Professor Murray Pittock explores the long, shared history between Japan and Scotland, demonstrating how strong education and business networks forged over many decades before the start of the Meiji age contributed to wider shifts in world and Pacific history
Japan today contains many traces of Scottish engagement and influence, and the same is true of Japanese influence in Scotland. Whether it is the playing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the closing of bars and supermarkets, or the success of the giant Japanese whisky industry pioneered by Masataka Taketsuru (1894-1979), the scion of a sake brewing family who studied chemistry at the University of Glasgow and went on to found his own distilling company with the support of his wife Jessie ‘Rita’ Cowan (1896-1961) of Kirkintilloch, Scotland and Japan are more often blended together than one might expect.
Perhaps the most beautiful, peaceful and visible confluence is in the Japanese garden in Scotland. The Japanese garden has had more impact as an imported style than any other garden type since the union: sharing a rocky landscape and often damp climate, Scotland proved an accommodating location for Japanese garden styles. Charles Anstruther-Thomson (1855-1925), George Bullough (1870-1939), Osgood Mackenzie (1842-1912) and John Henry Dixon (1838-1926) all created notable Japanese gardens in Scotland, and Japanese practice was also influential on institutional gardens, such as the Cruickshank botanical garden at the University of Aberdeen. In 1911, the Scottish National Exhibition at Glasgow featured a Japanese tea garden next to its mock highland village, An Clachan. One of the most accessible survivors is the (now restored) garden created by Isabella (‘Ella’) Christie of Cowden (1861-1949), who brought Taki Handa, originally from the Royal School of Garden Design at Nagoya, to lay out a garden over almost three hectares in Clackmannanshire, Shã Raku En, ‘the place of pleasure and delight’, in the first decade of the 20th century. It has been dubbed the best in the West by at least one Japanese expert.
Naturally then, Japan’s relationship with Scotland forms a key element of my book Scotland: The Global History, which is due out from Yale in August 2022. But in keeping with the book’s central theses on the relationships between hard and soft power, between nationality, sovereignty and force and the nature of the kin- and association-based strategic networks required to sustain both, the focus of its discussion is on the central contribution of Scottish soft to Japanese hard power in the half century before the First World
