3
A newly emergent Germany and a modernizing Japan found equal expressions of ‘homeland’
in their respective love of variations on the idea of ‘uniform,’ namely
nostalgia as aspiration.
Sadakichi soon left Germany and
these ideas behind. He immigrated to Philadelphia where he educated himself in
English. His career as a writer, critic, and actor had its big break here.
In the decade 1884-94 visiting
Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia, living
in Boston from 1887-89 writing plays and beginning a family that would
eventually comprise five children, then camping in New York from 1896-1916
writing critical essays on photography for the first great artist of
photography in America, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), then vamping in Hollywood
and other California cities during the 1920's and 1930's where he appeared in
one great silent film, 'The Thief of Baghdad' (1924) with Douglas Fairbanks
Sr., remarried, became a drinking buddy of Hollywood actors John Barrymore and
others who lived on Bundy Drive, Sadakichi Hartmann remained a main topic of
conversation, was a much sought after companion, and was never ostracized
because of his background.
Sadakichi reveled in the fiction
of himself as a Japanese literati. Though he had virtually no actual experience
of Japan other than having been born there, throughout his life, Sadakichi
relied proudly on aspects of his Japanese heritage, not all of them at the same
time. Being Japanese aided Hartmann’s artistic and critical ideas of modernism,
and the exoticism of his looks certainly made his American audience sit up and
take notice. Sadakichi cut a very handsome figure. 4
Tomisaburo Kuraba, nee Thomas Albert
Glover (1871-1945), like Sadakichi, was also born in Nagasaki, a few years
later, but he was eons away in terms of privilege and future potential.
Tomisaburo's father, Thomas Blake Glover was already the richest foreigner
living in the city. He had established his fortune in ferrying Japanese silver
to Shanghai where it fetched three times the rate in exchange it had cost to
obtain the mineral in Japan. Thomas Glover had come to Nagasaki in 1859, age
21, from Shanghai. By 1864, he had built the most magnificent and eccentric
house in Nagasaki, on a high bluff overlooking the bay. The house still stands
in a specially designated park maintained by the City of Nagasaki called The
Glover Gardens. It is known worldwide as Madame Butterfly's house, though the
fictional heroine of Puccini's most popular opera or anyone who even remotely
resembled her never lived there, nor did Puccini ever make a visit. Glover died
in Tokyo before the opera became famous. The City of Nagasaki only in recent
years appropriated the locale into its campaign for renewed travel and tourism,
and it is ‘Butterfly’ nostalgia that draws hordes of Japanese tourists to the
house every year.
With one brief interlude abroad for
study, Tomisaburo Glover-Kuraba never left the glorious Nagasaki house his
father had built on the bluff, even when Thomas Glover removed to another
mansion he had built for himself in the Shiba Park area of Tokyo. Tomisaburo
maintained a gracious presence in the city of Nagasaki through his quiet work
as a pillar of the city's merchant society. On the death of his step-mother
O-tsuru, Thomas Glover's wife, Tomisaburo dutifully married Waka, the daughter
of an English merchant and a Japanese woman, to whom he had been betrothed by
his father. Together, they lived peacefully in the Glover Mansion, childless,
until the final days of the 'dark valley' of the 1930's. Tomisaburo's major
contribution to world culture has yet to be recognized; his efforts to compile
the largest hand-drawn illustrated encyclopedia of the ichthyology of Japan,
over 800 magnificent sketches of the fishes and other marine life of the seas
surrounding Nagasaki that he commissioned from 1912 to 1933.
Tomisaburo's other greatest contribution
to the cultural life of Nagasaki is the building of the International Club, a
social club where non-Japanese mixed with the locals. This building still
stands on what is left of Dejima, the island built in Nagasaki harbour in 1632
to contain the only foreigners to be allowed commerce in Japan for the ensuing
two hundred years, the Dutch traders. Tomisaburo started the process of
historical conservation and protection in the City of Nagasaki. Today, the tiny
island settlement of Dejima is being partially restored by the city in time for
the 400th anniversary of official relations between Holland and Japan,
which will take place in 2000.
That's the bigger picture of
Sadakichi and Tomisaburo. I admire both of these men because each was able to
build a cross-cultural identity and make significant cultural contributions to
Japan and the United States based on a conscious construct, a nostalgic version
of their respective Japanese birthrights. Politics and economics combined to
produce equally significant disruptions in both men's lives which were directly
related to the Western halves of their heritages. Both of their fathers' had
their hands in the business of building and supplying the military. Both sons
rejected this aspect of Western business in Japan.
