Thomas Blake Glover spent the first six years of his life in Fraserburgh, which was fast expanding as a fishing and trading port.

Upon leaving school, Glover took a job as a shipping clerk with the trading company Jardine Matheson[2][page needed] and in 1857 he moved to Shanghai.

[4] Anti-western sentiment was rife in Japan in the Bakumatsu period due to the unbalanced treaty agreements imposed upon the Tokugawa shogunate by the United States and other western powers, which included extraterritorial rights.

Nationalistic militants in Satsuma and Chōshū spearheaded anti-government efforts aimed at toppling the Shogunate and restoring the Emperor as sovereign.

In the end Glover provided the needed rifles directly from Nagasaki, and accompanied Ito Hirobumi back to Shimonoseki, on 15 October 1865, for his first personal meeting with Kido, who noted: "Trading with our han is strictly prohibited for a foreigner; therefore, Glover is very reluctant about dealing with us," explained Kido; and he had not told his own crew about the sale of guns, which, in any case, were not aboard that ship.

In 1868, Glover made a contract with the Nabeshima clan of Saga Domain in Hizen Province and began to develop Japan's first coal mine at Hashima Island, Takashima.

Thomas Blake Glover died of kidney disease at his home in Tokyo in 1911, and was buried at the Sakamoto International Cemetery in Nagasaki.

[3] Thomas Glover had a common-law marital relationship with a Japanese woman named Awajiya Tsuru (淡路屋 ツル), a native of Bungo province (present day Oita Prefecture) whom he apparently met in Osaka in the early 1870s.

Official household registers preserved at Nagasaki City Hall indicate that Tomisaburō was the son of a woman named Kaga Maki (加賀 マキ).

Thomas Glover has been erroneously linked with Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly in tourist brochures, popular magazines, and some academic literature.

[9][10] The stories by John Luther Long and Pierre Loti that it is based upon (albeit with some debate on exactly which and to what extent) are set on the eastern slope of Nagasaki Harbour.

[12][page needed] There are no naval officers, desertions, or attempted suicides in Glover's life as in the stories; rather, Tsuru's aforementioned death followed surgery.

[12][page needed] These tourist brochures', magazines', and articles' source is ultimately the fact that the American occupation forces in Japan nicknamed the former Glover House at Glover Garden, which they had requisitioned after World War 2, the "Madame Butterfly House" (on the basis of the panoramic view over Nagasaki Harbor and the Euro-Japanese ambiance of the building).

[12][page needed] This nickname in its turn might have originated with the 1932 Cary Grant and Silvia Sidney American movie Madame Butterfly having been partly filmed on location at the Glover mansion, and there are earlier mentions of the mansion being "the original setting of Madame Butterfly" in the 1926-04-25 Japan Times in coverage of a cherry-blossom fête being held there.

[citation needed] What trading houses like Jardine Matheson were looking for were boys of high ambition who showed strength of character useful in negotiation and who were willing to spend years away from their families.

The reason for Jardine Matheson’s appointing Thomas Blake Glover are not documented, even in their own records, and may have involved exotic handshakes.

[15]In Scottish Freemasonry, it is possible for the son of a Freemason to become one himself, at the age of eighteen, but there remains no evidence that Thomas Berry Glover was a member of the secret society.

Due to local government reorganisation, the house became the property of Aberdeen City Council the same year, and in 1997 it was sold to Grampian Japan Trust for £1.

[21][22] A Scottish Samurai award has been initiated by one of Aberdeenshire's most famous sons, who also holds the Order of the Rising Sun; Ronald Stewart Watt, OBE, ORS, OSS 大将軍, KCCR, KHT, 9th Dan, Hanshi, assisted by the Aberdeen Sports Council.