In September of last year, after commenting on Shogun’s absolute domination of the 2024 Emmys, The Path co-writer and translator Olivia Snyder pointed out a particularly obnoxious and rather passive aggressive critique in The Guardian that claimed Shogun’s awards success was unmerited and due to…DEI? Category Fraud? Weak competition? Something like that. As Olivia noted:
It really just boils down to plain old racism, I think. We saw the same thing happen when Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite and Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture at the Oscars. It’s not in English, it uses too many subtitles, the story doesn’t make any sense or appeal to broader audiences (= Caucasian people). It’s always the same tired argument, and frankly I’m getting sick of it. When The Bear walks away with an Emmys sweep, people applaud it all year long, but when Shogun does the same thing, suddenly it’s a problem.
Notwithstanding the fact that The Guardian also pretends to be the wokest newsite you know by praising Shogun for reducing the role of the “white savior” John Blackthorne (Yes, these two articles were literally written by the same guy), it appears yet another “prominent” fuck boy media figure is lashing out at 2024’s Shogun because…basically everything Olivia wrote above. In today’s edition of the Hollywood Reporter, Jerry London, director of the 9 hour NBC miniseries, decided to pop a viagra on FX’s titanic achievement and limply attempt to stick it to the show via a petulant bit of whining that basically amounted to “The love story sucks. Why is it about history? They don’t care about American audiences. This show is for ASIANS! My Blackthorne was better than your Blackthorne!”
Okay.
“It’s completely different from the one I did,” London says about last year’s version. “Mine was based on the love story of Shogun between Blackthorne and Mariko, and this new one is based on Japanese history, and it’s more about Toranaga, who was the Shogun. It’s very technical and very difficult for an American audience to get their grips into it. I’ve talked to many people that have watched it, and they said, ‘I had to turn it off because I don’t understand it.’ So the filmmakers of the new one really didn’t care about the American audience.”
In a few respects this critique is not without merit. I too have greatly criticized Shogun 2024’s handling of John and Mariko’s romance, which is totally different than in the book. But things get stupid when he pivots to complaining that “this one is based on Japanese history” when the very Wikipedia for James Clavell’s Shogun notes “Shogun is a work of historical fiction based upon the power struggle between the successors of Toyotomi Hideyoshi that led to the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate. Clavell based each character on a historical figure, but changed their names in order to add narrative deniability to the story” and that “Clavell stated that reading a sentence in his daughter’s textbook that stated that “in 1600, an Englishman went to Japan and became a samurai” inspired the novel”. In fact you can read a full biography of the real John Blackthorne by the main historical consultant to FX’s Shogun (and buy it via our Top Picks Page!). Of course it’s based on history! Dude, it’s not Star Wars.
Second, Shogun was objectively a massive viewership success. According to the Streaming Viewership section on its Wikipedia page, Shogun was the top-streamed show in the U.S. and Canada during 2024, and the third most pirated.
Nielsen Media Research, which records streaming viewership on U.S. television screens, estimated that Shōgun was watched for 608 million minutes from April 22—28.[81][82]JustWatch later revealed that Shōgun was the top-streamed show in Canada and in the United States during 2024.[83][84] According to the file-sharing news website TorrentFreak, Shōgun was the third most-watched pirated television series of 2024.[85][86]
Those are not the numbers of a show nobody understands. But understandably, it will take a long time to translate this data into English (or is it just called “Americanish” now unless you use Google in a different English-speaking country?) Elsewhere we have such gems as these:
“They made it basically for Japan, and I was happy about it because I didn’t want my show to be copied. I think I did such a great job, and it won so many accolades, that I didn’t want them to copy it, which they didn’t do. But the new one is funny because everybody I talked to said, ‘I don’t understand it. What’s it all about?’ I watched the whole thing. It’s very difficult to stick with. It won all the [Emmy] awards because there were no big shows against it. There was not too much competition.”
Which is the same nonsense as in the Guardian, prologued by a personal complaint that no one is giving him accolades for a separate work he made 40 years ago, which, by the way, won 14 Emmys, apparently an insufficient amount to rest content on one’s laurels with at 78, rather than shit on a subsequent generation’s success.
Look, by all accounts Shogun 1980 was a great work, one which had Clavell’s personal involvement, even if it bombed in Japan for its myriad cultural inaccuracies (something Olivia commented on here). I personally love the book and have no desire to gratuitously attack earlier iterations of this story, but times have changed, and not just in some vague political sense. In 1980, most Americans had virtually no exposure to or understanding of Japan besides fading memories of World War II.
Clavell, who oversaw the script for the 1980 edition, greatly simplified the work for an American television audience, adopting the principle, according to a producer quoted in a contemporary article, that “what he [Blackthorne] doesn’t understand, we [shouldn’t] understand”.[6] and leaving all of the Japanese dialogue untranslated while making substantial cuts to the story.
Likewise, to spare American audiences the historical bewilderment London apparently encountered in the three people he asked about Shogun 2024 (two of whom said “I don’t get it” and the last of whom said “Oh shit, it’s that Chinese guy from Mortal Kombat!”), the miniseries cut the vast majority of the political maneuvering and attention to side characters from the book, which in the original text ultimately proves to be more important than Blackthorne’s story itself.
In the end, whether or not you want to read racial overtones into this guy’s lame outburst, the fact of the matter is that Shogun’ 2024”s success had nothing to do with “ForCeD DIVeRSIty” or whatever asinine bullshit Donald Trump is currently whining about to distract you as his Nazi lap dog steals your Social Security number. As Luis noted, the new Shogun is simply proof of concept that when you marry great storytelling craftsmanship to authentic cultural representation, its possible to make mature art that can appeal across cultural divides with no sense that audiences are being lectured to as if they’re idiots on a one-way ticket to the Panderverse.
Modern audiences in the U.S. inundated with Japanese pop culture and all manner of foreign subtitled content do not need hand-holding. Shogun succeeded because it was great, and it was great because it respected its audience. So sit your ass down, put the phone away, and buy some Cialys, sir.
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