The Scots who are more honoured in Japan than at home

Last week I told how, in the mid-19th century, Scots were among the first Westerners to settle in Japan after that country opened up to the West and, with Thomas Blake Glover leading them, Scots both inspired and took advantage of the great modernisation of the country under the 122nd Emperor, Mutsuhito, better known as Meiji.

The Meiji Revolution (also known as the Meiji Restoration) began when on January 3, 1868, he decreed the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and took over imperial rule of the country.

READ MORE: Meet the Scots who were big in Japan - part one

He wrote: “The Emperor of Japan announces to the sovereigns of all foreign countries and to their subjects that permission has been granted to the Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu to return the governing power in accordance with his own request. We shall henceforward exercise supreme authority in all the internal and external affairs.

“Consequently, the title of Emperor must be substituted for that of Taikun, in which the treaties have been made. Officers are being appointed by us to the conduct of foreign affairs. It is desirable that the representatives of the treaty powers recognise this announcement.”

The emperor also decreed that “knowledge shall be sought all over the world, and thereby the foundations of imperial rule shall be strengthened”.

The change from shogunate to imperial rule was not immediate. Some of the powerful clans objected and eventually Mutsuhito had to put armies in the field to crush the opposition. He also changed the way Japan was governed, eviscerating the Samurai officer class and appointing ministers to run his government.

READ MORE: How Scotland helped shape modern Japan - from engineering to medicine

The emperor was soon known as Meiji, which means “enlightened rule”, and from 1868 until his death in 1912, Meiji superintended the transformation of his country from a backward agrarian economy to a powerful industrial nation with Scots and other foreigners playing a vital role in the process. These foreigners were known as “o-yatoi-gaikokujin”.

It was a Scottish diplomat, Robert Bruce, the 8th Earl of Elgin, who led the way in opening up Japan to trade links with Britain when he arranged the Treaty of Yedo in 1858 while Japan was still ruled by the Shogunate government. It gave Britain a head start and with the success of Glover, who was close to Meiji, the way was opened for Scots to bring their technology and knowhow to Japan.

Richard Henry Brunton was one of the first of the o-yatoi-gaikokujin to arrive in Japan after the Meiji Restoration, eventually being employed by the Japanese government. Born on December 26, 1841, in Muchalls in what was then Kincardineshire, like Thomas Blake Glover, Brunton’s father Richard was an officer in the coastguard – he and Glover became friends in Japan.

Brunton trained as a railway engineer and had worked on several major civil engineering projects when his talents became known by the Edinburgh-based firm of David and Thomas Stevenson (the latter being the father of the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson).

The Stevensons were famed for their construction of lighthouses, and when Japan’s poorly designed and underlit lighthouse system came under severe criticism from the increasing number of shipping lines operating in the seas around Japan, the British diplomat Sir Harry Parkes persuaded the government back in London to pressurise the Japanese to deal with the problem of ships running aground by constructing new, modern lighthouses.

The Stevensons won the contract and realising it would take someone with experience of more than just lighthouse building, they employed the 26-year-old Brunton to head up the project. They put him through a crash course in their world-leading system of constructing lighthouses and in August 1868, accompanied by his wife and infant daughter and two assistants, Brunton arrived in Japan.

He began work straight away, charting the coastal waters around Japan’s main islands and choosing the sites for a chain of lighthouses. The trouble was that Japan at that time had very few men experienced in the necessary trades of stone masonry, brickbuilding and metalwork, so Brunton set up a training system – but also sent to Scotland for tradesmen and engineers. Knowing Japan had numerous geological faults that caused earthquakes, Brunton was one of the first civil engineers to incorporate metal stabilisers into his buildings and he even built an all-metal lighthouse.

Working day and night, Brunton accomplished the almost miraculous feat of building 26 lighthouses around Japan in just eight years. Some of them are still in use to this day. The vast improvement in safety at sea saw a huge boom in trade and Brunton was given the credit, being accorded the name of “father of Japanese lighthouses”.

The new lighthouses needed proper supervision so Brunton imported the practices of the Northern Lighthouse Board from back home in Scotland.

It was not just lighthouses Brunton built. He became a consultant in Yokohama and helped design the city’s harbour, a development which made it the leading port in the country. In that city he founded an industrial school which later was absorbed into Yokohama University.

He built the city’s first iron bridge and also introduced a gas lighting system and even recommended a change in how the streets of the city were paved, as well as advising on the sewage system. It’s no wonder there is a statue to him in Yokohama – as far as I know there are none in his native land.

