The 2024 Shōgun adaptation by FX is what happens when TV is afraid of its own shadow. Made with exceptional vision, craft, and sincerity, it is paralysed by a dread of misrepresentation. The result: a series that treats Japanese culture as something to admire rather than explore, and that is consequently reverent, immaculate, and airless.
Asian Interpretations
As a long-time James Clavell fan (I first encountered Shōgun at age 11, have read it about 20 times since, and love Noble House and King Rat nearly as much), I rejoiced when I heard that there would be a new adaptation of his most famous novel. Though more often dismissed in recent years for his orientalisms and occasional bursts of old-fashioned sexism, Clavell still deserves to be widely read. His books’ abiding themes of cultural collision and the need to learn from and respect outsiders are surely more pertinent than ever. They’re still great fun to read: big, bold, dramatic, and unputdownable, as they used to say.
I have watched the new television adaptation of Shōgun twice; the first time in rapt enjoyment, but the second time with growing concern. It looks superb, and deftly alters the focus away from Englishman Blackthorne and his adventures (based on the real-life William Adams, the first Briton to land in Japan, who rose to become a samurai) towards the rivalry between warlords Toranaga and Ishido. Rather than overdubbing the sections in Japanese, as the 1980 adaptation did in extremis, it provides subtitles so that we experience them speaking in character.
It has also wisely reduced the amount of fantasy oriental feminisation, with sweet, giggling women excised altogether. Creators’ Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks’ version of Shōgun looks and feels epic, features superb performances (especially from Anna Sawai as Mariko and Tadanobu Asano as Yabushige), and is conspicuously respectful of Japanese culture. The series’ vast haul of Emmy Awards is well-earned.
On re-watching, however, the series’ flaws became apparent. The excellence of the design and the cast’s performances conceal significant issues with plot, characterisation, and particularly themes. While it is fair to expect some modification of any text when it is transferred to television or cinema, the artistic choices made in Shōgun are sometimes puzzling and sometimes just plain wrong.
The heart of the book is missing in this series – from both the key relationships and from the growing appreciation for Japanese culture that the character Blackthorne personifies. Without them, Shōgun is stately, occasionally grisly, but cold. Jerry London’s 1980 series of Shōgun, starring Richard Chamberlain, Toshirô Mifune, and Yôko Shimada could be considered “too respectful” of its source material (perhaps inevitably, with Clavell as executive producer), but it gets the emotions right. The new adaptation is thus what Stephen King said of Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining – “a beautiful car with no engine”.
By trimming Clavell’s perceived excesses, the creators and producers of the 2024 Shōgun also cut away the story’s wish to confront readers with the strangeness and richness of a world not their own. The result is thus less a reimagining than a conceptual retreat. The whole point of Shōgun is how disoriented and perplexed the protagonist, English pilot John Blackthorne, is upon landing in Japan, how rich and distinct its culture is, and how he becomes integrated into that society. We see Japan through his eyes, not because he is the hero (it is titled Shōgun, not Pilot, after all), but because it helps us grow with him. He is C-3P0 and R2-D2, not Luke Skywalker.
Here, it seems as though Kondo and Marks decided that centering the series on Blackthorne’s experiences would be a colonialist perspective. This is fine philosophically, but it undermines the narrative’s effectiveness. There is no cultural dynamic in 2024’s Shōgun, and our impression of Japan remains static. Removing that narrative focal point doesn’t so much decolonise the story as deaden it.
Numerous scenes in the novel risk incredulity – such as the early forced bathing scene where the villagers are delighted at the size of Blackthorne’s penis – but the novel’s sexual frankness is meant to reflect well on Japan. No doubt this ideal of sexual maturity is an Orientalist fantasy, but one has to remember that Shōgun is a story, and as such it depends on drawing distinctions and oppositions. Blackthorne also presents puritanical Japanese and licentious Westerners. Clavell tries throughout his novel not to pigeonhole people. That’s one of his key themes.
James Clavell’s Vision for Shōgun
The real aim of Shōgun is to present a Western man who comes to respect Japanese culture through a Shakespearean tableau, expressing the country in all its range and emotion. The Bardic resonances are multiple and deliberate. Yet the new series trims both character and emotions to the point where many characters are muted or flattened, and the key emotional relationships – between Blackthorne and Mariko, Blackthorne and Father Alvito, and even Toranaga and his chief general Hiro-Matsu – are severely diminished.
The chief narrative motive force in Shōgun is its multiple cultural clashes: between East and West, between the bushido warrior mindset and mercantilism, between Christianity and Buddhism/Shinto, and between science and tradition. Rather bizarrely, the 2024 series makes little of these tensions. Clavell’s portrait of the Jesuit priesthood is, on the whole, withering, but here Martin Alvito is presented less as a Borgia, conveying the immense power of the priesthood, than a mild and empathetic Church of England minister.
