by Guest Author; Cali Weber
FX’s historical drama Shōgun recently won 18 Emmy Awards at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards, bringing home the most awards of the night and making history with the most wins for a single season of any show in Emmy history. Shōgun had many wins on September 15th, including winning an Emmy award for Outstanding Drama Series, and stars Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai both became the first Japanese actors to win Best Lead Actor in a Dramatic Series and Best Lead Actress in a Dramatic Series, respectively.
Shōgun’s record-breaking wins occurred after nearly a decade of production start-ups and failures, and it wasn’t until James Clavell’s novel Shōgun was sent to screenwriter Justin Marks that the series finally had its chance. Along with his wife, Japanese American writer Rachel Kondo, the couple spent years developing the show and a ten-month filming process, during which the couple even delivered two babies.
Shõgun is one of the many adaptations based on the novel, being the second show made, along with one stage production, a board game, and three video games. The novel, which is the third of six books in James Clavell’s “Asian Saga” series, is loosely based on early 1600s Japan, showing the final phases of the Sengoku period, when Japan was riddled with civil wars and the breakdown of the Japanese feudal system. Clavell was inspired by his time as a POW in Singapore during World War II, where he learned about Japanese culture and traditions, and he has described Shōgun as “passionately pro-Japanese.”
Clavell’s experience as an Englishman in Japan resembles his text, which is loosely based on the accounts of William Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan. While some view the novel as full of errors and mistranslations, Clavell intended to uphold Japanese culture. His main English character, John Blackthorne, becomes a “white samurai” in the backdrop of his evolving love with a Japanese woman.
The first TV adaptation tells the tale through strictly Blackthorne’s European lens, and large, complex parts of the novel were cut, causing Japan to seem like a foreign and unknown place rather than the land that Blackthorne and Clavell himself deeply admired and for the former, became a part of. However, FX’s Shōgun highlights the importance of Japanese figures and culture in this adaptation, including the subtitling of Japanese dialogue, which is left out in the original miniseries. FX’s Shōgun provided what the first series missed, paying attention to the minor elements and elevating Japanese characters to the same level in which the original series highlighted the European characters.
The show begins right in the middle of a very tumultuous period in Japanese history and pays accurate attention to all the cultures represented, not only Japanese but also the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English characters and cultural histories. The show does not spend time explaining the full historical context, so the viewers, much like the lead European character, are thrown into a world unfamiliar to their own, which they come to learn and appreciate as John Blackthorne does.
With 18 Emmy wins and phenomenal viewer ratings, Shōgun represents not only the redemption of a novel that has been adapted many times before but also emphasizes the true content in Clavell’s novel and fully displays his appreciation and admiration for Japanese culture. The Emmy wins highlight the diversifying of American television and media consumption in the wake of other foreign programs’ successes, such as the 2022 hit series Squid Games. Shōgun’s success is intertwined with Japan's deep and complex history and the legacy of Japanese Samurai films, which have influenced American viewers and producers for decades. Shōgun’s success is a long time coming, and its record-breaking wins are paving the way for the future of foreign media consumption in America.
Add comment
Comments