Shogun Episode 5 Review, “Broken to the Fist”

Shogun returns with “Broken to the Fist”, a searing episode on conflict, consequences, and the price of power. With war now inevitable, Toranaga must do everything he can to prepare for the looming battle with Ishido, and worse, while making sure the Kashigi stay loyal. Meanwhile, Mariko and Blackthorne’s romance is interrupted as the return of Buntaro plunges everyone into domestic hell. Read in Japanese here.

Score: 10

The Widening Gyre

The historical Tokugawa Ieyasu was an avid falconer. When we first met Toranaga in the pilot, he was falconing outside Osaka on the way to that fateful meeting of the Council of Regents. In the wake of Nagakado’s disastrous murder of Jozen in episode 4, he has some wisdom to impart.

“Did it ever occur to you that by killing Jozen you might have been doing Yabushige’s bidding? No. Maybe it was his eager nephew [Omi] who tricked you into being so stupid.  You so easily fell into their trap. Broken to another man’s fist. Like a falcon, but without the beauty. All men are like falcons. Some are flown straight from the fist,  killing anything that moves. Others are lazy and tempted by the lure. But all men can be broken. Learn to fly them at the right game, and they will do your hunting for you. “

Toranaga

Nagakado adores his father, and is full of zeal for the cause. But he is a fool; a lesser son of a greater sire. He has no patience. In Modern Japan: A Social History Since 1868 , J.E. Thomas quotes Ieyasu as saying,

“The strong manly ones in life are those who understand the meaning of the word patience. Patience means restraining one’s inclinations. There are seven emotions: joy, anger, anxiety, adoration, grief, fear, and hate, and if a man does not give way to these he can be called patient. I am not as strong as I might be, but I have long known and practiced patience. And if my descendants wish to be as I am, they must study patience.”

Tokugawa Ieyasu

In “Broken to the Fist”, everyone’s patience is tested. Toranaga prepares for war and manages the pettiness and scheming of his vassals. Yabushige watches as his position deteriorates. Mariko is sucked back into the horrors of her abusive marriage to Buntaro. Blackthorne is enraged at Mariko’s suffering and the way the Japanese culture appears to him to relentlessly devalue suffering and human life. And everyone is enraged at that goddamn rotting bird. Seriously John, what the fuck is with the bird?

Toranaga Returns

We open on the regimental training ground as the people of Ajiro clean up the mangled limbs of Jozen’s men. Suddenly, a messenger comes running declaring an army of thousands approaches. It is Toranaga and his army from Edo, accompanied by, you guessed it, Toda Hirokatsu a.k.a Buntaro, Mariko’s husband. Far from joy, the despair on Mariko’s face is palpable as she learns he’s still alive.

Buntaro fought valiantly after being left behind in Osaka, battling with the help of twenty ronin against Ishido’s men all the way to Edo. Only two others survived. Toranaga marvels at his bravery, telling Mariko it was a miracle, and then casually ruins her life by ordering Buntaro to stay with her and Usami Fujii in Blackthorne’s house. No good can come of this at all, and it doesn’t.

Meanwhile, there are other issues, namely Nagakado and Yabushinge. Toranaga is disgusted with his son, his foolishness and naivete, and yet he immediately grasps that Naga’s fuck-up has created an opportunity. The Kashigi obviously manipulated Naga into slaughtering Jozen, and in doing so have forced Ishido’s hand to open war, a battle Toranaga plainly thinks he can win as opposed to engaging in a suicidal siege of Osaka.

But his son’s foolishness cannot stand, and though he needs Izu’s continued manpower to wage war, he strips Nagakado of command of the cannon regiment and puts Yabushige on notice, forcing him to hand-off command of the regiment to Omi.

Told that “the barbarian’s cannon tactics offer surprising new advantages”, Toranaga says he “looks forward to a demonstration. Though I will be sure to keep my distance after what happened to Nebara Jozen.” Ouch. Toranaga’s spies have informed him of Ishido’s order to Yabushige return to Osaka, and Yabushige’s rope is once again running out.

