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When did the Japanese start eating eggs? A long たまご.

2024-Apr-16

Although the actual subject of this review is the 2024 TV series production of Shogun, I will be mostly talking about the novel it is based upon. Before we get onto my ramblings about Japan and fiction, I’ll give a summary appraisal of the series (I’ve watched up to episode 8 of 10). The show is fantastic! Repeating my claims to its excellence would get boring real fast, so I suggest taking my word that this recent production is a faithful representation of the book and damn good television even to those unfamiliar with the plot. Not knowing anything about Japan might even be a very fun way to experience this stranger in a strange land story.

The long and short of the storyline is in 1600 an Englishman reaches Japan in an effort to open trade, with the profits aimed at funding the Protestant side of the holy war between Protestants and Catholics. The Catholics had already made inroads (duplicitously) into the political leadership. The hermit-like four island nation Japan has had decades of unstable national leadership around the time the Englishman shows up with modern guns and cannons to shake things up a little. From there, you get a bunch of opportunities for political intrigue (so much), cultural exchange, decapitations, and sailors addressing each other with pure profane panache.

I came upon this book by way of my father. This title was among the handful he would give as his answer to, ‘what is your favorite book’. From what I can remember, what he enjoyed was how accurate and deep the author was able to look into an alien way of life: feudal Japan. James Clavell managed to do so by not worrying about the length of his novels. Shogun was a brick of a paperback in my dad’s library. Well over one thousand pages. I have since discovered in his library several editions of this book, including more easy to read hardcover editions. The bright red and gold fat paperback version with a very gaudy painting of a samurai on horseback in the midst of a battle is what I remember luring me.

Shogun is the book you’ll find nestled among non-fiction books about geopolitical events during the Cold War and paperback thrillers set in exotic locales. That was a big chunk of my dad’s library. Throughout my browsing of used book stores, garage sales, and estate collections I have come to find Shogun to be the ‘Dad’ book of the late 20th century. Were they all actually read? Hard to guess. It could be the Infinite Jest of its era. A big fat book to be displayed rather than read.

It has been over twenty years since I read that novel, and probably now around twenty when I last attempted to re-read it. Watching this TV series, I found several plot points or characters I had completely forgotten. I did remember their eventual outcomes, which gave me a bit of delight to have some surprise when seeing a favorite book from my past rendered on screen.

Although I do not remember the particulars of each double cross or climactic event, I do know feudal Japan. This started with reading the novel Shogun and cascaded so much further than that thousand page glimpse into the island nation found on the other side of the world from my homeland.

Japan got shafted when it comes to English words to describe things about the nation. Anglophile sounds more authentic and less likely to provoke fears of racism than Japanophile. I’m not sure what is the cute ethnic nickname you can use to describe somebody from Japan. I know it’s not as easy as just cutting out the sounds in their country name like calling somebody from Britain a Brit.

I’ve also heard the modern parlance for a Western who is an enthusiast about Japan is a ‘weeb’. I would not care to use that to describe myself. I’d prefer Japanophiles before that. Looking it up just now, I found that ‘shinnichi’ is the Japanese word for a foreigner who is very pro-Japan.

The reason for my distaste for the word is that I find the idea of self-described weebs as reprehensible because of my connotation of them being very superficial in their estimation of what is authentic ‘Japan’. I myself do not have the knowledge for an accurate estimation of Japanese authenticity. I would wager that the answer would require more research than simply watching a bunch of anime, let alone only the ones you like.

I myself enjoy dozens of anime productions, yet I think I like just as many regular cinematic films from Japan as I do animated features. Especially the anime released prior to the mid 2000s. I have the suspicion that the flavor of anime I enjoy can rarely be found after this era. Much the same way I fear the rated-R Hollywood action movies of that era are also bygones. I think I’m also biased to the stuff from any country made in the 90s and 2000s.

From what I have been told, anime holds several layers of meaning that do not easily come through to a non-Japanese audience or past translation. I remember listening to a Japanese to English translator of anime at a comic convention make that argument. He describes almost every anime, especially the comedies, as culturally dense as an episode of Family Guy. What a Western audience would not notice in Japanese animation are several visual clues found in facial expressions, sound effects, body language, and gestures that complement a joke or intone different emotions than what is being said. Trying to interpret those without knowing much about Japanese history or culture is like watching an episode of Family Guy without ever having watched American TV. Without the background, the jokes do not land and the story becomes opaque.

This opaqueness is what intrigued me about Japan. Such an alien culture to my Western sensibilities. Not only a culture that is hard to decipher, but one that played the same imperial games of Modern history as my own civilization! The bushmen of the Kalahari are arguably much more different from my lifestyle as a Japanese salaryman. My difference from then is diagonal on the historical scale of human events.

Japanese culture is an example of a people that came up with their own answers to modern problems. This is somewhat a retrospective approach to thinking about why I was so fascinated by Japan in my youth. When I was younger it was more basically put in my head that Japan is curiously weird but they also have amazing technology that lets them do their own thing. No other country was doing that except for the USA. They made the cultural products that could compete with my own culture’s, who itself was likely the prime mover in that sphere.

This is not to say I was not downright curious about every place I read about in the National Geographic volumes that my parents subscribed to. Japan though, even prior to reading Shogun gave me inklings about a cultural difference that jived with me more than say… Pakistan, Cambodia, or Italy. Fine places, but they were not pumping out cartoons about robots, samurai, or giant robot samurai. Japan was even before I was born, and Shogun gave me license to feel like a sophisticated fan of the island nation’s cultural gifts to the world.

An advantage the book offers over the cinematic production is an author has more leeway for describing internal monologue or the subtleties of dialogue. Shogun is jam packed with dialogue modulated with so many layers of meaning. I recall James Clavell indulging in a little bit of over-explanation to help the reader look into the protocols that baffle the English protagonist. The show follows more to the cinematic rules of storytelling by showing and not telling. I agree with both choices.

The advantage towards the cinematic feature is the visual storytelling of Japanese design. In this case the budget is there to recreate all the props needed to make a believable representation of Japan in the pre-Modern era. I have mentioned before I can find physical descriptions of objects or actions to be often tiresome when not handled briskly. The TV show made almost all the tactical movements of ships much easier to understand. The show did a splendid job with casting the sailors. Their dialogue is high brow swearing that sometimes reaches Deadwood level of elegance. When I read the book the non stop barrage of swearing when two sailors communicated turned to be grating. The cinematic version lets the profanity sing!

To be honest, I actually do not quite remember just how everything resolves for the players in the story. I do know how the Shogunate of 1600ish-1850ish began in real life, so there are some story outcomes I know will have to be true. I also remember the story is the beginning of a shared continuity with Clavell’s other novels about Westerners mucking about East Asia, so what I remember from the novel Gai-Jin also determines who I know has to be a ‘winner’ in the outcome of the last two Shogun episodes. I hope that means there will be a Gai-Jin series.