VOX POPULI: East and West converged in the life of Hana Glover Bennett
This is the story of a remarkable woman.
Hana Glover Bennett was born in Nagasaki in 1876, at the dawn of the Meiji Era (1868-1912).
Her father, Thomas Blake Glover (1838-1911), was a Scottish merchant who played a pivotal role in Japan's modernization during the final years of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the early Meiji Era. His former home, known as Glover House, still stands in Nagasaki.
Hana's mother was his Japanese common-law wife, Tsuru.
Lovingly raised in a cross-cultural household, Hana married a British merchant employed by a trading firm in Nagasaki. She was 21 at the time—shortly after the end of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895).
When her husband was later transferred to present-day Incheon, a key port city on the western coast of the Korean Peninsula, Hana accompanied him.
She would spend the rest of her life in that distant land, as chronicled in 'The Glover Family' by Brian Burke-Gaffney.
I first learned about Hana from Ikuko Toda, a 65-year-old writer and translator based in South Korea.
Last month, I visited the Incheon Gwandong Gallery, a space for exhibitions and cultural exchange that she operates in Incheon. There, she showed me a collection of photographs left behind by the Glover family.
Among them were rare and valuable images capturing the city as it appeared before Korea became a Japanese colony.
One striking photograph depicts a mansion perched on a hill overlooking the port, once home to Hana and her family. The building, later destroyed during the Korean War (1950-1953), had stood amid blooming rose bushes.
It was there that Hana and her husband raised four children.
'It was a time of great upheaval,' Toda reflected. 'Even those with wealth and privilege must have faced deep uncertainty about the future.'
In one faded photograph, Hana appears in traditional Korean dress, seated atop a yellow cow, her gaze fixed intently on something beyond the frame.
Her eyes are haunting—quiet yet piercing.
In that bustling port city where the shadows of East Asian history converged, what occupied her thoughts? What did she feel? Sadly, almost none of her words have survived.
A few years before Japan declared war on Britain in 1941, Hana passed away at the age of 61.
She still rests in the foreign cemetery in Incheon. Amid the hush of surrounding greenery, her white tombstone bears a name—HANA—clearly etched into the stone.
On a bright, clear day, the inscription stands out in sharp relief.
—The Asahi Shimbun, May 14
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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.
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