American Shogun

Does Hollywood finally "get" Japan? Where will Season 2 of Shogun take us? And should we really be idolizing a warlord?

Tokugawa Ieyasu, the model for Shogun’s Toranaga Yoshii.

Shogun’s sweep of the Emmys feels like a Moment. I wrote about why the series resonates so deeply with American audiences for The New York Times (gift link!) TL;DR: because our socio-politically fractured era resembles a culture-war version of Japan’s Era of Warring States. Hiroyuki Sanada, who took home the Lead Actor Emmy on Sunday evening, plays would-be Shogun Yoshii Toranaga with such flair that it borders on competence porn: the thrill of watching a talented statesman-warrior navigate an even worse time period than our own.

We’ll circle back to Toranaga at the end, but first I wanted to expand on something from my essay, which is the steady improvement in Hollywood portrayals of Japan in recent years. In contrast to the Boomer generation, and even to an extent Generation Xers, younger audiences don’t see Japan as a threat — nor do they see it as particularly exotic. There are more people than ever reading Japanese manga, watching anime, eating Japanese foods (even in previously unthinkable places like American 7-11s), and — thanks in part to lopsided exchange rates — visiting the country. This comfort with things Japanese helps explain why imported anime is bigger than football among Zillenials and also, apparently, a favorite pastime of NFL players (which makes sense, as many are Zs themselves.)

Familiarity in this case breeds not contempt but a demand for more authenticity and sensitivity. Contrast this year’s Shogun to portrayals from the immediate postwar decades, when Japan was portrayed as an exotic neverland, its women geisha-doll playthings, its men either emasculated buffoons or barely restrained warmongers. And that was when Japanese were even allowed to play Japanese roles, which they often weren’t. Take Mickey Rooney’s cringe-inducing, buck-toothed turn as the clownish Yunioshi in the 1961 Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (It really is as bad as it sounds. It’s wild to me how popular this film seems to be among Japanese Boomers.)

John Wayne in “The Barbarian and the Geisha,” 1958.

In the Seventies, Japanese names were taboo enough that Sanada was credited not as Hiroyuki but “Duke” Sanada in imports of his early martial-arts films (which are great nonetheless). The Eighties saw a slew of Japan-bashing movies, reaching a crescendo with 1992’s Rising Sun. That film was based on a book of the same name by Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame, who wrote it as a “wake-up call for America,” at a time when the only thing more terrifying than dinosaurs on the loose were salarymen on the loose. I actually see the much-loved 2000 film Lost in Translation is an heir to that era of films — not for bashing, but for rampant “othering.” Just look at how it treats its Japanese characters: short-statured, barely able to communicate, and pervs in bed.

Looking back, I think the turning point came in the Aughts with the 2006 television series Heroes, which featured a Japanese hero named, of course, Hiro. Played by Masi Oka, Hiro was one of the earliest examples I can recall of an almost entirely Japanese-speaking lead that wasn’t played either as a villain or for laughs. That said, while Oka brought Hiro to life, the scenes set in “Japan” were laughable, obviously filmed on Hollywood lots based on the whims of foreign set designers. Even still, it was obvious they’d been constructed out of a sense of love for the country. No input from actual Japanese, but love nonetheless. Progress of a sort.

Shogun of 2024 nailed the Japanese characters and the feel of the setting, but it was actually shot in Vancouver. On the other hand, 2022’s Tokyo Vice was painstakingly filmed entirely in Tokyo, as were parts of 2023’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, both with top-notch native-speaking cast members. It’s tempting to wonder if we’ve turned the corner, but we still have films like 2022’s Bullet Train, filmed on American soundstages, in which an unrecognizable shinkansen packed with foreign faces hurtles through a Japan so thoroughly exoticized it might as well be a planet in the Star Wars expanded universe.

So the latest iteration of Shogun is Japan-as-seen-by-Hollywood done right. Where do we go from here? The series already enjoyed enough popularity to earn the green-light for a sequel, even before sweeping the Emmys. The first season covered the entirety of James Clavell’s novel, so we don’t know where a second season might take us. But we do know how things played out for Ieyasu Tokugawa, the historical figure upon which Shogun’s Yoshii Toranaga is closely based.

In 1600, Tokugawa defeated his rivals at the epic Battle of Sekigahara and became Shogun, but he wouldn’t truly consolidate the country under his authority until the Siege of Osaka in 1614-5. This battle, or the build-up to it, is where I suspect any follow-up to the first season would be set.

Which brings me to my last point. As much as we might want to watch Tokugawa/Toranaga continue kicking ass and taking names, it’s important to remember some things about what life was like under the Shogunate.

It was better than civil war to be sure — so long as you followed the rules. And there were many of them. Tokugawa ruled with an iron fist. He drove out the Christians, sealed the borders, and tortured those who refused to renounce their beliefs. No criticism of the authorites was or ever would be permitted. During the Edo era, a succession of Tokugawa’s heirs further circumscribed the lives of citizens in ways large and small, from dictating religions to street fashions. This isn’t an exaggeration. “Sumptuary laws” prohibited ostentatious behavior or displays of any kind, including one’s kimono, down even to the materials and patterns that could be worn. (People got around this by concealing elaborate designs on the INSIDES of their garments. Take that, Tokugawa.)

Despite this history, Tokugawa’s fictional avatar Toranaga has no shortage of fans in ostensibly Democratic America. In fact the book’s depiction of what might be called “cultured authoritarianism” seems to stoke a hunger in some folks. Newt Gingrich declared Toranaga an “ideal.” Henry Kissinger, reported The New York Times in 1981, “began issuing orders to his wife and addressing her as ‘Woman!’ while under Shogun's spell.” In the same article, Clavell, a Brit who took American citizenship in 1963, declared that “we are in a sweep away from the leftwing attitudes that have been creeping in against our Constitution,” and praised “Reagan, the right-wing approach, America first.”

Tokugawa put Japan first, too, driving out foreign influences and sealing the borders. (He didn’t need to build a wall, as the oceans did that for him.) This may have made his position stronger in the short term, but it would prove corrosive for Japan, and his Shogunate, over the long term. When the Americans showed up in their gunboats almost two and a half centuries later in 1853, collective shock at how far behind Japan had fallen in comparison to the West played a key role in the Tokugawa reign finally crumbling.

None of which is to knock Shogun as a piece of entertainment. History is history and drama is drama. The showrunners, writers, producers, set-builders, consultants, and everyone else involved did an amazing job of updating Clavell’s book, shifting focus from West to East, and empowering female characters in ways that Clavell could or would not. Those changes made a 1975 novel set in the 16th century drama feel thrillingly relevant to current times. Sanada’s Toranaga is, to put it bluntly, a badass. And Tokugawa, the model for the character, is rightfully celebrated in Japan for putting an end to a century of civil war. The idea of a great unifier sounds like a fever-dream, in our chaotically fractured moment. But genius though Tokugawa may have been, I’ll stick with democracy, messy and unpredictable though it may be.