The real shogun
That boy cut down the whole town solo
That boy cut down the whole town solo
Shogun - New Mini-Series Debut On FX
- Thread starter blackbull1970
- Start date
God-Of-War-420
Mr. Pool
I hated this boring shit as a kid, is the new one better? Still white savior last samurai bullshit?
Gonna watch the last 2 episodes this weekend at home. And on Hulu.
If the Portuguese was smart, they would have flooded Japan with Blonde Hair/Blued Eyed White Women.
Those Japanese Men would have immediately signed the country over without a shot fired.
HaHa!!!
If the Portuguese was smart, they would have flooded Japan with Blonde Hair/Blued Eyed White Women.
Those Japanese Men would have immediately signed the country over without a shot fired.
HaHa!!!
The 1980's "Shogun" didn't usher in a decade of Japanophilia by itself. But it played its part
The second highest-rated miniseries after "Roots" announced America's rising fascination with all things Japanese
By MELANIE MCFARLAND
Senior Critic
MARCH 8, 2024
Toshiro Mifune (1920 - 1997, left), as Yoshi Toranaga, and American actor Richard Chamberlain as John Blackthorne, examine a samurai sword in the TV miniseries 'Shogun', 1980.
If you want to believe one of the more dubious claims concerning the influence of the 1980 adaptation of “Shōgun,” Americans may thank the production for bringing sushi to middle America.
This apocryphal trivia hasn’t been entirely debunked; it’s more accurate to say that it is roundly doubted. Never mind that Japanese dining establishments like Benihana had been wowing Americans since the mid-'60s, or that sushi as we know it didn’t appear until the 1800s. ("Shōgun" is set in 1600.) The allegation’s source is the behind-the-scenes documentary “The Making of Shōgun.”
Given the times in which NBC’s adaptation of James Clavell’s novel aired, however, that detail feels true even if it isn’t.
The 1980 miniseries was the first to bring a highly fantasized version of Edo-era Japan to American primetime television by way of a production filmed entirely in Japan. It went on to win a Peabody Award along with several Golden Globes and Primetime Emmys, including for outstanding limited series, along with giving Richard Chamberlain’s career a second wind.
Looking back on America’s 1980s fixation with Japanese popular culture, one might be tempted to theorize that “Shōgun” seeded that obsession. The late Tom Shales, who reviewed the series for The Washington Post, wagered that “[the] serial may in fact constitute the first great wave in the Easternization of the '80s and it could do much to popularize or re-popularize Oriental culture and fashion here.”
If you couldn’t tell from his usage of an offensive descriptive term in that sentence, 44 years ago was a very different time. (A British New Wave band called The Vapors already had a hit with the speedy “Turning Japanese” months before the miniseries premiered. Cultural sensitivity was not exactly at an all-time high.)
But Shales couldn’t have predicted how lasting in popularity “Shōgun” would turn out to be.
“Shōgun's" debut coincided with a strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) that had run since July. Meaning, it didn't have much competition on that fall's TV schedule.
Even if there were, by that era’s standards the miniseries' cinematography was dazzling, and the brutality, which challenged broadcast standards to a high degree, was unlike anything that had aired before. American TV dramas long depicted violence, but not beheadings. Sexuality was implied, but women didn't go topless; this miniseries flashed bare breasts.
Since the VCR wasn’t as ubiquitous as it would be a few years later, relatively few horndogs were rewinding to ogle those moments. But a lot of people took them in. Nearly 33% of households with TVs watched all or part of “Shōgun,” giving it the second-highest rating in TV history after ABC's “Roots,” which was broadcast in 1977.
Like that telecast, NBC put “Shōgun” on the air outside of sweeps, although it intended to draw more attention instead of burying it, as ABC’s top executives sought to do with “Roots” by having it air over eight consecutive nights in January.
Presenting its top miniseries as the opening salvo in its fall season worked. For five nights in September of 1980, if you owned a television, it was probably tuned in to “Shōgun” at some point, if not for the entire run.
As is the case with most pop culture curiosa, “Shōgun” only deserves partial credit or blame for escalating America’s fetishizing of Japanese style and customs. In truth, its premiere coincided with an enthusiasm that was already rising by the time we watched it.
Actor Richard Chamberlain and actress Yoko Shimada on set of the mini-series "Shogun" , circa 1980.
