Shōgun Podcast Episode 1 | FX's Shōgun

Blackthorne (Played by Cosmo Jarvis): That man was going to kill himself up on that cliff. He risked his life to save you, and then when he was done for in those waves he didn’t fight. He could have tried but he just turned and drew his blade.

Rodruiges (Played by Nestor Carbonell) : He chose his death, what better end could a man hope for?

Blackthorne: Will I die here?

Rodruigues: Likely.

Emily Yoshida: Welcome to Shōgun: The Official Podcast. My name is Emily Yoshida. I was a staff writer on this show, and helped adapt James Clavell’s beloved novel into the show you see today.

The writer’s room spent months creating this story but the premiere of this show has been years in the making. So many other contributors, from the actors to stunt choreographers, to translators and researchers have all brought FX's Shōgun to life.

On this podcast, we’re going to connect the pieces. After each episode of the show, we'll dive deeper into the different elements that went into making it. Each week, I'll be talking with co-creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, and we’ll hear behind-the-scenes stories from the cast and crew. We'll also go deeper into the real-life chapter of Japanese history that inspired the events of this story.

This week we’re talking about the pilot episode: “Anjin” (which, you may have noticed, means “pilot” in Japanese, but the boat kind, not the TV kind.) And heads up: there will be spoilers for this episode, so I highly recommend you go watch it first and then come back here and join us afterwards.

And I’d also like to give a quick content warning that this episode will include discussions about suicide.

So today on the pod, actor and producer Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Toranaga in the series, reveals what bonded the Japanese and American film crews on set. I talk to historian Frederick Cryns about the real world counterparts of each of our main characters, and costume designer Carlos Rosario talks about the secret behind all that samurai armor you see on screen.

But first, let’s go back to the very beginning.

Justin Marks: What drew us to Shōgun was that there is such a great throwback, classic, adventure epic told through an entirely different lens.

Emily Yoshida: This is Shōgun co-creator and showrunner Justin Marks.

Justin Marks: The novel Shōgun is a great page turner, first of all, and a really layered tapestry of a lot of characters. And the best way to describe it is it's a story of a crucial moment in Japanese history. A moment when they had been coming out of many, many decades of civil war and were still in kind of a transitional period; moving from the Sengoku Jidai into what would become the Edo period. And the story is reasonably loyal to the history of Japan with a lot of conflations and a lot of characters who have been kind of omitted or simplified and moved around.

And then it takes that story and it deposits this character of John Blackthorne who's based on the real life William Adams, an explorer—to use that term generously—uh, to who came to Japan, and forged really strong diplomatic ties with the Japanese power structure. In some ways with Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was the model for Toranaga, the lead character of our show. And then in other ways just with other religious and political figures at the time.

Emily Yoshida: Yeah, this book has had such a pull for so long and I think a lot of people maybe even know it from their parents having read the book. But what would you say is the thing that, that is like the draw that beyond just being this like really fascinating, detailed, historical fiction?

Justin Marks: Yeah, yeah.

Emily Yoshida: What’s the juice there for you?

Justin Marks: What I remember most about, you know, what we talked about in the writer's room when we were building this show was it felt like we couldn't just do a story that sort of dealt with some of the tropes that you would associate with ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ where, “Here I come into this place and look, they have paper walls and they eat raw fish and imagine all these amazing things.” We had to find a different reason for being.

What really excited me was to say, “Well, it is a story about globalization. It's a story about cultures meeting each other, and of course in a time when it hadn't happened much, but we're going to interpret it through the lens of the globalization that we have today. And so what are the issues that become important to us as a civilization?”

And I think those issues are really interesting when it comes to matters of empathy, matters of agency—who gets to speak for whom, who gets to speak for themselves—what expectations we have as outsiders coming into a new world, and what expectations we have as insiders when an outsider shows up into our culture.

Emily Yoshida: Yeah. You were talking about what it feels like for this culture to be seeing these foreigners. I mean, granted, as we understand they're not the first Europeans to be there, but they are a new kind of European, they're speaking a different language.

When we hear English on the show, in our kind of understanding of the show, that's not English. Right?

Justin Marks: No, not at all. Right. It's, it's, it was sort of our, you know, ‘lingua franca’ that we decided on early on. And there's a lot of precedence for this. You know, Silence is a good example I can think of, right, that dealt with it. Where if you have European characters speaking—for the most part they're really speaking Portuguese, almost entirely. You know, when Blackthorne finds himself speaking to the Japanese, the only language that any Japanese might know that wasn't Japanese to speak to him with would be Portuguese.

