The first televised version of “Shogun” aired across five nights in 1980 on NBC and drew record ratings. This was a few years after “Roots” turned prestigious TV adaptations into a lucrative business, and the 1975 novel of the same name by James Clavell, about an English shipman stranded in Japan in the year 1600, was an ideal candidate for a similarly lavish treatment.
The miniseries is often credited with stoking modern America’s interest in Japanese culture, and its plentiful sex and violence helped network television become more hospitable to adult storytelling.
But the 1980 version of “Shogun” is difficult to find, at least in a non-bootleg format, because like the book, it has not aged very well. Both earlier versions of “Shogun” are textbook examples of “Orientalism,” a term for reductive, stereotyped portrayals of Asian cultures that are common in Western storytelling.
Orientalism traffics in lazy tropes such as the exotic-ness of eastern Asian cultures, the hypersexualized presentation of Japanese women and a swaggering Western hero standing on the wrong side of the thin line between a “stranger in a strange land” story and a white savior narrative.
This is true of John Blackthorne, played in the 1980 version by Richard Chamberlain. Blackthorne washes ashore after a shipwreck and soon enough insinuates himself into a wide-ranging political conflict.
Naturally, Blackthorne falls in love with a Japanese woman, dresses in kimonos, out-samurais all the samurai and becomes, according to the original trailer, “the one man with the power to change Japan’s destiny for all time,” which is a lot of power for a mediocre sailor, but an encapsulation of how Orientalist stories usually work.
When FX announced in 2018 that it was producing a big-budget “Shogun” remake, there was plenty of skepticism about the idea of revisiting a story with such an outdated perspective.
But the new series, created by Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo and released after years of delays, removes the focus from the white outsider and brings the Japanese lords, their courtesans and their scheming rivals to the center of the story.
And for the most part it works. FX’s “Shogun,” now halfway through its 10-episode season, stars Hiroyuki Sanada as Lord Yoshii Toranaga, one of five daimyo leaders angling for power following the death of the nation’s ruler.
After the other four daimyos turn on him, Toronaga flees from Osaka, then the country’s cultural center, with the help of Blackthorne (played in this version by Cosmo Jarvis) and Mariko (Anna Sawai), a deceptively shrewd widow who is Blackthorne’s translator and inevitable love interest.
The most consequential update to the story is shifting Toronaga into the lead protagonist position. His power struggle, which threatens to instigate a civil war, has parallels to early “Game of Thrones” seasons, in which compelling personalities jockey for leverage, and the violence and mystical whatnot was merely flavoring.
Blackthorne is loosely based on a real figure, but his fish-out-of-water story arc feels rote and insubstantial by comparison. The performance does not help. A polite way of describing Jarvis’ screen presence is that it is a taste I have thus far failed to acquire. He is always at an 11 whether the scene seems to call for it or not.
His storyline also complicates the presentation of language.
Japanese dialogue is spoken authentically and subtitled in English. Besides Blackthorne, most of the European characters are Portuguese Jesuits. Blackthorne communicates with his Japanese hosts via Mariko, who knows Portuguese, except all the Portuguese is delivered to the audience in English.
This has the effect of “other”-ing the best parts of the story, all of which are delivered in Japanese. Considering the growing American interest in foreign-language entertainment (“Parasite,” “Squid Game,” “Godzilla Minus One,” etc.), it seems unlikely we couldn’t also handle Portuguese with English subtitles.
Or, hear me out, why not ignore the white people altogether? Given the setting, it would be difficult to tell a version of this story without European colonizers or missionaries at least on the periphery, but the Western point-of-view character in the new “Shogun” adds very little.
And the show would lose nothing by moving past the tired culture-clash narrative and trusting the audience to come along with it.