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.
“Is he trying to use the sword to grab on to the rocks?” she asked.
“Perhaps, but I wonder if he is trying to commit suicide,” I responded.
“The show can’t be that stupid,” she retorted. A few scenes later, we found out it was that stupid. (Note that I have never seen any such representation of an attempted samurai suicide in any Japan-made film or TV show. This was very much a non-Japanese imagination of Japan.)
Other early scenes, such as Anjin saving the boat in the storm by taking over the helm, too closely resembled the white savior narratives often seen in Hollywood (from Dances with Wolves to Avatar).
But we stuck with it, and Shogun got better, especially as the white guy receded into the background. There were still ridiculous moments, such as the earthquake, but Sanada Hiroyuki was excellent, as were most of the cast. Especially as a Japanese film expert, one with a long affection for the period film (jidaigeki), I was particularly pleased with a narrative whose conclusion ultimately results from the brave actions of two women—even if they were sparked by Toranaga’s gambles. There are not too many jidaigeki in which it is women’s actions that decide the story’s ending.
In the end, I found it a very intriguing contribution to the jidaigeki genre, even though, despite the very valuable contributions of its Japanese staff, it still looks like a product of a foreign gaze—a problem I also sensed with Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days. The film style was far too busy, insisting on close-ups and camera movements when the best jidaigeki know when to keep the camera still and rolling. Such an intense style undermined scenes like the tea ceremony conversation between Fuji and her husband. Not just the close-ups but the choice of lenses which warped the straight lines went contrary to both the at least surface serenity of the ceremony and the lines of Japanese architecture.
Nevertheless, I am open to new interpretations of the genre and enjoyed the challenge it posed. So it was a pleasure to take part in the podcast, and I learned a lot from the hosts, even if I did on occasion have to push back and temper their enthusiasm for the series’s depiction of Japan. Please take a listen here.
Returning to the Emmys, I really have to salute Sanada Hiroyuki. Having reviewed what I believe was one of his first attempts at a majority English-language film (Omori Kazuki’s Emergency Call, a film from 1995 mostly shot in the Philippines) as well as one of his first films shot in the United States (Okamoto Kihachi’s East Meets West, also 1995), I’ve followed his attempt to enter the Hollywood world for a long time. Really no one from Japan has succeeded as he has. It is very impressive.