It’s not as if Americans hadn’t been regularly exposed to Japanese culture, products or ideas before. The summer before, NBC News aired "If Japan Can . . . Why Can't We?" which endeavored to demystify the reasons for that country’s famed productivity. During the same September that “Shōgun” came to TV, PBS featured five programs from its public broadcaster NHK.
For many years before that, American and Japanese filmmakers had engaged in tacit cultural exchanges over the post-World War II era. Cinephiles already revered director Akira Kurosawa, who featured “Shōgun” co-star Toshiro Mifune in his famous Edo-era set jidaigeki films including "Rashomon," "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo." These works and other paid homage to American directors such as John Ford.
American audiences of the ‘60s, ’70s and ‘80s were amply exposed to other Japanese entertainment, mainly giant monster rampages epitomized by the 1954 movie “Godzilla” and its resulting sequels.
Since being syndicated to the U.S. in the mid-60s onward, American kids watched the adventures of, among others, “Ultraman,” “Spectreman” and “The Space Giants” after school.
These shows and movies reflect a post-war, industrialized, atomic-influenced vein of storytelling with none of the flirtation “Shōgun” foregrounded narratively and stylistically.
Then again, the miniseries also featured sword fights and ninja assassins, both of which still top the list of boyhood fantasies and inspire legions of would-be Karate Kids to this day. Each also figures centrally in many video games. The lineage of Sony Interactive’s lushly rendered “Ghost of Tsushima” may draw direct links to Kurosawa’s oeuvre, but if the swooning romance of its visuals and haiku interludes draw us in, I’d argue that’s a mild symptom of Clavell’s influence.
It’s impossible to place a concise count on the number of business school graduates who decided mounting katanas on the office walls was cool – it never was. Sadly, it was a thing for a while which, again, is less the fault of “Shōgun” than the result of an industrial shift.
When the American auto industry was in a slump in the early ‘80s, Japan’s economy was ascending. With the Reagan administration capping the number of vehicles allowed to be imported to the United States, Japanese automakers responded by moving a portion of manufacturing to the United States.
Honda began manufacturing automobiles at its Marysville, Ohio plant in 1982. Nissan’s first American-made cars rolled off the line in 1983; Toyota’s in 1986. Along with Sony, Casio and other brands we now see as commonplace, these companies’ functional entry into American life exposed more working and middle class employees to Japanese business culture, along with insinuating bastardized samurai lore into Western interpretations of the so-called Japanese business mindset.
So: Want to trace the origins of white-collar douchebaggery epitomized by, say, some of the choicest employees of the fictional Nakatomi Corporation of “Die Hard” to a source? Start there.
The perceived impact of “Shōgun” on fashion might have a stronger case although, again, many experts would argue that a group of Japanese designers including Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and the late Issey Miyake were already changing couture.
“[T]o many historians the exposure of modern ‘Japanese fashion’ to a suddenly more accepting international audience was intrinsically tied to the rise of Japan as an economic force in the 1980s,” observed Melissa Marra-Alvare, an assistant curator of research for the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in an article about the Japanese influence on fashion.
She went on to cite the “cultural exoticism depicted in author James Clavell’s bestseller ‘Shōgun’” as adding to America’s fixation on Japanese culture. This is true: in the weeks leading up to its adaptation’s TV debut Clavell’s book could be found in nearly every grocery store across the United States, and in the years afterward you could find piles of their paperback version at second-hand bookstores and used book fairs.
But like other fleeting trends of the '80s and '90s, our subsiding infatuation was followed by a collective embarrassment. Hence, when FX announced in 2018 that “Shōgun,” the prevailing murmured sentiment at the time was that the network was courting disaster.
Richard Chamberlain and Nobuo Kaneko in the 1980 miniseries "Shogun"
Its sins are what we remember best. Women depicted in “Shōgun” are highly sexualized, both in Clavell’s 1975 novel and the broadcast version. Chamberlain is written as the quintessential white savior, the “one man [who] has the power to change Japan’s destiny,” as a cable channel commercial describes. It’s no wonder that Japanese audiences couldn’t stand it when it first aired there in 1981.
But we’ve also benefited from what its success inspired. More than its predecessors, “Shōgun” ushered in the age of can’t-miss miniseries exemplified by “North and South,” “Lonesome Dove” and Chamberlain’s other best-known limited series star turn, “The Thornbirds.”
