Shogun: More like Shogood (Spoilers 4 days post episode release, show spoilers only)

[Veltigar]

On 4/19/2024 at 11:20 PM, Arakasi said:

I kinda want to read it again. Problem I think with any adaptation of the history is that I know the history well and how the book makes Tokugawa very different is always hard to get around. Plus I was always a Takeda and Hideyoshi fanboy (read Taiko it’s great) so I was never predisposed to like Tokugawa much.

Like it’s hard to watch this and hear him swearing over and over to protect the Taikos son when in real history he’s the one responsible for killing him.

Book spoilers in my response, so don't click on this if you want to remain unspoiled

Spoiler

My reading of the character in the book does not really induce dissonance on this front with Tokugawa's historical actions. I think the whole point of the character in the book is that he never openly admits to wanting ultimate power, while simultaneously doing anything he can to achieve it.

I absolutely believe that book Toronaga would kill Yaemon if given the opportunity to get away with it without tarnishing his reputation. He's just more subtle than anyone else in the book, with only Mariko and Ochiba truly understanding him ultimately.

 

[Zorral]

On 4/19/2024 at 5:20 PM, Arakasi said:

(read Taiko it’s great)

What is your opinion of this novel in terms of the history it covers?  It's been saved to my list to read for maybe three years now.  But other books turn up that feel more pressing for my/our immediate concerns all the time -- like now I have to immerse myself in Morocco's history and that of the Maghrib!

 

[Arakasi]

It covers pretty much all of Hashiba Hideyoshi’s life. Hard to say historical accuracy since it does start very early and I doubt that much was known of his early life. But his exploits post joining Nobunaga are fairly accurate. It basically covers his life. Anyway very good book but not sure what you’re asking.

[Zorral]

On 4/19/2024 at 5:20 PM, Arakasi said:

it’s hard to watch this and hear him swearing over and over to protect the Taikos son when in real history he’s the one responsible for killing him.

The above is a force instance of what I meant.  You say 'real history' but I am unclear whether this is from documented sources or from the novel.

[Arakasi]

It’s pretty well documented history that Ieyasu ordered the sieges and attacks on Osaka that led to Hideyori and his moms suicide. The pretence to the conflict followed by the initial siege plus the false truce to take down Osakas walls followed by the second siege.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyotomi_Hideyori

The Taiko book follows Hideyoshi’s life so it doesn’t cover anything after this death iirc. And like things like Masters of Rome I’m sure there is fictionalized stuff. That’s what happens with historical novelizations.

Edited April 21 by Arakasi

[Zorral]

Ha! What is it about possessing enormous power gets so many rulers lusting to be stage performers?   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyotomi_Hideyoshi

Following Rikyū's death, Hideyoshi turned his attention from tea ceremony to Noh, which he had been studying since becoming Imperial Regent. During his brief stay in Nagoya Castle in what is today Saga Prefecture, on Kyūshū, Hideyoshi memorised the shite (lead role) parts of ten Noh plays, which he then performed, forcing various daimyō to accompany him onstage as the waki (secondary, accompanying role). He even performed before the emperor.[33]

Edited April 21 by Zorral

[Arakasi]

Remember Hideyoshi was different because he came from peasantry. Nobunaga and Tokugawa came from families with long noble lineage. Hideyoshi could really never be Shogun since he lacked the birthright for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a certain resentment of nobility in his later life once he gained control of Japan.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

I haven’t read the entire book (started part of it many years ago and never finished it), but truly loving the show! I think Anjin is probably the weakest character in the show for me personally, the Japanese ones shine a lot more !

[JGP]

43 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

I haven’t read the entire book (started part of it many years ago and never finished it), but truly loving the show! I think Anjin is probably the weakest character in the show for me personally, the Japanese ones shine a lot more !

Blackthorne maddens me more often than not. 

Looking forward to the S1 Finale tonight, I'll be staying up.  

