Title: Shogun
Created by: Rachel Kondo, Justin
Marks
Based on: Shogun by James Clavell
Network: FX/Starz/Hulu/Disney+ it’s complicated, okay?
Shogun, the 1975 novel by James Clavell, is a
fictionalized account of the journey of William Adams, an Englishman who
visited and eventually settled in Japan in 1600.
I, the 1976 human being by Mr. and Mrs. I Senior, am a distressingly
nonfictional person who visited and eventually settled in Japan in 1998.
The two events are related.
Shogun, the 1980 miniseries by NBC, first sparked my
interest in Japan and led to my visit and subsequent ensettlement 18 years
later.
I was thus quite interested to see
Shogun, the 2024 miniseries by FX, an adaptation of the
1975 novel
Shogun, and to compare it to my memories of the 1980
miniseries,
Shogun.
It is an ambitious failure.
It’s sporadically brilliant. Individual scenes absolutely sparkle, as
joyful as a sake cup filled to the brim, as beautiful and delicate and
understated as a spray of cherry blossoms, as sharp-edged and pointed as a
katana. The actresses in particular, Anna Sawai (Mariko), Fumi Nikaido (Ochiba)
and Moeka Hoshi (Fuji), present a master class in saying everything while
saying nothing. A sidelong glance. A cup raised to cover a smile.
On the darker side, there’s also a fascinating study of an abusive
relationship between an outwardly brash but inwardly sentimental man who mistakes
possessiveness for love, and the woman who refuses to cave because she refuses
to acknowledge him at all.
But the whole thing feels a bit muddled, and this is because
Shogun, the adaptation of the novel
Shogun, doesn’t actually want to adapt the novel at all.
The novel is nearly as old as I am, and wears its years with about as much
grace, viz none whatsoever. Mr. Clavell was captured by the Japanese army
during WW2 and spent years in a fairly nasty POW camp, but to his credit came
out of the experience determined to understand the people who’d held him
prisoner. He gives it a good college try but the book does contain a number of
inaccuracies, and subscribes to some of the more offensive stereotypes about
Japanese people—about the second conversation the local have about our English
protagonist is to marvel at how big his penis is.
That said, it is not a “white savior” story, which much like “gaslighting”
or “woke” is a term the Internet seems eager to stretch into oblivion. The
protagonist John Blackthorne (as William Adams is called in Mr. Clavell’s
version) spends over 1000 pages in Japan, and if you keep a carefully track of
the number of people he saves over the course of this epic, at the end your
tally will be: 1. He saves one guy. In an earthquake.
He, er, also loses his ship, the woman he loves gets blown to bits, and the
man who controls his life ends the book by musing on the fact that Blackthorne
is effectively a prisoner in the country.
Blackthorne/Adams does potter about feudal Japan, befriends the man who
will one day become Shogun, Yoshii Toranaga (based on Tokugawa Ieyasu), falls
in love with his translator Mariko (the historical Hosokawa Gracia), fights
some ninjas, and learns about the Japanese people and culture. He is, in
essence, a reader stand-in, the portal through which an audience unfamiliar
with Japan could learn about it.
But that evidently still didn’t sit right with the creators of the new 10-episode
limited series,
Shogun.
In this iteration, they decided to focus more on the Japanese characters
than their white, Western visitor. Which, on the face of it, doesn’t sound like
such a bad idea. 2024 is not 1980 and we don’t really need someone to hold our
hands and explain to us what a samurai or sushi is. Japanese culture,
especially animation, has gone global. It also feels a bit too Last Samurai
to have yet another story set in Japan that is all about the white guy being
cool and getting the best girl.
So, fair enough.
The trouble is, the creators then had to build a show that wasn’t about
a white guy in Japan, based on a foundation that was about a white guy
in Japan. And the cracks, my dear friends, are painfully obvious.
The story of Blackthorne/Adams is the story of a man encountering a new
culture, learning about it, growing to appreciate it, and eventually
assimilating into it, at least to a certain degree. He does not really do much else.
If you do not want to tell a story about intercultural understanding, then do
you not want to tell a story about Blackthorne/Adams. And if you do not want to
tell a story about Blackthorne/Adams, there’s not much point in putting him in
your story.
