Tangemania

With the extraordinary success of Shogun at the Emmys, I thought I should finally post about the podcast I did on the show. (Part of the delay in posting was due to problems with my web software.) Having both read James Clavell’s Shogun and watched the 1980s miniseries based on it when I was a teenager, I was intrigued and not a little worried about the new adaptation, given the long history of orientalist depictions of Japan. I decided to put off watching it until it came out on DVD or something like that.

But when the folks at the Moving Histories podcast, Kim Nelson, Robert Burgoyne, and John Trafton, contacted me about doing an episode on the series, I bit the bullet and watched the entire series. The first episode did not bode well. Beyond the cruelty I found gratuitous, the depictions of samurai obsessed with suicide were ridiculous. 

When Yabushige falls into the sea, for instance, he starts flailing around with his sword. My Japanese partner and I were really wondering what he was doing.