So I say to you: /Through all things, I’d stand to be /Your kaishakunin. / Like Buntaro, I must learn / What it means to be denied.
What Makes Shogun Shogun
With its recent overwhelming Emmy’s success, Shogun has solidified its place in the pantheon of all-time great television. This is no surprise. When it’s pilot (somewhat cheekily named “Anjin” in a bilingual pun) debuted in February, I called it the best hour of television since Game of Thrones season 4 a decade earlier—-a bit shockingly in retrospect, since in hindsight the premier, while leagues better than much else, was by the standards Shogun set in the remainder of its run sort of a mid-level episode. The vast majority of critics then and since have concurred that Shogun was a phenomenon, and if it didn’t reach the viewership of the more Eurocentric 1980s adaptation of James Clavell’s novel, that was surely the result of a far more fractured media market today than at that time, which preceded cable, let alone streaming.
And yet in a quieter way, there is every reason to believe 2024’s Shogun has been and will continue to be a generational event. Most obviously, it’s very good, an exquisitely wrought work of cinematic art that made no compromises in its commitment to aesthetic integrity and authenticity. In every aspect of its craft, from costuming to dialogue, gesture, action, and cultural accuracy, Shogun adhered to a rigorously and even ruthlessly grounded vision of realism in storytelling, pursuing a narrative at once gripping and yet so materially and culturally meticulous that hardly a single note rang false.
Characters came to life in all their complexity, tropes were subverted or dispensed with without drawing attention to their own subversion, and an emphatically ensemble perspective enriched the show beyond Manichean distinctions between heroes and villains. Yabushige, probably the most beloved character on the show, first appeared as a seemingly one-note sociopath and unfolded into a tragic-comic huckster of epic proportions. Blackthorne, the apparent Tom Cruise stand-in at first, was rewritten from the source material into a grittier, more self-divided character, caught between his love for Mariko, his ambivalence toward Japan, and his opportunistic desire for conquest and glory that only the shock of Mariko’s death could resolve. Even Ishido, the nominal villain of Shogun, had something of a point, his bureaucratic strategizing repeatedly thwarted by the incompetence of his higher class peers, with his peasant lineage and self-made status continually invoked as a slur against him, as though the violent pursuit of power was a birthright only for the privileged.
A Lackluster Love Affair
But in one respect, arguably, Shogun failed, or at least made narrative choices so subtle that they underwhelmed. That aspect was the same one everyone has commented on, the most ironically controversial decision in its repertoire: the romance between John and Mariko. Because despite their obvious chemistry as scene partners and the consummate talent of Cosmo Jarvis and Anna Sawai, it’s an open question whether Shogun’s central romance works at all. Does it?
Sort of. As an avenue through which to explore conflict between freedom and duty, East and West, personal survival versus loyalty and honor, Shogun’s romance largely succeeds. But art, as a thing made, is not simply a vessel for ideas; it is a composite where the technical, material, and particular aspects of a mimetic representation exemplify and embody thematic universals. And by this metric, Shogun’s romance often fails, not because it is intellectually vapid, but because it is unbelievable.
Underwritten and overthought, Mariko and John meander through a will-they-won’t-they dynamic from the moment of Buntaro’s return in episode 5 to their last night in Osaka and Mariko’s death. While moments of exquisite beauty occur at the beginning, middle, and end of this odyssey, mostly it consists of them yearning desperately or arguing. It is never, contrary to showrunner Justin Marks’ comments on episode 6, “sexy”. More often it grows tiresome and mildly irritating, a fault exacerbated by Shogun‘s mid season dip in episodes 6 and 7, where the pacing slows to a halt like a cart stuck in the mud of Ajiro. The show dwells so little on the actual joy of romance, physical and emotional, that at times one strains to see what besides desperation draws these two lovers together at all, and in this it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that an excess of political sensitivity was largely to blame.
