\n<\/p>\n
Gina Balian, a television executive who had worked on the hit series \u201cGame of Thrones<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n It was \u201cShogun,\u201d James Clavell\u2019s 1975 best-selling chronicle of a hardened English sailor who lands in Japan at the dawn of the 17th century looking for riches and ends up adopting the ways of the samurai. Balian\u2019s first reaction was that she had already seen this book on television \u2014 back in 1980, when NBC had turned the novel into a mini-series<\/a> that earned the network its highest Nielsen ratings<\/a> to date.<\/p>\n Most of what she remembered about the first adaptation was Richard Chamberlain \u2014 its white, male star. But as she started reading, she discovered the novel had a much more kaleidoscopic point of view, devoting considerable pages to getting inside the heads of the Japanese characters.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought that there was a story to be told that was much wider and deeper,\u201d said Balian, who is co-president of FX Entertainment. It didn\u2019t hurt that something about it also reminded her of \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d in terms of the \u201crichness of so many characters\u2019 lives.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It took 11 years, two different showrunners and a major relocation to bring \u201cShogun\u201d back to the screen. The 10-part series debuts on Hulu on Feb. 27 with the first two episodes, followed by new ones weekly, and will premiere on Disney+ outside of the United States and Latin America.<\/p>\n Both Hollywood and Western audiences largely have moved beyond viewing the world as a playground where (mostly) white protagonists prove their mettle in exotic lands. Shows and films like \u201cSquid Game\u201d and \u201cParasite\u201d have shown that audiences can handle Asian characters speaking their own languages.<\/p>\n \u201cShogun\u201d \u2014 which includes a romantic story line between the Englishman and his Japanese interpreter \u2014 does not entirely forsake the genre of white characters encountering an alien Japan<\/a> that was popularized in such films as \u201cThe Last Samurai<\/a>\u201d or \u201cLost in Translation<\/a>,\u201d or going back even further, in star vehicles like \u201cSayonara\u201d (Marlon Brando) or \u201cThe Barbarian and the Geisha\u201d (John Wayne).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n So we see John Blackthorne, the ship\u2019s pilot, played by Cosmo Jarvis, perplexed by Japanese bathing rituals and their habit of removing shoes inside the home, and he is horrified by swift acts of seemingly unprovoked violence. Japanese characters explain their cultural psychology in aphorisms like, \u201cWe live, and we die. We control nothing beyond that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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 mini-series, the Japanese characters played subsidiary roles in Chamberlain\u2019s journey. The intermittent Japanese dialogue was not even translated. In large stretches of the new version, by contrast, the Japanese is subtitled, and significant plot lines revolve exclusively around the Japanese principals.<\/p>\n The first actor whose name appears in the credits is Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Toranaga, a Japanese lord modeled on Tokugawa Ieyasu, the military ruler who helped to unite Japan, introducing a period of peace that lasted for more than 200 years. Sanada, who is also a producer, said he remembers his disappointment that the original series gave short shrift to historical accuracy. \u201cAs a Japanese, I wanted to see something more real at the time, to be honest,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s wife and Blackthorne\u2019s interpreter, to speak in classical Japanese locutions.<\/p>\n But as an actor who appeared in \u201cThe Last Samurai\u201d as well as, more recently, \u201cBullet Train<\/a>,\u201d which recast a Japanese novel with many non-Japanese actors<\/a>, Sanada understood the allure of the Blackthorne character, whom Clavell based loosely on William Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cTo have a blue-eyed character, who existed in real history, will help more international audiences watch it,\u201d Sanada said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As Blackthorne, Jarvis did not have to pretend to learn a foreign culture; he knew little about Japan when he signed on to play the part. At first, he studied some Japanese history and woodblock paintings for inspiration. \u201cBut after a while I realized that it was better if I just learned whatever I needed to learn at the same pace that Blackthorne learned it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Scholars who teach Japanese history say the framing of \u201cShogun\u201d made more sense when the novel was first published.