I confess that I too had
connections with the military, both of which I talk as little about as
possible. My father was at the Boeing Company and worked on the wing assemblies
of the B-29 bombers that destroyed Japan, including the one that finally
dropped the A-bomb on Nagasaki. I reject that, but not him. So it was that
Sadakichi was taken out of Nagasaki, but it never left him. So it was that
Tomisaburo rejected his father's enterprises, but never the father.
The constructed identities of Sadakichi
and Tomisaburo are nostalgias based on birth. Both made decisions to abandon
genetic duality; in Sadakichi’s case for the clear light of exoticism, in Tomisaburo’s case for a communality
with the citizens of Nagasaki. I admire both of these men for their cultural
accomplishments. I suffer when I read of how the twentieth century’s
indignities of discrimination fell on both their heads, never allowing their
nostalgias to last, because it is all so within the realm of possibility today.
Part II: The Cultural Contributions of
Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944)
Sadakichi's father Carl Oskar
Hartmann was one of two partners in the company of Lehmann & Hartmann, and
had come, via the Matheson-Jardine offices in Shanghai, as a representative of
this English trading company whose task was to explore new opportunites in the
free port of Nagasaki. The years from 1855 to 1867 were boom years for
Nagasaki, and for Carl Oskar Hartmann.
But Sakakichi Hartmann, it was known, had few memories of Nagasaki, and
virtually no memory of his mother O-sada, except for the single photograph
which he carried throughout his life.5
O-sada must have been a handsome woman with prominent squared jaws and an
elongated face which my friends in Nagasaki tell me is called urizanegao, characteristically
Nagasakiesque. Sadakichi, particularly in his later years, exhibits much of his
mother's strong face and jaws in most photos taken of him after about 1920.
Sadakichi's youthful photographs such as the one is his German military academy
uniform indicate a soft, rounded, more Germanic contour. It appears that one ethnic aspect was
prominent in youth, while the truer visage emerged later in his life, and that
was most definitely long and square jawed, after the handsome faces one still
sees today in Nagasaki. The point I want to make here is that genes, looks,
Japaneseness in various guises, was what Sadakichi was most proud of in his
background, and in his personality. This is what people saw in him. This is
what he purveyed.
I find Oscar Hartmann utterly
fascinating because of the extent to which Sadakichi went to deny his father's
background and business interests. In the first place, his German relatives,
with the single exeption of his aunt in Hamburg, treated him with contempt, while,
on the other hand, his father Oscar was a dealer in armaments, failed dealer as
it turned out, who sought his fortune in a number of ways, and in a number of
places which would not have provided a stable upbringing for a boy with such
literary, poetic, proclivities as Sadakichi possessed in such great array.
Sadakichi identified his father Oscar as intimately connected with the
military. He was sent to military school outside of Hamburg, it seems, from
which he was expelled or turned out. One can imagine why. The photo of him in
military school shows a sad German boy in a uniform, hardly the Sadakichi of
new-worldly fame as the Bohemian King of Greenwich Village, which he became
several decades later. But before he left Japan, never to return, as his life
determined, he must have known that his father was away most of the time,
selling guns to the Japanese.6
So, Sadakichi and his brother were sent
back to Germany because his father had become involved, through Osaka, with the
clans in Wakayama that were holding out against the Tokugawa authorities, and
that when the Meiji did finally come, and the power of the Tokugawa central
authority began to die out, it also became clear that the Meiji authorities
intended to institute a new system of central authority in which centralization
of the military, and military procurement, was a part. It is ironic that
Sadakichi's father Oscar was doing the right thing, but for the wrong people.
Too bad he could not have found his metier among the newly established power
barons of the Meiji elite. But such was not the case, and so Oscar left Japan,
Sadakichi and his brother Taru were already in Germany, and never went back to
Japan, it seems.
Sadakichi runs away from the military
academy to Paris. His father disinherits him and sends him away to the care of
his philistine relatives in Philadelphia. He arrives in June of 1882, penniless
and dependent on his American kin. Sadakichi begins to read, educating himself
in the local Philadelphia libraries, and in the used bookstores of the city.