Put bluntly: in an effort to avoid reducing Mariko to a fetishized object of desire, Shogun squanders long sections of its romance. At base, the show seemed so inordinately uncomfortable with attracting criticism for its depiction of a love affair between an Asian woman and a white man that it chose half-measures. The show’s posture towards the complexities of interracial and intercultural love, to crimp a phrase used in other contexts by one reviewer, was fundamentally “defensive”. And in the end, while the romance is not a failure, and largely coheres on account of three pivotal and well-executed moments in the narrative (the bath scene, the Willow World date, and Mariko’s abortive seppuku), it is strikingly less than it could have been to the extent that it becomes over-reliant on these set piece scenes to validate long stretches of inertia in between and erotic cowardice in storytelling.
Though Shogun‘s grand gestures might be some of the most affecting ever put to film ( especially the not-seppuku, more on that below), relationships don’t live in fireworks but the space in between them. While Shogun‘s romance is many things at once and the fireworks, when there, burn very bright, after the glow in the night sky and the scent of smoke fades away, what we’re left with is a succession of grey days in Ajiro as Blackthorne whines about his ship and Mariko longs for suicide. Is that “love”? It doesn’t feel like it.
When John Met Mariko…and Buntaro
John and Mariko’s relationship is not a surprise, and not simply because they happen to be two very attractive people from different cultures in a show that is basically about that. From the opening episode, when we glimpse flashes of Mariko’s despair under her steely exterior, as well as her intelligence and facility with languages, we’re told that Mariko is a strong, capable woman filled with a reservoir of pain. As such she’s the only woman that makes sense as a match for Blackthorne, and it becomes natural for the show to use the complexities of their relationship to interrogate the broader clash of East and West in microcosm.
This is complicated by Buntaro, who fulfills a role that is both conventional in a forbidden love triangle and yet unconventional in other respects. As a public-facing man, Buntaro is an impeccable example of Samurai masculinity in late-Sengoku culture. He is brave, loyal, intelligent, and supremely skilled in the art of war. As a private man, however, by modern Western standards Buntaro is basically… shit. He is cold, explosively angry, emotionally abusive to his son, and emotionally and physically abusive to his wife. The very aggression that makes him exceptional on the battlefield, when transfered to a domestic context, renders him toxic, pathetic, and weak, the prime example of Japanese misogyny. To paraphrase an article by Olivia from awhile back, historically, in a narrative like Shogun, Buntaro’s abuse would carry orientalist overtones as a representation of barbarous, degraded, and implicitly effeminate Asian masculinity, with Blackthorne’s white masculinity held up as a more enlightened, chivalrous, and superior alternative.
Shogun eschews this, explicitly granting both men and their respective races differing virtues but similar failings. When Blackthorne engages in a deranged rant about female chastity to distract Ishido’s men and save the convoy in episode 3, Mariko is genuinely intrigued if not thrilled by the suggestion that women are revered in Renaissance England, as they are manifestly not in 1600s Japan.
But Blackthorne immediately deflates this suggestion later when he notes that London is filled with filthy prostitutes, and this equalization continues during the sake binge with Buntaro in episode 5, where Blackthorne affirms both England and Japan share fundamentally patriarchal attitudes toward marriage before intervening on Mariko’s behalf regardless. Again and again, while Blackthorne’s more expansive view of female agency and dignity facilitates their relationship (and is ultimately critical in its final stages to its success), it is shown to be a personal manifestation of his individualistic character, not a specific instantiation of an innately feminist and superior Western culture he supposedly represents.
Blackthorne “has no lords”, and yet at 36 years old, the only legitimate ruler of England he has ever known has been female (a fact given somewhat more weight in the novel, where Torornaga remarks upon Elizabeth I’s gender during their first meeting and Blackthorne is stated to have fought during the war against the Spanish Armada). He is not a feminist in an ideological sense so much as his obsession with personal autonomy gives him an unusual empathy with women.
