When we’re first introduced to Lord Toranaga (Hiroyuka Sanada), he’s riding a horse through a field with his entourage, watching his falcon dive out of the sky to take down a pheasant. It’s bright and sunny, and the audience gets a taste of just how gorgeous ShÅgun can be, with its incredible costuming and wide shots of jaw-dropping locations and sets. When Toranaga’s son, Nagakado (Yuki Kura), compliments the kill, Toranaga says of the falcon, “Conceals herself against the sun. Conserving energy, waiting for her moment.†Immediately after this, Toranaga is marched through Osaka castle where he faces the other four leaders of the Council of Regents, who admonish him for consolidating power and threaten to impeach him from his position. Toranaga, throughout the tribunal, remains deferential and stoic — conserving his energy, waiting for his moment. In a different show, the falcon metaphor could feel like the writers are picking it up and slapping us across the face with it. The writing in ShÅgun, however, follows the same path that Toranaga describes, concealing the full scope of its narrative until it’s time to strike.
Of course, the falconry scene isn’t how ShÅgun opens. Premiere “Anjin,†written by co-creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, begins aboard the Dutch privateer vessel Erasmus, as the English pilot John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) confronts the ship’s Dutch captain about their ability to make landfall. We learn the crew is starving, that the mission started out with 500 men and five ships but is down to just a dozen sick and starving sailors, and Blackthorne is convinced that white sand from their depth finder indicates that they’re close to Japan. The captain, less optimistic, demands Blackthorne’s pistol so he can off himself. The captain’s suicide is met with resistance from Blackthorne, but also acceptance. Everyone on the boat is starving to death, and while Blackthorn wants to fight on, he acquiesces to the request and hands over his pistol.
It can be difficult to parse the greater meaning of cold opens for an epic story like this, but it starts to come into focus later in the episode, as Blackthorne watches Lord Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano) unsheath his wakizashi and prepare to honorably kill himself instead of succumbing to drowning. Blackthorne views the captain’s decision to end his life as cowardly, the last resort for a man who has given up. But as Yabushige is rescued and pulled up the cliffside, Blackthorne bows to him, showing reverence for the first time since his ship washed ashore. Yabushige choosing seppuku while he still has the strength to fight against the waves strikes Blackthorne as an act of bravery he couldn’t conceive of with the captain, and gives us our first taste of Blackthorne being humbled by the culture he has just shipwrecked into.
Wait, hang on: We’re getting lost in the weeds a bit. But that’s very easy to do with ShÅgun! One of the strengths of the show’s scripting is how characters speak to each other the way normal humans would: Viewers might go ten minutes after a new character is introduced before we learn their name because, of course, no one in real life says, “Ah yes, my trusted and most oldest adviser, Hiromatsu, arrived here at my secret carrier-pigeon room to discuss the inner workings of the Council of Regents.†So here’s a quick recap-within-the-recap of the important plot beats:
1. It is the year 1600 and the ruler of Japan has died. His heir, who is a preteen, is too young to take over.
2. The former ruler has appointed five members to a Council of Regents to rule by committee.
3. One of those leaders, Lord Toranaga, is a celebrated warlord who has lately been agreeing to more marriages and expanding his fiefdom.
4. His rival leader, Lord Ishido (Takehiro Hira), who rules Osaka, has aligned the other three regents (Kiyama, Sugiyama, Ohno) against Lord Toranga and threatens to impeach him.
5. Those other regents who aren’t Toranaga or Ishido have converted to Catholicism and benefit from their relationship with the Portuguese Jesuits who have created a lucrative trade route with Japan in exchange for guns and cannons and wealth.
6. The Dutch ship Erasmus has washed ashore and its sickly crew has been taken prisoner. The ship’s English pilot, John Blackthorne, wants to speak to whoever is in power in order to establish a trade relationship to undercut the Portuguese Catholics, because he is an English Protestant and hates the Catholics.
7. Local lord Lord Yabushige, who rules the region that includes the fishing village the Erasmus’ crew is taken to, plots with his nephew Omi (Hiroto Kanai), who oversees the fishing village, to hold onto the guns and cannons as a bargaining chip to give to Ishido, who is plotting to impeach and kill Toranaga (whom Yabushige is sworn to). Omi states that Ishido will need to eventually face the Catholic regents if he wants to seize power, and the guns and cannons will be helpful, because the Catholic regents have guns and cannons they’ve received from the Portuguese Jesuits.
Was that … clear? No? That’s fine! You don’t need to fully grasp every plot point in ShÅgun right away, because the show unveils their greater importance one by one as the episodes roll on. One of the strengths of ShÅgun being a miniseries is that the writers know what the end of the show is before they even start writing, allowing them to reveal a dense narrative casually through conversation. It might feel confusing at times, but the show is best digested scene by scene, trusting that the seeds the writers have planted in this premiere episode will blossom in due time.