Sadakichi took to America in a
big way. It at least was a unified country, if young, unlike his native Japan
or his father’s country Germany. It had a mentality. It had a work ethic. It
had a feeling of freedom to become anything one wanted. The most formative
event of Sadakichi's career was to be his conversations with Walt Whitman, the
grey old man, his eminence the poet of Leaves
of Grass. In 1884, Sadakichi made his first visit to Walt Whitman in
Camden, N.J., across the river from Philadelphia. Sadakichi would have been 17
or 18 years of age. He was to make many visits to Whitman. Sadakichi Hartmann's “Conversations with Walt Whitman” were published in 1895, after Whitman's death. The
executor of Whitman's estate did not delight in Sadakichi's incisive, by now
almost legendary, quips about the great man, so much so that he tried to stop
its publication. In addition, the piece contains satire, and points mercilessly
to the foibles of prominent members of the arts community who were still living
at the time. Perhaps because of its scandalous nature, all critics bemoaned
that the conversations Sadakichi records never happened, or that they contained
such blatant inaccuracies as to make them completely bogus. I have read this
short work. It is most certainly more accurate that contemporary reports would
have it. Walt Whitman was blunt, was known to excoriate members of the artistic
community whom he considered inferior to himself, particularly those from the
moneyed classes. There is a ring of truth to Sadakichi's account:
"There was nothing overwhelming to
me in Whitman's face, but I liked it at once for its healthy manliness. It
seemed to me a spiritually deepened image of contemporary Americans: an ideal
laborer, as the Americans are really a nation of laborers. Above all else I was
attracted by the free flow of his grey hair and beard, and his rosy complexion,
Boucher-like, only healthier and firmer in tone. Of his features the large
distance between his heavy eyebrows and his bluish grey eyes, (calm and cold in
their espression) denoting frankness, boldness, haughtiness, according to my
physiognomical observations, particularly interested me."7
Sadakichi's early observations of
Whitman denote qualities that he most admired and emulated. Whitman's genes
seem transformed into Sadakichi's face; identification equals fusion. Later on
in this same essay, Sadakichi remarks about the beauty of Nagasaki, as if to
impress on Whitman how deeply his birth in Nagasaki influenced his world view.
When Whitman asks Sadakichi what he wants to do with his life, this is how the
conversation proceeds:
"At that time I was stage-struck,
and of course mentioned my intention to devote myself to the histrionic art; I
contemplated a special study of Shakespeare's fools (though I was rather too
tall for them…).
Whitman (shaking his head): 'I
fear that won't go. There are so many traits, characteristics, Americanisms,
inborn with us, which you would never get at. One can do a great deal of
propping. After all one can't grow roses on a peach tree.'
I spoke of Japan, of the
beautiful bay of Nagasaki though I did not know much about it from personal
recollection.
Whitman: 'Yes, it must be
beautiful.'
On leaving he gave me a proof sheet copy of "After
all Not to Create Only," saying paternally: 'Read it over six or eight
times and you may understand it.'" 8
Brief though this exchange is,
Sadakichi tells us that the man and mentor's advice to him is to take the
essence of America, not its look, to perfect his personality freely in his own
image. After all, Whitman was known to have been his best publicity agent, and
sold his publications directly from his house, rather than through this
publisher. It is amazingly appropriate that Sadakichi reports that Whitman gave
him a copy of the poem "After all Not to Create Only," because it
contains Whitman’s idea of the essence of the American spirit. Whitman’s
message to Sadakichi is in the first three lines:
‘After all, not
to create only, or found only,
But to bring,
perhaps from afar, what is already founded,
To give it our
own identity, average, limitless, free;’9
Disregarding Whitman’s advice to
stay off the stage, Sadakichi decided to be an actor, or to at least delve into
the life of the theatre. It was a fascination which never left him. Sadakichi
Hartmann was to write the first American drama, ‘Christ’ (1893), to contain
full frontal nudity, but in many other ways as well, the play is a forerunner
of modernity. 10
In 'Christ' (1893), which
Sadakichi calls a dramatic poem in three acts, Jeshua (his calling of Jesus) is
at the cottage of his sister Magdalen, when the pilgrimess Hannah appears. She
begins to have strange feelings which send her into a revery. Here is the
section which caused the a major scandal in the Press:
"(HANNAH enters.) Strange
feelings have come over me. I hardly know myself. (Breaks a lily and plucks out the stamens.) (Pause)
BOTH (as
before). The chaos of our childlike dreams have merged into unsatisfied
desires. Our love is poisoned by heart-corroding thoughts, and the mysteries of
creation have become the temptation in our Eden-like dream. (Their voices falter, tears fall from their
eyes, profound sobs convulse their throats. JESHUA kneels at HANNAH's feet,
lowers his head in bitter supplication, and weeps. She looks at him with an
expression of indescribably sadness, her whole body trembles, then the sunshine
breaks through the clouds, an angelic smile glides over her face, and the
drapery unveils itself from the divine beauty of her body. Music---HANNAH
hastily arranges her drapery, which formed a background to her denudation.)
