This contains plot spoilers
When I heard about the new FX reboot of “Shōgun”, my first reaction was not this again. I remembered the original 1980 series and the James Clavell novel it was based on with no fondness, since at the time I was studying Japanese history and heard “Show Gun?” whenever my major came up. “No, not “Shōgoon” I would say, adding that the show wasn’t historically accurate. Also, my field was modern Japanese history. But thanks to “Shogun”, suddenly the only Japanese things of interest were feudalism, beheadings and seppuku—or, as it was then called in English, “harry carry”. None of this made me want watch beyond the first episode, so I didn’t.
Although I was puzzled that the original series—so highly lauded in its time—merited a remake, at least this time around no one would compare it to my academic work. And people might pronounce the title more correctly, thanks to the long accent mark and help from the large Japanese cast.
The new series’ creators, Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, claim not to have watched the 1980 “Shogun”, but they made two significant improvements. The first: subtitling the Japanese dialogue, which the previous show’s producers didn’t, on the grounds that the Englishman John Blackthorne didn’t understand the language so why should the audience? In the new series, subtitles are a necessity—most of the dialogue is in Japanese and a large portion of the audience presumably isn’t conversant. The second improvement: changing the protagonist from Blackthorne to Lord Toranaga, the Shōgun of the title.
“Is it true?”, people used to ask me of the original series. Like British history as depicted in “Downtown Abbey” and “The Crown”, yes and no. The most accurately rendered character is Blackthorne, based on a real person called William Adams. The English pilot of a Dutch ship that washed up in Nagasaki in 1597, Adams was taken prisoner by the powerful daimyō (feudal lord) Tokugawa Ieyasu—Lord Toranaga in the series—who would soon unite Japan under its first federal government and name himself Shōgun, or military ruler. Like Blackthorne, Adams quickly rose from prisoner to hatamoto (bannerman) and, with the awarding of a domain, became a unicorn: Japan’s first foreign daimyō.
Although the events depicted in “Shōgun”—the succession drama of Toranaga’s predecessor, the martyrdom of Catholic priests, establishment of federal rule and the new capital, Edo—are mostly accurate, the timeline is not. Toranaga is clearly modeled on Tokugawa Ieyasu, but in reality the action in “Shōgun” spanned fifty years, beyond not only Ieyasu’s rule and but those of his son and grandson.
This history helps to explain Toranaga’s rapid evolution on the threat of Catholicism : in reality it was not Ieyasu but his grandson Iemitsu, the third Tokugawa Shōgun, who crucified Christians in 1637-1638 and closed Japan to the outside world in 1641. (Like the fictional Toranaga, Ieyasu regarded Catholics, particularly missionaries, as subversive, but left their persecution to his successors.) The 1615 siege of Osaka Castle and the forced seppuku of Hideyoshi’s heir Hideyori and his mother Yodo-dono were ordered not by Ieyasu but his son, Hidetada, who became Shōgun after Ieyasu’s abdication in 1605.
But who cares about the compression of history when there are beautiful costumes and exotic customs on display, not to mention impressive performances by Hiroyuki Sanada (Lord Toranaga) and Anna Sawai (Lady Mariko)? Once I learned the many characters and got used its stately pace, I was hooked. Unfortunately, my Japanese background not only doesn’t enhance my enjoyment of “Shōgun”, but hinders it. When not wracking my brain about the sequence of events and their dates, I’m beating my way through dense thickets of formal, antiquated dialogue—the kind of Japanese heard today only in feudal dramas and the Imperial Court. I find it maddening, but non-Japanese speakers won’t: they can read the relatively simple subtitles and focus on the colorful action.