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the 1970s \u2014 for a lot of white people, anyway \u2014 the idea of getting on a plane and going to Japan still felt like a big deal,\u201d said Daniel Botsman<\/a>, a professor of Japanese history at Yale University who previously taught the novel in his classes.<\/p>\n Amy Stanley<\/a>, a professor of Japanese social history at Northwestern University and author of \u201cStranger in the Shogun\u2019s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World<\/a>,\u201d said blue-eyed audience stand-ins like Blackthorne aren\u2019t as important for a younger generation of fans who have watched plenty of shows in Japanese online. \u201cThey don\u2019t necessarily need the mediating figure like \u2018Shogun\u2019 or \u2018The Last Samurai,\u2019\u201d she said. Still, she added, characters who serve as cross-cultural brokers \u201ccan be an attractive introduction to a different time and place.\u201d<\/p>\n Balian said the project hit early snags when the producers struggled to find enough open land to shoot in Japan. She also decided she wanted a different narrative sensibility from what the original showrunner, Ronan Bennett, brought to his script. (Balian did not go into further detail.) FX eventually decided to bring in a new showrunner and move the filming to British Columbia.<\/p>\n In 2018, Justin Marks, who had written a live-action screenplay of Disney\u2019s \u201cThe Jungle Book<\/a>,\u201d took over as showrunner and co-creator. His wife, the writer Rachel Kondo, who is ethnically part Japanese, is the other co-creator.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI said, \u2018Oh wow, look at my chance to connect with the culture I identify with and how I was raised,\u2019\u201d Kondo, who was born in Hawaii, said in a joint video interview with Marks. \u201cVery quickly in the process I came to understand that not only am I not Japanese, I\u2019m Japanese American, which is completely different.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For the writers\u2019 room, the couple selected mostly Asian American women.<\/p>\n \u201cI looked at it as, \u2018See, this is doing right by it,\u2019\u201d Marks said. But \u201cwe really started to see that Asian American wasn\u2019t quite enough of a point of view for what this story was.\u201d<\/p>\n To ensure that the Japanese scenes rang true \u2014 or at least truer \u2014 the pair worked with Mako Kamitsuna, a film editor raised in Hiroshima, and Eriko Miyagawa, a producer who has consulted for other Western-made films set in Japan, including Martin Scorsese<\/a>\u2019s \u201cSilence<\/a>\u201d and Sofia Coppola\u2019s \u201cLost in Translation<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Kamitsuna and Miyagawa worked to draw out the nuances of the scripts in classical Japanese and helped leaven them with contemporary diction. \u201cWe went for a classical authentic feel,\u201d Miyagawa said, although sometimes they fudged and modernized \u201cjust for the sake of clarity.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 topic of fervent debate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Marks had talked to a scholar who said women of the period would kneel in a position known as \u201ctatehiza,\u201d but Miyagawa argued that most Japanese audiences would expect the women to sit in \u201cseiza\u201d \u2014 their knees folded and feet tucked underneath. Staging the high-ranking women with a knee raised \u201cmight distract people or take people out\u201d of the scenes, Miyagawa said.<\/p>\n In the end, Marks agreed. \u201cWhat we were really chasing, I think, was this idea of spiritual authenticity,\u201d <\/em>he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The producers waived historical accuracy in other ways 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.<\/p>\n And despite the frank portrayal of sexuality in the novel, Sawai refused to film any nude scenes.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to end up being in \u2018Shogun\u2019 and going full nude and putting myself into that pigeonhole, or the stereotype of the Asian woman taking her clothes off and seducing a white guy,\u201d Sawai said during an interview at a cafe in Tokyo.<\/p>\n She appreciated that the women had textured scenes that showed them as more than accessories to the men. \u201cWomen were feeling these emotions that we\u2019re seeing in \u2018Shogun,\u2019\u201d she said. Before, \u201cthey weren\u2019t allowed to show it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Michaela Clavell, a daughter of the author and chief executive of a company that manages Clavell\u2019s literary estate, said her father, who died in 1994<\/a>, was proud of the original mini-series. But she recognized that it was of its time and wanted to update it.<\/p>\n \u201cWe only can do what we can do at any given real time moment, right?\u201d she said. \u201cIn 20 years, we may look back on this and say, \u2018Well, that was \u2026\u2019 fill in the blank.\u201d<\/p>\n Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n