FX's Shogun Takes A New Approach To An Old Story
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
The people he met when he landed in Japan in search of riches, are viewed and portrayed as primitive.
In the 2024 Shogun adaptation the Japanese characters are fully formed. The series elevates the stories of the Japanese characters as much as it does Blackthorne's.
That was a deliberate decision on the part of Shogun co-creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks.
In the 1980 version of Shogun, Japan, its culture and its people were portrayed as foreign and remote. What do we lose when stories are only told from one point of view? And what can be gained when we widen the lens?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Shogun, the staggering saga of feudal Japan, the story of ruling warlords battling for ultimate supremacy. |
| 0:08.0 | They are challenged by a stranger from across the seas John Blackthorne. |
| 0:13.0 | When the James Clavell novel Show Gun |
| 0:14.8 | was adapted for TV for the first time back in 1980, |
| 0:18.2 | the story centered on the shipwrecked English pilot John Blackthorne. |
| 0:22.0 | I'm pilot major of the Erasmus out of Rotterdam. |
| 0:25.0 | Following the death of the leader, the battle for the title in feudal Japan among the Japanese Lords |
| 0:30.0 | gets thrown for a loop when John Blackthorne washes up on the coast, or as the 1980 trailer put it, |
| 0:35.6 | The one man with the power to change Japan's destiny for all time. |
| 0:39.6 | A lot of power for a guy who doesn't even speak the language. And the original show |
| 0:45.1 | decided the audience would experience Japan the way that Blackthorne did with |
| 0:48.8 | no subtitles. It's a choice that leaves the audience entirely in Blackthorne's hands in his world |
| 0:55.2 | with Japan and its people only playing a part in his story. |
| 1:00.3 | Which I think might have been maybe right for the audiences of 1980 at the time because they didn't really |
| 1:06.5 | know much about Japanese culture. |
| 1:08.7 | That's Hawaii Chan Bowie, entertainment editor at Inverse. |
| 1:11.4 | She says a 2024 American audience has a deeper |
| 1:15.0 | understanding and interest in Japanese culture, signified by the new FX |
| 1:19.2 | adaptation of Shogun's choice to resetter the story around more of its Japanese characters. |
| 1:25.0 | It is not about the sort of stranger and a strange land, fish out of water, |
| 1:31.0 | story that we've kind of come to associate with a white man in Japan type of |
| 1:35.8 | narrative. Consider this in 1980 Japan its culture and its people were |
... |
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