When Shogun Arriving on our screens earlier this year, it did so with expectations as heavy as a samurai in full armour. A sprawling historical drama set in the tumultuous Sengoku period of feudal Japan, the series, in its epic scope and promise of adventure, has been compared to HBO’s colossal hit Game of ThronesMonths later, it is now the most nominated series at the 2024 Emmy Awards, with 25 nominations.
The story centers on the encounter of two ambitious men from very different worlds, as well as a mysterious samurai. John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) is an English sailor who ends up shipwrecked in Japan. Lord Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) is a shrewd and powerful daimyo—a feudal lord subordinate to the ruling shogun—who seeks to gain an advantage over his political rivals. Lady Mariko (Anna Sawai) is an enigmatic and skilled fighter with shady family ties.
Shogun has an impeccable pedigree. The new FX/Disney+ series, created by Top Gun: Maverick The novel by Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo is an adaptation of James Clavell’s eponymous novel, which was a bestseller when it was first published in 1975. The book was later adapted into a successful miniseries in the 1980s starring Richard Chamberlain, Toshiro Mifune, and Yoko Shimada. Although the story is fictional, many of the characters are based on real figures from Japanese history.
Indeed, Clavell once revealed that his best-selling novel was inspired by a sentence he read in his daughter’s schoolbook: “In 1600, an Englishman went to Japan and became a samurai.” This is the true story of how a sailor named William Adams became the first Westerner to achieve that historic rank.
William Adams was born in Kent in 1564. He later wrote about his childhood in a letter: “I am a man of Kent, born in a town called Gillingham, two English miles from Rochester, one mile from Chatham, where the king’s ships are…”
This proximity to British shipyards would have a decisive influence on Adams. At the age of 12, his father died and he was apprenticed to a master shipbuilder in Limehouse. He spent the next twelve years learning shipbuilding, navigation and astronomy before joining the Royal Navy at the age of 24.
That year, 1588, he was captain of a British Navy supply ship that was fighting the Spanish Armada under Sir Francis Drake. After the Spanish defeat, Adams married, had two children, and soon took a job as a ship’s pilot with the Barbary Company, a trading company.
In 1598, at the age of 34, Adams led an expedition that hoped to reach the East Indies (present-day Indonesia) by sailing through the Strait of Magellan in Chile. The voyage was disrupted by illness and bad weather, but finally, in 1600, after 19 months at sea, Adams’ ship anchored off the island of Kyushu, Japan. It was the first European ship to reach the country.
Adams and the other survivors (only 23 of the 100 sailors who left England) were summoned to Osaka to meet with Tokugawa Ieyasu, a powerful local lord who planned to rule Japan as shogun, the military governor who controlled the country. When Ieyasu questioned Adams, he realized that he could put the newcomer’s vast knowledge of shipbuilding to good use. Instead of executing Adams and his crew as pirates, he made the Englishman one of his trusted confidants. Adams continued in this role after Ieyasu became shogun in 1603, and helped Ieyasu build Japan’s first Western-style sailing ship the following year.
Although Ieyasu honored Adams, the sailor first requested to be allowed to return to his family in England. When his request was denied, Adams accepted his fate and settled permanently in Japan. The shogun presented Adams with two swords representing the authority of a samurai and decreed that William Adams, the pilot, had died and that Miura Anjin, a samurai, had been born in his place. Ieyasu stated that by this action, he was “freeing” Adams to serve the shogunate permanently, while making his wife in England a widow.
As a ruler, Ieyasu was eager to learn from different cultures and asked Adams to write to other countries to encourage their traders to visit Japan. He allowed Adams to open the East India Company’s first trading post in the city of Hirado in 1613, and the Englishman received a substantial income as well as his own property. He married a local woman, had two children, and began traveling outside Japan and resuming some of his expeditions. However, after Ieyasu’s death in 1616, his successor Tokugawa Hidetada pursued an increasingly isolationist path for Japan. Adams’ influence waned and after falling ill, he died in Hirado in 1620.
In James Clavell ShogunJohn Blackthorne’s character is heavily influenced by the life of William Adams, while Lord Yoshi Toranaga replaces Tokugawa Ieyasu.
However, although Clavell has done extensive research into Japanese history and the Sengoku period in which the story is set, the plot itself is a fantasy.
While Shogun While the story isn’t entirely historically accurate, the actors behind the new adaptation have stressed that there’s still a lot to learn from the story. It’s not only rich in details about life in feudal Japan, but also touches on timeless themes around the struggle for power and the difficulty of bringing peace out of conflict.
Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Lord Yoshi Toranaga, explained at a press conference for Shogun that this resonance is exactly why he is eager to tell this story now. “When I got this role, [I thought about] “It’s not important to do this show right now,” he said.
“Toranaga’s model is based on the real shogun, Ieyasu, who created the era of peace after the war period for about 260 years,” he explained. “That’s why he became a hero, both then and now.” Sanada believes audiences will be eager to see the kind of hero who seeks to establish peace and rule wisely on screen. “People are waiting to know his story,” he said. “That was my biggest motivation at the beginning.”
So while Shogun It shouldn’t be taken as a history lesson, but it promises to shed light on a fascinating period in Japan’s past, when a heroic leader managed to forge stability out of chaos – with the help of a Kentish sailor.
“Shōgun” is available on FX in the US and on Disney+ in the UK. Live updates from the 2024 Emmy Awards here.