The Price of Power

In many ways “Broken to the Fist” is fascinating for how unconcerned it is with lionizing Toranaga (or anyone else for that matter). Despite his evident amusement with the Anjin, Toranaga was more than willing to trade Blackthorne’s life away in “Tomorrow is Tomorrow” in the service of his survival. In this episode he proves equally willing to trade Japanese lives for the same goal.

If that goal, as stated, in “The Eightfold Fence” is to “protect Japan from treachery”, then the pretense of reluctance he adopted towards seizing the Shogunate in episode 1 is falling away fast. When the fisherman “Muraji”, actually Tonomoto Akinao, his “long–serving and prized samurai” tells Toranaga that Yabushige is hunting relentlessly for the spy in the village, he asks permission to sacrifice himself, and Toranaga flatly refuses him. “You will remain my spy. Find him another spy.” And with that a man is condemned to death, a action that will reverberate ironically through the entire episode.

Toranaga is a man of power. Is that power self-serving, or is the political reality simply that his own destiny as the Shogun-in-the-waiting has become inseparable from the national interests of Japan? Far more than any Western drama I’ve encountered, Shogun is perfectly willing to both commend its protagonist as a national hero and accept that his rise to power involves ugliness and even cruelty in pursuit of the good.

Reasons of State

It is a mistake to apply modern Judeo-Christian values or internationalist notions of human rights to a 17th society in which they were alien. It is all the more so considering, in ways that become relevant later on, European society was not radically more progressive, if at all, than Sengoku Jidai Japan. This plays out beyond Toranaga’s role in “Broken to the Fist.”

For example: later in the episode, when confronting Buntaro over his grotesque bullying of Mariko at dinner, Blackthorne states freely that in England, married women are the property of their husbands, as in Japan. He makes no ideological pretense, like 19th century colonizers, to represent a higher or more enlightened Western civilization tasked with a civilizing mission to free Asian women from Oriental misogyny—his defense of Mariko is based on her personal merit and, implicitly, paternalistic attitudes towards women originating in European chivalry. This is not “feminism”.

As to Toranaga, the real Ieyasu ruthlessly massacred the survivors of the Toyotomi clan after attaining the Shogunate, women and children alike. While Shogun 2024 pulls some punches in regards to its fictionalization of Ieyasu in Tornaga, and the show reframes the novel’s protagonist in more overtly honorable terms than Clavell wrote him, it remains refreshingly upfront about the price of politics. For Toranaga to do good, he must be ruthless. To bring peace and prosperity to the country, and to pacify and protect it, he must sacrifice, deceive and kill. 

His is the pragmatic school of grand strategy, at one with the unabashed violence and trickery of Machiavelli, yet informed by the same conviction from the latter’s Discourses on Livy that callousness and cruelty must serve the public good. It is irrelevant, in this anarchic and autocratic society, whether Toranaga seeks the shogunate for personal glory or the good of commonwealth—his rule must be measured by the fruits of his reign, and his destiny and Japan’s are now effectively one.

This is all the more interesting to consider in the light of recent films, such as Dune Part II ,that explicitly condemn the dangers of charismatic savior-leaders, or Godzilla Minus One, which democratizes Japanese nationalism against the suicidal aspects of the warrior tradition that outlived the shogunate into the Empire. If in that film it could be said that “The country has valued life far too cheaply” and the government is condemned for having spent young men’s lives in vain, in 1600, as Mariko says, death is still “in our air” and nobody blinks at it.

Of Birds and Blackthorne

So far I’ve complemented Shogun’s willingness to decenter Blackthorne and yet resist the cliched notion of rendering him an idiot. In this episode, Blackthorne initially is an idiot, and one decision he makes in particular causes terrible sorrow, while his defense of Mariko against her husband displays nobility and obtuseness in equal measure.

Echoing my previous comments from episode 1 and my note on “subtlety” last week: there were so many ways that the show’s emphasis on authenticity could have reduced Blackthorne to a bumbling fool, and so many ways in which even as the show and Cosmo Jarvis’ exquisite performance preserves his agency and charisma, Shogun never lets him rise to the mythical heights of The Last Samurai‘s war hero Nathan Algren.

