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Gina Balian, a television executive who had worked on the hit series “Game of Thrones” for HBO, had just left to help FX start a new limited series division when an agent sent her a nearly 1,200-page novel.
It was “Shogun,” James Clavell’s best-selling 1975 chronicle about a hardened English sailor who lands in Japan at the dawn of the 17th century in search of riches and ends up adopting the customs of the samurai. Balian’s first reaction was that he had already seen this book on television, back in 1980, when NBC had turned the novel into a mini series which earned the network its highest Nielsen ratings to date.
What I remembered most about the first adaptation was Richard Chamberlain, its white male star. But when he began reading, he discovered that the novel had a much more kaleidoscopic point of view and devoted considerable pages to delving into the heads of the Japanese characters.
“I thought there was a story to tell that was much broader and deeper,” said Balian, co-president of FX Entertainment. It didn’t hurt that something also reminded him of “Game of Thrones,” in terms of the “richness of the lives of so many characters.”
It took 11 years, two different teams of showrunners, and a major relocation to bring “Shogun” back to the screen. The 10-episode 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 beyond seeing the world as a playground where (mostly) white protagonists prove themselves in exotic lands. Shows and movies like “Squid Game” and “Parasite” have shown that audiences can handle Asian characters who speak their own languages.
“Shogun,” which includes a romantic story between the Englishman and his Japanese interpreter, does not completely abandon the genre of white characters encountering an alien Japan that was popularized in films like “The Last Samurai” or “Lost in Translation.” . or going even further back, in star vehicles like “Sayonara” (Marlon Brando) or “The Barbarian and the Geisha” (John Wayne).
Thus we see John Blackthorne, the ship’s pilot, played by Cosmo Jarvis, perplexed by Japanese bathing rituals and their custom of removing shoes indoors, and horrified by the rapid acts of apparently unprovoked violence. Japanese characters explain his cultural psychology with aphorisms like: “We live and we die. We don’t control anything beyond that.”
However, the new series, like the previous novel, gives enough time to the Japanese characters in scenes where Blackthorne does not appear. In the 1980 miniseries, Japanese characters played supporting roles in Chamberlain’s journey. The intermittent Japanese dialogue wasn’t even translated. In large sections of the new version, on the contrary, the subtitles are in Japanese and important plot lines revolve exclusively around the Japanese protagonists.
The first actor whose name appears in the credits is Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Toranaga, a Japanese lord inspired by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the military ruler who helped unite Japan, ushering in a period of peace that lasted more than 200 years. Sanada, who is also a producer, said he remembers being disappointed that the original series placed little importance on historical accuracy. “To be honest, as a Japanese, I wanted to see something more real at that time,” he said.
Sanada advised the cast and crew on period authenticity, given his experience acting in historical dramas in Japan. He helped teach Anna Sawai, who plays Toda Mariko, a samurai’s wife and Blackthorne’s performer, to speak in classical Japanese locutions.
But as an actor who appeared in “The Last Samurai” and, more recently, “Bullet Train,” which reworked a Japanese novel with many non-Japanese actors, Sanada understood the appeal of the Blackthorne character, on whom Clavell was loosely based. . William Adams, the first Englishman to arrive in Japan.
“Having a blue-eyed character, who existed in real history, will help more international audiences see him,” Sanada said.
Like Blackthorne, Jarvis did not have to pretend to learn a foreign culture; He knew little about Japan when he agreed to play the role. At first, he studied some Japanese history and wood paintings for inspiration. “But after a while I realized that it was better if I learned everything I needed to at the same rate that Blackthorne was learning it,” he said.
Scholars who teach Japanese history say the framing of “Shogun” made the most sense when the novel was first published.
“In the 1970s, for many whites, at least, the idea of getting on a plane and going to Japan still seemed like a big deal,” he said. Daniel Botsmanprofessor of Japanese history at Yale University who previously taught the novel in his classes.
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 doppelgangers like Blackthorne aren’t as important to a younger generation of fans as He watched a lot of Japanese shows online. “They don’t necessarily need a mediating figure like ‘Shogun’ or ‘The Last Samurai,'” she said. Still, she added, characters who act as cross-cultural intermediaries “can be an engaging introduction to a different time and place.”
Balian said the project ran into teething problems when producers struggled to find enough open land to film in Japan. He also decided that he wanted a different narrative sensibility than the one that original showrunner, Ronan Bennett, brought to his script. (Balian did not go into further details.) FX ultimately decided to hire 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 of Japanese ethnicity.
“I said, ‘Oh wow, look at my opportunity to connect with the culture that I identify with and how I was raised,'” Kondo, who was born in Hawaii, said in a joint video interview with Marks. “Very quickly in the process I came to understand that not only am I not Japanese, but I am Japanese-American, which is completely different.”
For the writers’ room, the pair cast mostly Asian-American women.
“I looked at it like, ‘Look, this is working well,’” Marks said. But “we really started to see that Asian American was not a sufficient point of view for what this story was.”
To make sure the Japanese scenes rang true, or at least truer, the pair worked with Mako Kamitsuna, a film editor raised in Hiroshima, and Eriko Miyagawa, who has been a consultant for other Western films set in Japan, including “Silence” by Martin Scorsese. ” and “Lost in Translation” by Sofia Coppola.
Kamitsuna and Miyagawa helped translate the scripts into classical Japanese, enhanced with contemporary diction. “We went for an authentic classical feel,” Miyagawa said, although they sometimes modified and modernized “just for the sake of clarity.”
To create a sense of historical fidelity, the producers became obsessed with the color scheme of the kimonos and how to carry katana swords. Even such a prosaic detail as how women should sit became the subject of fervent debate.
Marks had spoken to a scholar who said that women of the time kneeled in a position known as “tatehiza,” but Miyagawa argued that most of the Japanese public would expect women to sit in “seiza”: with their knees bent and feet tucked underneath. Placing high-ranking women with one knee raised “could distract people or take them out” of the scenes, Miyagawa said.
In the end, Marks agreed. “I think what we were really chasing was this idea of spiritual authenticity.” he said.
The producers waived historical accuracy in other respects to avoid alienating audiences. Sawai said that 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 novel’s frank depiction of sexuality, Sawai refused to film nude scenes.
“I don’t want to end up on ‘Shogun,’ stripping completely naked and pigeonholing myself into that stereotype of an Asian woman who takes off her clothes and seduces a white man,” Sawai said during an interview at a cafe in Tokyo.
He appreciated that the women had textured scenes that showed them as more than just accessories to the men. “Women felt these emotions that we see in ‘Shogun,'” she said. Before “they were not allowed to show it.”
Michaela Clavell, the author’s daughter and CEO of a company that manages Clavell’s literary estate, said her father, who died in 1994, was proud of the original miniseries. But she recognized that it was from his time and wanted to update it.
“We can only do what we can do at any given moment in real time, right?” she said. “Twenty years from now, we’ll be able to look back and say, ‘Well, that was…’ fill in the blank.”
Hisako Ueno contributed to this report from Tokyo.