At the Edge of Empire:
The Life of Thomas Blake Glover
By Michael Gardiner
Extract
From chapter 15: The Butterfly Effect
When a butterfly flaps its wings in Nagasaki, lifts in tower blocksbreak down in Coatbridge, and there are storms of frogs in Saltcoats.When a local dignitary makes a comment to the press in Aberdeen, thebirth rate in Gifu increases, and tourists in Nagasaki ‘flock’ to local spectacles.The lives of Great Scots are retold via a kind of chaos theory, where smallevents have unfathomable faraway circumstances. It has usually been thoughtto be vital to the corporate Glover haiku, itself thought to be key to internationalgoodwill, that there was a concrete connection between the Gloverfamily and the opera Madam Butterfly.
In the Ansei ports, marriages of convenience had the same economic logic as the Treaties themselves. The temporary wives were usually all but destitute, and the uneven-development economics of free trade made it natural that they stayed that way. Marriages were usually worked out through a professional intermediary. Until recently, when the ideal of romantic liaison has been raised above it practical possibilities, and second-hand feminism has persuaded some middle-class women that marriage means admitting career defeat, the arranged marriage has remained a common pattern. The romance-marriage pattern is so recent that there is a separate term for it (ren’ai kekkon). But the Ansei Treaties brought a new starkness to marriage economics, since a group with over-inflated buying potential, the Euro-American settlers, were able to choose partners at will. This economic differential is reflected in the story of Madam Butterfly and made tragic: Puccini understood the situation and created the opera with an ear open to the sexual exploitation that was taking place, albeit a nostalgic one. Yet something as stark as the international division of labour has led to ideas of Asian women which are still common today, when we still often look at structural economic differences as if they were differences of ethnic thinking. The original opera was not so naive. Only when Japan had been fully subsumed into a tradition of orientalism, did the story take on the mantle of European tragedy. In 1968, Pat Barr wrote:
In spite of its sentimentality and its distance from the rather sordid truth, the story of Madame Butterfly made its point: it was not the light-living, amiable, frivolous, simple Japanese women, but the ruthless, sophisticated, selfish western men who committed the worst moral sin; the Japanese were not pretty playthings to be petted, admired, laughed at and left at will, like dolls, dragonflies, or elves – they were people who got hurt, made jokes, felt love. Perhaps the worst fault of the Japanese was that some of them have always helped to sustain the westerners’ illusions. Some forty years after the Madame Butterfly syndrome had reached its climax [that is, 1957], the Japanese opened the Nagasaki residence of a former prosperous English merchant, Mr T B Glover, as a museum; to draw the crowds, they called it ‘Madame Butterfly’s House’. It would have amused Madame Butterfly, had she ever existed; it might even have amused Mr. Glover – a hospitable and courtly gentleman, apparently, who lived in the country for nearly fifty years and had great sympathy with and understanding of Japan, at both its best and worst.
Barr’s pithy comments seem to leave little room for a concrete connection. But if Barr wrote this with such conviction in 1968, why has there been so much argument over the nature of the Butterfly–Glover links since? There were two parallel phases which pinned Butterfly onto the Glovers between the 1960s and the 1990s.
Firstly, after World War Two an association between the Glover Garden and the opera arose because the Garden was atmospheric, western-looking, bore a resemblance, perhaps coincidental, to one source of the story, and seemed to encapsulate a formative period in Japan’s history – in Barr’s words, it was used ‘to draw the crowds’. During this phase, Tsuru was enlisted as Butterfly, even though her first husband, Murayama Kunitaro of Oka han, had never left her – she left him of her own will, and he made no fuss about their baby, Sen, who remained amicably attached to Tsuru and came to stay at Ipponmatsu in 1880–1. One iconic connection with Tsuru was a butterfly-like, actually more moth-like, design on her kimono, a family crest. But despite this embroidered crop circle, the idea of Tsuru as ‘the real’ Butterfly was discounted long ago because of evidence of family registers that show she was not the natural mother of the abandoned son supposed to be a model for the snatched child, Shinsaburo. Besides this, her tough childhood and her inability to conceive after Hana notwithstanding, there wasn’t that much tragedy in Tsuru’s life, compared with other yujo. Her life wasn’t long, but most of it turned out to be comfortable. The only serious exception to the rejection of Tsuru-as- Butterfly now is represented by Noda Shizuko, a descendent of Tsuru, who has gone to great lengths to interpret family registers to try to keep the story alive. Noda’s interpretations are worth reading, and we await more research which claims to corroborate a link to Ipponmatsu after Glover’s death, but with Tsuru there is simply no scene of abandonment to lead to Puccini’s ‘tragedy’.
