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Shōgun Has a Japanese-Superiority Complex
The series is determined to foreground Japanese perspectives, but it doesn’t quite know what to make of Japan’s more unsavory history.
The publicity surrounding the series has focused on its fidelity to authenticity: multiple rounds of translation to give the dialogue a “ classical ” feel; fastidious attention to how katana swords should be slung, how women of the nobility should fold their knees when they sit, how kimonos should be colored and styled; and, crucially, a decentralization of the narrative so that it’s not dominated by the character John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), an Englishman whose merchant vessel washes up on the archipelago’s shores in the first episode. Much of the action takes place in splendidly re-created interiors: miles of golden tatami and glossy wooden floors, austere rooms adorned with circular cushions for sitting and darkly glowing lacquer trays for dining, and paper doors that slide open to reveal flowering explosions of color in the courtyard. And the irony is that Japan could not maintain this balance anyway, its penchant for militarism leading straight to a cataclysmic correction in the 20th century in which it was stripped of its capacity to wage war, leaving it with the remnants of the other half of the historical ledger: the world of lacquer and silk robes and good food.
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