How the Hugely Acclaimed Shōgun TV Series Makes Translation Interesting

Many of us grew up see­ing hard­back copies of Shō­gun on var­i­ous domes­tic book­shelves. Whether their own­ers ever actu­al­ly got through James Clavel­l’s famous­ly hefty nov­el of sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Japan is open to ques­tion, but they may well have seen the first tele­vi­sion adap­ta­tion, which aired on NBC in 1980. Star­ring Richard Cham­ber­lain and Toshi­ro Mifu­ne (and nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles), that ten-hour minis­eries offered an unprece­dent­ed­ly cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence to the home view­ers of Amer­i­ca, pre­sent­ing them with things they’d nev­er before seen on tele­vi­sion — and things they’d nev­er heard on tele­vi­sion, not least numer­ous lines deliv­ered in untrans­lat­ed Japan­ese.

The idea, accord­ing to screen­writer Eric Bercovi­ci, was to put the view­ers in the shoes of Cham­ber­lain’s pro­tag­o­nist John Black­thorne, an Eng­lish ship pilot marooned in Japan with no knowl­edge of the local lan­guage. Dur­ing the show’s run, news­pa­pers print­ed glos­saries of the Japan­ese words most impor­tant to the sto­ry. The sec­ond adap­ta­tion of Shō­gun, which aired ear­li­er this year on FX, does things dif­fer­ent­ly. For one thing, it makes use of those help­ful devices known as sub­ti­tles, which over the past four and a half decades have become not just accept­ed but demand­ed by West­ern audi­ences (even for pro­duc­tions in their own lan­guage).

This choice, as Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak says in his video on the new Shō­gun, “lets us into the minds and con­ver­sa­tions of the Japan­ese char­ac­ters,” much like the omni­scient nar­ra­tion of Clavel­l’s nov­el. Puschak high­lights how the series “uses the act of trans­la­tion to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties and lim­i­ta­tions of com­mu­ni­ca­tion across cul­tures and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, peri­od.” One notable exam­ple is its por­tray­al of the var­i­ous bilin­gual char­ac­ters who inter­pret for Black­thorne, each of whom does so dif­fer­ent­ly accord­ing to his or her moti­va­tions. The 1980 Shō­gun also had a few such scenes, but their dra­mat­ic irony was inac­ces­si­ble to mono­lin­gual view­ers.

Even if you speak both Eng­lish and Japan­ese, you know how lit­tle pro­tec­tion that real­ly offers against cul­tur­al mis­un­der­stand­ings. The new Shō­gun’s drama­ti­za­tion of that truth has sure­ly done its part to win the show more Emmy awards than any oth­er sin­gle sea­son of tele­vi­sion. A com­par­i­son to the 1980 adap­ta­tion, which rep­re­sent­ed the height of dra­mat­ic tele­vi­sion in its day, reveals the ways in which our expec­ta­tions of the form have changed over time. Nev­er­the­less, even the 2024 Shō­gun takes its lib­er­ties, the most brazen being the use of Eng­lish instead of Por­tuguese, the real lan­guage of first con­tact between Japan and the West. Clear­ly, Por­tu­gal has its work cut out: to raise a gen­er­a­tion of actors ready to star in the next adap­ta­tion by the late twen­ty-six­ties. がんば っ て and boa sorte.

Relat­ed con­tent:

16th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese His­to­ri­ans Describe the Odd­ness of Meet­ing the First Euro­peans They Ever Saw

The 17th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Samu­rai Who Sailed to Europe, Met the Pope & Became a Roman Cit­i­zen

The His­to­ry of Ancient Japan: The Sto­ry of How Japan Began, Told by Those Who Wit­nessed It (297‑1274)

Meet Yasuke, Japan’s First Black Samu­rai War­rior

Let’s Learn Japan­ese: Two Clas­sic Video Series to Get You Start­ed in the Lan­guage

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.


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