It is worth remembering parenthetically here that although the marriage of convenience was a common pattern, not all of the early settlers in Japan practised a smash-and-grab sexual policy. Glover was a long way from being faithful and disappeared for as much as eight months at a time, but he did look after Tsuru and provide for her until she died, and described her in public as ‘my wife’. A distinguished precedent for a European who went native in romance was the Dutch doctor and scholar, Philip Franz von Siebold, who arrived in Dejima in 1823, a figure who is commemorated in Nagasaki as fondly as Glover, and whose son became adviser to Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru. Siebold built up an enormous amount of knowledge on Japanese nature and customs, and Commodore Perry used his book as reference in preparation for his move on the country. There was certainly a degree of exploitation in the marriage of convenience, but scenes of abandonment were not universal.
When it was found out that the biological mother of Tomisaburo was the yujo Kaga Maki, who was left, or not, by the ‘fair-haired devil’ (balding merchant) who returned later with his new wife to take the son they had had together, Maki became the second possible abandonee. One immediate problem is that Maki, a low-ranking sex worker, would never have expected Glover to stay with her. For local prostitutes, unplanned pregnancies were a professional hazard. Another problem is that Glover, unlike Pinkerton in Puccini’s opera, never left the town to spark the tragedy of separation. In fact when Shinsaburo was born, he was posting a strong intention to stay and clear his mining debts. And Nagasaki being a small and gossipy town, he and Maki were probably always vaguely aware of one another’s whereabouts.
By the late 1980s, Alex McKay was bringing to Scottish attention the fact that Nagasaki-shi was advertising a Glover–Butterfly connection, and that the only plausible source remained Maki. McKay suggested persuasively that the Nagasaki-connected writer C.S. Long may have seen Tomisaburo as the child in the story, and that Maki may have become distraught after having her son taken by the infertile Glovers. This argument bolstered the second phase of speculation which saw Maki as Butterfly. Some corroborated this by pointing out that Tomisaburo was in Philadelphia in 1889–91 at the same time as Long, and others by suggesting that Long later mentioned Tomisaburo by name. As McKay asks:
Long elaborated on his earlier admissions by telling her [Miura Tamaki, famous for playing Butterfly in the opera in Japan] that the real name of the boy in the story . . . was Tom Glover and that this boy was known to his sister . . . [d]id Thomas, or perhaps Tsuru . . . unfeelingly offer to take the child from Maki? Did Thomas completely reject her?
If this was the source, there would still have to have been major changes made to Long’s story before it reached Puccini: Glover would have been sent to sea, Tsuru would have been made an American, and Maki would have been hidden from the incomer over whose loss she was weeping. But Maki never considered herself to be married to Glover as we understand it. She was intrigued by him, but didn’t know him enough to love him. She was professionally disconnected. Yujo were, as Pat Barr points out, only ever that naive in male western fantasy. Maki was certainly unsettled by the sudden loss of Shinsaburo, especially because she had never expected Glover to come back – which he only did because of the discovery of Tsuru’s infertility – but it was also common for babies to be re-adopted by wealthier or more conveniently-placed families. Glover himself did the same with Nakano Waka, who later became his daughter-in-law, with no hint of the tragic. Nor did Maki commit suicide as did the opera’s tragic heroine, in fact she lived until 1905, longer than Tsuru.
Perhaps most importantly, Kaga Maki couldn’t have lived in Minami Yamate as a wife-of-convenience, since this was within the foreign concessions. There were two classes of yujo, and normal ‘interference’ between a western man and a Japanese woman was technically forbidden except for the upper level of yujo who paid registration fees. Unlike Tsuru, Maki didn’t have the licence which allowed her to live in the concessions. She was of the common unlicensed strain, stuck on the outside, while Tsuru was of the licensed, prestigious strain, able to enter the concessions and become Glover’s recognised wife.
