James Clavell’s bestselling 1975 novel Shōgun and the 1980 miniseries that followed did wonders for bringing Japan to the West. True, movie buffs and Hollywood directors had already tapped the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa and others. But Shōgun was a blockbuster book followed by a blockbuster TV show. It’s credited with helping start a 1980s tsunami of Japanophilia in the West and did wonders for sushi sales.
The series starred Richard Chamberlain before he starred in The Thorn Birds. In Shōgun he played an Englishman washed up in 17th-century Japan. After a bath, he looked like a Bee Gee in a kimono.
Clavell had based his story on William Adams, the first Englishman to arrive in the country where Portuguese traders and Catholic Jesuit missions already had a foothold. The writer had been a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II.
Starting out as a screenwriter, Clavell’s credits included POW classic The Great Escape. His first novel was King Rat, based on his experiences in Singapore’s Changi Prison. Shōgun, effectively a fictionalised study into the roots of Japanese imperialism, was a potboiler of sex, violence and political intrigue and was widely praised for being a crash course in Japanese history and culture.
After the first screen adaptation became the second-biggest miniseries of its era behind Roots, it became a template for other white-guy-goes-east productions. Konichiwa, The Last Samurai, we’re talking about you. The Tom Cruise film made in NZ was set in the 1860s near the end of the Edo period in which Shōgun begins, in the early 1600s. Cruise’s US cavalry officer got sword lessons from a character played by veteran actor Hiroyuki Sanada. Sanada is producer and star in the new Shōgun, playing Toranaga, the feudal lord who takes in marooned English mariner John Blackthorne, a figure Clavell based on Adams, as he squares off in a civil war with rival fiefdoms on the eve of the historic Battle of Sekigahara.
Compared with its screen predecessor, the new Shōgun, made by American producers for the Disney-owned FX channel, feels gritty rather than glossy but still aspires to Game of Thrones-level scale.
It was shot over 10 months in some very misty bits of Canada, enhanced with some impressive computer-generated image work for storm-tossed ships and Osaka. Early episodes suggest it has also taken notes from Martin Scorsese’s stern, grim Silence, his 2016 film of early Portuguese Catholic missionaries to Japan.
The show’s creators, Justin Marks and his Japanese-American wife, Rachel Kondo, brought in Asian-American and Japanese writers to create 10 episodes. Unlike the previous series, they aren’t all told through the outsider perspective of the Englishman. This time, the Japanese characters are subtitled. They weren’t in the original, leaving audiences as mystified as Chamberlain’s Blackthorne.
Here, he is played by English actor Cosmo Jarvis, who looks and sounds more authentic as a 17th-century castaway. The series also stars NZ-born, Tokyo-raised Anna Sawai in the pivotal role of Lady Toda Mariko, who becomes a tutor, translator and object of desire for Blackthorne.
Clavell started his idea for the novel when he became intrigued by reading about Adams in his daughter Michaela’s history textbook. These days, Michaela looks after her father’s rights.
Her late father would approve of the new version, she says. He was a stickler for detail, she told a press event last year, and the series is very true to the book – “the darkness of it, the lightness of it, the Japanese-ness of it”.
Shōgun begins with a two-episode debut on Disney+ on Tuesday, February 27, then continues with one episode a week. All 10 episodes will be available to view by April 23.
