Bringing a Modern Sensibility to a Historical Drama
This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
The 2024 television series 'Shogun,' a historical drama set in feudal Japan, was a worldwide hit. The show and its actors won a record 18 Emmy Awards, as well as four Golden Globes. Critics and viewers praised it not only for its writing, acting and production, but also for its devotion to accurately portraying Japan and Japanese culture in the early 1600s.
The historical drama, which has been renewed for a second season, is based on a novel of the same name by James Clavell, published in 1975 and adapted into a mini-series in 1980. The story focuses on the relationship between Lord Yoshii Toranaga, a warlord struggling to fend off his political rivals, and John Blackthorne, a marooned English navigator who becomes an adviser to Toranaga. The 2024 series gives a more prominent and complex role to Toda Mariko, Blackthorne's interpreter.
The characters' historical counterparts are Tokugawa Ieyasu (Toranaga), the 'shogun,' or military ruler who helped to unite Japan; William Adams (Blackthorne), the first Englishman ever to reach Japan; and Hosokawa Gracia (Mariko), a Japanese noblewoman and converted Catholic.
The novel and two series show varying degrees of faithfulness to the events they're based on. The newest 'Shogun,' however, is built around its Japanese characters and culture in ways that the 1980 series was not, foregrounding those characters' points of view and their presence as drivers of the plot. And the accuracy the show embraces in details as small as gestures and fabric colors makes it a striking recreation of some parts of historical Japanese culture.
It does include changes — some modernized language, for example, or stylistic omissions — to make it understandable to modern viewers around the world. But its commitment to authenticity makes 'Shogun' a compelling lens through which to examine television's role in interpreting and portraying history, as well as how actors inherit and embody history and culture in their performances.
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