JESHUA. Your
nakedness was a prayer! (To Ellosar the poet, who enters.) Soon you will hear
from me. The mission of my life begins this very hour. (MOTHER MARIA enters the
garden, and converses with HANNAH.)
ELLOSAR. People,
nowadays, believe only in signs and wonders.
JESHUA. Then I
will stoop to do them.
ELLOSAR. Oh,
that I could always stay with you!
JESHUA. You
could forget yourself, but not your art.
ELLOSAR. Oh, my
beloved art!
JESHUA. Fair for
a day.
ELLOSAR. Fair
for ages to come! Art eternizes whatever is beautiful; each idea by purity
composed has right to breathe the vital air. Inspirations of color, sound, or
thought will yet survive when the pyramids have fallen to ruins, and the temple
of Jerusalem no longer lifts its golden dome against the azure of the timeless
sky.
JESHUA. May be,
but to what end?
ELLOSAR. To
beautify--to beautify!" 11
The nakedness, the lights and
music, the drapery point to techniques that had been used, not to scandalous
effect at all, in the dances of Louie Fuller in the Paris Expo of 1900 and
which delighted the poets and writers of Europe. Mixing the senses, synesthesia
practiced by the Symbolists is at the core of Sadakichi's play. America was
simply not ready for such, particularly when it was cast on the same stage with
the primary icon of Christianity. Notice also that Christ takes the primary
function of words to be purely aesthetic, not functional, as his poet Ellosar
reminds him. No, no. America was not ready for the Word of God as symbolic.
Sadakichi had introduced a modern technique (lights and nudity), and a modern
idea (canonical text as literature) to the American stage. The result was scandal,
arrest, and a messy trial.
Sadakichi’s real calling, however, was
his life as a journalist, a critic, and a Bohemian bon vivant with a New York
sense of style, a European flair, as a newly fashioned oriental icon, an
afficionado of free love, socialism, emancipation, and as an artist of new
forms of literature and the arts.
While his plays failed, Sadakichi
Hartmann wrote copiously on the subject of photography in his New York years.
His essays on photography written in the last decade of the 19th
century and the first two decades of the twentieth, have been recently
re-published with a critical introduction. 12
His main concern in these articles was to introduce America to photography as
an art, and to establish himself as its best critic. He was the first to do so
in America. It is beyond the scope of this paper to deal with particular
aspects of Sadakichi’s critical writings on photography, but many times he uses
concepts of Japanese painting to help establish photography’s modernity.
As an art critic, Sadakichi
Hartmann wrote the first book on Japanese Art in America, Japanese Art (1904). His chapter on the influence of Japanese Art
is intended to explain to the American reader the reasons behind the current
rage for Japonisme in Europe:
"European artists have equalled the Japanese in clever grouping,
vigorous action, force of expression, passion for form and colour, and even in
sketchy figure delineation without the appliance of shadows, but they have
never reached that unlimited suggestiveness which even the most insignificant
Japanese picture-book contains. This suggestiveness had conquered modern art.
It came at the right time. Too
much philosophy had been written in Europe; everything, from the most
commonplace to the most sublime, had been collected, catalogued, commented
upon, raked up merely for the sake of raking up barren knowledge. It now became
necessary to remove the dust and cobwebs that had settled on it, and infuse new
life by purifying, remodelling and developing that heap of knowledge. And what
could accomplish this better than Japanese art? Its influence was everywhere
felt. It called forth, for instance, the short story literature, in which
Anderson, Turgenjew (sic), Verga, and the modern French and Scandinavian writers
are masters,--a tendency toward brevity and conciseness of expression, which
suggests a good deal more than it actually tells. Its law of repetition with
slight variation, we can trace in Poe's poems, the work of the French
symbolists, and above all else, in the writings of Maurice Maeterlinck, that
quaint combination of Greek, medieval, and Japanese art reminiscences." 13
Sadakichi wrote other books as
well in this period. They deal with establishing a reputation for American
painting and sculpture: A History of American Art (1903), Shakespeare in Art (1901), The Construction
of Painting (1909), The Whistler Book
(1910), The Construction of Landscape Painting and Portraiture (1910), and Modern American Sculpture (1918).