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

1 hour ago, JGP said:

Blackthorne maddens me more often than not. 

Looking forward to the S1 Finale tonight, I'll be staying up.  

Same here. I think part of the issue is that he was highly internalised in the book and it’s difficult to translate that to a visual media which means a lot of his character development that happens internally is missed out. They should’ve taken the dune route and done visions/flashbacks or dialogue debates between him and other characters. That moment in the book when he realises how unhygienic and shitty his life in England was completely brushed over. Was quite disappointed with the pigeon cooking scene. And yeah I never got the feeling Mariko and he are in love other than a random fling based on physical attraction. She seems irritated with him most of the time.

Edited April 23 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[Arakasi]

Well I think that’s a good ending to the series and true to the books. Still felt they could have done Mariko and John better but the show ended on a high note.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

Man id love a second season of this just focused on Toranagas Reign and Anjins continued growing role as his advisor... or a movie at the very least! 

[Myrddin]

On 4/19/2024 at 3:27 PM, Jaxom 1974 said:

And I just thought I'd see about maybe picking up a copy of Shogun at the local B&N, since it should be available again with show interest...only they're selling it in Book 1 and Book 2...ha.

My 70's hardback editions, which I stole inherited from my parents, are also in two volumes. Which is funny seeing them looking all skinny a shelf away from Martin and Jordan tomes.

[Slurktan]

2 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Man id love a second season of this just focused on Toranagas Reign and Anjins continued growing role as his advisor... or a movie at the very least! 

Fat more likely they would make a go at Taiko and make a prequel if they were going to do more seasons. Or if they don't want to use that directly just convert  everything historically Nobunaga to Kuroda.

[Zorral]

8 hours ago, Arakasi said:

Still felt they could have done Mariko and John better but the show ended on a high note.

Spoiler

But-but-but-but Grim Dark invented this narrative gut shot to the great GREAT praise of one and all!

Meaning of course the opposite. 

Spoiler

This was far more honest a conclusion than the historical fiction provided generally in 1975.

 

[Arakasi]

Spoiler

I forgot the ending to the original novel. For good or bad I guess. So I am not getting your point there.

But it was nice they brought back the attempted seppuku scene just at a different point in the story and to a different audience.

 

[Zorral]

A perspective, some of which shares what I commented on the show in the Watch thread.

Shōgun Has a Japanese-Superiority Complex
By Ryu Spaeth, a features editor at New York

https://www.vulture.com/article/shgun-what-the-hit-series-gets-wrong-about-japan.html?

Quote

 

.... Blackthorne is the archetypal westerner who discovers “the Japans,” as he calls this isolated jewel of the East, shrouded in equal measures of mist and mystery. It is through his eyes, in the book and in its televised adaptation from 1980, that we come to understand these “strange” people and their strange ways. This device has been employed in Tom Cruise’s lesser imitation of Shōgun, The Last Samurai; by Bill Murray in Lost in Translation; and in the other recently concluded prestige series set in Japan, Tokyo Vice.

In the new Shōgun, however, Blackthorne is our focal point only in the first half of the series before gradually shrinking to a mere pawn in a deadly game of chess played by an embattled warlord named Toranaga (a masterful Hiroyuki Sanada), who emerges as the story’s actual main character. Jarvis, who has the neck of a pit bull and puppy-dog eyes to match, acts with blundering gusto as Blackthorne and ultimately comes off as an inferior sort of creature: coarse, if well meaning, and not too smart. The Japanese protagonists, in contrast, are regal, cunning, and in command of their own destiny.

Indeed, if some American entertainments, like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, seem baffled at the prospect of depicting the Japanese at all, Shōgun is intent on showing how wonderfully superior they are. Despite the occasional lightning flash of insight into some more troubling Japanese cultural tendencies (extreme deference to authority, people committing suicide for the slightest of transgressions), Shōgun’s Blackthorne, like Tokyo Vice’s Jake Adelstein, is the quintessential gaijin who falls hopelessly in love in their first encounter with the alien — with the lovely women, the sumptuous surroundings, the elegance in dress and manner. Shōgun’s showrunners are similarly smitten, their admiration reflected in the way the camera lingers on the luxurious trappings of court life in medieval Osaka.