And William Adams, historically, and John Blackthorne, the fictional character, both spoke a number of languages. So it would make sense that Portuguese could be his way of getting in with them. I would also say, if you're really thinking about it in the first episode, you know, when Blackthorne's speaking to the men in the pit, he'd also of course be speaking Dutch. So really there's almost no opportunity for him to speak actual English in the story. But, you know, in our case, we had to make some, uh, exceptions to that.

Emily Yoshida: A majority of the show’s dialogue is in Japanese, but our writer's room was entirely English speaking, writing scripts in English. One might assume that it was just a matter of translating those scripts from English to Japanese, but there was actually a lot more to it than that. right?

Just tell me a little bit about the translation process here.

Justin Marks: So we went through this very detailed process to say, if we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it right. Where we would—of course, all of us wrote it in English—worked with a producer on the show who I would call kind of the voice in my ear from a cultural point of view; just to sort of make certain adjustments, as in someone wouldn't have said that kind of thing or been that direct with that kind of idea.

So then we made some adjustments, accordingly. Then we would send it to a team of translators in Tokyo who would kind of translate it into a modern Japanese of sorts and they would hand that to a Japanese playwright who specialized in Jidaigeki, and you know, period Japanese, who, uh, spoke no English and would rewrite that dialogue into a more polished prose. And then that would, you know, be performed. And when we did the subtitles, we translated back, not from the script, but from the Japanese, we translated it again into English.

And so the subtitles that you're reading on screen have gone through about nine steps to get to where they are. And we're really proud of the attention to that detail because I hope it shows an effort to say, “if we're going to do the act of translation, we're going to get it right and we're going to do something that's very special.”

Emily Yoshida: Well just episode one, there's so much that's thrown at us just in the first hour and, you know, a lot to take in a lot of characters that are introduced. Is there anything that you personally really hope the viewer catches that maybe might fly under the radar? Any interesting stories?

Justin Marks: I think one of the most important stories of this entire show, happens in the first episode. And I remember in the writer's room we were really slow to understand its impact early on, and it took conversations with a lot of our Japanese advisors, Japanese producers, before I really finally began to understand the power of Tadayoshi's gesture in the very early scene of the first episode. When that young Samurai stands up and crosses the line, you know, steps over the tatami with the sword almost drawn in the ceremonial meeting hall, to speak in protest of the way all of these regents are speaking to his lord, Toranaga. That Tadayoshi would stand up in the name of his lord, realize that he's then jeopardized all of their safety for having done so, and then not just offer up himself for sacrifice, but also offer up his own child.

And the scene speaks to this idea of just what one has to give up in order to truly serve a cause. And I think that the story of Fuji's baby's death—this baby that she offers up to death because her husband pledged it in order to make a peace—really has ripple effects throughout the story. So, um, something I hope people pay close attention to.

Emily Yoshida: Shōgun’s story revolves around the powerful but inscrutable Lord Toranaga: A master tactician whose motives and secrets are often known only to himself. For an actor, conveying that complexity could prove to be quite a challenge.

Hiroyuki Sanada: Um, luckily I played Ieyasu Tokugawa, the model of Yoshii Toranaga, before in Japan.

Emily Yoshida: This is actor Hiroyuki Sanada, known for his roles in The Last Samurai, John Wick and 47 Ronin. But even with the previous experience playing Toranaga’s historical counterpart, Hiro took on a new challenge with Shōgun. He worked as both the star and producer to maintain the story's authenticity.

Hiroyuki Sanada: As a producer, I could hire experienced Japanese crew for the wig, costume, props, everything. And then, master of gesture. It's very important how to sit, how to stand up, how to walk, how to serve. You know, those kinds of things are very important. Even hard, hard for the Japanese young actors.

So we should teach them from the beginning. So we started from there. And after all these kind of things during the preparation time, finally I put my wig and costume and then sat on set and then speaking dialogue. That was the easiest part for me. An enjoyable part.

Emily Yoshida: Yeah, I bet.

Hiroyuki Sanada: So I just enjoyed playing my role.

I was on set every day, every single day as a producer. Before the director coming, check the props, set design, costume, extras, movement. Then bring the director and start. So when I start acting, I was like... whoo finally, I'm free now. Just live as Toranaga. So that, that feeling was first time for me, but it was so fun.

Emily Yoshida: Were there any fun stories from behind the scenes that you remember from shooting the pilot?

Hiroyuki Sanada: Yeah, so many memories.