Absorption of Maki and the Glovers into the Butterfly story misses our willingness to retain an orientalist twist in order to celebrate Glover. The story is expensive in terms of gender and ethnic stereotyping: white men are explorers with a tendency to be taken off by the affairs of the world, native women (‘girls’) sit at home pining. Men move, women stay still. Men go outwards, women retreat inwards. But unlike Pinkerton, and apart from his brief midlife crisis ranching in Washington with Alex, Glover had made it clear from the mid 1870s that he was staying – in conditions which don’t trigger images of exploration, but rather embracing corporate management. While Butterfly’s Pinkerton recovers from going native to leave Butterfly for an American wife, Glover stays initially somewhere near Maki, to consolidate his relationship with another yujo, Tsuru. If Maki is Butterfly, this show of permanence comes six years before the traumatic scene of Shinsaburo’s adoption. And it was in the year of his son’s adoption that Glover got his peach job, with an offer that not even a fair-haired merchant could refuse. Moreover, although Glover dedicated himself to Tsuru in a closed-doors but formally arranged ceremony in 1870, the partnership still lacked the quasi-Catholic, Italian-American sense of unbreakable permanence with which Kate became Pinkerton’s wife in the opera. Glover and Tsuru stayed together for almost 30 years and felt a deep bond, but merely extended a temporary arrangement typical of the time. How did the Butterfly story come about?
The story evolved into Puccini’s opera via a couple of routes. Firstly, through Nagasaki kyoryuchi gossip overheard by Sarah Jane (Jennie) Correll, wife of Irvin Correll of the American Methodist Mission and briefly headmaster of Chinzei Gakuen school, Shinsaburo’s alma mater. During the Corrells’ fiveyear stay in Higashi Yamate lot six, at a loose end, Jennie turned overheard scraps about a ‘tea-house girl’ – perhaps entirely made up by foreigners – into a story to tell her brother, would-be author C.S. Long, whom she visited in Philadelphia in 1897. Long’s story survived almost intact in the libretto of Madam Butterfly, though it was joined there by elements from a similar, earlier story by Pierre Loti (real name Julien Marie Viaud), who had come to Nagasaki in 1885, when his ship arrived there for repairs.
In Loti’s story, Madame Chrysanthemème, an American sails into port and arranges via a broker a marriage which the bride takes seriously, but which the American sailors laugh off. When he leaves, she has his child and refuses all other offers of marriage to await his return. When he does return it is with a blonde woman. His wife-of-convenience, realising that he had never taken the marriage seriously, tries to commit suicide. Loti’s story parallels and prefigures Madam Butterfly, and Jennie Correll may have known the story already when the ‘tea-house girl’ gossip was arranging itself in her head. She may or may not have had Ipponmatsu, one of Nagasaki’s bestknown foreign houses, in mind. As Jan Van Rij points out, Long uses a great deal of Loti’s detail but also exaggerates the itinerant sailor into the crass caricature that would become Puccini’s Pinkerton. Van Rij also notes that Loti’s immediate inspiration was probably a French vessel anchored in Mitsubishi docks in 1887 – though Loti doesn’t mention Glover’s tenure as Mitsubishi’s most important foreign employee.
Loti’s book was turned into a mini-opera by André Messager, and when Messager composed the music in 1892 in Italy, he was a guest of Giuli Ricordi – along with Giacomo Puccini. Puccini had become interested in an idyllic Japan as early as 1872, when portrayed by Camille Saint-Saens in La Princesse Jaune. Saint-Saens was the first composer to popularise the pentatonic scale in western music, a scale based on five notes and intended to sound ‘oriental’. Saint-Saens’s pentatonic scale was immediately post- Restoration, but also well before the peak of Japonisme in the arts. La Princesse Jaune describes an unlikely match between a Japanese woman and a Dutch doctor, who bears a resemblance to Siebold, and who acts with an integrity incompatible with Pinkerton. Saint-Saens’s non-tragic version of Butterfly is now often overlooked, even though he can be identified with some of the musical and cultural themes of Japonisme.
