‘Shogun’ remake: This time the white guy is just one of the stars

Gina Balian, a television executive who had worked for HBO on the hit series “Game of Thrones,” had just left to help FX create a new limited series division when an agent sent her a nearly 1,200-page novel.

It was “Shogun,” James Clavell’s 1975 best-selling chronicle about a hardened English sailor who lands in Japan at the turn of the 17th century in search of wealth and eventually adopts 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 it into a novel. mini series that gave the network its highest Nielsen ratings to date.

Most of what she remembered from the first adaptation was Richard Chamberlain – the white, male star. But when she started reading, she found that the novel had a much kaleidoscopic perspective, devoting significant pages to getting inside the minds 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 about it also reminded her of “Game of Thrones,” in terms of the “richness of so many characters’ lives.”

It took eleven years, two different teams of showrunners and a major move to bring ‘Shogun’ back to the screen. The 10-part series will debut 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 ignored 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 relate to Asian characters speaking their own language.

“Shogun” — which features a romantic storyline between the Englishman and his Japanese interpreter — doesn’t entirely abandon the genre of white characters encountering an alien Japan popularized in films like “The Last Samurai” or “Lost in Translation.” or go back even further, in 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, perplexed by the Japanese bathing rituals and their habit of removing shoes indoors, and he is shocked by rapid acts of seemingly unprovoked violence. Japanese characters explain their cultural psychology in aphorisms such as: “We live and we die. We have no control over anything else.”

Yet the new series, like the novel before it, gives ample time to Japanese characters in scenes where Blackthorne does not appear. In the 1980 miniseries, the Japanese characters played a minor role in Chamberlain’s journey. The intermittent Japanese dialogue wasn’t even translated. In contrast, large parts of the new version are subtitled in Japanese, and major storylines revolve solely around the Japanese protagonists.

The first actor whose name appears in the credits is Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Toranaga, a Japanese gentleman modeled on Tokugawa Ieyasu, the military ruler who helped unify Japan and usher 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 gave short shrift to historical accuracy. “As a Japanese person at the time, I wanted to see something more real, to be honest,” he said.

Sanada advised the cast and crew on period authenticity, given his experience acting in historical dramas in Japan. He helped Anna Sawai, who plays Toda Mariko, a samurai’s wife and Blackthorne’s interpreter, to speak in classical Japanese.

But as an actor who appeared in “The Last Samurai” and, more recently, “Bullet Train,” which rewrote a Japanese novel with many non-Japanese actors, Sanada understood the appeal of the Blackthorne character, which Clavell loosely based on. William Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan.

“Having a blue-eyed character that existed in real history will help a larger international audience watch it,” 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 role. Initially, he studied some Japanese history and woodblock paintings for inspiration. “But after a while I realized it would be better if I just learned what I needed to learn, at the same rate that Blackthorne learned it,” he said.

Scholars who teach Japanese history say the wording of “Shogun” made more sense when the novel was first published.

“In the 1970s, the idea of ​​getting on a plane and going to Japan still felt like a big deal – to many white people anyway,” said Daniel Botsmana professor 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 spectators like Blackthorne aren’t as important to a younger generation of fans who have a lot of Japanese online watched shows. “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 brokers “can be an engaging introduction to another time and place.”

Balian said the project ran into problems early on when producers struggled to find enough open land to film in Japan. She also decided she wanted a different narrative sensibility than what the original showrunner, Ronan Bennett, brought to his script. (Balian did not go into further detail.) FX ultimately decided to bring in new showrunners and move filming to British Columbia.

In 2018, Justin Marks, who had written a live-action screenplay of Disney’s “The Jungle Book,” took over as showrunner along with his wife, writer Rachel Kondo, who is ethnically part Japanese.

“I said, ‘Oh wow, look at my opportunity to connect with the culture that I identify with and how I grew up,’” Kondo, a native of Hawaii, said in a joint video interview with Marks. “Soon I started to understand that not only am I not Japanese, but also Japanese-American, which is completely different.”

For the writers’ room, the couple selected mostly Asian-American women.

“I looked at it as, ‘Look, this is doing well,’” Marks said. But “we really started to see that Asian American wasn’t a sufficient perspective for what this story was.”

To ensure that the Japanese scenes sounded true – or at least truer – the pair worked with Mako Kamitsuna, a film editor raised in Hiroshima, and Eriko Miyagawa, who has consulted on other Western films set in Japan, including Martin Scorsese’s ‘Silence ‘ and ‘Lost in Translation’ by Sofia Coppola.

Kamitsuna and Miyagawa helped translate the scripts into classical Japanese, leavened by contemporary diction. “We went for a classic, authentic feel,” Miyagawa said, though at times they messed around and modernized “just for the sake of clarity.”

To create a sense of historical fidelity, the producers obsessed over kimono color schemes and how to carry katana swords. Even a detail as prosaic as how the women should sit became a subject of intense 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 the women to sit in ‘seiza’ – their knees folded and the feet tucked underneath. Performing the high-ranking women with their knees raised “can distract people or take them out of the scene,” Miyagawa said.

Ultimately, Marks agreed. “What we were really chasing, I think, was this idea of ​​spiritual authenticity,” he said.

The producers refrained from historical accuracy in other ways to avoid alienating the audience. 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 portrayal of sexuality, Sawai refused to film nude scenes.

“I don’t want to end up in ‘Shogun’ and get completely naked and put myself in that box, or the stereotype of the Asian woman taking off her clothes and seducing a white man,” Sawai said during an interview at a cafe in Tokyo.

She appreciated that the women had textured scenes that showed they were more than accessories for the men. “Women felt the emotions we see in ‘Shogun,’” she said. In the past, “they weren’t allowed to show it.”

Michaela Clavell, a daughter of the author and CEO of a company that manages the Clavell literary estate, said her father, who died in 1994, was proud of the original miniseries. But she realized it was of its time and wanted to update it.

“We can only do what we can do at any given real-time moment, right?” she said. “Twenty years from now we can look back on this and say, ‘Well, that was…’, fill in the blank.”

Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo