Is Shōgun a Japanese show or an American one? It was produced by an American company (FX), written by Americans (Justin Marks and his Japanese American partner, Rachel Kondo), and based on the 1975 novel by James Clavell, an American. Yet the dialogue is mostly Japanese, the credits abound with Japanese advisers and producers, and the actors are almost all Japanese too. I’m not sure there has ever been anything quite like it. The American showrunners have been so careful not to foreground the viewpoint of the West that their epic series about late-16th-century Japan could very well have been made by the Japanese.
The publicity surrounding the series has focused on its fidelity to authenticity: multiple rounds of translation to give the dialogue a “classical” feel; fastidious attention to how katana swords should be slung, how women of the nobility should fold their knees when they sit, how kimonos should be colored and styled; and, crucially, a decentralization of the narrative so that it’s not dominated by the character John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), an Englishman whose merchant vessel washes up on the archipelago’s shores in the first episode.
Blackthorne is the archetypal westerner who discovers “the Japans,” as he calls this isolated jewel of the East, shrouded in equal measures of mist and mystery. It is through his eyes, in the book and in its televised adaptation from 1980, that we come to understand these “strange” people and their strange ways. This device has been employed in Tom Cruise’s lesser imitation of Shōgun, The Last Samurai; by Bill Murray in Lost in Translation; and in the other recently concluded prestige series set in Japan, Tokyo Vice.
In the new Shōgun, however, Blackthorne is our focal point only in the first half of the series before gradually shrinking to a mere pawn in a deadly game of chess played by an embattled warlord named Toranaga (a masterful Hiroyuki Sanada), who emerges as the story’s actual main character. Jarvis, who has the neck of a pit bull and puppy-dog eyes to match, acts with blundering gusto as Blackthorne and ultimately comes off as an inferior sort of creature: coarse, if well meaning, and not too smart. The Japanese protagonists, in contrast, are regal, cunning, and in command of their own destiny.
Indeed, if some American entertainments, like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, seem baffled at the prospect of depicting the Japanese at all, Shōgun is intent on showing how wonderfully superior they are. Despite the occasional lightning flash of insight into some more troubling Japanese cultural tendencies (extreme deference to authority, people committing suicide for the slightest of transgressions), Shōgun’s Blackthorne, like Tokyo Vice’s Jake Adelstein, is the quintessential gaijin who falls hopelessly in love in their first encounter with the alien — with the lovely women, the sumptuous surroundings, the elegance in dress and manner. Shōgun’s showrunners are similarly smitten, their admiration reflected in the way the camera lingers on the luxurious trappings of court life in medieval Osaka.
But what we might call a Japanese-superiority complex is precisely where the show’s Americanness shines through, revealing a blinkered view of its source material that fails to engage with or even understand its tensions. And for all the show’s preoccupations with the Japanese viewpoint, it remains an American text, riddled with American concerns about political polarization and how to wield vast military power. Just as every monument to history tells us something about the people who made the monument, so every American story about Japan bears the mark of that story’s creators — their dreams, their anxieties, their fears, all of which have been projected onto this ultimate other.
Japanese history, very roughly speaking, can be described as alternating between periods of war and peace. There are epochs in which a powerful emperor or military dictator (i.e., a shogun) asserts stability over the country’s competing factions, and others in which feudal lords duke it out for supremacy and a miserable tooth-and-claw chaos reigns. As a result, expressions of Japanese culture tend to be defined by their position between these two poles of barbarism and civilization. Think of The Tale of Genji, the classic 11th-century depiction of the Heian court, which prized an ultra-refined aesthetics in poetry, lovemaking, music, and making and drinking tea. Then consider filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) or Ran (1985), both set in the medieval Japan of the Sengoku period, between the 15th and 16th centuries, when the country was convulsed by bloodshed. In this Japan, the courtesans killed one another in their sleep.
Shōgun is set on the cusp between war and peace at the tail end of the Sengoku period. Japan’s ruler has died and been succeeded by an heir who is too young to govern. A council of five regents has been established to rule in the boy’s stead, and as the show begins, four of these are trying to purge Toranaga from the council for amassing too much power. Toranaga is outnumbered and beset by assassination attempts, forcing him to fall back on his wits to outmaneuver the council.
In the Tom Cruise version of this story, Toranaga would recruit Blackthorne to enter the fray with his musket and cannon and show his sword-wielding enemies a thing or two about the ancient art of kicking butt. In Shōgun, however, Toranaga executes a series of bureaucratic maneuvers to stymie the council, just one example of his using rules of procedure or decorum to thwart his rivals. Specifically, he makes Blackthorne, a Protestant, his bannerman, or hatamoto, which poses a threat to members of the council who are in league with Portuguese traders and have converted to Catholicism. The Catholic councilmembers demand that Blackthorne be eliminated before any vote to impeach Toranaga, and without an impeachment, Toranaga is tentatively safe. So Toranaga and Blackthorne become dependent on each other for survival. To communicate with his foreign hatamoto, Toranaga enlists Lady Mariko (Anna Sawai), also a Catholic convert, to translate.
The West’s presumed supremacy is turned on its head from the first episode, when Blackthorne declares, “I will not die in this wretched land,” to which his Spanish companion replies, “Tell me when you set eyes on Osaka if you really think our world is the hilt of civilization.” In another episode that emphasizes his uncouthness, Blackthorne declines to take a bath because he already bathed that week and is thus sufficiently clean by his debased English standards. In contrast, Toranaga and Mariko are always perfectly groomed and like to recite poetry to each other in the time-honored way — that is, spontaneously, when the moment calls for it.