I don't know where should I start. My son, Nagakado.Yeah, Yuki.

I spent good time. Father and son bonding time. So we went to shopping together, supermarket. “What shall we eat tonight? Okay, let's do barbecue.”

And, uh, yeah, during shooting, we had a nice catering team, western food, japanese food. And we separated in the line for the lunch time. But little by little, crossovered, Western crew tried to eating Japanese food, and then Japanese cast and crew eating Western food. And then, “what did you eat today?” Those kind of conversation made us great atmosphere on set. East meets West.

Emily Yoshida: It’s just. You know, the whole theme of the show at crafty.

Hiroyuki Sanada: Yeah.

Emily Yoshida: Wow. So our first introduction of Toranaga in, in our first episode is, is with him and his, his falcon, his beloved falcon, Tetsuko.

Hiroyuki Sanada: Oh yes, my favorite.

Emily Yoshida: And this is sort of a running theme. Did you actually handle the, the, the falcons? Oh, wow.

Hiroyuki Sanada: Yeah. Before the, before we start shooting, we had a boot camp and training the samurai movement, horseback riding, everything, and falcon training. That was my mission to control him until start shooting. And especially the falcon scene was my first day in the whole shooting.

Emily Yoshida: Wow. Cause it shot chronologically, right?

Hiroyuki Sanada: Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Hiroyuki Sanada: He was only two weeks old, but already trained well, and his name was Shōgun. So, like, he was born just for this show.

Emily Yoshida: He was born for the role.

The falconry is such a big part of Toranaga's character and he's, you know, it becomes a metaphor I think, for a lot down the road. Did you feel like you learned anything about Toranaga through working with the, with the falcons and with the, the birds?

Hiroyuki Sanada: Yeah. Um, I, I knew the falcon hunting was a good training for the samurais. And then, I learned Ieaysu loved hunting with a falcon or hawk. And so, during the shooting, I could feel why he loved. Because we can learn a lot, you know. When’s the best timing? Or learning about being patient, wait, you know. And controlling people equals control falcon. So kind of same system there. I could feel that.

Emily Yoshida: One of the first examples we see of Toranaga and his strategic mind is in the meeting of the Regents. Which is already a very tense scene before Todayoshi, the young samurai, steps on the tatami mat and almost causes a blood bath. And there's so much going on in the scene that's going unsaid. Can you describe what's going on in Toranaga's head in this moment?

Hiroyuki Sanada: Yeah, Tadayoshi said something and then maybe Turanaga was, “Oh my gosh. What are you doing boy? I have a plan here.”

Emily Yoshida: Yeah.

Hiroyuki Sanada: “Don't bother me.” But I know his braveness so stop him but i'm happy the other side, the other hand because that's samurai way.

Emily Yoshida: Yeah. You see that he's willing to risk his life to defend his lord.

Hiroyuki Sanada: Yeah. But a step onto tatami mat, or even not draw the sword, just holding a sword, you know, scabbard, that's enough.

Emily Yoshida: Yeah, yeah.

Hiroyuki Sanada: So, have to be commit to seppuku or start fighting immediately. So, all or nothing. So, Toranaga has no choice. So, of course, sad. But he loves the samurai spirit.

Emily Yoshida: This week on Shōgun, Todayoshi stands by with the rest of Toranaga’s vassals as the Council of Regents accuses their leader of treachery. When he can no longer bear this dishonor, Todayoshi stands and puts his hand on his sword in defiance of the council. But when he realizes this action has endangered his Lord, he asks for permission to end his family bloodline.

When faced with extreme circumstances, samurai were known to take their own life, and even those of their families, in a ritual known as seppuku.

This act sent a powerful message. In Tadayoshi's case, it was a message of atonement, to reclaim his honor and express commitment to his Lord. But seppuku could also be a form of protest to proclaim innocence or to express disagreement with the lord's decision. Whatever the reason, seppuku was a solemn act taken seriously by one's allies and enemies alike.

Typically, once a samurai had decided to end their life, they would enlist what we refer to on the show as a ‘second.’ This was a trusted friend, a fellow warrior or family member who would help them in the process. They would compose a death poem – serving as their final words. Then, when it was time to do the deed, the samurai would take their short sword, or wakizashi, and turn it on themselves, making a deep semicircular cut across their lower abdomen.

This cut was intentionally fatal, and, obviously, extremely painful. Once it had been made, and the samurai had effectively guaranteed their own death, the second would be ready to step in and deliver a quick merciful strike to end their suffering.

