TV Review – Shogun Season One

Shogun Season One (2024)
Written by Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks, Shannon Goss, Nigel Williams, Emily Yoshida, Matt Lambert, Maegan Houang, and Caillin Puente
Directed by Jonathan van Tulleken, Charlotte Brändström, Frederick E.O. Toye, Hiromi Kamata, Takeshi Fukunaga, and Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour

I must confess that of all the Japanese media, the stories surrounding this historical period typically leave me cold. I can acknowledge that there is tremendous quality here, but the philosophy of life is so dramatically alien to me that I have difficulty connecting to it. Unlike the protagonist here, I do not feel the intense etiquette systems. It comes across to me as oppressive and suffocating. But then, I wouldn’t be surprised if a Japanese person who finds this perspective normal looked at how I lived my life and felt that I was in a sort of prison, too. All societies are, to an extent, prisons; they have rules relatively rigid to outsiders. And that’s kind of what this show is exploring.

John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) is an Englishman in 1600 AD who, with his Dutch crew, is desperate to find Japan, where the Portuguese have established strong trade ties. By chance, he ends up shipwrecked. Blackthorne is in the territory of Lord Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), a powerful daimyo embroiled in some tense political problems. Blackthorne is assigned Lady Mariko (Anna Sawai) as his translator, and the two develop an intense relationship that threatens them both as other parties become aware. Our protagonist observes the system of personal honor and devotion to a lord in Japan, and it reshapes how he sees the world, eventually realizing he will likely never leave and that he needs to understand his new home.

I have never read the James Clavell source novel & I likely never will, so I can’t compare this to that. On the surface, it does feel like a show made possible by the success of Game of Thrones. The opening credits are a clear nod to that series, a Japanese sand garden made to serve as a miniature of the landscape and conflicts we will explore in the show. This series is about stunning battles between samurai and careful political machinations. 

Every move a lord makes is mannered and thought about. We have brief scenes where Toranaga sits in nature, on the edge of a cliff, looking out over the sea as his lieutenants sit meters away for hours until he announces his plan. This is juxtaposed with the quickness of death. A lord may take days to decide how to push their opponent into a compromising position. When those plans are executed, a character’s death may happen in the flash of a katana, followed by their head rolling across the ground. You will meet characters, become close to them, and then they will die. There’s a lot of seppuku in this show.

Three core characters (Blackthorne, Toranaga, Mariko) have separate strands that have become very intertwined by the end of the first season. They have experienced tremendous amounts of death, and that has shaped the way they see all of life. There’s a refrain as Blackthorn wrestles with ritual suicide, eventually understanding the honor of ending your life at your own hands. That’s one of the most prominent themes in the show – death is unavoidable; thus, when faced with being killed by man or nature, there is honor found in doing it yourself. To a Western mind, that could be shocking as the Christian Bible, one of the foundational pieces of Western thought, vilifies suicide. To kill yourself in the Western mind is to be condemned to eternal damnation. 

It would have been straightforward for this show to fall into gross Orientalism, but the showrunners came into it with the intent of demystifying Japan. While we have the trope of the outsider character with Blackthorne, it is Mariko who grounds the Japanese perspective. She’s also someone living in between the worlds; she has converted to Catholicism after an arduous period of her life. She speaks English and Japanese. She is a married woman, and as the show goes on, we learn that that relationship is unhealthy. Blackthorne is someone exotic and different. Her family background is one of rebellion. The question of how Mariko will choose to live her life is a significant part of the season, and we get a definitive answer in the final episode.

The most substantial element of Shogun is the dialogue. This is top-tier writing full of complexity, nuance, and ideas that clearly paint who each of these people is. People speak about the topic, but rich subtext is beneath it all. The plot’s core revolves around the shogun’s death a year before the show begins and how a council of regents is ruling while the heir comes of age. The head of the council, Ishido, clearly has designs on acting as a shogun without formally taking that title, employing brutal yet subtle tactics to hold onto power. When the council meets, the visuals convey much meaning that adds to the dialogue. Where characters sit in relation to others, communicates a clear hierarchy of power with the guards and the lowest remaining outside the room, but still watching what unfolds. There’s a very obvious visual grammar at work here.

While I certainly appreciated Shogun, I can’t lie. I felt some moments dragged for me, but that has more to do with my perspective and relation to the culture rather than the show’s actual quality. I’m a big believer in exploring why a piece of media doesn’t click with you as intensely as others, and more often than not, it’s a personal thing. Certain audience members usually like to turn their dislike of something into an attack on the art. I think the series finale of Lost is fantastic. I loved The Last Jedi, I saw it twice in theaters. If you don’t like these things, that’s fine. I’m probably asking too much, but it would be nice if discourse about media moved more in this direction. I won’t be holding my breath.