Manage Your 'Shogun' Hangover, with Even More Samurai and Feudal Japan Stuff
A chat with the historical consultant from 'Shogun,' Japan recs with Professor Thomas Conlan, and more.
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
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Anyone else been watching Shogun, on FX? It seemed like “the show everyone was talking about” for at least a hot minute there. I’m about halfway through and enjoying it a lot, even if it feels like a bit of a bait-and-switch. I felt like I tuned in for a prestige TV show about feudal Japan and samurai, and then three episodes in they were like “Psyche! This is actually basic cable TV show about feudal Japan and samurai.”
Bret calls it “Rising Suns of Anarchy.” Anyway, I’ve adjusted my expectations now and I like it well enough. I could definitely do without the main guy’s blue colored contacts though. I’m always baffled when movies or shows do this (see also: The Fabelmans). Cinematographer have to know the contacts always look fake and distracting as hell, right? And how important is the actor’s eye color to the character, really? Seems like either it’s important enough to hire an actor with the “correct” eye color or it isn’t important enough to stick shitty contact lenses on them.
I digress! Anyway, a few weeks back my editor at GQ asked if I’d put together a list of additional reading/watching for Shogun, the way I did with Napoleon and Oppenheimer. Feudal Japan (the show is set at the end of the Sengoku Period, in 1600) is even more outside my sphere of expertise than Bonaparte’s France or the Manhattan Project, so I figured I’d poll some Japan experts about it.
I managed to connect with fewer of those than I thought, but in the end I did score an interview with Shogun’s historical consultant, a charming Belgian man named Professor Frederik Cryns. He has been in Japan for 35 years studying and writing biographies of the exact figures Shogun happens to be based on (it’s actually adapted from a 1975 James Clavell book of historical fiction, which was already adapted for an earlier miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshirô Mifune in 1980).
I had a nice long chat with Cryns and probably could’ve easily talked his ear off for another hour. One thing I found particularly interesting was the way they altered certain historical things in the show, not for greater drama or for the sake of simplicity, but out of, well, essentially, nationalism.
When liberties on the show were taken, Cryns says, it was often to make certain details “more Japanese,” rather than more exciting or more historically accurate. It’s an issue that many who study history run into, as nations adopt certain customs as foundational to their national identities, even though those traditions are neither as old nor as specific to the nations who adopt them as we modern folks would like to believe. (Italians, for instance, and especially Northern ones, weren’t especially familiar with pasta until after the first World War).
“One example which I could give is the way women sat,” Cryns says. “Today, the formal way of sitting, Seiza, was not yet common at the time. People sat in more relaxed positions, and mostly women sat with one knee up. That was something I propagated, but the Japanese cast wasn't keen to do that because you have in Japan the image of Seiza as the formal, Japanese way of sitting. If they sat relaxed, it would look, for a Japanese public, as a bit of… not good manners, so to speak.”
This phenomenon of imposing our modern conception of nation-states and “national identity” on the past, when people didn’t really think about that stuff, is always interesting to me (see also: Anya Von Bremzen’s latest book which is all about this, at least as it relates to food).
Long story short, I had such a wide-ranging chat with Cryns (which you can read at GQ) that I ended up not having room for the Feudal Japan reading/watching list that I’d already gotten from one of my experts.
That expert was Professor Thomas Conlan, Professor in East Asian Studies and Professor of History at Princeton, who has written a handful of his own books about Feudal Japan and samurai culture. With his permission, I’m sharing his list of Shogun-related media that he recommends here.
The 1989 film Death of a Tea Master (Sen no Rikyū: Honkakubō ibun) provides an introspective account of the age from those who lost, but survived. Kurosawa’s Kagemusha is great fun as well, although its battle scenes are over the top. The best biography is Mary Elizabeth Berry’s Hideyoshi (Harvard). To know more about warrior epics and their ideals, the work of Royall Tyler cannot be surpassed. The Tale of Heike (Penguin) is a classic, and he also has a three-volume set entitled Fourteenth Century Voices that I highly recommend. I also can’t resist mentioning my Samurai and the Warrior Culture of Japan, 471-1877, and Weapons and Fighting Techniques of the Samurai for broader overviews of the age. And to understand the seventeenth century, Luke Robert’s Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan is eye-opening. Finally, for good reading on the beach, read James Clavell’s Shōgun itself.
Pretty good list, right? Kevin Kruse once told me “reading lists are the historian’s love language,” which turns out to be incredibly accurate. If you want a historian to recommend some books, just ask.
ODDS & ENDS
-In the interest of recommending great reads, definitely check out this piece from Dan Bessner, “The Life and Death of Hollywood” in Harper’s. It’s a great primer on why the entertainment industry is so fucked up and how we got here. And part of that is the government just summarily deciding it didn’t feel like enforcing its own antitrust laws:
The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television. What is to be done? The most direct solution would be government intervention. If it wanted to, a presidential administration could enforce existing antitrust law, break up the conglomerates, and begin to pull entertainment companies loose from asset-management firms. It could regulate the use of financial tools, as deWaard has suggested; it could rein in private equity. The government could also increase competition directly by funding more public film and television.
This is just a small part of my ongoing series, “private equity ruins everything and it doesn’t make sense that it’s even legal.”
-Speaking of Brave New World stuff, a new Netflix true crime documentary used AI to make fake photographs of its subject.
“Jennifer was bubbly, happy, confident,” a high school friend of Pan’s says during the sequence. As he’s saying this, a series of three photos of Pan in a red dress flash on screen. These images offer a stark contrast to how the audience sees Pan for most of the film: quiet, shaken, and under the harsh lighting of an interrogation room.
The first of the photographs in this sequence appears to be real, and shows her in a red dress, smiling at the camera and throwing up the peace sign. The next two, however, seem clearly fake. One image also shows her smiling and throwing up the peace sign, but her hands are mangled in that now signature tell of older AI image generators.
Another image, which also appears to be AI-generated, also appears in some of the promotional material for the documentary. The promotional split image shows a mugshot type image of Pan looking coldly at the camera during her investigation on one side, and an image of her smiling ear to ear on the other. Again, the image conveys a cliché of the true crime genre: how could this seemingly normal and happy person commit such a horrible act?
How does a doc director not know how insanely unethical this is? This should get your doc license revoked. I am begging people to be just a little normal.
-I have very little bandwidth for Trump trial stuff, but there have now been multiple rounds of jurors getting dismissed while having their mean texts and whatnot about Trump read out loud to the entire courtroom with Trump in the room. And that’s just funny. To wit: “Dismissed juror says Trump ‘looked less orange’ in person.”
My friend Clint sent me the I Think You Should Leave hat sketch screencap in response, which feels perfect:
How is there one for everything? I Think You Should Leave has nearly surpassed the Simpsons for meme applicability.
-Finally, your Bobby Hacker approved clip of the week, Vin Diesel getting out of the pool slowly.
It’s very “what if fat guy wearing his shirt in the pool, but make it fashion.”
That look on his face as he stands up just screams “damn my knees hurt when I squat like that.”
Hey, I know the feeling. Did you know Vin Diesel is 56? I thought he was like 48, tops. Don’t tell him I said that, the last thing this dude needs is more confidence.
Paul Giamatti is 6 weeks older than Vin Diesel.
Shogun is pretty darn good. Agreed about how it could perhaps be a bit more "snappy" in pacing and also a bit more of the common person's view to offer a break from the upper class niceties.