Mariko’s conflict between her Japanese heritage and Catholic beliefs is likewise unexplored, which is significant given how much of her character is about repression. So many oppositions that drive Shōgun are stripped away, simplifying the conflict to that between Toranaga and his enemy, the regent Ishido. Perhaps this was required to reduce the number of plot points, but the narrative remains essentially identical. The issue with this version of Shōgun, therefore, lies in its characterisation.
The series diminishes the characters and robs them of their complexity, humanity, and development. Blackthorne is presented as continually bumbling and petulant. He learns Japanese, but his relationship with Mariko does not blossom until the penultimate episode, which is ludicrously late (more on that later). Toranaga seems to have only one mode: a thoughtful grimace on his face, whereas Clavell presents him rather as a complete man. Like Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Clavel’s Blackthrone enjoys acting, poetry, and flower-arranging as much as the art of warfare. (This, indeed, is what separates him from Ishido, who has no such broader interests).
Toranaga’s most attractive traits – his humour, his ceaseless quest for knowledge, his dislike of flattery, and his relish of the everyday – are all obliterated. One of the key scenes in the novel and the 1980 adaptation of Shōgun is when Toranaga encounters Blackthorne dancing the sailor’s “hornpipe”, and insists on learning the dance himself.
Perhaps this is unlikely behaviour from a great warlord, but it establishes Toranaga’s character as a man who is interested in the world outside of Japan, and he, too, is willing to act and perform; key attributes which foreshadow later plot developments. Oddly, too, caste is omitted altogether in this recent adaptation, in a curious act of what we might call Japanwashing.
Of course, a degree of simplification is necessary in adapting a novel with a cast that rivals Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but surely some elementary characterisation would have conveyed a greater humanity. At least some characters are allowed to retain their complexity. Yabushige boils a sailor alive, and afterwards has a sexual tryst with a young man and a young woman at the same time. The Portuguese pilot Rodrigues is the archetypal frenemy, never quite sure how to handle his conflicting emotions towards Blackthorne. However, Alvito’s imperiousness, Ishido’s coarseness, Omi’s hen-pecked homelife, Zataki’s sexual jealousy, Ochiba’s hatred of Toranaga, and Nagakado’s bumptiousness are all removed in Kondo and Marks’ version of Shōgun.
As a former scriptwriter and director, Clavell clearly idolised Shakespeare and mentions him in Shōgun on several occasions. His desire for his novels to contain both the broadest range of humanity and of human emotions comes directly from the Bard. Thus, its characters range from the highest of nobles to the lowest of villagers. The scene where villagers dig for Toranaga’s swords after an earthquake is a very deliberate allusion to the gravediggers’ scene in Hamlet. “That shit-picker makes me want to fart,” says Uo, the fisherman. (Uo was the village farting champion.)
Sure, this is something of a caricature, but as E.M. Forster put it in Aspects of the Novel (1927), some characters will be flat, two-dimensional, and some will be rounded, fleshed out. Shōgun does a remarkable job at bringing so many characters to life. His depiction isn’t racist stereotyping but a novelist handling the practical realities of fiction. Emotionally, Clavell covers all the human passions and many of the flaws: love, hate, contempt, admiration, revenge, lust, ambition, cruelty, disappointment, indifference, zealotry (a recurring theme), compassion, strategic focus, intellectual hunger, loneliness, obsequiousness, spartan self-control, and insanity.
Cutting these powerful drivers of human behavior in 2024’s Shōgun thus deprives the plot of much of its inherent drama, and the characters don’t hold our interest as well. It is very difficult to care for anyone in the new adaptation. You come to admire Toranaga, but love him? That isn’t possible. Here, Clavell’s vision of a story teeming with life, conflict, and learning becomes flattened into a show focusing on the political machinations of the Council of Regents. That would be like turning Star Wars into a movie focusing on galactic trade policy and tax credits. Surely no one could be that crazy.
Getting Shōgun Right
I don’t want to condemn Kondo and Marks’ adaptation of Shōgun. There are good reasons why it won a remarkable 14 Emmys (setting a new record as the most awarded single season of television). First, it looks fantastic, with tremendous production values and a painterly sense of the Japanese landscape. It has a far greater sensitivity to the historical reality of Japan during this period, so the castles and fortresses look more realistic, the samurai weaponry and costumes are changed, and the scenes that take place on ships look compellingly nauseating. Perhaps most notably, numerous names are changed to become more realistically Japanese: Yabu becomes Yabushige, Onoshi becomes Ohno, Naga becomes Nagakado, and Gyoko becomes Gin.
