Kuraba Tomisaburō (T. A. Glover) (1871–1945)
Kuraba Tomisaburō was the son of Thomas B. Glover (1838–1911) and a Japanese woman named Kaga Maki (d. 1903). Maki raised Tomisaburō until about the age of six, when Glover took him and brought him into his own home.
Tomisaburō attended Chinzei Gakuin in Nagasaki and Gakushuin in Tokyo before studying at Ohio Wesleyan University and the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to Nagasaki in 1894 and began working at Holme, Ringer & Co., a company founded by his father’s former employees. While working for Holme, Ringer & Co., Tomisaburō helped establish the Steamship Fisheries Company, which revolutionized the fishing industry by introducing steam trawlers to Japan. He is also known for compiling the Glover Atlas: Fishes of Southern and Western Japan, which contains over 800 watercolor illustrations of marine species found in southwestern Japan.
In 1899, Tomisaburō married Nakano Waka (1875–1943), the daughter of a British merchant and a Japanese woman. They made a comfortable life for themselves in Nagasaki until the late 1930s, when Japanese society became gripped by xenophobia and nationalism, and their international connections came under harsh scrutiny.
Waka died in 1943. On August 26, 1945, two weeks after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Tomisaburō committed suicide at his home. The couple had no children.