In a simpler story, John would best Buntaro, who would be left completely discredited and alone, if not killed. But in Shogun they are essentially equalized in heartbreak, and while Mariko affirms her love for Blackthorne rather than Buntaro before her death, ultimately, her duty to herself, her family’s memory, and the good of the realm as part of Crimson Sky outweighs either of them, and both in varying ways must “learn what it means to be denied.” This outmaneuvers the racial element found in films like The Last Samurai, which despite being a far more valuable and sensitive narrative than is commonly acknowledged (who precisely does Tom Cruise’s “white savior” actually save?) wasted time on an ill-thought-out romance with murderous cuckoldry overtones.
It is not masculine competition or two competing racialized versions of masculinity that determine Mariko’s love, but her own free choice, which ultimately arbitrates between them while surrendering her autonomy to neither. This element of autonomy is crucial, because the philosophical battle over the nature and boundaries of autonomy is at the heart of John and Mariko’s relationship. It is telegraphed in the first great love scene between them, the bath scene, and ultimately defines them till Mariko’s final moments. It’s also the principle weakness in the show’s depiction of their romance: a representation executed with such success that other, more quotidian but equally essential facets of their relationship wither in the telling.
Sanpo o Suru
Shogun’s romance is essentially divisible into three acts. It begins with the slow buildup between John and Mariko culminating in the bath scene and their first sexual encounter, progresses through a conflictual middle stage that includes the Willow World brothel and proceeds through the rupture in their relationship after Toranaga’s surrender, and ends in a final reconciliation with Mariko’s abortive seppuku and death. It’s important to note however that from its first major setpiece, the relationship is implied to be doomed. In episode 4, as Blackthorne bathes, Mariko turns away from him and attempts to narrate the history of her father, Akechi Jinsai. John stops her, and instead they begin to fantasize about a romantic evening in London together. While the show superficially portrays John’s indifference to Mariko’s past as an act of respect and empathy, as he affirms that just as a house falls and is rebuilt, so she has fallen and rebuilt herself as a woman, something subtler is at work.
Although John’s statement and Mariko’s receptivity to it can be taken at face value, it also robs him for a time of crucial context just as their relationship is about to begin. It is likewise easy to read the fact that they sit back to back during the London conversation as a mere nod to performative modesty on each character’s part, but to do so would sell the immense thoughtfulness of Shogun short. Even as they share this fantasy, they face in opposite directions and remain allegorically distant from one another and in separate worlds, John focused on his seductive narrative, Mariko torn between desire for escape and resignation to her fate. As crucial as their separated lines of sight is the fact that John remains in the hotspring bath while Mariko sits on land. As in his “I have no lords” speech, Blackthorne’s evocation of the Thames in his fantasy ties his sense of freedom and individuality to water. Water also represents for him an effacement of memory and the responsibility and obligations to others that memory preserves.
As John has abandoned his wife and children for the sea, so in the bath he imagines abandoning the complexity of his present circumstances for a night in London with Mariko and joining her on the Thames in a sort of shared oblivion. The notion of erotic love as an elimination of the self, as well as a collapse into death or microcosm, is old in Western literature. In works like ‘The Ecstasy” and “The Canonization” of John Donne as well as the plays of Shakespeare (the latter of which Blackthorne, in-universe, has clearly seen in some capacity), it is a common motif of 16th and 17th century English letters through the modernist verse of T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and onward. But such a melding and elimination of personality is only possible in the context of individualism, when the self can unite with an erotic other abstracted from its societal and familial ties. For Mariko, as a Japanese of the 17th century, as well as due to her individual circumstances, that move is impossible; the gap in psychology, values, and pragmatic obligations is unbridgeable. Thus, when Mariko tells Blackthorne that unless he vanquishes his ego, he will never be free of himself, the conflict between them has already been foreshadowed.
When I reviewed episode 4, I both acknowledged and criticized the show’s presentation of John and Mariko’s sex scene. I want to press that further. The show’s framing of their encounter as well as its employment of nudity rings false. While it’s not surprising that Mariko would initiate the encounter, and Shogun was very much intending to push back against stereotypes of sexually passive (and subservient) Asian women, the decision to objectify Blackthorne’s body without doing the same to Mariko is of piece with Hollywood’s increasing embrace of purity culture under the guise of feminism. In light of historical objectification of women, so the argument goes more often than not, the “male gaze” must be “subverted” by sex scenes that explicitly code the female as the dominant and active partner, up to the point of revealing the male’s actor’s body while preserving the female actress’ modesty.