Blackthorne is a pirate, not a Medal of Honor winner, and his success so far has been equal parts bravery and bullshit. He does not have the luxury of casually training in kenjutsu with Ujio for months in between philosophical chat sessions with Ken Watanabe. He has no specialist knack for linguistics and anthropology that allows him to learn Japanese to conversational fluency in a Winter.

He has not fought on the cutting edge of modern warfare at Gettysburg, nor seen so much as a single infantry battle, though he has some experience at looting and raiding in Manilla. His only real assets so far to Toranaga have been being from a country at war with Catholics and the former owner of some really good cannons he didn’t build. By rights he should be long dead. And as much as he wants to he, is not suited to save Mariko from the misery that has just walked scowling back into her life. He doesn’t know the rules. It all begins with a bird…

Toda’s Tantrums

After being given a gift of a pheasant by Toranaga, Blackthorne hangs the bird outside his residence to let it mature in preparation for a stew. What exactly this means is not clear, but the bird quickly begins to rot and disgust everyone in the house after Blackthorne unseriously forbids them from removing it on pain of death. Meanwhile, Buntaro returns, and whether he’s intimated his wife’s liaison with Blackthorne or is simply a bastard by default, he immediately begins to antagonize the Englishman over dinner and make Mariko wish he had stayed dead.

It doesn’t take Blackthorne long to realize he’s being insulted, and, in a fit of contempt, he effectively challenges Buntaro to a sake-drinking competition. Toda Hirokatsu has already proven himself to be a violent, irascible, and controlling man around his family. Amazingly, he gets worse this episode, insulting Mariko’s lineage while drunk and then firing arrows past her face at the gate post of Blackthorne’s house.

We learn also that when Mariko talked Fujii down from sepukku in episode 1, she was speaking from bitterly personal experience. She has not delayed her suicide, as initially seemed the case, out of a sense of duty to Toranaga, nor her faith; she has simply been forbidden by Buntaro and so is incapable of committing seppuku or seeking vengeance without disgrace.

Buntaro insults Mariko when Blackthorne attempts to defend her from this abuse, cursing her as coming from a “filthy, disgusting” lineage: she is the daughter of Akechi Jinsai, a vassal to Kuroda (i.e. Oda Nobunaga) , “the ruler of Japan before the Taiko” who was “corrupt and murderous, and so my father killed him out of love for the realm” before he was forced to murder her entire family and commit sepukku himself as punishment.

Later, Blackthorne is awoken in the night by Buntaro beating Mariko in a drunken rage. Blackthorne follows Buntaro from the house and threatens to shoot him before, either stung with shame or not capable of dodging bullets, Buntaro lays down his swords and apologizes for disturbing the hatamoto’s home. A furious Blackthorne refuses to execute Buntaro while he is defenseless.

The next morning he seeks out Mariko as Fujii and the other villagers beg him to take down the awful smelling bird. He finds Mariko by the shore and tells her to leave her contemptible husband, but she declines, telling him that just as Toda Hiromatsu lied to Fujii about her father’s cowardly death (“because that is what she merits”), she will giver her husband “Nothing. not even my hatred.”

Codes of Conduct

Blackthorne sees no sense in this, and is increasingly appalled at what he is beginning to conceive of as the Japanese’s complete disregard for human life. Mariko leaves him with an injunction not to speak to her as well as the warning that if he remains selfish, he will never be free of his own ego.

This is not the final word on their relationship. More than anything, the Anjin has represented up until now an alternative to the unswerving patience Mariko has preserved behind her eightfold fence and the casual contempt with which men hold women in 17th century Japan.

This was evident from the pillowing conversation in episode 3 when she seemed genuinely thrilled at the notion that men in Western countries might defend the purity of women rather then simply trading them as disposable sex objects.

