And what Shogun can teach us about modern politics
Since the announcement of Shogun’s renewal for a second and potentially third season, we’ve been assured time and time again that though the plot line of James Clavell’s novel has been exhausted, the wealth of historical material documenting the time period leaves Shogun plenty of room to keep expanding its narrative into Yoshii Toranaga/Tokugawa Ieyasu’s actual rule as, well, Shogun. While normally going off-book without source material is a recipe for turning award-winning show adaptations into disasters, Shogun has several advantages over the average show that indicates we may still get very compelling television next time around.
The first of these is the fidelity of Clavell’s fiction to actual events, unusually high for historical fiction. Each major character in Shogun is a fictionalization of an actual person, and despite his very limited and often faulty understanding of the Japanese language, Clavell’s research and preparation for the novel, based off the available English sources, was commented on favorably by Frederik Cryns, a polylingual expert on the Sengoku Era and the major historical consultant for the show. This means in effect that while the showrunners of Shogun are now creating original work rather than adapting, they are not flying blind.
Extensive documentary evidence exists for the lives of characters that survived Season 1 of Shogun, and not just Toranaga and Blackthorne. For example, we know that in real life, Honda Masazumi (Kashigi Omi in Shogun) fought at Sekigahara, became a major daimyo in the Tokugawa government, worked with William Adams (Blackthorne) to set the foreign policy of the shogunate (mainly in regards to China), fought at the siege of Osaka Castle and, like Adams, was ultimately sidelined by the Iyeasu’s successor. By Cryns’ account, Adams and Honda seem to have gotten along surprisingly well in later years, which would be an interesting turn from the pissing and “milk-dribbling fucksmear” energy of season 1.
Likewise, while the Anjin served primarily as a distraction for Toranaga’s enemies in Season 1, there’s great possibility to expand upon the concepts of cultural exchange and conflict once Toranaga is firmly ensconced in power in season 2. In the actual history, Adams largely succeeded in prejudicing Japan’s foreign policy in favor of Protestants at the expense of Catholics as he rose through the ranks of Tokugawa’s service, partially, perhaps, because of the obvious rapport between the two men, but more so because once his domestic enemies were defeated, Ieyasu judged correctly that while the intentions of the Protestants were firmly commercial, the Catholics, especially in light of their conquest of the Philippines, represented a far more nakedly colonial threat.
Seen in this light, there is plenty of room for dramatic tension and character development, with a second season potentially portraying Blackthorne as belatedly achieving everything he wished for in season 1 but struggling to understand why, with conflict and perhaps his downfall from favor eventually resulting. That’s on top of the essentially conflicted cultural perspective that emerges of Adams from the historical material, where he never formally abandoned his aspiration of returning to England but had so fully assimilated to the Japanese way of life in the end that he often alienated English ex-patriots and could never commit to leaving. In the end, I imagine Blackthorne will get a somewhat poignant ending that reinforces his outcome in season 1—retirement as a private citizen of no particular importance, at peace with his place in a world where his fortunes have waxed and waned in an almost karmic fashion.
But the more important question is what to make of the Shogun and the realm itself. At its core, Shogun is a myth of the making of modern Japan, with Clavell’s Toranaga going into considerable detail in his final monologue in the novel about the “Golden Age” he intends to establish, reflecting in part a shift in Japanese attitudes towards the Tokugawa Shogunate and the policy of sakoku since World War II. As the Meiji-era narrative of the Shogunate as a suffocating drain on Japanese power and creativity has been revised, some newer historians have reframed the sakoku era of isolation as a wise policy that preserved the independence, flourishing, and stability of Japanese civilization at a time when virtually all of the global East and South was colonized by the West, one which ultimately left Japan in a stronger position to modernize and compete internationally following the Meiji Restoration.
Given Hiroyuki Sanada’s professed admiration for Tokugawa Ieyasu, this is likely the vision we’ll be sold at the conclusion of Shogun, and while it’s a narrative I’m largely sympathetic to, the real test of Shogun’s success as historical myth-making will be how effectively it can complicate but affirm this narrative. As works like Silence suggest, and as the fandom’s universal clamor for a Lord of the Rings-scale battle of Sekigahara episode reflects, no Golden Age is bloodless or achieved without violence. As the “warrior who seeks peace”, in Sanada’s words, the most fascinating thing Shogun can and should do in its second and/or third seasons is emphasize the cost and the compromises that enable that future glory. Ultimately, while Shogun season 1 was about intrigue, season 2 has the potential to model statecraft, and to embrace politics in a fundamentally healthy way. In an era of populism, authoritarianism, and hardening international conflict, perhaps the most thrilling thing to watch will be to see how Toranaga gets Japan out of its early 1600s mess of duplicitous foreigners and warring fiefdoms, and what lessons that might hold for a world that seems closer than ever to World War III with each passing day.
Image credited to FX