Order of the Scottish Samurai

07/09/2026

07/09/2026

Fraserburgh Japan Club
Ronnie assisted by Helena teaching Shodo to the students
Preparing for their visit to Nagasaki next year

07/09/2026

OSS at the Glover Garden Fraserburgh guests of Alexander Mennie OSS Taisho.

From Ronnie Watt OSS Founding President ,Graham Guyan OSS Ambassador Helena Anderson Wright
OSS Cultural Ambassador and Pastor Joe Ochei OSS Taisho

Alexander Mennie OSS Taisho for services to History and the Glover Garden Fraserburgh.

Judy Whyte Provost of Aberdeenshire OSS Taisho. For services to charity and the community.

Mr Ed Walton OSS Shogun BunBo Ryo -do medal For services to Fraserburgh Academy and the Japanese Club.

Maisie Hendry OSS Cadet Samurai For
services to Fraserburgh Japan Club.

Fraserburgh Academy Japan Club OSS
Golden Dragonfly.

07/09/2026

From Ronnie Watt OSS Founding President ,Graham Guyan OSS Ambassador Helena Anderson Wright
OSS Cultural Ambassador and Pastor Joe Ochei OSS Taisho

OSS Awardees
Monday 7th September Fraserburgh.
Alexander Mennie OSS Taisho for services to Charity ,Culture and the Glover Garden Fraserburgh.

Judy Whyte Provost of Aberdeenshire OSS Taisho. For services to charity and the community.

Mr Ed Walton OSS Shogun BunBo Ryo -do medal For services to Fraserburgh Academy and the Japanese Club.

Maisie Hendry OSS Cadet Samurai For
services to Fraserburgh Japan Club.

Thanks to Cllr Ann Bell MBE OSS Shogun, Cllr Doreen Mair ,Robert Watt Chairman Fraserburgh Rotary and the Fraserburgh Academy Japan Club.

07/09/2026

From Helena Anderson Wright OSS Ambassador for Culture
Good morning Lady Provost,
Fraserburgh Academy pupils and staff.
I am an ambassador of the Order of the Scottish Samurai and also Convener of the Scottish Cultural and Burns Society•

Today we have the honour to present special awards to outstanding individuals. The Scottish Samurai Award was founded by Ronnie Watt OBE, ORS over 32 years ago, there are currently over 400 Samurai awardees throughout the world, including many top awardees on Japan

Ronnie has devoted much of his life to teaching karate and still has an active club. He is the only Tenth Dan in Scotland and as well as an OBE he has the highly prestigious Japanese honour, The Order of the Rising Sun.

He has instilled confidence, self reliance and devotion to his pupils, enabling them to reach the pinnacle of their own individual goals.
We are honoured that he is presenting these prestigious awards today, in the true Spirit of the Samurai.

The aims of your Head Teacher, Mr Ed Walton and his creation of community and international partnerships, are also shared by the Order of the Scottish Samurai.

This award exemplifies excellence, in achievement and self discipline.
It honours values that transcend boundaries, cultures and generations.
Congratulations to you all!

The following awardees:

Maisie Hendry OSS Cadet Samurai for services to learning and culture

Judy Whyte Provost of Aberdeenshire
OSS Taisho services to culture and charity.

Alexander Mennie OSS Taisho Services to History, the Glover Garden and Culture.

Ed Walton OSS Shogun Commander
BunBo Ryo- do medal for services to young people and Japan Scotland Relations.

06/09/2026

As we continue to remember insulin pioneer JJR Macleod's legacy today on what would have been his 150th birthday, we take a look back on the contribution he made to a scientific success which has saved millions of lives around the world.

🔗 http://abdn.io/2pf

06/09/2026

Today marks what would have been the 150th birthday of an Aberdeen-educated professor who led the life-saving discovery of insulin.

It was an achievement for which he was jointly awarded the Nobel prize but for decades the name John James Rickard (known as JJR) Macleod, was mired in accusations that he had stolen ideas and claimed credit where it was not deserved.

More recent research has helped to restore the reputation of Macleod, who spent his later years back in the University of Aberdeen as Regius Professor of Physiology, and a new edition of a biography of his life will now be published http://abdn.io/2pd

06/09/2026

🗾 In Nagasaki there is a hillside garden that receives around two million visitors a year. At the top of it stands the oldest surviving Western style house in Japan. It was built for a young man from Fraserburgh who arrived with almost nothing.

Thomas Blake Glover was born in 1838 in Fraserburgh, the son of a coastguard officer, and grew up in Bridge of Don in Aberdeen. He came out to Nagasaki in 1859, aged twenty one, in the first months after Japan opened its treaty ports to foreign trade. He was there at the exact hinge of Japanese history, and he did not stand still for a moment.

He traded tea and silk, then ships and arms. He supplied the western clans of Satsuma and Choshu who were pushing to overthrow the shogunate, and in 1865 he helped smuggle a group of young Choshu and Satsuma men out of Japan to study at University College London, at a time when leaving the country was punishable by death. Several of them came back to run the new Japan. One of them, Ito Hirobumi, became its first prime minister.

Then Glover did the harder thing. He built. 🚢

He put in Japan's first commercial steam locomotive demonstration, opened the Takashima coal mine using Western methods, and established the Kosuge slip dock, the patent slipway at Nagasaki that fed directly into what became the Mitsubishi shipyard. He was closely involved in the founding of the brewery that grew into Kirin, and Japanese lore has long claimed that the moustachioed mythical beast on the Kirin label is a nod to him.

In 1908 the Japanese government made him a member of the Order of the Rising Sun, a rare honour for a foreigner. He died in Tokyo in 1911 and is buried in Nagasaki, in the city he helped build. His wife was Japanese, his children were Japanese, and his descendants stayed.

A coastguard's son from the Buchan coast, buried on a hill above a Japanese harbour, remembered by a nation that is not shy about who it thanks.

Scots did not only go west. They went everywhere, and they left the place different.