During the Edo period, which comes directly after the events of Shōgun, seppuku became highly ritualized. This is often how we see the act depicted in pop culture now. The samurai would wear white robes, as we Tadayoshi wearing for his seppuku, and the action would be performed in front of an audience.

In the Sengoku period, when our story takes place, seppuku was typically a much more private act. It was done in a quiet, intimate setting behind closed doors. While hard to comprehend from a modern perspective, death was a part of life for many Japanese people at the time. With over a hundred years of warring samurai factions, people were accustomed to lives being lost.

The Sengoku period is not depicted on screen nearly as often as the more famous Edo period, and it was quite a different time in a lot of really important ways. Thankfully, Shōgun was lucky enough to have one of the authorities on all things Sengoku on our research team. He’s a Japanese historian living in Kyoto – who coincidentally emigrated from the Netherlands, just like the crew of the Erasmus.

Fredrik Cryns: My name is Frederik Cryns. I am a professor of Japanese history at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan, and my field of research is basically the Sengoku period.

Emily Yoshida: I wanna first ask about Tadayoshi and his seppuku. Would it be common for Samurai like him to face a death sentence just for interrupting an important meeting?

Fredrik Cryns: So it's Tadayoshi himself who asked the permission to commit seppuku and to kill his son. There are a lot of misconceptions about seppuku. And they originate in the Edo period because seppuku in the Edo period became more of a sentence of punishment while originally seppuku was something you did by yourself.

In most cases, when you are on the brink of defeat, they would commit seppuku. When they did something which they thought was not honorable, they would commit seppuku, but that was their own decision. For samurai, seppuku was something special. It was a way to show their courage.

Emily Yoshida: It's kind of both a privilege to do it, but also kind of a, almost a social responsibility…

Fredrik Cryns: yes, indeed, that's it.

Emily Yoshida: …in a way too. Well, it feels like a big part of the appeal of Shōgun at any point has been the historical accuracy and that you feel like you're really in this world and really get to know it.

So I kind of wanted to go through just very briefly, the real life counterparts of these three characters. So let’s start with Toranaga.

Fredrik Cryns: The historical equivalent of Toranaga is Tokugawa Ieyasu. He was one of the most powerful warlords at the time and he was a member of the Council of Regents. But he was in a quite precarious situation because the other regents were plotting against him and it was not sure for him if he could keep his power.

Then we have John Blackthorne. His equivalent is William Adams, and it was just in 1600, in this period of political instability, that he washed ashore on a Dutch ship in Japan. He was just an English pilot, so normally he wasn't permitted to see such a great warlord as Ieyasu was, but, in some way or another, Ieyasu ordered him to come to Osaka to have an audience with him.

Then we have Mariko, Hosokawa Gracia. And she again plays a very important role in the political atmosphere at the time. Gracia was a very important figure, very high standing from the Akechi family. So these three main characters are the basis of the story, but they all have their equivalence in history.

Emily Yoshida: Pretty much every element of Shōgun involved painstaking historical research and I’ll talk to Frederik more about it in the coming weeks. But bringing this research to life also took enormous attention to detail. And just minutes into the first episode, you can see that detail on display in the costumes.

Carlos Rosario: Now, something that is interesting is that period, the samurais were not wearing a uniform in which all of them were wearing exactly the same armor. The samurais were wearing, actually, their own clothes, right? So there was a diversity of chaos in their clothes. Everybody was wearing something a little bit different.

Emily Yoshida: This is costume designer Carlos Rosario, who created the outfits for everyone from the Dutch sailors to Japanese fishermen to the samurai lords.

Carlos Rosario: You know, it was really interesting to, to understand the language of the clothing at that period. You know, it's at the end of sort of like a period of chaos, before this economic growth that happens in the Edo period in Japan. So I was fascinated about that period of transition. By doing a lot of research and actually at some point even I was able to speak with the daughter of Mr. Kurosawa, who's a costume designer in Japan.

Emily Yoshida: Cool. I didn't know that. That’s awesome.

Carlos Rosario: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was able to understand that regardless of how linear the silhouettes of the clothing for men and women look at that period, the intricacy, the details, the layering, the way they get dressed is completely different based on what your rank is and based on the circumstances that you are in. And that was maybe the most complicated part of this show because it wasn't like in other TV shows where you can create a closet for each character and then you keep reusing the same costumes.

All these characters sort of progress so much throughout the storyline that I had to understand that for every single one of the situations, I had to design something specifically for that moment. And that was the complicated part of the show for me, but at the same time, incredibly interesting.