This is a strange attitude toward sex, not because it seeks to correct real or perceived gender imbalances, but because it is artificial. Put bluntly, most heterosexual women find passivity in men unattractive, and most heterosexual partners do not in fact have a CFNM kink. As with the entire concept of the “male gaze”, which is little more than a fragile admission that feminist critics find male desire, as well as masculinity itself, inherently threatening, it represents a contorted view of empowerment, wherein the sexual vulnerability inherent in being the physically passive partner (as women almost always are in heterosexuality) is not dignified but in fact further degraded through an attempt by the woman to assume a masculine role.
Likewise, male submission is erroneously coded as positive, whereas anyone who has ever encountered an incel knows that misogyny more often bespeaks a deficit of masculinity, not an excess of it. The very “chad/virgin” dichotomy represents this explicitly: it is not strong men who hate women, but weak and effeminate ones. To quarrel with the ideology of gender-as-performance need not imply patriarchal essentialism nor hostility to gender fluidity; but it is only by acknowledging that some aspects of gender are determined by biological sex and indeed innate that the notion of expanding them attains any coherence.
A show that unabashedly sexualizes the white male body while concealing the Asian female body in an erotic encounter is not disputing the fetishization of Asian women; it is negating their sexuality in an attempt to dodge criticism, much less grappling with the real world nuances of what such women want in bed or how interracial and intercultural couples actually have, discuss, and conceptualize sex. It is, at a word, cowardice; a form of cringing before the anticipated and oh-so-performative whingering of Twitter, cultural commentators, and activists that dogs so much of modern art. And in the absence of any adult attempt, even by a writers room composed primarily of Asian women, to depict Mariko’s sexuality in a more blunt way, we are left with the same ironically racist suggestion that John and Mariko’s relationship, being between a white man and an Asian woman, is somehow too inherently problematic or unseemly to depict, and really shouldn’t even exist anyway.
No similar reticence characterizes the sex between Kiku and Omi, for example. And it goes without saying that what responsible creators will cower in fear of representing, pornographers will not, and thus we have representationally traveled in a circle from fetishistic and demeaning depictions of Asian women’s sexuality to purity culture and back again. This is the core problem of John and Mariko on a physical level, and it is even worse in Shogun on a sentimental level. Too often, they do not feel like a couple, and this seems to be because the writers’ room deeply wished they weren’t. I am not offended by this sentiment as a white man. If anything, I pity it.
A Cart Stuck in the Mud
After the sake binge, Shogun‘s romance largely pivots to an allegorical treatment of culture clash, which initiates several episodes of friction bordering on animosity between John and Mariko. This coincides with a significant diminution in Blackthorne’s role in episodes 6 and 7 which proves jarring in some respects. As the narrative focus and the role of protagonist shifts firmly to Toranaga during episodes 6 through 8, one starts to wonder what in the hell Blackthorne is doing in this show. He undergoes little character development and is effectively sidelined for two hours, his interactions with Mariko reduced to a philosophical grappling between individualism and Japanese collectivism that bear little resemblance to an actual love affair. We are told by Gin in the negotiation over Blackthorne’s night in the Willow World that the two are always seen together, but what do they do besides argue with increasing tedium over Blackthorne’s ship and his apparently “unreasonable” disbelief that Mariko will abandon her abusive husband?