Crucially, Van Rij notes that Long, author of the later version, was motivated not just by literary ambitions, he also aimed to raise awareness of the Japanese campaign to abolish the Ansei Treaties. In this, he certainly did recognise that the situation was an economic one, rather than merely one of loose and easy eastern ways. In the context of a society in which the Unequal Treaties had become a national crisis, Long’s Butterfly begins to look quite political when set next to that of Loti: marriages of convenience were revealed as a domestic form of Unequal Treaty. Long’s story was immensely popular on its publication in 1898 – a year before the enactment of the repeal of the Treaties – and was taken up by the playwright David Belasco. In 1900, a production of Belasco’s play, based on Long’s story, was seen by Puccini, who had now experienced both dramatic threads – those of Long and Loti.
Puccini was now ready to act. He had since become aware of a number of ‘oriental’ musical experiments which had followed in the wake of Saint- Saens, for example those of Claude Débussy, from whom Puccini may have taken the use of the pentatonic scale. Pietro Mascagni’s Iris (1898) added to the momentum, its libretto written by Luiga Illica, who was also the librettist for Madam Butterfly. Illica also took ill-advised clues from the Japanophile Judith Gautier, whose view of Japanese women was slightly batty – the women in her account are in the business of ‘selling smiles’. In Iris there are clear hints of Puccini’s drama to come, including the extended tragic scenes when Butterfly is waiting for Pinkerton and of her ritual suicide. Less influential but also worth mentioning is Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885), which, though it looks Monty Python-like today, seriously adopted Saint-Saens’s pentatonic scale.
Not all Japonisme, meanwhile, was so nostalgic: at exactly the same time as Puccini was adapting the stories of Loti, Long, Belasco and Illica, Japonisme was having a serious influence on Scottish artists including Patrick Geddes, Phoebe Traquair and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. These Celtic Revivalists used the bold, clean lines of Japanese art and fed it into a movement which would become known as the Glasgow Style. It would have made for an interesting cultural legacy if Glover had known of the early trips to Japan of the Scottish artists Edward Arthur Hornel and George Henry in 1893, especially if he had supported them as he had supported students making the trip in the opposite direction. Perhaps more important than the question of whether Glover knew of the opera, is whether he knew of the effect Japanese art was having on his fellow Scots – the answer almost certainly being no.
Japonisme as a whole helped Meiji Conservatives to sell the country as culturally and ethnically unique, which they did with some pragmatism, reckoning this to be a prerequisite for imperial pride. A state company was set up as early as 1874 to regulate the cultural export of things marketable as typically Japanese. In Europe, Japonisme became whatever Meiji Conservatives said it was, and all but the most critical of western artists and critics failed to keep an eye on the economics, going along with the exported images. For example, for Ernest Fenollosa, the celebrated American scholar of Japanese aesthetics and an influence on the poet Ezra Pound, who in turn influenced the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, kanji – Japanese characters – were imagined to carry an essence of the object they described. Kanji were pictures. This implies that Japanese language is simply experience itself, an idea so nostalgic it makes Gilbert and Sullivan look gritty, and that the Japanese language has no ability to refer to things or feelings outside of whatever is present and visible. The abstract remains impossible to the Japanese mind: like Butterfly, the Japanese can only talk about things which are in front of their eyes, having no past and no future. Thus, Butterfly waits every day as if it were the first day, and the tragedy is her inability to grasp the passing of time. Japonisme lifts her clean out of the flow of history. Dating from half a century later, some of the most striking exhibits at Japan’s first atomic bomb museums are the clocks which melted and stopped telling the time simultaneously.
Puccini worked on Madam Butterfly between 1901 and 1904, a writing period that spanned a car crash, a divorce and an excruciating wait for a libretto from Illica. Illica’s story in the end was a mixture of Long and Belasco, with the editorial aid of native informants, particularly Oyama Hisayo, wife of the Japanese minister in Rome, who helped repair the Americanisms. The restraints put on Illica’s story by the libretto format, particularly in having to collaborate with the notoriously difficult Puccini, meant, ironically, that the story was brought closer to the Glovers’ than its original version. For example, in the original stories, Butterfly’s child is left with the mother, but at the end of the opera Pinkerton’s wife wants to adopt him, as did Tsuru with Shinsaburo. This certainly shows a similarity to the Glover–Maki story, but at two removes, and via the chance conjunction of two interpretations.
