‘Shōgun’ Writers Explain Why Ochiba and Mariko’s Friendship is the Key to Everything

The penultimate episode of FX‘s Shōgun is simply titled “Crimson Sky.” The phrase, of course, refers to Toranaga’s (Hiroyuki Sanada) top secret battle plan to conquer Osaka with massive blow. It’s intended to be a last resort for the tactical genius and for weeks the implication has been that Toranaga would need an army, a ton of firepower, and an awful lot of luck to pull it off.

Shōgun Episode 9 “Crimson Sky” instead reveals all he needed was Mariko (Anna Sawai).

Mariko travels to Osaka where she tells reigning lord Ishido (Takehiro Hira) that Toranaga has demanded that she escort his two favorite consorts to Edo immediately. Ishido understands that she is flouting his unspoken rule that everyone in the city is his hostage and attempts to bully her into staying put through words and force. However, Lady Ochiba (Fumi Nikaido) — the true power player in Osaka — immediately recognizes the power of what Mariko is attempting.

“Toranaga and Mariko’s plan for Crimson Sky is not a battle. It’s not like this big assault on Osaka that everyone kind of anticipates it to be,” Shōgun Episode 9 “Crimson Sky” co-writer Puente told Decider during a Zoom call last week. “It’s like this battle of wills and words and that’s the domain of Ochiba and Mariko.”

“They are the two masters of it. That’s how they’ve been fighting this whole time. That’s how they’ve carved out their place in the world and how they’ve maintained their status and like power despite all the things that have happened to them.”

Shōgun Episode 9 “Crimson Sky” was co-written by Puente and Shōgun co-creator Rachel Kondo. Decider learned during our Zoom conversation with them last week that Episode 9 went through many permutations throughout the production process, including a version that did not end with Mariko’s dramatic death. However, Puente and Kondo’s north star was their obsession with Lady Ochiba, one of the most enigmatic characters from James Clavell’s 1975 novel. As in the show, we hear about the heir’s formidable from characters like Toranaga and Ishido, but we don’t meet her until much later in the story.

“This is this incredibly powerful person, but we don’t actually get her perspective until so, so late in the game,” Puente said, noting that she only arrives in the latter part of the 1000+ page novel. “I feel like both Rachel and I were like, ‘Who is this character?’”

Lady Ochiba is based on Yodo-dono, or Lady Chacha, a real historic figure from feudal Japan. Both Ochiba and Yodo-dono were consorts to the previously ruling Taikō and rose to power by producing the Taikō an heir. After the Taikō dies, Ochiba’s one role in life is to keep her young son, the Taikō’s heir Yaemon (Sen Mars) alive. “Helping” her are the council of regents, five rival lords who are meant to balance each other out, thereby ensuring none of them can take power and become the all-powerful Shōgun in the heir’s place.

During our conversation, Caillan Puente noted that there’s a scene in Shōgun Episode 9 “Crimson Sky” where Ochiba “tells Mariko, in this like moment of frustration, that like she only exists to protect her son. Like she doesn’t exist as the person that Mariko knew her as anymore.”

The person Ochiba has become by the time Shōgun takes place is somewhat of an antagonist to Toranaga. Her obsession with maintaining control over the council and protecting her son creates the situation that puts Toranaga and his vassals in peril. Throughout Clavell’s book, Toranaga thinks bitterly of Ochiba as a “treacherous tigress.” It was a depiction that Rachel Kondo said they started with in the early days of making Shōgun.

“She was never a mustache twirly [villain in FX’s Shōgun], but I think she was, in our minds, a less complicated villain,” Rachel Kondo said. “Like she was just a kind of a villain who was going through the story,”

Kondo also revealed that it was a woman working in props who mentioned to Puente that the Ochiba they were prepping for the screen didn’t wholly square with her reputation in Japanese culture.

“She was a very revered character in Japanese culture. It would be like us and, I don’t know, Eleanor Roosevelt or somebody who we are all familiar with,” Kondo said. “We had to rethink. We couldn’t just apply whatever story we wanted to her because we wanted to be respectful of the built-in awareness of her.”

“It actually taught us to think about her in really complex ways and I think she evolved in a more interesting way.”

Shōgun fans probably already know the big change Puente and Kondo made to Ochiba’s backstory: they made her childhood best friends with Mariko. It was a flashback they included in drafts of their Episode 9 script before it wound up as the cold open to Episode 6.

“This is what I don’t think the book had, which was these girls. A feudal Japan girlhood in which it’s very much a patriarchal society and you are a pawn for your father and you do his bidding. I think that in that setting, naturally, you search, right?” Kondo said in a separate conversation Decider had with her and fellow series co-creator Justin Marks. “Or if you were lucky to have come upon it, you hold on to the sisterly camaraderie, the sisterly affection, the sisterly safe haven, right?”

Kondo revealed that the writers talked about how that closeness would manifest itself on screen, sparking the idea for the shot where the young versions of Mariko and Ochiba are sleeping in the same bed with their backs touching.

“Talking about these two women who are so kind of alone in the story, like we wanted to bring them together and see what it would be like to kind of explore the politics, like through their perspective,” Puente said.

As it happens, the real battle for Osaka plays out completely through these women’s perspectives. Toranaga and Ishido might be technically in charge, but Mariko’s never really targeting the lowborn bureaucrat.

“Ochiba is clearly who Mariko is actually facing off with,” Puente said. And Ochiba knows it.

“[Ochiba]’s the one who sees how dangerous [Mariko’s] words are and realizes the political position she’s putting them in. This like trap she set,” Puente said before explaining that Ishido is not only blind to the real battle that’s occurring, but foolishly thinks he can use “blunt force” to stop Mariko.

Kondo went on to explain that “the power, too, that Toranaga has, above and beyond someone like Ishido” is that Toranaga actually takes time to study the relationship between these two high-born women. He drills Mariko on her past with Ochiba.

“He’s storing information, right? As to how he can kind of blindside everybody and hinge everything on this girlhood friendship,” Kondo said. “And I think that that’s what he has over someone like Ishido. It wouldn’t even occur to him to understand that these relationships are powerful and they have an effect.”

In the end, as fans of Shōgun will see when they either watch Episode 10 “A Dream of a Dream” on Hulu today or FX tonight, Toranaga’s inkling that Mariko and Ochiba’s relationship is important will be the deciding factor in this entire power struggle.

Shōgun doesn’t come down to canon fire, samurai swords, or even duel between two men. The ending hinges on the love two little girls once shared and the willful women they became.

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