Equally, many sequences are breathtaking. Mariko’s suicidal charge at the samurai in Osaka is hair-raising. The death of Jozen (who is smartly lampshaded early on in the new version) is incredibly brutal. Hiro-Matsu’s death is deeply affecting, particularly knowing his relationship with Toranaga. The two ninja attack scenes in Osaka Castle are wonderfully exciting. You can’t really accuse this adaptation of being boring: every episode contains fantastically exciting, dramatic sequences.
The producers’ desire to create a show that respects Japanese history and culture is admirable. Yet that very ambition undermines the show by sacrificing character complexity. Shōgun becomes stately and solemn, a museum piece rather than a human drama. The characters feel less full as flawed human beings, and instead become idealised representatives.
Consequently, the above sequences just don’t mean as much as they ought to. Mariko is quickly established as distant, even aloof, but her death-seeking is elided. It is her wish to take revenge on the late Taikō’s remaining family (the military dictator whose death without an adult heir has caused such political strife). Her relationship with her husband, Buntaro, similarly lacks depth. Omi’s relationship with the courtesan Kiku is transformed into a simple unrequited passion, whereas in the novel, she cleverly strings him along, as a good prostitute would.
While the Japanese veracity has rightly been lauded in 2024’s Shōgun, the historical fidelity is one-sided. The accuracy of the Europeans has declined compared to that in the novel. The priests may no longer be wearing asynchronous orange robes, but the language used by Blackthorne and others is quite off-putting. Clavell may sometimes be guilty of a certain ripeness in portraying 17th-century European sailors, but he does at least attempt linguistic fidelity. Oaths sound genuinely of the period. (“Thy mouth in the devil’s arse, Ingeles!” “Thy mother was there first, Rodrigues!”)
However, here Blackthorne on numerous occasions says “Fuck” and “Fucking”, a term Clavell conspicuously avoids, because it was not used in that period. Even the Japanese customs aren’t always right. Mariko, on numerous occasions, refers to Fuji as Fuji-sama – an honorific given to a social superior. Yet Mariko is the nobility, not Fuji.
The irony is that this greater surface realism creates a kind of cultural taxidermy. Everything is exquisitely preserved, but nothing quite lives. For all the care lavished on costumes, castles, and courtly etiquette, the spiritual and emotional accuracy has been lost. Shōgun looks great, but it doesn’t move.
Getting Shōgun Wrong
Although the 2024 adaptation largely follows the novel’s plot, there are some changes. A number of these – minor and major – are baffling. To start with the relatively minor points: the Friar Domingo character becomes a tool of clumsy exposition; Nagakado’s death is pointless (whereas Hiro-Matsu’s death replaces the challenge to Toranaga from his son and heir Sudara, who was expunged to reduce the number of secondary characters); Toranaga personally fighting during the escape from Osaka Castle is almost farcical; Sugiyama’s resignation as Regent remains unexplained (why, if he was willing to impeach before?), and Blackthorne’s shipmates disappear for far too long.
Indeed, the section where Blackthorne encounters them living with the eta (outcaste) community is one of Clavell’s most symbolic and most savage points. Unlike Blackthorne, they never adapt to Japan and never learn anything. They remain covered in lice, fornicate with impoverished prostitutes (“How about fetching Big-Arse Mary, Sonk?” “Or Twicklebum?” “Shit, not her, not that old whore.”) and drink themselves to death from something they’ve brewed in their homemade still.
Blackthorne, meanwhile, is learning the language and has adopted Japanese customs in bathing, hygiene, eating, and dress, which he comes to see as superior mannerisms to his cultures’. Those who cannot value other cultures, Clavell is saying, are in a hell they cannot even recognise. Few moral judgments could be more severe. The point, of course, is the inverse of Clavell’s main theme. Those who learn from others and other cultures do well. Those who do not learn, through zeal, ignorance, or willful stupidity, are condemned.
Downplaying Blackthorne’s attempted suicide is another significant omission in Kondo and Marks’ Shōgun. In choosing death but surviving the attempt, Blackthorne symbolically sheds his European identity and begins to see the Japanese way of life not as madness but as a coherent moral code. The act transforms him from a captive foreigner into an active learner. This series’ relegation of this important transformation to the final episode is significant. In this telling, it is no longer a pivotal moment. Blackthorne’s understanding of Japan is thus limited; his stature as a complex and curious character is diminished, and the symbolic thrust of his willing adaptation is just… gone.