Unsurprisingly, much of Illica’s early draft was scrapped. Puccini then stunned his friends in November 1902 by telescoping acts two and three into one long act, a decision against which all tried to persuade him, but of which he was only cured after the opera’s disastrous opening in Milan in February 1904. Further changes were made for the opera’s US tour in 1907, which predictably portrayed the Americans in a much more sympathetic light. In this version, the haughty American wife Kate, responsible for stealing away Pinkerton – our would-be Glover – almost disappears, and we return to a tragedy brought about by simplistic native thinking.
Although the increasing popularity of the opera coincided with Glover’s last years, in which he allowed himself more time to pursue hobbies, there is no indication that he knew about the phenomenon. (Alan Spence’s background music to Glover’s famous last interview in The Pure Land involves a handy piece of poetic licence.) Even if Glover had known about the opera, it is unlikely that he would have seen any resemblance with his own life story – as Spence carefully shows. More likely he would have described the opera in bah-humbug tones as an example of sub-standard Japanology.
Long’s version achieved prominence in Japan, since he told his story directly to Miura Tamaki, who is still known throughout the country as a veteran of the role of Butterfly and who brought the opera back to the country. Miura’s name is almost inseparable from the role. Her statue is to be found front-and-centre in the Glover Garden in Nagasaki. The Japanese adapted the story in their own way: Kawakami Sadayakko performed a version of Belasco’s play in Osaka in 1916, then in Tokyo in 1917, and both versions boldly stressed the irresponsibility of abandonment, rather than tragedy. Miura Tamaki finally premiered the opera in Tokyo in 1936, as it turned out with the worst possible timing, when the country had little time for western sailor-rogues. Even post-war, the opera never gained a great deal of popularity in Japan, despite the efforts of Miura, the speculative linking of the story to a real place in Nagasaki, or, since 1967, the ‘Worldwide Madama Butterfly Competition’, the finals of which, significantly, take place in the Glover Garden.
For her part, Jennie Correll gave an interview in March 1931 in which she claimed to be the only person who knew the real Butterfly story. But her dim recollection, her taste for sensation, and her lack of detail, only served to throw her account into more doubt. This left the door open to Nagasaki city to make an explicit Glover connection after the war, which it duly promoted when the Garden was set up as a tourist attraction in 1957. In the interview Correll states mistakenly that Tomisaburo was the natural child of Butterfly and ‘an English merchant’. This line was taken up by Noda Heinosuke, father of Noda Shizuko and a source of the first round of Glover–Butterfly links which had Tsuru as Butterfly. For Correll, Tsuru-as-Butterfly was corroborated by a bemused nod by Tom in answer to a question about whether his parents could have been connected to the story. Who knows what Tom was thinking? He may have been bored by being interviewed about his father again. He was also scrupulously diplomatic. And probably nervous: various unpleasant experiences at school had turned him from an anxious boy into an anxious adult.
We might think that Nagasaki city authorities would want to hush up the possibility of a connection between their genteel city, the Glover family, prostitution, child-snatching and the manipulation of official family registers. But even sceptics connected to Nagasaki have pushed the Glover connection. Van Rij, for example, described on his book jacket as an ‘opera buff’ (making us wonder how many ex-diplomats are jazz-fusion buffs or hip hop buffs) follows the movement of the two other Glover brothers, Alex and the young Alfred, and suggests that either one of them could have been the father as they passed through Nagasaki, while Thomas was moving between Shanghai and Hyogo. For Van Rij, the brothers’ absence from the young Shinsaburo represents a possible scene of abandonment; this is a well-argued and plausible idea, though it remains hypothetical in terms of journey times, paints a slightly sordid picture, and still assumes from the outset that Ipponmatsu was the site of the original story, when our evidence that this house was the scene is so far after the fact.
The placing of Butterfly in Nagasaki is itself debatable. After keeping the possibility of a connection between the Glovers and Puccini’s opera uncertain from 1957 till the 1990s, the Glover Garden in Nagasaki itself now claims no definite influence – at least in their English brochure. The Japanese brochure is pointedly equivocal, framed in a ‘what if’ voice. Looking back with the English leaflet in hand, it is hard to deny that the search for the ‘real’ Butterfly is an anachronistic approach. Few studies have been written on who was the real Jane Eyre. Or the real Luke Skywalker. Or the real Fred Flintstone. The answer to the question of who was the real Butterfly is that there was no real Butterfly: Butterfly was made up.
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