Four decades later, FX’s refreshing revisit from the perspective of its Japanese characters drew 764,000 same-day viewers for its on-air premiere, an audience that expanded to 9 million streaming views globally on Hulu, Disney+ and Star+.
These totals reflect a whole new world of television in which the 10-episode limited series competes not with two or three other channels but hundreds of episodes across dozens of channels and platforms, and a streaming view is defined by a formula: total viewing time divided by running time.
It’s also breaking through in a time when American audiences can choose from a broad variety of series and films from Asian countries; Japan is but one. We are fortunate to live in an era when a new “Shōgun” invites informed discussions about its filmmaking techniques and storytelling instead of gawking at its supposed foreignness. And it does make a person hungry for more limited series like it. Other cravings are entirely coincidental.
New episodes of "Shogun" premiere Tuesdays on Hulu and air Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.
The second highest-rated miniseries after "Roots" announced America's rising fascination with all things Japanese
By MELANIE MCFARLAND
Senior Critic
MARCH 8, 2024
Toshiro Mifune (1920 - 1997, left), as Yoshi Toranaga, and American actor Richard Chamberlain as John Blackthorne, examine a samurai sword in the TV miniseries 'Shogun', 1980.
If you want to believe one of the more dubious claims concerning the influence of the 1980 adaptation of “Shōgun,” Americans may thank the production for bringing sushi to middle America.
This apocryphal trivia hasn’t been entirely debunked; it’s more accurate to say that it is roundly doubted. Never mind that Japanese dining establishments like Benihana had been wowing Americans since the mid-'60s, or that sushi as we know it didn’t appear until the 1800s. ("Shōgun" is set in 1600.) The allegation’s source is the behind-the-scenes documentary “The Making of Shōgun.”
Given the times in which NBC’s adaptation of James Clavell’s novel aired, however, that detail feels true even if it isn’t.
The 1980 miniseries was the first to bring a highly fantasized version of Edo-era Japan to American primetime television by way of a production filmed entirely in Japan. It went on to win a Peabody Award along with several Golden Globes and Primetime Emmys, including for outstanding limited series, along with giving Richard Chamberlain’s career a second wind.
Looking back on America’s 1980s fixation with Japanese popular culture, one might be tempted to theorize that “Shōgun” seeded that obsession. The late Tom Shales, who reviewed the series for The Washington Post, wagered that “[the] serial may in fact constitute the first great wave in the Easternization of the '80s and it could do much to popularize or re-popularize Oriental culture and fashion here.”
If you couldn’t tell from his usage of an offensive descriptive term in that sentence, 44 years ago was a very different time. (A British New Wave band called The Vapors already had a hit with the speedy “Turning Japanese” months before the miniseries premiered. Cultural sensitivity was not exactly at an all-time high.)
But Shales couldn’t have predicted how lasting in popularity “Shōgun” would turn out to be.
“Shōgun's" debut coincided with a strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) that had run since July. Meaning, it didn't have much competition on that fall's TV schedule.
Even if there were, by that era’s standards the miniseries' cinematography was dazzling, and the brutality, which challenged broadcast standards to a high degree, was unlike anything that had aired before. American TV dramas long depicted violence, but not beheadings. Sexuality was implied, but women didn't go topless; this miniseries flashed bare breasts.
Since the VCR wasn’t as ubiquitous as it would be a few years later, relatively few horndogs were rewinding to ogle those moments. But a lot of people took them in. Nearly 33% of households with TVs watched all or part of “Shōgun,” giving it the second-highest rating in TV history after ABC's “Roots,” which was broadcast in 1977.
Like that telecast, NBC put “Shōgun” on the air outside of sweeps, although it intended to draw more attention instead of burying it, as ABC’s top executives sought to do with “Roots” by having it air over eight consecutive nights in January.
Presenting its top miniseries as the opening salvo in its fall season worked. For five nights in September of 1980, if you owned a television, it was probably tuned in to “Shōgun” at some point, if not for the entire run.
As is the case with most pop culture curiosa, “Shōgun” only deserves partial credit or blame for escalating America’s fetishizing of Japanese style and customs. In truth, its premiere coincided with an enthusiasm that was already rising by the time we watched it.