It’s at this point, I confess, that Shogun very nearly lost me as a viewer, and my reviews of episodes 6 and 7 reflect that. Though still quite high, they were my lowest scores for the series, and were perhaps overly generous at the time. One need not agree with the intellectual conclusions of a work of art to enjoy it, but when one side of the argument is given all the best points, a sense of disingenuity creeps in. We begin to believe that we are not being persuaded so much as lectured to; that the artist refuses to respect our intelligence. This is precisely the sin of episodes 6 and 7. Following Ryu Spaeth’s insightful article at Vulture, at this point in the story Shogun begins to demonstrate a certain arrogance. If Blackthorne’s diminution as a protagonist is a deliberate bait-and-switch of the audience (something we can very reasonably believe, based on comments by Justin Marks and Toranaga’s final monologue), he still has to serve a purpose. Like Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher (no, the books and games, not that damned show) a great character in a political drama can absolutely remain compelling even as he becomes a pawn of forces beyond his control. Yet even if his actions are ultimately irrelevant, they must mean something, even if that something is non-political. A distraction is no distraction at all if he remains ignorable and insignificant.
This shift is partly structural, a fact that was the subject of much Reddit discussion during the weeks surrounding these episodes. As the show built out Mariko and Toranaga’s stories in their own right, I often felt a sense that the episodes were too short, with not just Blackthorne but important Japanese characters like Fujii and Yabushige receding far into the background. At a rate of more than 100 pages an hour in only ten hours, such cuts were inevitable, but along with the very slow pace of events between the earthquake and Nagakado’s death, the show began to feel flat in these episodes, the narrative simultaneously creeping along and ignoring important relationships. On a macrocosmic level, episodes 8-10 utterly redeemed the series in its totality; but they do nothing to alleviate the boredom and distaste of these episodes as standalone entries.
Kaishakunin
To return to the substance of “Johniko” (or “Marikthorne?”) however, the lessening of Blackthorne as a character is not a distinct issue but intrinsically intertwined with the souring of Shogun‘s romance. Mariko’s willingness to sacrifice everything, including her life and her love for Blackthorne, for the good of the realm is a harsh but fundamentally noble impulse. In the last episodes of the series, Blackthorne’s acquiescence to this wish ultimately doubles as his redemption: the honoring of his lover’s autonomy over his own personal desire for her to live. Without his willingness to “second” Mariko during her near-seppuku, which would have saved her in the last resort from both a long and agonizing death and, in at least the show’s logic of Christianity, hellfire, his passion would’ve been unmasked in the end as thoroughly selfish.
To a great extent, that is what love actually is, and Shogun‘s emphasis of this point during “Crimson Sky” is magnificent. It is this act, coming hard on the heels of Buntaro’s moving but fruitless appeal during the episode 8 tea ceremony, that solidifies the genuineness of John and Mariko’s relationship. His sacrifice (and it is, to be clear, a tremendous act of sacrifice) may be read by some as a triumph of feminist notions of autonomy over male passion, or Eastern notions of duty over Western individualism, but on a more basic level, it is beyond all of these things. To love someone romantically is not simply to covet them or possess them. It is to achieve a unity in separateness, a mode of thought and action wherein two people are “one, but not the same” built on mutual sacrifice and respect for each partner’s autonomy that is inviolable. This is what Blackthorne achieves in “Crimson Sky” before Mariko’s death, when they make love for the second and last time. The journey is largely Blackthorne’s, even if the ultimate heroine of the series is Mariko, because while she was always prepared to sacrifice herself for her mission, Blackthorne does not transcend his own selfish instincts except by her example. To vanquish himself, he must love Mariko to the hilt; to love Mariko, he must let her go.
This is a narrative triumph, and such a mature depiction of romance is seldom achieved in television, but the strongest lines in any text must hit on account of the ones before them. For a work of art to function, the entire thing must be pressurized, each element working in tandem to reinforce the others. Shogun fails this test, not because it falls short of grandeur, but because the grandeur is not entirely earned. I was awestruck the first time I watched Mariko’s seppuku scene, but I was also surprised by it, which in some respects I shouldn’t have been. The show had seemed to commit so utterly and foolishly to the trope of Educating The Mediocre White Man in the case of Blackthorne in the preceding episodes that I would not have been surprised for it to continue until the end.
