Gina Balian, a television executive who had worked on HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones,” had just left to help FX launch a new limited series segment when an agent sent her a nearly 1,200-page novel.
It was “Shogun,” James Clavell’s best-selling 1975 chronicle of a hardened English sailor who lands in Japan at the dawn of the 17th century in search of riches and ends up adopting the ways of the samurai. Balian’s first reaction was that she had already seen this book on television — in 1980, when NBC had turned the novel into a miniseries that earned the network its highest Nielsen ratings to date.
Most of what she remembered about the first adaptation was Richard Chamberlain – its white, male star. But as she began to read, she discovered that the novel took a much more kaleidoscopic view, devoting significant pages to getting inside the heads of the Japanese characters.
“I thought there was a story that needed to be told that was much broader and deeper,” said Balian, who is co-chairman of FX Entertainment. It didn’t hurt that something about it also reminded her of Game of Thrones, in terms of the “richness of the lives of so many characters.”
It took 11 years, two different show teams and a major relocation to bring “Shogun” back to the screen. The 10-part series debuts on Hulu on February 27 with the first two episodes, followed by new ones weekly, and will premiere on Disney+ outside the United States and Latin America.
Both Hollywood and Western audiences have largely moved on from seeing the world as a playground where (mostly) white protagonists prove their mettle in exotic lands. Shows and movies like “Squid Game” and “Parasite” have shown that audiences can handle Asian characters speaking their own language.
“Shogun” — which features a romance between the Englishman and his Japanese interpreter — doesn’t quite abandon the kind of white characters encountering an alien Japan popularized in movies like “The Last Samurai” or “Lost in Translation.” . or go even further back, with star vehicles like ‘Sayonara’ (Marlon Brando) or ‘The Barbarian and the Geisha’ (John Wayne).
So we see John Blackthorne, the ship’s pilot, played by Cosmo Jarvis, bewildered by Japanese bathing rituals and their habit of taking off shoes indoors, and horrified by the rapid acts of seemingly unprovoked violence. Japanese characters explain their cultural psychology with aphorisms such as: “We live and we die. We don’t control anything beyond that.”
However, the new series, like the novel before it, gives the Japanese characters plenty of time in scenes where Blackthorne does not appear. In the 1980 miniseries, Japanese characters played supporting roles in Chamberlain’s journey. The choppy Japanese dialogue wasn’t even translated. Large stretches of the new version, instead, are subtitled in Japanese, and important plot lines revolve solely around the Japanese mainstays.
The first actor whose name appears in the credits is Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Toranaga, a Japanese lord modeled after Tokugawa Ieyasu, the military leader who helped unite Japan, ushering in a period of peace that lasted for more than 200 years. Sanada, who is also a producer, said he remembers being disappointed that the original series took a small turn for historical accuracy. “As a Japanese person, I wanted to see something more real at the time, to be honest,” he said.
Sanada advised the cast and crew on period authenticity, given his experience as an actor in historical dramas in Japan. He helped teach Anna Sawai, who plays Toda Mariko, a samurai’s wife and Blackthorne’s interpreter, to speak in classical Japanese expressions.
But as an actor who appeared in “The Last Samurai” as well as more recently in “Bullet Train,” which reworked a Japanese novel with many non-Japanese actors, Sanada understood the allure of the Blackthorne character, which Clavell loosely based on. William Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan.
“Having a blue-eyed character, who existed in the real story, will help the international audience to watch him more,” Sanada said.
As Blackthorne, Jarvis didn’t have to pretend to learn a foreign culture. he knew little about Japan when he signed on to play the part. First, he studied some Japanese history and wooden paintings for inspiration. “But after a while I realized that I had better learn what I needed to learn at the same rate that Blackthorne learned it,” he said.
Scholars who teach Japanese history say the framing of “Shogun” made more sense when the novel was first published.
“In the 1970s — for many white people, anyway — the idea of getting on a plane and going to Japan still seemed like a big deal,” said Daniel Botsman, a professor of Japanese history at Yale University who previously taught the novel. in his ranks.
Amy Stanley, a professor of Japanese social history at Northwestern University and author of “Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World,” said blue-eyed stand-ups like Blackthorne’s aren’t as important to a younger generation. fans who have watched many Japanese shows online. “They don’t necessarily need the mediating figure like ‘Shogun’ or ‘The Last Samurai,'” he said. Still, he added, characters who serve as cross-cultural mediators “can be an engaging introduction to a different time and place.”
Balian said the project hit an early roadblock when producers struggled to find enough open land to shoot in Japan. He also decided he wanted a different narrative sensibility than the original showrunner, Ronan Bennett, brought to his script. (Balian did not elaborate.) FX eventually decided to bring in new showrunners and move filming to British Columbia.
In 2018, Justin Marks, who had written a live-action script for Disney’s “The Jungle Book,” took over as showrunner with his wife, writer Rachel Kondo, who is ethnically Japanese.
“I said, ‘Oh, wow, look at my opportunity to connect with the culture that I identify with and how I grew up,'” Kondo, who was born in Hawaii, said in a joint video interview with Marks. “Very quickly in the process I realized that not only am I not Japanese, I’m Japanese-American, which is completely different.”
For the writers’ room, the couple chose mostly Asian American women.
“I looked at it as, ‘Look, this is happening right,'” Marks said. But “we really started to see that Asian American wasn’t enough in terms of what this story was.”
To ensure that the Japanese scenes were real – or at least more real – the pair worked with Mako Kamitsuna, an editor who grew up in Hiroshima, and Eriko Miyagawa, who has consulted on other Western films set in Japan, including Martin Scorsese’s ‘Silence’ and Sofia Coppola’s ‘Lost in Translation’.
Kamitsuna and Miyagawa helped translate the scripts into classical Japanese leavened by modern lexicon. “We went for a classic authentic feel,” Miyagawa said, even though it was sometimes muddled and modernized “just for the sake of clarity.”
To create a sense of historical fidelity, the producers were obsessed with kimono color schemes and how to carry katana swords. Even a detail as trivial as how women should sit became a matter of heated debate.
Marks had spoken to a scholar who said that women of the period would kneel in a position known as “tatehiza”, but Miyagawa argued that most Japanese audiences would expect women to sit in “seiza” – their knees folded and their legs hidden underneath. Directing high-ranking women with their knees up “can distract or drive people away” from the scenes, Miyagawa said.
In the end, Marx agreed. “What we were really after, I think, was this idea of spiritual authenticity.” he said.
The producers forgoed historical accuracy in other ways to avoid alienating the audience. Sawai said none of the actresses shaved their eyebrows or painted their teeth black, as would have been the case for women of the samurai class.
And despite the frank portrayal of sexuality in the novel, Sawai refused to film any nude scenes.
“I don’t want to end up being in ‘Shogun’ and being completely naked and putting myself in this pigeonhole, or the stereotype of an Asian woman taking off her clothes and seducing a white man,” Sawai said during the during an interview at a coffee shop in Tokyo.
He appreciated that women had textured scenes that showed them as more than accessories to men. “Women felt these emotions that we see in ‘Shogun,'” she said. Before, “they weren’t allowed to show it.”
Michaela Clavell, daughter of the author and chief executive of a company that manages Clavell’s literary estate, said her father, who died in 1994, was proud of the original miniseries. But he recognized that it was of his time and wanted to update it.
“We can only do what we can at any given moment in real time, right?” he said. “In 20 years, we might look back on this and say, ‘Well, that was…’ fill in the blank.”
Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo
