"Shōgun" Review
Out now in The Spectator and reposted here with some extra thoughts in Bonus Perspectives
Since last summer, I’ve landed a regular freelancing gig at The Spectator, the oldest magazine in the world that remains in print. Thanks to my friend Ross Anderson who works as editor of the publication’s Life section, most of what I pitch usually gets accepted and a couple of my articles have even been featured in the print edition sold at news stands and bookstores across the United States.
While I regularly advertise my freelance writing on Twitter, I’ve neglected to repost links to those articles here, so I intend to do so from now on in order to inform subscribers to this Substack of my latest work. When I post links to my other articles here on Foreign Perspectives, I’ll also use this opportunity to add some extra notes or commentary when appropriate.
This week, I had the wonderful opportunity to write a review of Shōgun for The Spectator, the highly acclaimed FX television limited series based on James Clavell’s bestselling novel. You can read my article here.
While many are discovering Shōgun for the first time, I’ve been a longtime fan of James Clavell’s book and the original 1980 television miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune. I discovered it over a decade ago when I was learning Japanese for the first time back in high school, so you can imagine how much of an impact it had. And look at me now all these years later, living in Japan full time and even recently married!
In my article for The Spectator I aimed to provide readers with greater context for how the current show compares to the novel and previous television series, while also illustrating how James Clavell’s own life and beliefs influenced the work. My editor told me it was the best piece I had written for him so far, which I was pleased to hear. I hope others will find it informative as well.
With that said, here are a few extra notes I neglected to mention in my Spectator piece due to the word count limit. Please come back here after you’ve read the article for some additional thoughts.
Bonus Perspectives
Cosmo Jarvis’ performance as John Blackthorne! I mentioned Toshiro Mifune and Anna Sawai being fantastic as Toranaga and Mariko, but I for some reason neglected to praise the star of our show. While Richard Chamberlain’s performance in the 1980 series is very memorable for the generation that grew up with him and he did a great job, it was always odd to me that an American was playing a 17th century English sailor while making no attempt to change his accent. NBC originally wanted Sean Connery, but the Bond actor balked at returning to television. In the end, it was decided that since American viewers were already being taken out of their comfort zone with so much unsubtitled Japanese dialogue, so Chamberlain kept his American accent.
Jarvis, on the other hand, is a native Brit and he knocks it out of the park. I heard a comparison that he sounds like Tom Hardy channeling Richard Burton and I’d say that’s pretty apt. Through his performance, we truly feel that Blackthorne is a brutish and headstrong sailor who has seen his share of hardship after years on the high seas. As I mentioned in my review though, there are times when Blackthorne and the other Western characters can feel like an afterthought, so I definitely encourage reading the novel or checking out the 1980 miniseries if you want more of that perspective.
Another important thing I didn’t mention in my review, the side characters! The Shōgun novel featured dozens of characters with their own subplots. While not everyone could be included in the 2024 series due to time constraints, the showrunners really made sure that every character that did appear was well-written and fully fleshed out.
I think most will agree that Tadanobu Asano steals every scene he’s in as Kashigi Yabushige. It’s quite a different portrayal of the character than what was previously in the novel and 1980 television series, but Asano’s talents as a comedian make him a delight to watch as he schemes behind Toranaga’s back. Some of my favorite characters in fiction tend to be ones like Darth Maul in Star Wars who have these grand ambitions for power, but we as the audience know they will never succeed because there are greater forces at play. Yabushige is one of those.
The other highlight is Moeka Hoshi as Usami Fuji, the Japanese woman who becomes Blackthorne’s consort. Though she’s initially repulsed by the idea of living with a “western barbarian,” she eventually warms up to him after Blackthorne proves to be a good-hearted man. Hoshi is truly a beautiful actress, but while Fuji is initially portrayed as a timid woman, we later see throughout the series that she displays great inner strength after facing so much personal tragedy.