Actor Richard Chamberlain and actress Yoko Shimada on set of the mini-series "Shogun" , circa 1980.
It’s not as if Americans hadn’t been regularly exposed to Japanese culture, products or ideas before. The summer before, NBC News aired "If Japan Can . . . Why Can't We?" which endeavored to demystify the reasons for that country’s famed productivity. During the same September that “Shōgun” came to TV, PBS featured five programs from its public broadcaster NHK.
For many years before that, American and Japanese filmmakers had engaged in tacit cultural exchanges over the post-World War II era. Cinephiles already revered director Akira Kurosawa, who featured “Shōgun” co-star Toshiro Mifune in his famous Edo-era set jidaigeki films including "Rashomon," "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo." These works and other paid homage to American directors such as John Ford.
American audiences of the ‘60s, ’70s and ‘80s were amply exposed to other Japanese entertainment, mainly giant monster rampages epitomized by the 1954 movie “Godzilla” and its resulting sequels.
Since being syndicated to the U.S. in the mid-60s onward, American kids watched the adventures of, among others, “Ultraman,” “Spectreman” and “The Space Giants” after school.
These shows and movies reflect a post-war, industrialized, atomic-influenced vein of storytelling with none of the flirtation “Shōgun” foregrounded narratively and stylistically.
Then again, the miniseries also featured sword fights and ninja assassins, both of which still top the list of boyhood fantasies and inspire legions of would-be Karate Kids to this day. Each also figures centrally in many video games. The lineage of Sony Interactive’s lushly rendered “Ghost of Tsushima” may draw direct links to Kurosawa’s oeuvre, but if the swooning romance of its visuals and haiku interludes draw us in, I’d argue that’s a mild symptom of Clavell’s influence.
It’s impossible to place a concise count on the number of business school graduates who decided mounting katanas on the office walls was cool – it never was. Sadly, it was a thing for a while which, again, is less the fault of “Shōgun” than the result of an industrial shift.
When the American auto industry was in a slump in the early ‘80s, Japan’s economy was ascending. With the Reagan administration capping the number of vehicles allowed to be imported to the United States, Japanese automakers responded by moving a portion of manufacturing to the United States.
Honda began manufacturing automobiles at its Marysville, Ohio plant in 1982. Nissan’s first American-made cars rolled off the line in 1983; Toyota’s in 1986. Along with Sony, Casio and other brands we now see as commonplace, these companies’ functional entry into American life exposed more working and middle class employees to Japanese business culture, along with insinuating bastardized samurai lore into Western interpretations of the so-called Japanese business mindset.
So: Want to trace the origins of white-collar douchebaggery epitomized by, say, some of the choicest employees of the fictional Nakatomi Corporation of “Die Hard” to a source? Start there.
The perceived impact of “Shōgun” on fashion might have a stronger case although, again, many experts would argue that a group of Japanese designers including Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and the late Issey Miyake were already changing couture.
“[T]o many historians the exposure of modern ‘Japanese fashion’ to a suddenly more accepting international audience was intrinsically tied to the rise of Japan as an economic force in the 1980s,” observed Melissa Marra-Alvare, an assistant curator of research for the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in an article about the Japanese influence on fashion.
She went on to cite the “cultural exoticism depicted in author James Clavell’s bestseller ‘Shōgun’” as adding to America’s fixation on Japanese culture. This is true: in the weeks leading up to its adaptation’s TV debut Clavell’s book could be found in nearly every grocery store across the United States, and in the years afterward you could find piles of their paperback version at second-hand bookstores and used book fairs.
But like other fleeting trends of the '80s and '90s, our subsiding infatuation was followed by a collective embarrassment. Hence, when FX announced in 2018 that “Shōgun,” the prevailing murmured sentiment at the time was that the network was courting disaster.
Richard Chamberlain and Nobuo Kaneko in the 1980 miniseries "Shogun"
Its sins are what we remember best. Women depicted in “Shōgun” are highly sexualized, both in Clavell’s 1975 novel and the broadcast version. Chamberlain is written as the quintessential white savior, the “one man [who] has the power to change Japan’s destiny,” as a cable channel commercial describes. It’s no wonder that Japanese audiences couldn’t stand it when it first aired there in 1981.
But we’ve also benefited from what its success inspired. More than its predecessors, “Shōgun” ushered in the age of can’t-miss miniseries exemplified by “North and South,” “Lonesome Dove” and Chamberlain’s other best-known limited series star turn, “The Thornbirds.”
