Glover Garden

The path climbs steeply here. Stone underfoot, the smell of clipped hedges and damp earth, and then the hillside opens. Below you lies the long, narrow harbour of Nagasaki, ringed by green hills. Ships move slowly across the water. Cranes stand on the far shore. Somewhere a gull calls, and the breeze comes up from the sea. Before any history, take a breath and look outward. This view is the reason people built houses on this slope.

You are standing in Glover Garden, an open-air collection of Western-style houses on the Minamiyamate hillside. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this slope was part of the foreign settlement. Japan had just reopened its ports to Western trade after a long period of strict isolation. Merchants from Britain, America and elsewhere arrived in Nagasaki. Many of them chose this hill. It gave them fresh air, a little distance from the docks, and a clear view of every ship that entered the bay.

The garden takes its name from one of those merchants, Thomas Blake Glover. He was born in Scotland, in Aberdeenshire on the northeast coast, and he arrived in Nagasaki as a young man around 1859. He began in trade, dealing in tea and other goods. Within a few years, he was dealing in far more serious cargo. His story is tied closely to the moment Japan changed from a feudal country into a modern industrial state.

At the centre of the garden stands his home, Glover House, completed in 1863. It is widely described as the oldest surviving Western-style wooden building in Japan. Look at its shape. It does not rise tall like a European townhouse. Instead it spreads low and wide across the slope, with deep verandas, stone floors, and a roof of Japanese tiles. Japanese carpenters built it, and the mix shows. It is a colonial bungalow, made with local hands and local materials.

Here is something many visitors miss. Glover was not only a merchant of tea. In the 1860s, Japan was close to civil war. Powerful domains in the southwest, such as Satsuma and Choshu, wanted to overthrow the ruling shogunate. Glover sold ships and weapons to these rebel domains. He also helped young samurai travel secretly to Britain to study, at a time when leaving Japan was forbidden. A group from Choshu, later known as the Choshu Five, made that journey. Several of them became leading figures in the new government.

After the shogunate fell and the Meiji era began, Glover turned to industry. He was involved in bringing a steam-powered slip dock to Nagasaki for repairing ships. He also invested in coal mining on Takashima, an island off the coast, where Western mining methods were introduced. Because of these links to early industry, Glover House is now part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing called the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution. A wooden family home, listed beside shipyards and mines. That surprises many people.

Now look across the harbour again. The large cranes on the opposite shore belong to the Nagasaki shipyard of Mitsubishi. Glover later worked closely with Mitsubishi as an adviser. So the view from his veranda is not only pretty. It shows the direct line from his business deals to the heavy industry that still works the water today. The house and the shipyard face each other across the bay.

Glover's private life was also part of Nagasaki. He married a Japanese woman named Tsuru, and they had a family here. Their son, Kuraba Tomisaburo, grew up between two cultures. Glover himself was later honoured by the Japanese government for his contributions to the country. He spent his last years in Tokyo and died there in the early twentieth century. His grave is in Nagasaki, in the international cemetery not far from this hill.

One story you will hear in the garden concerns opera. Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly is set in Nagasaki. It tells of a Japanese woman and an American naval officer. Locals and guidebooks often link the opera to this hillside, and some even call Glover House the Butterfly House. But this is a popular association, not documented fact. The opera drew on earlier stories, and no one has shown that Glover's family inspired it. Still, the garden embraces the link. You will find a statue of Puccini, and another of Miura Tamaki, a Japanese soprano who became famous for singing the role of Butterfly abroad.

Glover House is not alone here. Next to it stand the homes of other merchants, such as the Ringer House and the Alt House. Several more buildings were moved here from other parts of the city to save them. Walk slowly between them. Notice the different verandas, the stone foundations, the painted window frames and the wooden shutters. Each house shows how foreign families tried to live in a Western way, inside a Japanese climate of hot, wet summers.

Watch the ground as you walk, too. According to a popular local tale, a heart-shaped stone is set among the paving stones somewhere in the garden. Couples search for it, and people say touching it brings luck in love. It is a light piece of folklore, not history. But it turns a walk into a small game, and you will often see people bending down, studying the path, smiling when they find it.

Outside the gates, the old foreign settlement continues. Just below the garden stands Oura Church, a white Catholic church from the same period, built for the foreign community. The streets around it slope down toward the water, lined with small shops selling castella, a soft sponge cake that Nagasaki has made for centuries. The smell of baking often drifts up the hill. These streets show how close Nagasaki has always been to the outside world.

Before you leave, return to a spot where you can see the harbour. Look at the water, the ships, and the cranes on the far shore. Then look back at the low wooden house with its wide veranda. A young Scotsman stood here more than a century and a half ago and watched ships come in. Many of those ships helped to change a country. As you walk back down the slope, listen to the city below you... and notice how the harbour stays in view almost all the way down.