One of Brunton’s most influential activities was going as a special adviser on the famous Iwakuru Mission to Britain in 1872. He persuaded the leading Japanese politicians and academics on the fact-finding mission to visit many industrial sites and left a record of one such visit: “The Embassy [Mission] came on to Newcastle where they had the opportunity of inspecting the works of Sir William Armstrong from which they have since obtained so many vessels and munitions of war.

“The hydraulic machinery and appliances with which the whole establishment was fitted were explained to them by Sir William Armstrong himself. One of the first Gatling guns ever made, which had 10 bands and which fired 250 shots per minute, was shown at work.”

Back in Japan, Brunton also pioneered telegraph lines and planned some of the rapidly growing railways of the country. But all too soon his time in Japan came to an end – he fell out once too often with Japanese officials – and in 1876 he and his family returned to Britain.

Before he left he created Japan’s first Ordnance Survey map and for all his efforts he was accorded the singular honour for a foreigner of being received in audience by Emperor Meiji.

In his memoirs, Brunton indicated the frustration he felt in having to deal with Japanese bureaucracy: “Instead of having free scope for their talents, the foreign servants of the Emperor were swathed round so tightly with the cramping bonds of suspicion and jealousy that they were unusually helpless.”

Brunton emerged from Japan into obscurity. He worked as a manager for James “Paraffin” Young in Glasgow before heading to London where he worked variously in architecture and engineering before dying at home in South Kensington on April 24, 1901, at the age of 59.

He is buried in West Norwood cemetery where a headstone was erected in his memory on the 150th anniversary of his birth paying tribute to his “significant contributions to the transfer of modern civil engineering technology to Japan”.

Brunton wrote his memoirs under the title of Pioneer Engineering in Japan: A Record of Work in helping to Re-Lay the Foundations of Japanese Empire (1868-1876). It was not published until the 1990s, when it was printed by separate publishers under two different names: Building Japan 1868-1876 and Schoolmaster to an Empire: Richard Henry Brunton in Meiji Japan, 1868-1876.

Another Scot who played a role in the Meiji modernisation of Japan was pharmacist and all-round sportsman Alexander Cameron Sim. Born in Aberlour on Speyside on August 28, 1840, we know little about his early life here in Scotland, but we do know Sim was educated in London, where he trained in chemistry and pharmacy, his first post being as a pharmacist at the Royal London Hospital in 1862.

Four years later he volunteered for service overseas and was posted to the Royal Naval Hospital in Hong Kong. In 1869, just a few years after Japan had opened its borders, Sim immigrated to the open port city of Nagasaki, before moving to Kobe with its small but vibrant foreign community – Japan at that point allowed foreigners to set up their own communities in major port cities.

He worked at first as a pharmacist for a British firm but in 1870 he decided to establish his own company, AC Sim Shokai, importing medical supplies for Japanese people who were moving away from the traditional medicine of their country.

At the same time, and probably partly as a networking exercise, on September 23, 1870, Sim founded the Kobe Regatta and Athletic Club (KRAC) with the name suggesting his preferred sport of rowing. The oldest sports club in Japan and still going today, KRAC is recognised for its pioneering role in bringing foreign sports to Japan, holding its first regatta in December 1870 with Sim the chief organiser and umpire.

It was the first regatta club in Japan to have its own clubhouse and berthing facilities, and its constitution and rules – mostly drawn upon by Sim and his fellow committee members – proved very influential on Japanese sport.

Later he would take an interest in football and with Sim looking on, the first formal Association Football match in Japan, as recognised by Fifa, took place between KRAC and a similar club from Yokohama in 1888, with KRAC winning.

Meanwhile his business did well, especially after Sim developed a carbonated water drink with lemon-lime flavouring similar to our lemonade. It may have been inspired by lemonade drinks in Britain and India but this was a distinctively Japanese drink which was originally called “marble soda” because of the ingenious use of marbles as stoppers in its distinctive bottles.

With a brilliant piece of marketing, Sim had his new drink advertised as “cholera proof”. Not strictly true but the Japanese people were terrified of cholera outbreaks and reasoned that if the bottle had not been opened then it was indeed safe. That drink which changed Japanese drinking habits was named Ramune, and is still popular in Japan and elsewhere.

Sim died on November 28, 1900, aged 60, and was buried in Kobe Foreign Cemetery on Mount Futatabi. There is also a memorial obelisk for Sim in Higashi Yuenchi, Kobe East Park, with the following inscription: “Remembrance of public work performed by Alexander Cameron Sim, native of Aberlour, Scotland. Erected by friends in Kobe, Yokohama and Nagasaki, both foreign and Japanese.”

Like Brunton, as far as I know there is no such memorial to Sim in Scotland. It really does seem that some Scots are more honoured furth of these shores than they are here.