Four decades later, FX’s refreshing revisit from the perspective of its Japanese characters drew 764,000 same-day viewers for its on-air premiere, an audience that expanded to 9 million streaming views globally on Hulu, Disney+ and Star+.
These totals reflect a whole new world of television in which the 10-episode limited series competes not with two or three other channels but hundreds of episodes across dozens of channels and platforms, and a streaming view is defined by a formula: total viewing time divided by running time.
It’s also breaking through in a time when American audiences can choose from a broad variety of series and films from Asian countries; Japan is but one. We are fortunate to live in an era when a new “Shōgun” invites informed discussions about its filmmaking techniques and storytelling instead of gawking at its supposed foreignness. And it does make a person hungry for more limited series like it. Other cravings are entirely coincidental.
New episodes of "Shogun" premiere Tuesdays on Hulu and air Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.
The 1980's "Shogun" didn't usher in a decade of Japanophilia by itself. But it played its part
The second highest-rated miniseries after "Roots" announced America's rising fascination with all things Japanese
By MELANIE MCFARLAND
Senior Critic
MARCH 8, 2024
Toshiro Mifune (1920 - 1997, left), as Yoshi Toranaga, and American actor Richard Chamberlain as John Blackthorne, examine a samurai sword in the TV miniseries 'Shogun', 1980.
If you want to believe one of the more dubious claims concerning the influence of the 1980 adaptation of “Shōgun,” Americans may thank the production for bringing sushi to middle America.
This apocryphal trivia hasn’t been entirely debunked; it’s more accurate to say that it is roundly doubted. Never mind that Japanese dining establishments like Benihana had been wowing Americans since the mid-'60s, or that sushi as we know it didn’t appear until the 1800s. ("Shōgun" is set in 1600.) The allegation’s source is the behind-the-scenes documentary “The Making of Shōgun.”
Given the times in which NBC’s adaptation of James Clavell’s novel aired, however, that detail feels true even if it isn’t.
The 1980 miniseries was the first to bring a highly fantasized version of Edo-era Japan to American primetime television by way of a production filmed entirely in Japan. It went on to win a Peabody Award along with several Golden Globes and Primetime Emmys, including for outstanding limited series, along with giving Richard Chamberlain’s career a second wind.
Looking back on America’s 1980s fixation with Japanese popular culture, one might be tempted to theorize that “Shōgun” seeded that obsession. The late Tom Shales, who reviewed the series for The Washington Post, wagered that “[the] serial may in fact constitute the first great wave in the Easternization of the '80s and it could do much to popularize or re-popularize Oriental culture and fashion here.”
If you couldn’t tell from his usage of an offensive descriptive term in that sentence, 44 years ago was a very different time. (A British New Wave band called The Vapors already had a hit with the speedy “Turning Japanese” months before the miniseries premiered. Cultural sensitivity was not exactly at an all-time high.)
But Shales couldn’t have predicted how lasting in popularity “Shōgun” would turn out to be.
“Shōgun's" debut coincided with a strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) that had run since July. Meaning, it didn't have much competition on that fall's TV schedule.
Even if there were, by that era’s standards the miniseries' cinematography was dazzling, and the brutality, which challenged broadcast standards to a high degree, was unlike anything that had aired before. American TV dramas long depicted violence, but not beheadings. Sexuality was implied, but women didn't go topless; this miniseries flashed bare breasts.
Since the VCR wasn’t as ubiquitous as it would be a few years later, relatively few horndogs were rewinding to ogle those moments. But a lot of people took them in. Nearly 33% of households with TVs watched all or part of “Shōgun,” giving it the second-highest rating in TV history after ABC's “Roots,” which was broadcast in 1977.
Like that telecast, NBC put “Shōgun” on the air outside of sweeps, although it intended to draw more attention instead of burying it, as ABC’s top executives sought to do with “Roots” by having it air over eight consecutive nights in January.
Presenting its top miniseries as the opening salvo in its fall season worked. For five nights in September of 1980, if you owned a television, it was probably tuned in to “Shōgun” at some point, if not for the entire run.
As is the case with most pop culture curiosa, “Shōgun” only deserves partial credit or blame for escalating America’s fetishizing of Japanese style and customs. In truth, its premiere coincided with an enthusiasm that was already rising by the time we watched it.
