2024-04-27 11:33:52
Hollywood filmmakers have always been fascinated by Japan, but their depictions more often revealed stereotypes experienced in the West rather than the reality of the Asian country. The new Shogun series, the last episode of which will be released this Tuesday on the Disney+ video library, tries to avoid prejudices. The Japanese themselves are satisfied.
It is not the first time that Shogun has attracted millions of viewers to the screens. The previous American adaptation of the same material from 1980 was watched by a third of households owning a TV in the US and became the second most successful series there of all time, the Hollywood Reporter wrote in 2020. The series Kořeny, only three years older, was more popular. Shogun was also praised by critics – it won the Emmy and Golden Globe television awards.
The original series also made a hit of sushi restaurants and changed the view of tuna – from a dish intended for cats to a delicacy for their owners, according to the Japanese newspaper The Japan Times.
Australian writer James Clavell invented the story of the English sailor John Blackthorne, who with his crew is shipwrecked off the coast of Japan in the 17th century and subsequently becomes part of power struggles, both physical and political. Although fictional, it was inspired by the fate of a real-life island sailor, William Adams, the first Briton to visit Japan.
Clavell’s 1975 book became a bestseller and sparked interest in Japan, but it is not very popular among experts in the field. “For those seriously interested in the country, on the contrary, it may create a bad and historically inaccurate idea of this period,” Japanologist Matyáš Šimice explains to Aktuálně.cz.
The new adaptation tries to change that. It was made by husband and wife Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, who has Japanese roots. From the beginning, they wanted to pay homage to Japanese culture and history. Mark Schilling, who worked as a consultant to the screenwriters, said that he was actively encouraged to “respect Japanese culture and do everything to show the reality of the time, place and people, from the dialogue to the costumes”, as quoted by the British newspaper The Guardian.
The series deviates from the book in the storyline, when in the original English hero had the role of a so-called white savior, i.e. a person helping to civilize a foreign, from his point of view, less developed culture.
However, we follow the story of the new Shogun from the point of view of the Japanese protagonist. More than 70 percent of the dialogue is in Japanese, and the filming was supervised by experts to ensure that the clothing and tea ceremonies were also period-appropriate.
Thanks to this, according to Schilling, the chances of success in the Japanese market increased significantly, where the first series from 1980, aimed exclusively at non-Japanese audiences, “failed significantly”.
Sexy Japanese women
The original Shogun from the 1980s did not deviate from how Japanese people and Japan are portrayed in Hollywood to this day. “In Hollywood, there has already been a kind of confusion about what a Japanese person looks like and what ‘Japanese values’ are, which very often does not correspond to reality,” says Šimice, referring to a study by expert Sheridan Prasso, who addressed the issue. One of the most common stereotypes concerns the portrayal of women. “The West has a constant image of sweet, gentle, even childlike Japanese women,” she says, citing the opera Madama Butterfly or the 2005 film Geisha as examples.
“Japanese women played sexy women, submissive characters, or action heroines,” said New Zealand-Japanese actress Anna Sawai, who plays Lady Toda Mariko in the current Shogun adaptation. “I wanted to see more depth, and I think Mariko really shows the inner workings of Japanese women and what’s inside of us. She shows a different kind of strength that the Western media has never captured,” the Guardian quoted her as saying.
Stereotyping also concerned men, especially fighters, whether those from ancient times or more recent ones in the films Karate Kid or Kill Bill. “In Hollywood movies, every samurai is willing to commit seppuku, ritual suicide, for the slightest insult to his honor,” the Japanologist gives another example.
In the past, it was more common to make fun of characters of Japanese origin. Examples can be the supporting characters of Japanese people played by white people in the otherwise popular film Breakfast at Tiffany’s from 1961 or in the Bond film You Only Live Twice from the second half of the same decade.
The Japanese audience tends to be tolerant of such a portrayal and sometimes uses it themselves – for example, the representative women’s soccer team is nicknamed Yamato nadeshiko, which denotes a pure female beauty characterized by gentleness, benevolence and loyalty. It is directly related to Japanese women, points out Matyáš Šimice.
The first authentic depiction of Japan
The film adaptation of the most successful Japanese manga comic Ghost in the Shell from 2017 was an exception, when critical voices were also heard from Japan. In the Hollywood version, the main character Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg from Japan, was portrayed by a white American, Scarlett Johansson. The authors were subsequently accused of so-called whitewashing, i.e. the practice where characters of diverse origins are replaced by white people.
The new series has successfully avoided this, although Šimice points to another problem that is common in Western productions and is also present here. “Hollywood usually finds ‘its Japanese’ or ‘its Chinese’, who is then cast in all the films for the next few years,” he describes. That’s why Shogun also features at least two actors that viewers may know from Marvel’s comic book movies: Hiroyuki Sanada and Tadanobu Asano.
However, the creators apparently managed to bring the series as close as possible to the reality of the time, as evidenced by the feedback directly from Japan. “Once I started watching, I couldn’t stop. For the first time in a long time, I was amazed,” the Guardian quoted one Japanese viewer as saying. Actress Anna Sawai evaluates the act similarly. “It is the first truly authentic and accurate portrait of our history, culture and people,” he believes.
Video: Trailer from the Shogun miniseries
The Shogun series is in the Disney+ video library with Czech subtitles. | Video: FX Networks