As we prepare to pick our next president, America remains sharply, disconcertingly divided. Yet there is one leader about whom a great many Americans seem to agree. He isn’t a politician, an American or even real. His name is Yoshii Toranaga, and he is a fictional warlord from feudal Japan.
Toranaga, who’s based on the real-life Japanese warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu, is the character at the center of “Shogun,” the TV series likely to sweep the Emmys on Sunday night, having already earned a record 14 creative arts Emmys last weekend. It’s quite a trick for a show set at the dawn of 17th-century Japan, featuring mostly Japanese dialogue.
This isn’t the first time that the story of “Shogun” has been told to an American audience: The 1975 novel of the same name by James Clavell inspired a similarly lauded mini-series in 1980. But the current telling is different in crucial ways — and its popularity demonstrates how sharply America’s attitudes toward Japan have changed over the past 50 years. If American audiences once regarded Japan as an alien land, compelling in all its differences, we’re now able to see in the series a common experience that feels strikingly relevant to our own tumultuous times and polarized politics.
The 1980 version of “Shogun” earned record ratings for NBC and won several Emmys, including best limited series. But that “Shogun” centered squarely on the viewpoint of John Blackthorne, played by Richard Chamberlain, a shipwrecked English sailor who finds himself on Japanese shores. Through his eyes, Japan is depicted as having exotic customs and cruel punishments, counterpoints to the civilized West. Blackthorne served as the audience’s avatar in the Japan of “Shogun,” a strange and, to Blackthorne, often enigmatic land.
The show’s tone was consistent with the attitudes of the era. In 1980, many middle-aged Americans still remembered Japan as an adversary in the war in the Pacific. (Clavell, a British officer who served in the Royal Artillery, spent the latter part of World War II in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.) As a flood of Japanese products imperiled American manufacturing industries, tensions over Japan’s rise as an economic power fueled an epidemic of Japan-bashing of the figurative and sometimes literal variety.
Presidential candidates on both sides railed against Japanese companies for what they saw as unfair trade practices. Talk-show hosts targeted Japan with endless jokes. In widely publicized stunts, workers and politicians smashed Japanese products with sledgehammers. And the specter of Japan as a threatening rival proliferated in pop culture; in his 1992 follow-up to “Jurassic Park,” Michael Crichton penned “Rising Sun,” a novel that featured anti-Japanese screeds and depicted an America brought to its knees by a rapacious Japanese company.
When the Japanese economic bubble popped in 1990, ushering in an era of economic and emotional depression in Japan that proved so bleak that economists call it the “Lost Decades,” Japan mostly dropped out of the headlines, save for schadenfreude about its various social ills. But even though the country imploded as an economic superpower, it exploded as a pop-cultural one. Video games, manga and anime and new superstars with names including Usagi, Goku and Pikachu won hearts and minds among Generations X through Z.
Most Americans no longer see Japan as an enemy or a rival. Neither do they see it as particularly foreign. Younger Americans, raised on cultural depictions of Japanese fantasies, are particularly primed to appreciate the version of the country’s history that the 2024 “Shogun” series offers.
Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, the creators of the new version (and a married couple), expressed their intent to “put the Japanese language and perspective at the forefront — to get closer to these characters, as opposed to keeping them at arm’s length.” Their iteration of “Shogun” elevates the perspective of Toranaga, the charismatic warlord played by Hiroyuki Sanada, who serves not only as the show’s star but also as one of its producers.
The 2024 version is as much a product of its time as was the 1980 one. Today’s audiences demand sensitivity and authenticity in the portrayals of other cultures, and we are also better positioned to appreciate the context of the warlords’ fractured era. The sociopolitical tumult depicted in the show deftly evokes the rifts in our own divided society.
“Shogun” is set in a time known as Sengoku Jidai — “the Warring States Era” — a historic period of civil wars that lasted over a century, leaving Japan a shattered nation. Rival warlords, playing a real-life “Game of Thrones,” built armies, forged alliances and waged ferocious battles for territory.
We Americans are living through a Sengoku Jidai of our own: not an era of warring states, but of warring cultures. Sanada’s Toranaga is exactly the kind of figure lacking in our modern landscape: canny enough to navigate a polarized and fractured world and skillful enough to stitch it back together. Is it any wonder audiences have been so drawn to Sanada’s portrayal of Toranaga? The “Shogun” of 2024 is more than just compelling television. It’s national wish fulfillment.
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