Actor Richard Chamberlain and actress Yoko Shimada on set of the mini-series "Shogun" , circa 1980.
It’s not as if Americans hadn’t been regularly exposed to Japanese culture, products or ideas before. The summer before, NBC News aired "If Japan Can . . . Why Can't We?" which endeavored to demystify the reasons for that country’s famed productivity. During the same September that “Shōgun” came to TV, PBS featured five programs from its public broadcaster NHK.
For many years before that, American and Japanese filmmakers had engaged in tacit cultural exchanges over the post-World War II era. Cinephiles already revered director Akira Kurosawa, who featured “Shōgun” co-star Toshiro Mifune in his famous Edo-era set jidaigeki films including "Rashomon," "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo." These works and other paid homage to American directors such as John Ford.
American audiences of the ‘60s, ’70s and ‘80s were amply exposed to other Japanese entertainment, mainly giant monster rampages epitomized by the 1954 movie “Godzilla” and its resulting sequels.
Since being syndicated to the U.S. in the mid-60s onward, American kids watched the adventures of, among others, “Ultraman,” “Spectreman” and “The Space Giants” after school.
These shows and movies reflect a post-war, industrialized, atomic-influenced vein of storytelling with none of the flirtation “Shōgun” foregrounded narratively and stylistically.
Then again, the miniseries also featured sword fights and ninja assassins, both of which still top the list of boyhood fantasies and inspire legions of would-be Karate Kids to this day. Each also figures centrally in many video games. The lineage of Sony Interactive’s lushly rendered “Ghost of Tsushima” may draw direct links to Kurosawa’s oeuvre, but if the swooning romance of its visuals and haiku interludes draw us in, I’d argue that’s a mild symptom of Clavell’s influence.
It’s impossible to place a concise count on the number of business school graduates who decided mounting katanas on the office walls was cool – it never was. Sadly, it was a thing for a while which, again, is less the fault of “Shōgun” than the result of an industrial shift.
When the American auto industry was in a slump in the early ‘80s, Japan’s economy was ascending. With the Reagan administration capping the number of vehicles allowed to be imported to the United States, Japanese automakers responded by moving a portion of manufacturing to the United States.
Honda began manufacturing automobiles at its Marysville, Ohio plant in 1982. Nissan’s first American-made cars rolled off the line in 1983; Toyota’s in 1986. Along with Sony, Casio and other brands we now see as commonplace, these companies’ functional entry into American life exposed more working and middle class employees to Japanese business culture, along with insinuating bastardized samurai lore into Western interpretations of the so-called Japanese business mindset.
So: Want to trace the origins of white-collar douchebaggery epitomized by, say, some of the choicest employees of the fictional Nakatomi Corporation of “Die Hard” to a source? Start there.
The perceived impact of “Shōgun” on fashion might have a stronger case although, again, many experts would argue that a group of Japanese designers including Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and the late Issey Miyake were already changing couture.
“[T]o many historians the exposure of modern ‘Japanese fashion’ to a suddenly more accepting international audience was intrinsically tied to the rise of Japan as an economic force in the 1980s,” observed Melissa Marra-Alvare, an assistant curator of research for the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in an article about the Japanese influence on fashion.
She went on to cite the “cultural exoticism depicted in author James Clavell’s bestseller ‘Shōgun’” as adding to America’s fixation on Japanese culture. This is true: in the weeks leading up to its adaptation’s TV debut Clavell’s book could be found in nearly every grocery store across the United States, and in the years afterward you could find piles of their paperback version at second-hand bookstores and used book fairs.
But like other fleeting trends of the '80s and '90s, our subsiding infatuation was followed by a collective embarrassment. Hence, when FX announced in 2018 that “Shōgun,” the prevailing murmured sentiment at the time was that the network was courting disaster.
Richard Chamberlain and Nobuo Kaneko in the 1980 miniseries "Shogun"
Its sins are what we remember best. Women depicted in “Shōgun” are highly sexualized, both in Clavell’s 1975 novel and the broadcast version. Chamberlain is written as the quintessential white savior, the “one man [who] has the power to change Japan’s destiny,” as a cable channel commercial describes. It’s no wonder that Japanese audiences couldn’t stand it when it first aired there in 1981.
