MANY Scots went to the British Empire’s territories in Asia in the 19th century, particularly India and Hong Kong, as soldiers, administrators, and merchants. But less known are the stories of Scots in parts of East Asia that lay outside the British Empire.
Most important of these was Japan, where Scottish people made an outsized contribution to that country’s history in the 1800s.
Until second half of the 19th century, Japan was an isolationist country. For 200 years, a Dutch enclave at the port of Dejima was its only real link to the rest of the world.
But after an expedition by the American Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open back up to the world in 1853, its government soon realised he country had been left far behind technologically. They began to hire foreign experts from Europe and America to help support the country’s rapid modernisation. These oyatoi gaikokujin, or foreign employees, included many Scots.
Henry Dyer, an engineer from what is now Bellshill, Lanarkshire, was recruited in 1873 to teach at Japan’s new engineering school, later the Imperial College of Engineering.
He designed the school’s curriculum and established an engineering works. His students would go on to play a major role in Japan’s rapid industrialisation.
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For his work, Dyer was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japanese emperor. Even after returning to Glasgow in 1882, he continued to support the Japanese engineers who visited the city to study and managed to have
Japanese recognised by Glasgow University as a foreign language for prospective students. Another Scots engineer, Richard Henry Brunton, would also work in Japan. From Muchalls in Aberdeenshire, Brunton worked on railways in the Highlands and in England before leaving for Japan in 1868.
France, Britain, and the United States were each concerned that their shipping was at risk in trading with Japan, as the country lacked a modern lighthouse system. The three countries pressured Japan to agree to build lighthouses to help aid navigation around the country’s long coastline. Brunton applied to work on the project and was appointed chief engineer to the Japanese government’s lighthouse department.
Over the next eight years, Brunton would build more than 30 lighthouses, constructed Japan’s second iron bridge, and advised on railway and telegraph line projects. He also helped expand the harbour at Yokohama, one of the first ports opened to foreigners when the country ended its isolationism.
A further Scottish engineer in Japan was Alfred Ewing. Originally from Dundee, he worked on the telegraph network of Brazil before being appointed professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1878.
In Japan, he worked with fellow Scot Thomas Gray and Englishman John Milne to create the first modern seismograph, an invaluable invention in a country that suffers frequent earthquakes. The three would found the Seismological Society of Japan in 1880.
Scottish contributions were not just to engineering and industrialisation. Alexander Shand, a banker from Aberdeenshire, had worked in Hong Kong for the Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China. In 1864 he moved to Japan, where after briefly managing the bank’s branch in Yokohama, he was headhunted by the Japanese finance ministry.
Shand wrote a guidebook to banking which the ministry published in Japanese in 1873. He also gave courses on economics and finance to the ministry’s civil servants and undertook bank inspections.
Like Dyer, Shand continued to lobby for Japan after he returned to Britain. As a banker in London during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, he helped Japan secure loans on the London market.
He would receive several honours from the emperor for this, including the Order of the Sacred Treasure. Shand has been regarded as the father of modern Japanese banking.
Another area Scots participated in was medicine. Neil Gordon Munro, a doctor from Dundee, became director of the Yokohama hospital in 1893. He would later live among the Ainu, the aboriginal people of Japan, and write the first detailed anthropological study on them.
Another doctor, Henry Faulds, from Ayrshire, went to Japan in 1873 to join a church mission there. He worked in the mission hospital in Tsukiji near Tokyo, before being appointed honorary surgeon superintendent by the Japanese government.
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In 1876 he would found a medical school there, where he introduced Joseph Lister’s antiseptic techniques. He also had an interest in supporting blind people, founding a school for them in 1878. While in Japan, Faulds also developed the science of fingerprinting, inspired by seeing how ancient Japanese pottery preserved the fingerprints of their long-dead makers.
He started to investigate fingerprinting as a tool for tracing criminals, identifying dead bodies, and finding lost children. Faulds published a paper on the subject and invented a method of classifying prints. Although his proposals to establish fingerprinting at Scotland Yard were not taken up, he was the first to draw attention to the value of fingerprinting in forensics.
In turn, Japanese people also visited Scotland, bringing back new ideas and produce. The daughter of a Kirkintilloch doctor, Jessie Roberta Cowan, later known as Rita Taketsuru, met her husband Masataka Taketsuru in Glasgow. His family had run a sake brewery for centuries but while in Scotland Masataka studied whisky-making with apprenticeships at Longmorn and Hazelburn distilleries.
The couple married in 1920 before returning to Japan, hoping to build the country’s first whisky distillery. Taketsuru first built a distillery near Osaka for the Kotobukiya brewing company. Meanwhile, Rita taught English and piano to locals. The networks she created through this helped her introduce her husband to the investors needed to create his own distillery, Nikka, in the town of Yoichi in 1934.
Kirkintilloch has been twinned with Yoichi since 1988, the first such link between towns in the UK and Japan. The main street in Yoichi is called Rita Road and Masataka’s story was made into a TV series in 2014.
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