Much of the action takes place in splendidly re-created interiors: miles of golden tatami and glossy wooden floors, austere rooms adorned with circular cushions for sitting and darkly glowing lacquer trays for dining, and paper doors that slide open to reveal flowering explosions of color in the courtyard. The show lovingly conveys all the details of court society: the Noh performance by torchlight, the extemporaneous verse, the calligraphic stroke falling on a blank sheet of paper. In one of my favorite scenes, Blackthorne, having made love to Mariko the night before, contentedly sips his morning tea as rain falls on a freshly raked stone garden. It is as if, by virtue of his union with Mariko, he suddenly understands traditional Japanese notions of aesthetic harmony — the merging of interior and exterior, of humans and their environment.
Meanwhile, Toranaga is engaged in a constant thrust and parry with the council. As he prepares for the final gambit that will rout his enemies and usher in a new era — the era of order and stability, the era of the shogun — he deploys so much clever deception that Blackthorne gets spun around and betrays his liege, unwittingly doing exactly what Toranaga needs him to do to execute his plans. These deceptions include Toranaga coaxing his oldest and most trusted adviser, Hiromatsu, to commit ritual suicide, or seppuku, to convince the council (and Blackthorne) that Toranaga is willing to surrender. It is an act that contains within it the central tension of the series: gruesome violence in the service of hastening the day when the rightful ruler can take the throne and make peace.
To that end, Blackthorne reluctantly agrees to be Mariko’s second when she volunteers to perform seppuku, overcoming his instinctive pursuit of individual happiness and freedom in deference to Japanese notions of duty that he frankly fails to comprehend. The show is ambivalent about this practice, even as it uses suicide as a plot device over and over (including, somewhat ridiculously as the bodies pile up, Blackthorne threatening to kill himself in the series finale). We are treated to Blackthorne’s revulsion, which mirrors the audience’s own, at the fetish the Japanese make of self-inflicted death here. But the show also tries to convey the view that death epitomizes the transience of life and therefore must be gracefully accepted and sometimes even sought out, since a good, honorable death will define you forever. As Mariko explains, “Accepting death isn’t surrender. Flowers are only flowers because they fall.” Whether we are to be moved or appalled by this fatalistic logic is unclear; to my mind, anyway, flowers are flowers because they exist. For the most part, it feels as if the show throws up its hands, attributing all this suicide simply to the Japanese being Japanese.
Shōgun’s relationship with Japan’s beautiful things is far less complicated than its relationship with suicide, the overarching sentiment being that beauty is an unadulterated good. But other works of art take a less rosy view of Japan’s cult of beauty. Take Kurosawa’s Ran, set at nearly the same time. The royal rooms are just as prettily austere, the shining garments just as impeccably layered, but the ambience is harsher and more menacing, the lonely castles starker against the dark, smoking plains. Or take Martin Scorsese’s Silence, set some 40 years after the events of Shōgun, when Japan was finally under centralized military control and the authorities were ruthlessly stamping out the Christian communities that had taken root in previous centuries. Scorcese’s Japan at times is almost lunar in its grayness and barrenness, a land that is quite literally godforsaken. His meticulously reconstructed interiors, meanwhile, are stage sets hiding Japanese society’s skeletal architecture of sadism and Orwellian oppression.
The extent to which the creators of Shōgun have thought about the relationship between beauty and violence appears to be: Let’s do a Japanese Game of Thrones and make it as ravishing as possible. As a result, the main feeling I had watching Shōgun was desire. I wanted to scour the internet for cheap plane tickets to Japan, as if the series were some extended advertisement for the ryokan of my dreams. In successfully subverting the western gaze, the showrunners of Shōgun have suggested that Japanese culture is unsurpassed in its delights. It reminds me of that scene in Lost in Translation when Murray’s aging Hollywood star, having first experienced some rather stereotypical pratfalls with Japanese businessmen and prostitutes, calls his wife back home and demands, “I would like to start eating, like, Japanese food.” Adelstein in Tokyo Vice also suffers from Japanese-superiority complex after being thrust into a beguiling demimonde of yakuza gangsters and gorgeous hostesses who garnish his adventures with Kobe beef and bottle service. A recurring theme is that Jake really, really doesn’t want to go home; he returns to see his family in St. Louis only reluctantly and skips out as soon as he can. No offense to St. Louis, the show’s writers all but declare, but can you blame him?
In Shōgun, this admiration for the Japanese way betrays all kinds of hidden American yearnings. One is for a society that, even as it collapses into civil war, still maintains some semblance of honor and dignity, a code that is mutually agreed upon. The show also valorizes a supreme military power that is tempered by the pursuit of beauty and the highest of cultures, as if that might be a formula for peace. Shōgun displays these two extremes of the Japanese self, the savagery and the refinement, but seems wholly unaware that there may be a connection between them, that the exquisite sensibility Japan is famous for may flow from, and be a mask for, its many uses of atrocious domination. And the irony is that Japan could not maintain this balance anyway, its penchant for militarism leading straight to a cataclysmic correction in the 20th century in which it was stripped of its capacity to wage war, leaving it with the remnants of the other half of the historical ledger: the world of lacquer and silk robes and good food. An enchanting world, for sure, but it did not save Japan from itself — a warning that, as always, we should be careful what we wish for.
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