But we’ve also benefited from what its success inspired. More than its predecessors, “Shōgun” ushered in the age of can’t-miss miniseries exemplified by “North and South,” “Lonesome Dove” and Chamberlain’s other best-known limited series star turn, “The Thornbirds.”
Four decades later, FX’s refreshing revisit from the perspective of its Japanese characters drew 764,000 same-day viewers for its on-air premiere, an audience that expanded to 9 million streaming views globally on Hulu, Disney+ and Star+.
These totals reflect a whole new world of television in which the 10-episode limited series competes not with two or three other channels but hundreds of episodes across dozens of channels and platforms, and a streaming view is defined by a formula: total viewing time divided by running time.
It’s also breaking through in a time when American audiences can choose from a broad variety of series and films from Asian countries; Japan is but one. We are fortunate to live in an era when a new “Shōgun” invites informed discussions about its filmmaking techniques and storytelling instead of gawking at its supposed foreignness. And it does make a person hungry for more limited series like it. Other cravings are entirely coincidental.
New episodes of "Shogun" premiere Tuesdays on Hulu and air Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.
FX’s New Historical Epic Is a Runaway Hit. I Know the Real Reason Viewers Love It So Much.
Shōgun brings it back to the basics.
Disgusting
Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai on Shōgun, the TV epic of the moment
The actors sit down with The A.V. Club to chat about FX's sweeping years-in-the-making series, the importance of Japanese viewpoints in storytelling, and more
www.avclub.com
Season One
Episodes 3 and 4
I watched these two this afternoon at home.
That cat Buntaro, dude went off like a damn Jedi taking out them cats on the pier. Dude went down like a true warrior at the end. I had to rewind that scene to soak it in.
Fucked up that Fuji has to lay up with Blackthorne for 6 months. Ol’ gurl rather be a nun than sleep with him. But she softened up when he showed her some kindness and respect and not like a piece of meat. She looks to be loyal to him now.
That dumbass Nagakado with his daddy issues, went and let that sneaky mofo Omi get into his head. That last scene was vicious watching those horses explode, I wasn’t expecting that. I rewinded it see it again cuz that shit went through quickly.
FYI…as pointed out earlier in the thread, FX is showing a censored version of the series. FX doesn’t show Women’s nudity like boobs. They fade out their boobs on the FX version.
Hulu shows the unedited version, but the catch is you need the Hulu premium version without commercials. I got regular Hulu as part of the Disney bundle. The Hulu with that package has the edited FX version. And the Hulu I have is flooded with commercials. They got the episodes stuffed with 5 separate, minute/half breaks which drag down the episodes.
I’m going back recording it off FX on my cable so I can FF thru the commercials.
Going to let a couple episodes stack up again before catching up.
Damn good series, highly recommend watching it if you aren’t.
Episodes 3 and 4
I watched these two this afternoon at home.
That cat Buntaro, dude went off like a damn Jedi taking out them cats on the pier. Dude went down like a true warrior at the end. I had to rewind that scene to soak it in.
Fucked up that Fuji has to lay up with Blackthorne for 6 months. Ol’ gurl rather be a nun than sleep with him. But she softened up when he showed her some kindness and respect and not like a piece of meat. She looks to be loyal to him now.
That dumbass Nagakado with his daddy issues, went and let that sneaky mofo Omi get into his head. That last scene was vicious watching those horses explode, I wasn’t expecting that. I rewinded it see it again cuz that shit went through quickly.
FYI…as pointed out earlier in the thread, FX is showing a censored version of the series. FX doesn’t show Women’s nudity like boobs. They fade out their boobs on the FX version.
Hulu shows the unedited version, but the catch is you need the Hulu premium version without commercials. I got regular Hulu as part of the Disney bundle. The Hulu with that package has the edited FX version. And the Hulu I have is flooded with commercials. They got the episodes stuffed with 5 separate, minute/half breaks which drag down the episodes.
I’m going back recording it off FX on my cable so I can FF thru the commercials.
Going to let a couple episodes stack up again before catching up.
Damn good series, highly recommend watching it if you aren’t.
I’ll let y’all in on a little secret . Anna Sawai’s asshole smells like Apple Oakridge Cake .
I would do some outrageous things to her . Nothing is off limits!!!!
When I’m finished with her, she ain’t just gonna be seeing “Clouds and Rain”.