That’s a problem. Your story should be about whatever your story is
about.
What that means is the Shogun miniseries begins, as the novel does,
with the arrival slash shipwreck of Blackthorne and his crew of Dutch merchants
slash pirates in a fishing village on the Izu Peninsula, where they are imprisoned,
interrogated, and boiled alive (in one case), before Blackthorne is taken to
meet the local warlord, Toranaga, and is introduced to a Japanese-Portuguese
interpreter and noblewoman named Mariko.
Round about episode 4 the story then decides it doesn’t really want to be
about Blackthorne (played by Cosmo “we have a Tom Hardy at home” Jarvis) anymore,
and he sort of hangs around for the next half-dozen episodes bleating about his
ship and men, before the show attempts to give us a satisfying resolution to
the story by having a scene of him working alongside the local villagers.
This doesn’t satisfy as an ending, because the journey between episodes 1
and 10 hasn’t been about him assimilating into this culture at all. He’s
wandered about in a befuddled haze for 9 hours or so and accomplished
absolutely bugger all.
The story would rather be about Mariko (played by Anna Sawai), who let’s
face it is a more interesting character. She’s not only the daughter of Akechi
Jinsai (historical Akechi Mitsuhide), a famous traitor who ambushed and
murdered his liege lord, but also a convert to Christianity in a country deeply
ambivalent about this foreign religion, and one of the few people to speak a second
language (English in the show subs for Portuguese in real history). But if it
is about her, what’s this whiny white dude doing in her show? Why does he get
to start and end her show? He adds nothing to her arc, does nothing to
influence any of her decisions, and even the romance from the novels is largely
repressed here.
It would also like to be about Toranaga (actor Hiroyuki Sanada, who seems
to play the Asian elder in every Hollywood movie now that Ken Watanabe has gone
back to Japan), the cold and ruthless manipulator who uses and discards people
like pawns in his quest to eliminate his rival, Lord Ishido (historical Ishida
Mitsunari) and become the supreme ruler of Japan. But if it is about him, why
are this English fella and minor noblewoman taking up so much of his time and
why does he pay them any attention when the future of the country is at stake?
In the meantime, the show goes out of its way to downplay any contribution
Blackthorne might make to the plot. Does he have anything to teach the Japanese?
No. Do they want to learn shipbuilding from him? No. Do they hope to use him to
open trade with the Dutch? No. Do they learn anything from him at all? No. Does
he learn anything from them? Not really. By the end of the show, he can speak
one or two words of Japanese.
If Shogun wanted to be an outsider story, great. Very popular
choice. Gives the reader a guide who can introduce them to this make-believe
world as they learn about it. Hobbits in Lord of the Rings, the kids in Narnia,
John Carter on Mars, all that good stuff. Ease us into the world of the story.
And then: A crisis. Our outsider protagonist must use the knowledge and skills
they have developed to take control of the situation. They move from passive
observer to active participant in the story. They take control. Only here,
Blackthorne never does. His arc stalls, he treads water, and then we’re supposed
to be happy that everything somehow worked out for him.
It manages to come across as very dismissive of the historical Adams, who
apparently became a valued advisor on nautical matters to the Shogun and helped
promote trade with the Dutch. He married, settled, and had children. In the
show, Toranaga snidely laughs him off as someone he keeps around like a jester,
because “he makes me laugh.” As a white dude happily living and working in
Japan, it’s disappointing that nobody has the courage or imagination to end the
story exactly the way it did in real life, with Adams the white dude happily
living and working in Japan.
But then, once you take out the one unique thing about this story (the first
English guy in Japan) it becomes just another samurai flick, albeit with more
of a political bent. I tried getting my Japanese wife to watch and she gave up
after about five minutes, saying “It’s just another taiga drama” (historical
drama TV shows that have aired in Japan almost every year since 1963: Nothing
new, in other words).
We’ve seen this with Halo, with the Witcher, the Wheel of Time, World War
Z, and if writers don’t want to adapt the original source material, I would
suggest they don’t adapt the original source material. Create something new!
Yes, yes, I know the name is a label slapped on the cover to attract eyeballs,
but it does result in a ramshackle end product, crudely folded together like
amateur origami.
A shame, because the non-Blackthorne bits of the show are often bloody brilliant.