But what we might call a Japanese-superiority complex is precisely where the show’s Americanness shines through, revealing a blinkered view of its source material that fails to engage with or even understand its tensions. And for all the show’s preoccupations with the Japanese viewpoint, it remains an American text, riddled with American concerns about political polarization and how to wield vast military power. Just as every monument to history tells us something about the people who made the monument, so every American story about Japan bears the mark of that story’s creators — their dreams, their anxieties, their fears, all of which have been projected onto this ultimate other.

Japanese history, very roughly speaking, can be described as alternating between periods of war and peace. There are epochs in which a powerful emperor or military dictator (i.e., a shogun) asserts stability over the country’s competing factions, and others in which feudal lords duke it out for supremacy and a miserable tooth-and-claw chaos reigns. As a result, expressions of Japanese culture tend to be defined by their position between these two poles of barbarism and civilization. Think of The Tale of Genji, the classic 11th-century depiction of the Heian court, which prized an ultra-refined aesthetics in poetry, lovemaking, music, and making and drinking tea. Then consider filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) or Ran (1985), both set in the medieval Japan of the Sengoku period, between the 15th and 16th centuries, when the country was convulsed by bloodshed. In this Japan, the courtesans killed one another in their sleep. ...

 

 

[Zorral]

22 minutes ago, Arakasi said:

 

  Hide contents

I forgot the ending to the original novel. For good or bad I guess. So I am not getting your point there.

But it was nice they brought back the attempted seppuku scene just at a different point in the story and to a different audience.

 

Spoiler

The point is that a major character, Marko, in whose character the audience has invested positively, is killed off - and not at the end, but before the arc of the narrative is concluded.  So many seem to believe that GOT, as novel and HBO invented that sort of shocking finishing off a major character before the the narrative has concluded.

Further point is that the two romantic leads, she and Blackthorne, in whom also the audience has positively invested in the novel by then, do not have a romantic conclusion to the romance in which the audience has invested itself; and the codes by which Mariko lives would not have allowed for that even if she doesn't sacrifice herself to her long yearned for death of honor. However, I thought on my later second reading of the novel, when I knew more than the first time, that this was an ingenious writing choice by Clavell, since the Kiss of Death has long been a trope in heroic fiction and entertainments, meaning if the hero figure has a girl, she will surely die, leaving him free to move on to the next thing.

And most of all, Blackthorne, particularly in this television series, never becomes a hero saving the day with his ship and reaping riches and honors, and sailing back home to the great envy of all his peers.

 

 

[Arakasi]

Spoiler

I don’t mind the Japanese superiority complex here. I find the common westerner comes into oriental or native culture and becomes the hero to be a bit overdone and unrealistic. Why would a foreigner get such a position of power? These stories always assume the person is some exceptional individual better than the natives, whether that is Sully in Avatar or Cruise in Samurai or Blackthorne in the novels. Why would a lord of Toronagas status be smitten with a random foreigner.

So I do like that Toronaga was more clear here in his manipulation of people around him. Yes that comes at a loss of Johns heroness but it feels real. What I still feel was missing was the attachment between Mariko and John. Episode nine tried to rekindle it but it had been snuffed out too much with the story of episodes 5-7.

 

[Slurktan]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

A perspective, some of which shares what I commented on the show in the Watch thread.

Shōgun Has a Japanese-Superiority Complex
By Ryu Spaeth, a features editor at New York

https://www.vulture.com/article/shgun-what-the-hit-series-gets-wrong-about-japan.html?

 

Weird that examples used to show Japanese barbarism in that article are literal Japanese versions of Macbeth and King Lear respectively. Did the authour not... know that somehow?