She gonna be seeing “Pink Hearts, Yellow Moons, Orange Stars and Green Clovers”.
I ain’t showing no mercy on that Pussy.
HaHa!!!
You better be ready to fight a grizzly bear because I’m not letting you have her before me.When I’m finished with her, she ain’t just gonna be seeing “Clouds and Rain”.
She gonna be seeing “Pink Hearts, Yellow Moons, Orange Stars and Green Clovers”.
I ain’t showing no mercy on that Pussy.
HaHa!!!
I mean....it is based off the book so it was going to happen. Whether we wanted it to or not.
I watch the show because it has some great acting and the cinematography is on point.
I was prepared for Anna to fall in love with the pirate. Like I said, it is staying true to the book.
However...
I just don't like how it progressed to get to that point. So let me get this straight....
- She initially sees him as a filthy barbarian.
- This is confirmed when she finds out he doesn't regularly wash his ass.
- She then finds out he has a wife and child he chose to leave behind.
- Then she finds out he does not have hands on experience in battle like they assumed.
- Then she reads his diary and finds out he was lying about not being and pirate and was actually committing the atrocities they accused him of.
And after finding out all of that, she, all of a sudden has a WAP and is sneaking into his room to spread her legs faster than a woman in labor at the gynecologist. Mind you this is mere hours after finding out he lied about being a pirate and just days (or weeks) after her husband died.
I mean..come the fuck on. With such a good show they could have built that arch out a lot longer. It is like Hollywood cannot help themselves.
Would Yasuke get instant pussy this way? Yasuke took regular baths too
They have to squeeze the story into 10 episodes.
They can’t go in-depth on a lot of things.
This is a mini-series with no plans at this time to extend it.
The pirate is now considered a high ranking samurai (Hatamoto), it's in her best interest to fuck with him.
Yeah, I know. It was the flow of the episode that threw me off. Like, reading the diary then jumping in bed with him.
Maybe.
But even as a high ranking member of their clan they still saw him as a barbarian outsider.
I also did not like how when the other girl had to give up her child to be killed she was all, "You have to honor the code for the best of the clan" but when the other girl was given the order to be his consort, Anna's character was all like, "Don't worry, I can do it for you."
And again, he may some new methods they can use in war be he truly has not proven himself in battle yet.
Regardless, it is still a good show.
not at all - the title only serves to protect Anjin while Toranaga is away
( samurai have the right to kill non samurai for any reason)
in anjin's case the title has thin veneer of status but no real power as he has no land no vassals no heishi nor soldiers
both Mariko and anjin's consort are of higher status than he is
Meh. I love foreign language films and prefer subtitles over dubbing but I definitely wouldn't watch one without subtitles if isn't dubbed. I would completely miss out on the plot that way and I really can't be expected to learn the language of every foreign film I watch to the level of understanding a possibly complex plot.
Small detail but Mariko reacted to the idea of escaping to London with the Anjin.
She really has no future in Japan since her family was dishonored and no husband*.
she liked the idea - but thats not how a samurai thinks
she is never thinking as an individual - her primary purpose is service to Taranaga and then her husband
she already said plainly that if left to her own choice she would walk a path of vengeance (a la blue eye samurai or lone wolf & cub)
both were dealing with extremely different rules in those 2 situations
she never disagreed with the seppuku for her husband and child because that was husband's decision - and she had no choice in the matter
she only argued against Taranaga's order that she not also kill herself as it was her duty to do so
(similar to Mariko's husband forbidding her from neither seeking vengeance nor killing herself)
Being a consort to anjin -that was a favor to Taranaga and she was under no obligation- here she had a choice, she could have said no.
thats why she was able set a time limit of 6 months
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‘Shogun’ Is High-Stakes Event TV at Its Finest
The new FX limited series is a sweeping historical epic oozing with political intrigue
theringer.com
‘Shogun’ Is High-Stakes Event TV at Its Finest
The new FX limited series is a sweeping historical epic oozing with political intrigue
I know the initial plan was for it too be a limited series.
Disney is gonna have to make this a full blown series and extend the storyline beyond the book.
Folks were already Thirsty for this when HBO debuted “Samurai World” in the Westworld series.
Somebody needs to have a talk to Bob Iger right now.
You can’t let shit like this slip through.
