‘Shōgun’ Brilliantly Depicts the Rise of Modern Japan

The streaming miniseries Shōgun, an adaptation of James Clavell’s international bestseller, takes place at a fascinating juncture in Japan’s past. Though it takes many liberties and what we often see onscreen is a composite of real figures, clans, dynasties, and events, the series is not uninterested in historical dynamics and how they drive relations among people from radically diverse backgrounds and walks of life. The creators have expertly reimagined a popular 1980 miniseries of the same title.

Shōgun looks both backward, to what was then—at the time of its 1600 setting—the relatively new phenomenon of European incursion into the Japanese islands, and forward to emergence of the longtime “hermit kingdom” onto the world stage and its bitter, bloody wars with foreign powers in the modern era. This engagement with the world got a fitful start during the epoch presented here, before the Tokugawa kingdom mostly curbed it for another couple of centuries.

At the outset of Shōgun, a crew of English sailors find themselves in an unfamiliar and dangerous setting when their Dutch-chartered ship Erasmus veers far off course and founders on the shores of a Japanese isle home to feudal lords vying for power. The head of the ragged interlopers is the improbably named John Blackthorne. It seems Clavell and the makers of the series needed the hero to have a less prosaic name than Smith or Jones.

The warriors who pluck Blackthorne and the other sailors from their ship happen to have a priest on hand who speaks Portuguese, of which our protagonist happens to know a few words. Oddly enough, this interpreter encourages the hosts to murder Blackthorne, even though the priest’s faith does say this and that about the sanctity of life and, presumably, no one knows better how disorienting and scary it must be end up at the mercy of these warriors, one of whom literally pisses on Blackthorne to show who is boss.

Yet the lords’ reaction to Blackthorne and the other sailors, and the murder of one of their number in a shocking early scene, conform to a reality presented in R. Taggart Murphy’s brilliant study Japan and the Shackles of the Past. His subject is the nation’s transition from its ancient and feudal periods to modernity, and it would not surprise me to learn that the makers of Shōgun had referred to this work in their project’s developmental phases.

In a section entitled “The Coming of the Europeans,” Murphy details how Japan became the target of what we today would call a gold rush thanks to Marco Polo’s account of a land with temples and palaces decked out with the fine metal. When a group of Portuguese landed on the island of Tanegashima, south of Kyushu, in 1543, they struck their hosts as bizarre and alien.

“Not knowing who these people were, the Japanese dismissed them at first as savages: Nambin-jin, or Southern Barbarians,” Murphy writes. “After all, they had arrived from somewhere to the south, they lacked the defining mark of any civilized person throughout East and Southeast Asia—the ability to read and write Chinese characters—they smelled bad, and they babbled on about some weird religion involving a god who had been tortured to death on a wooden cross.”

Shōgun leaves none of this out. The hosts repeatedly express their contempt for the new arrivals in racial terms, with references to “barbarians,” “savages,” and various lower animals. Then there comes a moment in the second episode where one feudal lord reminds another that he once rescued the latter from underneath a heap of bodies of Koreans.

It’s a vicious comment—at once true to a historical reality, and prescient given the footage that would emerge during the Second World War of pits full of the heads of massacred Koreans press-ganged into forced labor on Tarawa and other conquered islands and territories.

Murphy explains how the attitude of the hosts softened a bit as they came to hold the navigational skills of the Europeans in high regard. Shōgun captures this truth. The Japanese begin to refer to Blackthorne as pilot, out of respect for his seafaring prowess. When the Spaniard, Rodriguez, takes Blackthorne out on a vessel into a raging storm with thirty-foot waves, the British sailor’s expertise and decisiveness save the Spaniard’s life and help the crew return the vessel to shore in one piece.

In a later scene, one of the feudal lords grows so ashamed over his inability to rescue Rodriguez’s prone body from the base of a rock cliff threatened by violent waves that he nearly attempts seppuku, or ritual suicide. He cannot bear the fact that a Westerner has upstaged him by showing courage and prowess in a life-and-death scenario. Here, a strange respect for the foreigner begins to bloom, much as in Murphy’s historical account.

For all their loathing of barbarians, and their maybe understandable resentment of explorers and traders who came to the islands in pursuit of gold rather than in a spirit of cultural and intellectual curiosity, some Japanese began to show admiration for St. Francis Xavier and other Jesuits who followed in the wake of the Portuguese traders from the 1543 mission, Murphy relates.

“Thanks to a combination of Jesuit skill, the perennial Japanese fascination with anything novel, and a particularly favorable environment for a new faith—the near constant warfare and the resulting social and political tumult—within three decades of St. Francis’ arrival, as much as a third of the population of the western island of Kyushu may have converted to Christianity,” states Murphy.

Portuguese and other Western styles of cooking, fashion, and language, not to mention weaponry, began to catch on throughout Japan. Murphy describes how an understanding of firearms—the damage they could inflict and what they meant for the conduct and future of warfare among the clans and dynasties—became a deciding factor in the conflicts coming to engulf Japan at the moment when Shōgun opens.

The vying of the rival warlords in Shōgun presents a blurry composite of a historical process that Taggart explicates at length. At the end of the sixteenth and the dawn of the seventeenth centuries, it was three lords—Odu Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and the latter’s lieutenant, Tokugawa Ieyasu, who fought the battles that cleared the way for the emergence of the strong, unified Shogunate to which Tokugawa gave his name.

The new regime ensured peace, but also resisted the tendency, sporadically in evidence after contact with the Jesuits, to engage with the world and adopt foreign customs. The state consolidated its power ever further and the tendency to view other nations and races as inferior, even as animals, did not abate.

Here is the source of the uncanny prescience of Shōgun. In its depiction of ugly attitudes towards non-Japanese, the series adumbrates a reality that would be on hideous display during the Russo-Japanese War, the first and second Sino-Japanese conflict, and, of course, the Second World War.

Princeton scholar Gary J. Bass, in his new study Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia, relates how a military mind steeped in Shinto and Bushido traditions could barely conceive of prisoners of war as human. By suffering defeat and becoming prisoners, they had for all intents and purposes given up their humanity and any entitlement to decent treatment. Hence for Japanese officers and soldiers with hundreds of thousands of Allied POWs on their hands, torture, overwork, mass murder, and even cannibalism were not beyond the pale of acceptable conduct.

Shōgun will thrill and entertain viewers and stoke interest in a fascinating society and culture, even as it subverts certain fashionable historical assumptions of our time.