Shogun, the shocking Japanese story that inspired the latest television hit of 2024

Jorge Loser Madrid

Madrid

Updated Thursday, March 21, 2024-9:32 p.m.

Many who are already combing one gray hair, or more than two, will be familiar with the name

Shogun

, the title of a new 10-episode miniseries released on

Disney+

, thanks to the previous version from 1980, which adapted for the first time the

bestseller

of James Clavell, in turn freely inspired by real events. This raises the question of whether the current adaptation is a

remake

or a historical recreation but, either way, it has not appeared again by chance. It's unlikely that FX Networks overlooked the fact that the original achieved

some of NBC's highest ratings at the time

, impressive numbers for its time, which translated into a strong impact on American television, influencing other works. of fiction in ways that are perhaps undervalued today when we see the success of series like Game of Thrones.

Who wouldn't want to see an epic saga of war, passion and power set in feudal Japan?

For now, the miniseries, which has new episodes every Tuesday until April 23, seeks the milestones of the previous one and accumulated more than

9 million views

worldwide through Hulu and

Disney+

only in the first six days since its launch. premiere, where it reached number one on Hulu,

becoming the main general entertainment series of that period internationally

. According to John Landgraf, director of FX Networks, the book on which the two miniseries are based is very valuable material to find the point of difference between the two, "when we examined the original material we realized that it was a very rich in research and development, very convincing and precise, of feudal Japan.

The text tells a fictional story told partially from the perspective of

John Blackthorne

, a sailor whose ship reaches the eastern coast of Japan after a storm and turns out to be the first Englishman to reach Japan at a time when the Portuguese were the only ones Europeans who did business in the region, controlling most of the world's maritime trade. The story takes place at the end of the

Sengoku period

and the foreigner is loosely based on the sailor William Adams, who in 1980 was played by

Richard Chamberlain

. In that adaptation, condensed into five episodes, the story was told for the most part from his perspective, something that has now been resolved from the root of the project.

NBC's flaw was that it paid little attention to the Japanese characters, and for Landgraf

"there are many points of view that were omitted in the original series because at the time it was thought that American audiences would not want to see the story from the original point of view. from an Asian point of view

. And now, I think it's impossible to understand this story without telling it from both sides." A problem that the new

Shogun

has solved by having an award-winning Japanese cast, an unprecedented fact in an American production, but which had begun to change in the second season of

The Terror

. Blackthorne is now played by

Cosmo Jarvis

, but his on-screen weight is greatly offset by Lord Toranaga, here played by the iconic

Hiroyuki Sanada

.

"There are many people quite committed to the same idea, which is not to limit ourselves to making the whitewashed version of what we have seen before"

John Landgraf, head of FX Networks

Sanada made it a condition that actors be hired who fairly represented his culture and so we have characters like Lady Mariko, originally played by

Yoko Shimada

, who now becomes one of the main characters, this time played by

Anna Sawai

. Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, the creators of Shogun, had a complex process of translating their scripts into Japanese, adapting and checking them by specialists at that time.

As they tell

Hindustan Times,

they focused on locating "what mistakes we have made and how we can avoid them. On the one hand, it is very simple: you hire a team and Japanese consultants, but we also had to combine it with a sensitivity that combines East and West. It was a journey that required on the part of our Canadian-American team an openness to listening and

on the part of our Japanese team a willingness to speak up when things were bad, and to do so with generosity

."

The series is an exciting look at the growing tension between the Japanese and the Portuguese Jesuits amid Portugal's influence over the region's trade, especially between Japan and China, and is also a key part of the history of the early 17th century. which, for Landgraf "it is difficult, it is not easy to do well. "But there are a lot of people here who are quite committed to the same idea, which is to

not just make the whitewashed version of what we've seen before

, but to try to make something that's better, more honest." One of the challenges was to make a faithful recreation of the

Council of Regents

, of which Toranaga is a part, and which is based on the real regents who ruled on behalf of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's son, who was five years old when his father died.

Now the role of

William Adams

in the creation of a commercial relationship between Japan and the Netherlands also has an important weight in the plot, and beyond the first stages of the clash of cultures and values ​​between East and West in a colonialist context, the story seeks to highlight the real impact of his life there. Marks explains "China and Japan did not have a good relationship, so the Portuguese got in the middle and

benefited greatly to the point of usury

. The Japanese had no prospect of this until a Dutch ship with an English pilot appeared, which began to reveal a reality that perhaps some members of the Japanese contingent did not know. Now, they are beginning to see the light of day and that is really where the story of the series begins."