At the same time, in case you missed some of these seeds, it’s worth mentioning that Lord Toranaga comes from the Minowara bloodline that held the title of ShÅgun (ultimate military dictator of the entire country of Japan) for many, many years, and when characters inquire whether he intends to ascend to that title, thus nullifying the Council of Regents, he flat out says no. Patient falcon that he is, Toranaga has his eyes turned elsewhere, back in the fishing village where the Erasmus washed ashore. Though Yabushige had intentions of holding the cannons and guns for himself as a bargaining chip, it turns out Toranaga has a spy in the fishing village and wants those cannons and guns as a bargaining chip for himself. He’s confiscating the ship and everything that was on it, including Blackthorne, who is to be brought to Osaka. There, he enlists Lady Mariko (Anna Sawai), the converted Catholic daughter-in-law of his most trusted advisor, to be his personal Portuguese translator for “this barbarian who could turn the tide.â€
That brings us back to the show’s cold open, and maybe its trickiest element to navigate: Is John Blackthorne a white savior arrived to Japan to fix everything? Are we staring down a The Last Samurai situation here? In the show’s official companion podcast, showrunner Justin Marks says that the writers’ room wanted to avoid too many “stranger in a strange land†tropes, where Blackthorne might walk up to a village and say, “My God, look at all these strange paper walls of these buildings!†And then in “Anjin,†when Blackthorne is taken to a house and bathed and given clean clothes, he immediately puts his hand through the paper wall of his room trying to open the door.
Small moments like this feel like the show is trying to address what an American audience might expect from a fish-out-of-water story without indulging the instinct to revel in the exoticism of a foreign land. For instance, Blackthorne repeatedly and viciously declares all the Japanese soldiers who hold him hostage to be savages; the soldiers, in turn, only refer to him as a barbarian. The culture clash in ShÅgun has more give and take to it than other onscreen attempts to tell this sort of tale, but at the same time, Blackthorne is painted as a man of unwavering bravery and unmatched skill: He single-handedly saves Yabushige, Toranaga’s lead adviser Hiromatsu (Tokuma Nishioka), and the Spanish pilot Rodrigues (Néstor Carbonell) when the ship carrying them all runs into a dangerous squall on the way to Osaka. He might be brash and rude, but he’s immediately painted as someone capable of heroic deeds, who witnesses one man unceremoniously decapitated in the street, and another man, one of his crew, boiled alive in his place as Yabushige’s “special†punishment for potentially being a pirate. In some ways, “Anjin†reinforces a gasping look at some of the more brutal elements of Japanese life in the year 1600, established early on when Tadoyoshi impulsively speaks up during the Council of Regents meeting to defend Toranaga, and then in order to prevent immediate war promises to commit seppuku, also sacrificing his infant son in the process to end his family name.
But ShÅgun isn’t an episodic TV show designed for a five-season run that needs to establish everything in the pilot: It’s a ten-episode miniseries, and some of these questions of intent regarding the show’s depiction of Japan have to be taken as part of a bigger picture. Remember: It’s not John Blackthorne himself that is of value, it’s his guns and cannons. Maybe it’s my own bias that sees him in the white savior role more than what’s actually in the show. The closing monologue, delivered by Rodrigues to Blackthorne as they pull into Osaka bay, seems designed to pin Blackthorne’s own personal bias directly to the viewer’s.
When Rordigues threatens to give the Jesuits the Erasmus’ ship’s log, which details Blackthorne’s mission to pillage any Spanish naval base they see, Blackthorne declares: “I will not die in this wretched land†a description that prompts Rodrigues to laugh. He says, “Tell me when you set eyes on Osaka, if you really think our world is the hilt of civilization. And then ask yourself: what kind of man wields power in a land like this? The one who schemes in the open, or the one you never see.†Rodrigues adds, over scenes of Tadoyoshi preparing for seppuku and Blackthorne taken to his audience with Toranaga: “Every man has three hearts: one in his mouth for the world to know, another in his chest just for his friends, and a secret heart buried deep where no one can find it. That is the heart a man must keep hidden if he wants to survive.†That hidden third heart as the key to survival mirrors Toranaga’s observation about the falcon, laying the foundation not just for the political workings of the land where Blackthorne finds himself, but also for how ShÅgun will reveal itself to us.
Feudal Gestures
• Even though we as viewers hear English, there’s no English spoken in the world of the show. Every episode is primarily in Japanese with subtitles, and when we hear English the characters are either speaking Dutch (Blackthorne to his crew) or Portuguese (Blackthorne to the Japanese soldiers, Blackthorne to Lady Mariko, etc.).
• According to the official podcast hosted by ShÅgun staff writer and former culture writer Emily Yoshida, every script was written first in English, reviewed by a Japanese producer, sent off for Japanese translation, reviewed by a Japanese playwright for adherence to period-specific language, and then retranslated back to English for the subtitles. Impressive!
• When Blackthorne gets mad at Omi, he yells about how much he hates Japan and would piss on the whole country while holding his crotch. Even though he doesn’t understand Portuguese, Omi immediately drops trou and pisses all over Blackthrone’s face. It’s a small moment, but one of the most successful examples of the tit-for-tat culture clash where each side is disgusted by the other even if their tactics are, ultimately, the same.
• I can’t stop laughing at the way Cosmo Jarvis delivers the line, “Sorry about your sack of shit lord,†when Yabushige looks like he might die in the ocean. ShÅgun is rarely funny, but Jarvis steals the show when he gets to add these bits of levity.
• Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Toranaga, talks on the companion podcast about his role as a producer on the show, describing how before every scene he painstakingly went over every actor’s posture, movement, and positioning. It pays off: Part of what grounds the historical epic-ness of ShÅgun is just how meticulous the small details are, and comparing Toranaga’s straight posture to Yabushige’s slouch helps define how each of these characters moves through the world they exist in.