Founding editor’s introduction

Just outside the International Cruise Terminal in the city of Nagasaki in Japan, there is a magnificent piece of bronze statuary.A man who looks distinctly Western and moustachioed sits in a rather grand chair.A woman, who looks Japanese, stands on the right, and a younger man stands on the left.The inscription on the plinth is entirely in Japanese, but there is no doubt for a non-Japanese speaker who these people are.The monument commemorates Thomas Blake Glover, the Scot who went to Nagasaki in 1859 and became its most famous resident in the Meiji era.The woman is his wife, Tsuru Yamamura, and the younger man is Tomisaburu, his son (though it is thought he may have been the son of Glover's concubine rather than of Tsuru).Across the road from this group of statuary are the surviving buildings of the foreign settlement of Nagasaki during treaty port days -the former British consulate, the customs house, and the original Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.Further up the hill behind stands Glover's

Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · History, Culture, and Diplomacy · Japanese History and Culture