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“Our strategy was pretty simple:
Empower the people who actually know what’s authentic, and then listen to
them,” says Rachel Kondo who, with husband Justin Marks, was involved in every
aspect of adapting James Clavell’s 1,000-page novel into 10 episodes of TV for
Disney brand FX.
“Everyone agreed that the only way to tell the
story properly, was to tell (as in the novel) from a full variety of its points
of view,” the showrunners explain to Mike DeAngelo at The Playlist podcast.
“Which meant that in a story that is in some ways fundamentally about the act
of translation, you have to be able to tell it in two different languages. It
wouldn’t work any other way.”
Among other things, the duo elevated the series’
star, veteran Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada (Avengers: Endgame) into
the dual role of producer, which would see him serve as a de facto cultural
adviser to the show, assisting with everything from improving the scripts’
Japanese dialogue to casting many of the younger Japanese actors and making
sure that traditional costumes were accurate.
The show has proved a critical and
commercial hit and a large part of this appears down to the attention to detail
in world building of 17th Century feudal Japan ensuring that historical and
cultural accuracy doesn’t get lost in translation.
The book has been filmed before as a
huge hit miniseries in 1980, a few years after the book itself was published in
1975.
“Generationally, that novel, for us, was the book
we all grew up with our parents having on their nightstands,” Marks told The
Hollywood Reporter’s Patrick Brzeski. “So many movies and television shows
have ripped it off its ‘stranger in a strange land’ archetype. So when FX sent
it over, there was a representational side to it that concerned us.”
Marks said he was initially worried
that it was a saga that had been seen too many times before, but then he read
the book and realized that the story Clavell’s story was still relevant today.
“How do we encounter another culture?
How do we encounter ourselves in that process? How do we create a language of
curiosity, respect and humility when faced with what we don’t understand? All
of these things were really impactful to us and now the time was right to adapt
it in a way where you put the Japanese language and perspective at the
forefront — to get closer to these characters, as opposed to keeping them at
arm’s length.” Cr: Katie Yu/FX
The 1980 miniseries foregrounded the
story of white pirate Blackthorne whereas the original novel revolves around an
ensemble of characters. It was this angle coupled with the ‘white savior’
narrative of the first show that Kondo and Marks as well as FX were intrigued
to set right in their version. But doing so meant owning up to their own
inevitably blinkered cultural perspective.
Marks continues, “All we want to do
is find ways to subvert the gaze. We would never be able to properly invert the
gaze, because we’re western filmmakers, just like James Clavell was a western
writer. What we are hoping to do is to subvert the gaze enough to surprise the
audience — like, let’s see Blackthorne as the Japanese see him.”
Another choice was to give greater
agency to the story’s female characters, notably Mariko played by Anna Sawai.
This was despite the constraints that the period setting forced on them.
Kondo says, “We found that because
the female characters’ seem to have constraints – — whether gender, or class or
their faith system — there was a way to tell the story of how they used their
limitations as a form of power. All of their stories deepen in really
fascinating ways as they are compelled to translate their limitations into
empowerment.” X
The process of adapting Shogun to
screen with due respect for Japanese culture and historical accuracy led them
to create a complex workflow that exchanged ideas and translations back and
forth with local experts, actors, co-producers and creatives.
“It often felt like we were building
the car while already driving it down the road,” Kondo says of the process that
began in the writer’s room and extended into the edit.
“What we wanted to do was to present
something that people hadn’t seen before, but that by nature means there is no
template,” she told NPR’s Scott Detrow. “And so this process was, I would
say, quite chaotic and quite daunting.”
Over the course of translation, from
English into Japanese, and from English into period Japanese, “where it almost
kind of feels to the Japanese ear maybe more like Shakespeare would feel to the
English-speaking ear,” her co-creator added, “there are a thousand nuances that
you have to consider.”
Scripts, written in the US by
Americans (albeit some were Asian American), were sent to Tokyo for
translation. From there, it was sent to a Japanese playwright who specializes
in ‘Jidaigeki’ (Japanese period drama, usually set during the Edo period of 1603
to 1868) who put a literary touch to it.
“Then our Japanese producers, Eriko
Miyagawa and Hiroyuki Sanada oversaw that moment between taking it from the
playwright and giving it to our actors to perform,” Kondo explained to THR.
“And they were always discussing the scripts with Justin, asking, “Is this the
intention? Is this what we are going for?” Yu/FX
The craziest part was the painstaking
process of translating the actor’s Japanese performance back into English
subtitles. Details were fought over.
“I’d be like, ‘We should split this
sentence here.’ And she’d be saying, ‘No, it flows better if we keep it
together,’” Marks relates. “And then, I’d be like, ‘No, we need an em dash.’
And then we’d watch it 100 more times. And then I’d say, ‘OK, yeah, you were
right. Let’s just leave it.’ So many obsessive conversations like this.”
They chose to position the subtitles
higher up on the screen than you would normally see with closed captioning.
This brought them closer to the eye line and was intended to reduce the
audience fatigue. They were also fastidious with the color timing behind the
subtitles, to make sure that the words were always “jumping off the screen and
you don’t get that white-on-white problem that we all remember from watching
classic foreign films in black and white during our college days,” Marks
explains.
The show’s Japanese actors, notably
Sanada, advised on details such as whether costume kimonos were tied
appropriately while history advisors on the project ensured that the many
scenes of rituals – including seating positions and bowing – were accurate.
There were two sides to this. Kondo
and Marks felt they had to enable their Japanese collaborators to speak up “and
speak outside of the traditional hierarchy when they noticed something was
wrong” (which is not natural to many Japanese) whilst ensuring that the crew on
set in Vancouver (home of the show’s soundstages and some exterior locations)
were open to hearing suggestions and willing to respond to it.
A historian of Japan marks Shogun’s
card. Writing for The Conversation, University of Maryland
professor Constantine Nomikos Vaporis says that while the original 1980
series reflects both the confidence of postwar America “and its fascination
with its resurgent former enemy,” it was highly unpopular among Japanese
viewers.
“FX’s remake demonstrates [that]
American viewers today apparently don’t need to be slowly introduced to
Japanese culture by a European guide,” and that the series does a far better
job at cleaving to Clavell’s narrative in which Blackthorne comes to see Japan
as far more civilized than the West.
“Of course, authenticity has its
limits,” the historian notes. “The producers of both television series decided
to adhere closely to the original novel. In doing so, they’re perhaps
unwittingly reproducing certain stereotypes about Japan.
“Most strikingly, there’s the
fetishization of death, as several characters have a penchant for violence and
sadism, while many others commit ritual suicide, or seppuku.”
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