Family
Thomas Glover shared a common-law marital relationship with a Japanese woman named Awajiya Tsuru, a native of Bungo province (present day Oita Prefecture) whom he apparently met in Osaka in the early 1870s. The couple had a daughter named Hana, born in Nagasaki in 1876. Hana wed British merchant Walter George Bennett in 1897 and later moved with him to Korea, where she died in 1938. She had four children but only one grandchild, Ronald Bennett (born 1931) who is living today in the United States. Thomas Glover also had an adopted British-Japanese son, later named Guraba Tomisaburo (1870–1945), who was born in Nagasaki and went on to make important contributions to the economy of this city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tomisaburo was married to Nakano Waka, also of mixed British and Japanese descent.
Official household registers preserved at Nagasaki City Hall indicate that Tomisaburo was the son, not of Glover's wife Tsuru, but of a woman named Kaga Maki. Except for these official registers, however, nothing is known about Kaga Maki, her relationship with Glover, or the circumstances of their separation. Glover and Tsuru remained together until the latter's death in 1899. Kaga Maki, meanwhile, married a Japanese man and died in Nagasaki in 1905.
Despite his Japanese citizenship, Guraba Tomisaburo was hounded as a potential spy by the Japanese military police during World War II. His wife Waka died in 1943, and Tomisaburo committed suicide on 26 August 1945, soon after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a few weeks before the arrival of American Occupation forces in Nagasaki. Since the couple had no children, this marked the end of the association between Nagasaki and the Glover family.
Thomas Glover has been linked with Giacomo Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly," which is set in Nagasaki, but there is no historical evidence to support this claim, except the fact that, in some photographs, Glover's wife Tsuru appears wearing a kimono with a butterfly design on the sleeve. There is also no evidence whatever for the claim that Tsuru went by the nickname "Ochō-san" (Ms Butterfly). It is likely, as Brian Burke-Gaffney points out, that the Glover-Madame Butterfly connection is derived from the fact that the American Occupation forces nicknamed the former Glover House the "Madame Butterfly House" (purely on the basis of the panoramic view over Nagasaki Harbor and the Euro-Japanese ambience of the building) and that Nagasaki authorities picked up on this as a way to promote the postwar tourism industry.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Blake Glover
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—Jane Nelson (20th century)