Emily Yoshida: But there are some characters who do definitely have their own style that's very specific. I mean, Yabushige's feather ja– I mean, it's just such a fantastic piece of costuming. For that one specifically, what inspired that? Where did that come from?

Carlos Rosario: Okay. That one is one of my favorite costumes and actually it's one of—you know, the jinboari, which is the top layer, that vest that goes over the armor—is one of Justin Marks, our showrunner's favorite piece. Right? And so that look, well, let's just say that, first, that I think what's important for the audience to understand is that, you know, a lot of these characters are actually based on real characters, right? So, for us, when we started doing all the research, we started doing the research on the armors that Yabushige, Toranaga, and all these different people wore, right? And so, and after that, we did our own interpretation.

And I think the jinbaori, it came because when I spoke with the daughter of Mr. Kurosawa. You know, I asked her a question and I asked the question of, “when all these lords that are bigger than life, right, so powerful, they go to, for example, small villages, do they tone down their costumes?”

And I remember her very specifically telling me, “you know, Carlos, actually, it's the reverse. When they go to the countryside, the more they can show through their clothing how powerful they are, the better it is.” And so, and she said, “in terms of the jinbaoris,” she said, “there are no rules, so you can go for it. So just get as creative as possible.”

And so to me, Yabushige was such an interesting character and so complex, but I thought he was a bit of a rock star. You know, the first time we see him, he comes to Ajiro and just with all his feathers. And I just wanted to make him just a little bit more edgy than everybody else.

Emily Yoshida: And he's, you know, he's got to keep those villagers in line too.

Carlos Rosario: Totally. Totally. Yes, exactly.

Emily Yoshida: Was there anything that really just, was not at all what you expected as far as, you know, how these people were dressing? Like, what was, you know, the kind of norm, the standard for people?

Carlos Rosario: You know, I think what really shocked me the most, is the time that it takes to actually dress somebody with any of these outfits. You know, it takes about two people maybe, one hour-one hour and 15 minutes. It's a lot of work to dress.

And, you know, when you do the research and you see all these different silhouettes for men and women, it just seems so simple. And then when you get into it, it's so complicated, so architectural, and there's such a very specific way of dressing everybody that, you know, that becomes very, very complicated, you know, and we wanted to get it right.

And so we could do our research, but then thanks to our fittings with all these Japanese actors that have so much experience, we're able to understand the little tricks, you know, of how to dress them. And like, for example, Toranaga in the beginning, when we did his, you know, like the sash, you know, the belts, right. In the beginning, we did it like in silk, you know, and it was pretty smooth. Right? And then he said that he wanted something a bit more like raw silk with more texture because it would be easier for him to kind of actually tie it because It could grab the fabric much better. So it was little details like that, that made a big difference. And that helped us throughout all the 10 episodes to know more and more about the clothing and how to dress people

Emily Yoshida: Yeah. Yeah. So that armor, once you had it all, uh, manufactured and were getting ready to, to ship it out, did you ever get a chance to try it on yourself?

Carlos Rosario: So actually, actually, it's really interesting. So I've obviously, you know, before the show, I never wore samurai armor. Right? And what we did before, as I was prepping the show, is that we rented an armor from Japan. And so I had it shipped to Vancouver and myself—and I still have the pictures—I wore that armor because I wanted to experience how heavy it was. Right? And that one was very, very heavy. And I remember thinking that for everything that our actors needed to do and perform in terms of action and how long they needed to wear those armors, they needed to be as light as possible.

So what I did is that I made them in leather.

Emily Yoshida: Oh wow.

Carlos Rosario: Because I thought it would feel more organic, more in touch with what they would be able to make at that period, you know?

And so I thought that it would represent more that period, the way it would have been manufactured, but also it would help in terms of the lightness.

And I remember the first time that our lead actor, Hiro-san, wore the armor, he said, this is the lightest armor I've ever worn. And we never ever had anybody, in 10 episodes, complaining about the armor.

So that was amazing.

Emily Yoshida: That's all for this week's episode of Shōgun: the Official Podcast. Next week: How will Blackthorne be received in Osaka? And will the embattled Lord Toranaga see him as a friend or an enemy? Tune in next time when we discuss episode 2 of FX's Shōgun.

You can find a link in our description to episode one of Shōgun. And if you want to dive deeper into the world of our story, check out the Official Shōgun Viewer's Guide. There's a link to that in the show notes as well.

Be sure to rate, review, and follow Shōgun: The Official Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Emily Yoshida and I'll see you next week.