Sadakichi Hartmann also wrote
screenplays in Hollywood, and even appeared in the great silent film 'The Thief
of Baghdad (1924),' with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in which he played a magician.
The film also stared two other major Asian faces, Anna May Wong (1905-1961) as
a Mongol princess, the gloriously beautiful Chinese-American who stared in many
other Hollywood films, and Sojin (Kamiyama Sojin (1891-1954)) who played the
role of Anna May Wong’s brother, the Mongol Prince. Among Kamiyama’s last films
was Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai
(Shichinin no samurai) (Toho, 1954) where he stared with Toshiro Mifune.
Sadakichi’s was one of the first Asian faces in cinema.
In the 1930’s, Sadakichi becomes
an intimate in the circle of Hollywood actors known as The Bundy Drive Boys
which included John Barrymore, Gene Fowler, W.C.Fields, and John Decker. I find
in a review of Gene Fowler’s book Minutes
of the Last Meeting (1984) that
Bundy Drive was the Studio/home of John Decker, in what is now notorious
Brentwood, California of OJ Simpson fame. Perhaps the neighborhood has always
been on the edge. John Decker was an artist with Hollywood actor friends. The
Bundy Drive boys were a rude, urbane, witty, vicious, caustic, loyal, intrepid,
and hard living (read hard-drinking) group, and Sadakichi was their prime
delight. In this era, Sadakichi worked on a long manuscript called Esthetic Verities. This has not been
published. It is known that Sadakichi had asthma, drank, and often acted the
buffoon at these Brentwood Bundy Drive parties. 14
Sadakichi Hartmann spent
the WWII years living as an eccentric in a clapboard shack next to his daughter
Wistaria Linton, which he called “Catclaw Siding.” He moved to this location in
Banning, California, on the edge of the Morongo Indian Reservation, in 1923, and
remained there until shortly before his death in 1944 when he was in his late
seventies. He died while on a visit to another daughter, Mrs. Dorothea
Gilliland, by his first marriage, in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The only book in Japanese on
Sadakichi Hartmann remains one published in 1972 by Ota Saburo called Rebellious
Artist-Bohemian of the World-Life of Sadakichi (Hangyaku no geijutsuka--sekai
no bohemian=Sadakichi no shoogai). Almost all of Sadakichi's books of art
history and criticism are out of print and nearly forgotten, yet his influence
has been remarkable on the those artists who strove to forge an identity for
American art, drama, photography, painting, and sculpture. Though exiled to the
hinterlands of California, Sadakichi continued to correspond with America's
cultural elite until his death in 1944. Among his letters are eight addressed
to Ezra Pound on the subject of poetry and the arts, also kept in the Special
Collections Library of the University of California at Riverside.
Part III: The
Cultural Contributions of Tomisaburo Kuraba-Glover (1871-1945)
In an era when mixed children
whose mother was Japanese and whose father was not a Japanese citizen had no
hope of legitimizing their existence through inheritance of name and property,
Tomisaburo Kuraba was far luckier than Sadakichi in claiming the Japanese part
of his identity. Tomisaburo’s father Thomas Glover saw to it that Tsuru, his
Japanese wife, was made official. Though Tsuru lived her last days with the
senior Glover in Tokyo, arrangements were made in Nagasaki for a new family
register (koseki tohon) to be established in the name of
Kuraba, a Japanized rendering of the name Glover. Being a married woman, and
thus lacking a family register in the name of Glover, Tsuru was officially
registered in the same Kuraba named document to which Tomisaburo had been
attached. Tomisaburo was twenty-three years old when his family name became
officially recognized. As a convenience, Tsuru was registered as his mother,
though, in fact, she was his step-mother.
In this way did Tomisaburo remain
an loyal member of the Nagasaki business establishment as well as a respected
and active member of the Nagasaki foreign community, at least until ‘dark
valley’ of 1930s militarism pitted his native ancestry against his Scots genes.
