Why a Historian Is Looking Forward to the New Shōgun Series

 He original Shōgun was a rare phenomenon. More than 1,200 pages and 400,000 words in length, it proved stunningly successful, staying on the best-seller list for more than 30 weeks and selling millions of copies. The 1975 novel presented a fictionalized account of a real event: the arrival of an English pilot, William Adams, to Japan in 1600. Clavell reimagined the story, giving his hero (whom he renamed John Blackthorne), a starring role in the archipelago’s turbulent domestic politics in the months leading up to the climactic battle of Sekigahara, which brought more than a century of constant warfare to a final end.

Some historians criticized Shōgun as a text rife with errors and national stereotypes. But others like Henry Smith championed the book, arguing that it conveyed “more information about Japan to more people than all the combined writings of scholars, journalists, and novelists since the Pacific War.”

Five years after its publication and millions of dollars later, Shōgun made its way to television screens in the form of a five-episode miniseries. It, too, was a huge hit, captivating a massive audience estimated at more than 120 million people. Even so, many fans of the novel grumbled about how it flipped the story by rendering Japan an alien, unintelligible place where Japanese dialogue was left untranslated and unsubtitled. For those historians who had defended the book, the miniseries left a bitter taste in their mouths. 

The imminent premiere of FX’s adaptation raises a key question. What kind of Shōgun will we see? All the clues suggest a break from the 1980 miniseries and a return to what made the book so special. 

The backstory to Shōgun is as compelling as the book itself. It starts in 1942 when Japanese forces captured Clavell, a young officer in the Royal Artillery. He ended up in Changi, the infamous Japanese prisoner of war camp in Singapore. Changi became the formative experience of Clavell’s life. It was, he explained, “my university instead of my prison.” 

It left a deep imprint. For years, Clavell carried a can of sardines with him while fighting an impulse to rummage through trash for food. And it provided the subject material for his first novel, King Rat, which presented a semi-fictionalized account of his experience as a prisoner of war. 

Strikingly, years of captivity left Clavell with no hatred. To the contrary, it instilled a deep and sustained admiration for Japan and its people. When it came to Shōgun, Clavell wrote what he described as a “passionately pro-Japanese” book.