“Oru Wa Inuja“
By this trope I refer to the inverse of The Last Samurai or white savior effect: when the major white male character in a drama, be he the protagonist or a supporting actor, devolves into an excuse for intersectional lecturing. Arrogant, bumbling, if not actively racist or stupid, he becomes a straw man onto which characters of color and those who write them project their grievances, in essence the Word of white supremacy made flesh. As with the discussion of sexuality and fetishization above, the problem is not that this type of person doesn’t exist, but that they are a way of talking down to one’s audience. There is real merit to the opposition of values at stake in Shogun‘s romance, and it would be simplistic to say Shogun ever totally commits, even at its weakest points, to this trope. But as Spaeth notes, at a certain point, in its desire to respect Japan and its values, the show lets those values off the hook. Blackthorne must assimilate in-part to his host culture to achieve his character arc and grow in maturity, but no reciprocity is ever demanded of Mariko. Her admonitions against his selfishness are never contradicted, and likewise the value of selfless sacrifice to one’s lord are upheld even when he is not present, as when Kiku shores up Omi’s wavering loyalty in “The Abyss of Life” by affirming her trust in Gin. These are the values Shogun espouses. They also are a form of authoritarian hero-worship.
In the last resort, the show’s authorial voice (and its source material’s author, no less) agree and agreed with the basic nobility of Tokugawa Ieyasu and his vision of an enlightened dictatorship. Clavell described his novel as “passionately pro-Japanese”, and it is a remarkably humane work for a man raised in a British Imperial milieu that was racist by default, not least toward an enemy whom he had fought and suffered under personally for years as a POW. But if Shogun the novel dwells too much on the size of Blackthorne’s penis at times and contains numerous linguistic errors despite its generally high degree of historical fidelity, it is also bolder in its depiction of cruelty and the venal aspects of human nature than its 2024 counterpart. To Clavell, the Japanese were both thoroughly admirable (so much so that at least one contemporary critic complained the novel lionized Japan in contempt of the West) and thoroughly capable of a horrifying brutality that Shogun, barring the boiling incident in its first episode, often elides. Common practices of the 17th century like pederasty are scrupulously ignored in the show. The oppression of the Eta, the Buddhist caste of untouchables, is wholly excised. Blackthorne’s imprisonment in Osaka, which basically occurs in a hole filled with dying men and shit, is transposed to an open-air cage. Men are still routinely executed, but while there is reference to crucifixion, we see no examples of it or other stomach-churning gore.
The Nationalist Mirage
Like Ghost of Tsushima, Shogun is a dignified, respectful depiction of Japanese culture by Westerners that ultimately raises questions about what “respectful” representation ultimately means. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Western directors’ eternal misreading of Kurosawa. As Spaeth notes, using Ran as an example, for Kurosawa, the glamor and corruption of the samurai, and by extension the beauty and cruelty of his homeland, were not a duality. They reinforced one another, for better and worse. In Seven Samurai (also set during the Sengoku Jidai) the very “seven” that defend the village from bandits are the cast-off survivors of pointless feudal wars. As their leader notes, if the villagers they defend have become craven, murderous, and corrupt, it is largely the fault of the samurai class itself, which has violently abused them for decades, inflicting and modeling depravity for the lower classes.
All of which is to say that whether or not one sides with Mariko or John in the philosophical struggle between East and West, individual and collective, the show grants Mariko a superiority that is not fully earned, one which conveniently elides contemporary fissures in Japanese politics and culture around issues such as remilitarizing the country’s pacifist foreign policy, debates over feminism and gender, and its relationship with its imperial legacy in East Asia. The recent LDP election to replace Premier Fumio Kishida, which saw the now-incumbent Shigeru Ishiba defeat an avowed ultranationalist, is a case in point. Shogun is a period piece. It would serve no purpose and be of perhaps minimal interest even to Japanese viewers if it allegorized contemporary politics. But it does not need to do this to articulate the basic contradiction identified by Spaeth, because that contradiction is embedded in the national mythos. Shogun is content to let the Japanese present themselves as they see themselves.
