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Tokuma Nishioka Brought the Shōgun Set to Tears


“I looked around and they were clapping, very, very silently, and some of them were crying. I thought, I guess I did well.”

The series has killed off characters via boiling alive, beheading, earthquake, bandit attack, cannon fire, and bloody accident, for losing a battle, disrespecting the Council of Regents, or breaking a facetiously uttered rule against touching a rotting pheasant. But even under those established rules, the seppuku sacrifice of Toda Hiromatsu in the eighth episode, “ The Abyss of Life,” is an agonizing surprise. It was Nishioka’s idea, he says through a translator, to limit the death count in order to emphasize the singularity of Hiromatsu and Toranaga’s bond.

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