I mentioned in my article that language is a major part of Shōgun, but its heavy use of subtitles is being received somewhat controversially online. In a viral tweet of mine, I highlighted some asinine IMDB user reviews of people complaining about having to read text, while others lamented that they couldn’t do other things while watching the show. Personally, my mentality has always been that if you’re actively doing something else while a film or television show is playing, you’re not really “watching” it but using it as background noise. And for a show like Shōgun which has so much historical and political content, you definitely want to pay attention.
As for the subtitles, I cannot think of a more childish complaint. Firstly, there actually is an English dub available for Shōgun, though I cannot imagine watching the show that way as it completely erases the wonderful performances of the Japanese cast. Secondly, this appears to be something mostly Americans whine about which only contributes to the unfortunate stereotype that we’re all culturally ignorant dolts incapable of reading text. While foreign language dubs are nothing new, most of the non-English speaking world has grown up needing to read subtitles at some point. If they can do it, why not us? As Bong Joon-ho succinctly put it, “Once you overcome the one inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
There seems to be some slight confusion around the ending. Skip ahead to the paragraph after the next image if you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want to be spoiled.
Based on some thoughts I saw on social media, a few people are under the impression that Blackthorne eventually left Japan given the last episode’s dream sequence depicting him as an old man on his deathbed back in England, but this is clearly a “what if?” scenario and not actually what happened. Remember, Blackthrone intentionally drops Mariko’s cross into the bay, which would have made it impossible for him to be holding it decades later as we saw in his dream/hallucination. My interpretation is that Blackthorne’s fate would have been to die as a sad and unfulfilled man if he left Toranaga’s service, but the show definitively ends with him rejecting this path and being committed to building a fleet of ships for him.
Toranaga even mentions that it’s Blackthorne’s destiny to remain in Japan, which is what happened to the real William Adams and the rest of his crew. The latter point is something that I think the show could have better expanded upon as we are only given one seen where Blackthorne unsuccessfully tries to make up with his men. He has a falling out with crew member Salamon, who may or may not be based on Jan Joosten, the real life Dutch shipmate of William Adams who also became a samurai. If one goes to Tokyo Station today, the surrounding neighborhood Yaesu is actually named after him.
Lastly, I would also like to mention that the 1980 and 2024 television series are not the only adaptations of Shōgun into other media. James Clavell spent years of his own time and money trying to bring his book to the stage, which finally happened in 1990 with Shōgun: The Musical. If you thought it would be a gargantuan task to adapt a 1,000+ page book into a show under four hours with elaborate costumes, staging, singing, and dancing, you would be correct. The reason you don’t hear about this musical today is because it was, for all intents and purposes, a disaster. I wouldn’t expect a Broadway revival anytime soon.
If that wasn’t strange enough, there are a total of not one, not two, but three different video game adaptations of Shōgun. The most famous one was James Clavell’s Shōgun released for computer systems in 1989 published by Infocom. Despite being handled by the director of acclaimed games like the Zork series, Dave Lebling called it the worst title he ever worked on noted that Clavell had little involvement despite his interest in computers.
While having some decently drawn graphics for the time, the game amounts to little more than excerpts from the novel held together by a few basic text-based puzzles. It’s dull stuff and you’re better off just reading the book. Even worse are the two previous video games based on Shōgun. While the 1989 edition at least gave you some pretty pictures, the 1983 text adventure video game adaptation has almost nothing in the way of actual graphics. Another adventure game released in 1986, but good luck trying to figure out the nonsensical gameplay. Beyond the digital world, a Shōgun board game even hit store shelves in 1983, but it’s long out of print and little remembered.
The fact that all of these attempts of adapting Shōgun into other media exist is a testament to the rich world James Clavell created. Some were clearly more successful than others, but it always fascinated me how Clavell himself continues to exist years after his passing as this fascinating bridge between World War II veterans who fought Japan as an enemy and a post-war era of Westerners who continue to be fascinated by its culture. A 2024 big-budget television adaptation of a novel from the 1970s isn’t something that happens every day. It wouldn’t surprise me if 50 years from now my grandchildren will be watching their own version of Shōgun.
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Congrats on the wedding, must have missed the tweet