In the same year that Tomisaburo
officially became a Kuraba, 1899, he joined in the establishment of the “Nagasaki
International Club” (naigai kurabu),
the first such association meant to bring the foreign community into social
contact with the Japanese community in Nagasaki. Also in 1899, the boundaries
of the foreign settlement, beyond which non-Japanese nationals were not allowed
to buy or rent property, were abolished, thus marking the beginning of a truly
international era for the city which held historic first place in the list of
Japanese cities in which Europeans and other Asians had lived and carried on
business since the sixteenth century. Tomisaburo and his friend and employer,
Frederick Ringer, joined in financing the construction of a new building to
house the International Club. It opened its doors in 1904. In the busy days
when business once again flourished in the port of Nagasaki after the end of
the Sino-Japanese War, the club, though an expensive all-male establishment,
provided the best face the city put forward to visiting dignitaries from
abroad. The club sailed through the difficult days of the Russo-Japanese war of
1904-05, witnessing the repatriation of some 1400 Russian prisoners of war,
under the command of Anatoly Stessel, defeated by General Maresuke Nogi, back
to Vladivostok. La Scala, Milan, in 1904 heard the first performance of Puccini’s
opera ‘Madama Butterfly.’ In his later years as director, Tomisaburo was known
to have masqueraded as Pinkerton for the club’s annual masked ball. Tomisaburo
acted the part of the perfect English gentleman, even to aping Pinkerton in
opera which made Nagasaki a famous name, basking in the light of a mixed
identity which was acceptable in this era of brisk business and diplomacy. The
International Club of Nagasaki survived into the 1930’s with Tomisaburo as its
leading personality. Everything about the club reflected Tomisaburo’s taste and
experience of the West; the two story wooden building was in the colonial style
known throughout Asia, while every detail of the mantelpieces on the fireplaces
in each room, on the broad second story veranda, of the large staircase with
its polished bannisters, to the marble washrooms, gave an impression of
impeccable Meiji taste. Tomisaburo’s designs included a boardroom, a reception
salon, a library, a dining room fitted with European tables and chairs, a
billiard room, and a bar.
At the same time, Tomisaburo kept
up his many contacts with the Japanese community of Nagasaki, and continued to
act as a member of the Board of Directors of the Mitsubishi Shipping
Company.
All was well until Tomisaburo was
moved from his home, the ecentric and handsome mansion atop the hill in Minami
Yamanote, Nagasaki, built by his father in the 1860’s, to a less conspicuous
but old foreign house at the foot of the hill, a number 9, in 1939 when the
house was requisitioned by the Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Company. Thomas Blake
Glover had established the repair yard directly below the mansion on the hill
for the repair of Russian ships early on in his entrepreneurial career, seen it
transformed into a facility capable of building ships as well as repairing
them, then seen the Mitsubishi Company establish the largest military
shipbuilding yard in Japan, to which he was appointed as a member of the Board.
Now that same Mitsubishi that his father had helped gain a foothold in Nagasaki
turned on Tomisaburo because the yard was too visible from the hilltop to be
permitted in times of great secrecy, and literally put him under house arrest.
Meanwhile the Japanese Imperial Navy was building the largest warship in the
world, the Musashi, in the yards Glover had turned originally into a
shipbuilding works at the turn of the century.
Waka died in 1943, and Tomisaburo
was found hanged in the upstairs bedroom of number 9, ten days after the A-bomb
fell on the Urakami area of the city, destroying its Catholic cathedral and all
buildings within a radius of several miles. His body joined the thousands of others which remained unburied in the
rubble and aftermath of the bomb. His greatest achievement, the “Atlas
of Fish Species in the Waters off West and South Japan “(Gyorui zufu 1933), a compendium of the fishes and marine life of
Japan, survived, as did the house, the Glover mansion atop the hill, as well as
the old club house on Dejima. Today, they have all been restored, thanks to a
resurgence of affection for Tomisaburo among the families with whom the Glovers
associated as friends for more than a century.15
Courtesy of Special Collections University of
California Riverside Library.
Sadakichi as a school boy in Hamburg Courtesy
of the University of California Riverside – Special Collections. 
Courtesy of University of California
Riverside-Special Collections.
Courtesy of Special Collections, University
of California Riverside.