The novel’s central structure is the way the three main characters serve as bridges between cultures. Blackthorne adapts to Japan, initially unwillingly, but then consciously. Mariko bridges Japan and the Catholic Church, helping Blackthorne understand Japanese language and customs. Toranaga’s is more complex and ironic, for in the novel, we do not gain access to his private thoughts until the final chapter. (In the 1980 series, his thoughts are narrated by Orson Welles, in this version of Shōgun, they are given voice rather absurdly during a conversation with the condemned Yabu). Still, Toranaga desires to obtain knowledge from everyone he meets and he makes brilliant use of what he has learned to further his strategic goals.
The tragedy of these omissions in Kondo and Marks’ series is that they hollow out the novel’s moral architecture. The great irony in Shōgun is that its supposed rivals are morally indistinguishable. Toranaga and Ishido oppose one another, but they share the same aims. Toranaga is not ethically superior – he plots the death of the Heir, a child supposedly in his tutelage, from the outset – but he plays the political game with greater subtlety.
Clavell uses chess as a motif throughout the novel to symbolise the power struggle between Toranaga and Ishido. Toranaga is the superior player in the game, knowing when to sacrifice, retreat, and attack. Toranaga’s curiosity, humour, and cultural breadth make him more sympathetic, yet beneath, he remains a shark, as he must be, to survive.
The same moral symmetry governs the novel’s depiction of the Europeans: England and Portugal are both driven by the same imperial hunger. Our sympathies fall, understandably, with Blackthorne over the priests, and with Toranaga over Ishido because they are the more intelligent, the more humane – and they are the ones who win.
However, Shōgun is not a story about political intrigue but about transformation through understanding. Every major event in Clavell’s novel demonstrates how humans can cross boundaries of language, faith, and class. The new series, by sanding off these moments, has removed the very friction that generates meaning. What remains is a spectacle of surfaces: men fighting, armies moving, words spoken, but souls untouched.
The Shōgun Series Erases Love
The greatest flaw with the new adaptation lies at its heart. The romance between Blackthorne and Mariko is the real driver of the novel. It is not arbitrary or gratuitous, but rather a symbolic demonstration of two cultures learning from and appreciating each other. In the novel, certainly Blackthorne appreciates Mariko physically, but there’s no sense of him fetishizing her. It is her intelligence and bravery that appeal to him most.
Similarly, in the novel, Blackthorne is not a bumbling oaf but a highly educated man who speaks five languages and is one of the best pilots in the world. Their mutual regard and mounting love are charming and convincing.
Yet the relationship is almost entirely elided in the 2024 series. Mariko does pretend to be a maid and seduces Blackthorne quite early on, as in the novel and Jerry London’s series, perhaps to show her as a girl boss, in charge and dominant. Yet their attraction for one another goes nowhere after that. Not until they are in Osaka Castle, when her life is endangered, do they finally admit their love. Coming so late in the series, in the midst of so much other drama, an otherwise powerful love story no longer drives Shōgun‘s narrative.
This erasure has to be deliberate. The creators were probably anxious to pre-empt charges of Orientalist fantasy: the familiar accusation that any romantic attraction between a white man and an East Asian woman must be rooted in fetish or conquest. (Quite forgetting Clavell’s many references to the superior mental strength of women). This is a timid and reductive reading of both the source material and human experience. The power of Shōgun lay in its moral seriousness: two people from utterly different worlds, drawn together by curiosity, respect, and the mutual admiration of courage. By downplaying that love, the new adaptation strips the story of its emotional ballast.
Indeed, erasing the romance is an act of cultural cowardice, implying that intimacy across racial or cultural lines is inherently suspect. This is an absurdity and an insult to Clavell’s vision. The relationship between Blackthorne and Mariko is not exploitative: it symbolises their growing respect for the culture the other represents and, ultimately, is tragic and ennobling. She is not his object, but his mirror: the proof that understanding is possible even across the deepest divides. Without that love, Shōgun ceases to be a story about transformation.
That Beautiful Car with No Engine
The lack of development, typified by the gutting of the love story, exemplifies the new adaptation’s weakness. No one grows. No one develops. All the characters move through their arcs, their machinations bearing fruit – or not. But worst of all, there is no sense of a growing appreciation of Japanese culture. Because we do not start with bewilderment, we do not end with wisdom. Japan, therefore, is a static frieze, an unchanging background – one of considerable beauty, for sure, but one that is ultimately chauvinist, because the world presented is so strong that it can admit no development.
This is the greatest irony. Shōgun is a novel about cultures colliding and learning from one another, about curiosity and respect as the antidote to zealotry. But by trying so hard to avoid the taint of cultural imperialism, the 2024 adaptation actually lapses into its mirror image: cultural chauvinism. It presents Japan not as a society in motion but as an impermeable world, frozen in perfection. Clavell’s Shōgun is about the dirt and grit of humanity; the new version, in its anxiety to be virtuous, preserves a culture in aspic. It looks beautiful, but there’s no engine.
Mike
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