In the abstract, I have no opposition to this. As a Jew, I am totally accustomed to routine and mind-numbingly ignorant depictions of my culture both by the white Christian majority of Western societies and Westerners of every race and faith who claim to speak on behalf of the marginalized, a category in which my people are included so long as we wield no actual power and make repeated shows of deference to those supposedly worse-off than us. Nationalism is a means to self-respect, and in that it can be a drug. Yet in seeking to arbitrate a dialectical dispute between opposing value systems and cultures, a resort to the comforts of nationalism is naive, if not outright dangerous; for more often than not it leads to a state of violence, and in the exigencies of a war where each side seeks it’s rival culture’s destruction, it is irrelevant who is right, only who is left.
A Conservative Revolution
When Shogun is confident in its narrative, it achieves unparalleled success. But despite the grandest moments of the John and Mariko romance, that confidence in respect to eros is by no means a given. The show was not comfortable with their pairing to begin with, and it never fully grew comfortable with it. In matters from sex and love to the ideological antagonism at the heart of their relationship, Shogun demonstrates a fundamental fragility. It has progressive instincts but no new answers as to how to portray the complexities of intercultural love. It opposes East and West yet in the name of “respect” succumbs to deference. It subordinates the blue-eyed perspective but lacks the boldness to jettison blue-eyed anxieties. There is no gainsaying the totality of Shogun’s achievement, and I have no desire, as an admirer of the show, to challenge its accolades in the least, nor discredit its victories.
But for all the noise that has been made about Shogun‘s advances in representation, the show’s vision remains fundamentally conservative. It remains caught, though not wholly, in what Yascha Mounk calls “the identity trap”; the multiracial vision where differences can only be celebrated by remaining deterministic and inviolable; where the “mongrel” reality of modern race relations and cultural diffusion must be excised in favor of morality tales, tales in which people of color’s self-empowerment and excellence remains needlessly intertwined with narratives of white guilt and white penitence, to the mutual insult of both. Shogun‘s romance proves hollow not because it accedes to racist stereotypes but because in its relentless drive to avoid them, it strangles the joy and spontaneity that makes actual human relationships, sexual or otherwise, possible.
This fault is not the novel’s, which portrayed a more passionate romance; nor is it entirely the creators’ adaptive choices. It is simply a given of intersectional culture and the era of film and television it has produced, one which, under the guise of objecting to the fetishizing of race in sexuality, promotes an ideology of racial “purity” that wishes the ambiguities of interracial and intercultural love away. It promotes the lie that white men are inherently predatory, and the lie that women of color who happen to date them, or any other race the men of their own races have beef with, are all secretly self-loathing.
It is an attitude ironically common to both white male supremacist obsessions over cuckoldry; to Hindu nationalist delusions of “Love Jihad”; and to, yes, quite a bit of journalism by progressive women of color themselves, at publications from the Huffington Post to The Juggernaut, who cannot square the divergence in their own sexual practices or those of their peers with the ideological preoccupations they have incorporated into their lives as sacred truth. Some of my closest friends, past and present, have been women of color who engaged in interracial relationships. Sometimes they dated men who turned out to be racists. Those men quickly found themselves single. But these negative experiences were often atypical.
A Hollow Victory
In all cases, leaving aside vile and self-conscious bigots whose weakness is conspicuous, the modern doomsayers of interracial relationships—the well-meaning but misled academics and critics, male and female, white and black, Asian and brown, and so on and so forth who make up this amorphous and often pitiful group—do not write in the manner of people who genuinely believe diversity and feminism are strength. Their brashness is not courage, and their sophistry is not wisdom. Trysoever hard as they may to roar like tigers, in the end, their voices are but the mewling of kittens, the anxious whingering of the fearful, and the weak.
It is a shame that Shogun, for all its grandeur, chose this path of weakness for the majority of its second half after seeming to reject such simplistic and ineffective approaches to romance in the beginning. But choose it Shogun did, and while its creators have much to congratulate themselves on, in the case of John and Mariko’s love, Crimson Sky was a hollow victory.
Benjamin Rose is the Editor and owner of The Path.
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