While this purity was not actually real as Blackthorne offhandedly pointed out, and the chivalry supporting it fake, his “I have no lords” rejection of class deference, along with his Western individualism and rough approximation of sexual equality, has shown her an alternative to the soul-crushing self-repression and duty around which she has built her existence. Anna Sawai has spoken of Mariko as “every woman in Japan who has suffered” under patriarchy, and by far, this episode has demanded her most grueling and accomplished performance.

Those who know the history of Hosokawa Gracia, who have read the novel, or have become familiar with either since watching Shogun know that in the end, this is Mariko’s story, and without her struggle, there can be no victory…but as much as I want to drive that point home here, we’re only halfway through Shogun, and spoilers must be withheld.

The Tatarigami…Bird

There is a responsibility in liberty, and Blackthorne doesn’t get it. When he returns home, Fujji and the house are in mourning, and the rotten pheasant, which has spread rumors of a tatarigami (or demon) through the village, is gone. Uejiro took it down.

Blackthorne commends him for doing so and then asks Fujii to fetch him. She can’t…because Uejirou has been executed on Blackthorne’s order, having suffered the death penalty the Anjin handed down in jest earlier. He is hatamoto. His word is law, whether he was aware of it or not. “You put that man to death over a stinking, God-cursed pheasant? What the hell is wrong with you?” he asks, stunned. Fujii offers to him to commit seppuku in return for their mistake, which throws Blackthorne into a rage. Now furious at everyone and convinced he has no place in this death-centric culture, he rides to Toranaga to demand his ship in order to depart.

Meanwhile, Mariko apologizes to Toranaga for her own beating, saying she unduly antagonized Buntaro. Toanaga is not overtly concerned. Buntaro can do what he wants with his wife so long as it doesn’t stop her from translating. Blackthorne rolls up and complains about Uejiro’s death. Toranaga immediately grasps the tension between them but, in a manner mirroring his dressing down of Nagakado in the beginning, tells Mariko to “Tell him to stop acting like a child” and then walks off to survey his troops in disdain of such nonsense.

Blackthorne finally grasps his culpability in Uejirou’s death just as a massive earthquake strikes Ajiro, throwing Toranaga from a cliff and burying him alive. After Blackthorne and Nagakado dig him from the rubble, Blackthorne offers Toranaga his daishō to replace Toranaga’s missing swords, and the lord erupts in bemused laughter at his intriguing, irritating vassal.

The four return to Ajiro to assist in the rescue efforts, with Blackthorne solemnly rebuilding Uejirou’s rock garden as Fujii recovers from injuries she sustained in the quake. Meanwhile, Muraji lies to the Kashigi, blaming Uejirou as the spy, thereby saving himself and some other random person from torture and death.

Soon after, Ochiba no Kata arrives in Osaka, none too pleased with Ishido’s ineffectiveness and the Christian bickering. As the heir’s mother she will assert her power over the Council. The time for politics is over. Ready the drums of war.

Conclusion

It is becoming pointless to compare episodes of Shogun to one another. They are all amazing, offer very few lows, and demonstrate impeccable visuals, writing, acting, and character development. Like Buntaro’s efficient maiming of Ishido’s troops during episode 3, Shogun has now dispatched 5 hours of television with ruthless efficiency and hardly a single wasted frame. It tells a complex story of East versus West culture clash in which no perspective is allowed a monopoly on truth nor character a monopoly on virtue or vice.

In Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai, and Cosmo Jarvis it fields an excellent central trio adept at complementing one another’s strengths while remaining grounded in the widely disparate objectives their characters are pursuing. It’s only flaw remains a paucity of action that even episode 3 did not wholly satisfy. We’ll see what the remainder of the show holds, and I cling to the tantalizing possibility that, unlike in Clavell’s prose, we’ll see up close the final Battle of Sekigahara.

All photos are property of FX.

Benjamin Rose is a poet from Washington D.C. and the author of Elegy For My Youth (2023) and Dust Is Over All (2024).  He studied English at the Catholic University of America and is the winner of the 2023 O’Hagan Poetry Prize. From 2019 he has edited The Path. Buy his books here

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