Japan cheers as Shogun puts western cliches to samurai sword

With Disney+’s big-budget but Japan-focused production, Hollywood has done the country justice at last.

Top billing in the Disney+ series is given to Hiroyuki Sanada who plays shogun-in-waiting, Lord Yoshi Toranaga. Picture: Kurt Iswarienko/FX

In the century since foreigners with film cameras first arrived on their shores, Japanese people have grown wearily familiar with disastrous Western efforts to portray them and their country on screen.

There was You Only Live Twice, in which Sean Connery’s James Bond goes undercover as a Japanese fisherman, with dodgy eye makeup and a heavy Scottish accent. So when it was announced that Disney was remaking Shogun, the 1980 television series about an English sailor who washes ashore in feudal Japan, it was reasonable to expect more familiar cliches, stereotypes and borderline racism.

“Samurai and cherry blossoms, Shinto shrines around the place, Japanese women as nothing more than sex objects, everything a bit strange and weird – I was expecting the usual orientalism,” Japanese author and translator Hiroko Yoda said.

“But this is not like that at all. It’s made with respect and authenticity. The dialogue is the real thing. You can tell from the beginning that they have listened to Japanese people.”

It is less than a week since the first two episodes of Shogun were released around the world on the Disney+ streaming platform, but so far those who have seen them in Japan agree this is a drama in a different class. In its attention to accurate period detail and the way it places Japanese characters at the centre of the story, it goes further than any big-budget ­foreign production before it.

“Many people may worry about the way Japan is going to be portrayed – don’t worry,” the Japanese film website Eiga.com said in a rapturous review. “In this drama, there is almost none of that feeling that ‘this just couldn’t happen in Japan’. It is full of serious portrayals that I can honestly say are extremely realistic and of high quality. This is epoch-making.”

Shogun is based on the best-selling 1975 novel by British-American writer James Clavell. It is inspired by the true story of William Adams, a sailor from Kent, who was shipwrecked in 17th century Japan and went on to become the first “blue-eyed samurai”, a trusted adviser to the government of the shogun, or military ruler.

Five years later, the book was made into a five-part miniseries, in which Richard Chamberlain played Adams character John Blackthorne, with the manly relish of a 1970s aftershave commercial. In the new version, the role is taken by Cosmo Jarvis, but the top-billing star is Hiroyuki Sanada, a veteran Japanese actor, who has appeared in countless jidaigeki – domestically produced historical dramas.

As well as playing shogun-in-waiting, Lord Yoshi Toranaga, Sanada is also a producer. Its US creators credit him with maintaining the high standards of linguistic and historical accuracy.

The success of Shogun is a consequence of big shifts in the world of international screen entertainment, as well as changes in perceptions of Japan. Shallow Western portrayals go back a long way, at least as far as Puccini’s Madam Butterfly, with its tragic Japanese heroine suicidally in thrall to the faithless Western man.

Shogun has its foreign character, in the form of Blackthorne, but what is striking is the extent to which he is eclipsed by the Japanese cast, in a story of Game of Thrones-like political intrigue.

“Until a few years ago, Hollywood did everything it could to avoid subtitles,” Yoda said.

“But 90 per cent of this dialogue is in Japanese. That’s something I’ve never seen.”

This is a consequence of what is referred to in the industry as “glocalisation" – the discovery, partly down to the pandemic, that US audiences, starved of new domestic production, were willing to watch dramas in foreign language. The success of Squid Game was the outstanding example, an all-South Korean cast telling a story solely in Korean that became an international hit.

In 2020, South Korean film Parasite became the first non-English-language film to win the Best Picture Oscar.

Godzilla Minus One, the latest film in the monster franchise, has played to big foreign audiences and secured an Oscar nomination of its own. It is part of a transformation in the way Westerners have come to regard Japan. More people are visiting Japan as tourists. In 1980, year of the Chamberlain Shogun, there were 1.3 million foreign visitors. In 2019, the number was approaching 32 million.

“The idea that you need a foreign angle to a story to be able to tell it to Western audiences, that’s changing,” Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World author Matt Alt said.

“We’re more open now, and there are many human dramas playing out in the world that don’t involve Westerners.”

THE SUNDAY TIMES