Shōgun Podcast Episode 8 | FX's Shōgun

Mariko (Played by Anna Sawai): You see once loyalty begins, it does not have an end. Otherwise it would not be loyalty.

Blackthorne (Played by Cosmo Jarvis): But loyal turns senseless very quickly when the order is suicide.

Mariko (Played by Anna Sawai): Would you like me to translate that, or was that for me?

Emily Yoshida: Welcome to Shōgun: The Official Podcast. My name is Emily Yoshida and I was a writer on the show. And each week, after every episode, we dive deeper into the different elements that went into making Shōgun with co-creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, along with the cast and crew that helped bring this story to life.

Today, we'll be talking about episode eight, “The Abyss of Life,” and as always, this is a quick heads up that there will be spoilers for this and all previous episodes of the show.

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

On today's podcast, I'll hear a bout the emotional undertones of the tea ceremony from director Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour, the fates of the real life shipwrecked sailors from historian Frederick Cryns, and creating the foundations of the city that will become Tokyo with production designer Helen Jarvis.

But first, showrunner Justin Marks gives us some insight into our character's choices in this episode and the introduction of Toranaga's Unfinished City, Edo.

Justin Marks: We have in our show a variety of settings, and for us as writers it was really important that every setting felt unique. You know, Osaka, for example, as the main city up until this point, is always depicted by means of this idea of imprisonment. Even the sound design of Osaka Castle that—we robbed the gardens of the thing that matters most in Osaka, which is the birds that you would always recognize. And I said, ‘if you hear birds too many times, you're gonna think that this is a nice place.’ And we wanted to feel like we were depicting it with some sense of paranoia.

But in Edo we have this other thing and we needed it to represent something very different from Osaka. And so Edo really is the future. That's what we wanted more than anything. From the moment it's introduced, it's introduced from Toranaga's point of view, looking over a bridge into its unconstructed future. And you know, you see it as Toranaga sees it, which is it's everything of where his fate is pulling him. And yet we're seeing it at a moment where, to quote Gin in episode seven, Toranaga doesn't have a future. It may be out of reach for him. So this representation of an unbuilt future, I think, is really, in a very expressionistic kind of way, it's the physical manifestation of where Toranaga is in the story, which is, ‘look at my unbuilt road ahead.’

Emily Yoshida: Another huge moment that has been built up for a very long time and we finally get to see this episode is Blackthorne's reunion with his crew which is, of course, not exactly how he imagined it to go.

And this is another big character moment because it kind of changes, I think, Blackthorne's sense of the world and sense of like, what he's going to do, like who he is.

Justin Marks: Yeah. It's such an interesting—this sequence is such an interesting one in the book, and the evolution of this sequence in our show was, you know, where in a lot of ways we, as a writer's room and then producing the show, found our modernity, right?

So much of this is based around this idea of a—if you're going by the stranger in a strange land story and all of the tropes that that is bound to, you know, this is an essential scene in that story shape, right? Because it's the moment when the character who has seemingly begun to integrate himself into a new society finds that he really is no longer part of the world that he came from. We didn't quite buy that as writers in a modern day. And, you know, I think what we really felt was that one can never truly integrate themselves into something that they weren't born into, that they don't belong to, that that's a bit of a fantasy. That one can wear the costume and one can speak a language, but that doesn't really speak to the idea of belonging. I think belonging is something that, you know, we're all trying to understand for ourselves and for others among us. And that's one of the things that, you know, where we are today and why Shōgun is such an important story for today is something that I think, you know, we wanted to explore it on a deeper level.

And it's actually, I have to credit, this scene did evolve past the writer's room. It was a conversation with Cosmo Jarvis, our lead actor. It was Cosmo who said, ‘I want to confront it and I want to be confronted by it. And I want to be confronted by who I am, for all of my ugliness, to be seen, by someone and to reveal it that way.’

That he was willing to beg, cheat, and steal and the way that he's been doing with the Japanese, but he was also willing to do it with his own men because frankly, Blackthorne has these colonial impulses that we really wanted to interrogate, and to confront him with at this moment when he doesn't know what else to do and he thinks he's going to his men to get everything that he's wanted. ‘I've made my way in Japan, and I can use those connections. Maybe things didn't go the way they were supposed to go with Toranaga, but that's okay. Now I've got my ship and my men back,’ and even his men have finally come to terms with who he is.

And so he has no roads back. And he has to go to his secret shadow on every level, and that's Yabushige. A man who, like Blackthorne, tells lies out of every orifice of his body and has only this kind of clinging to survival in his arsenal. You know, Yabushige and Blackthorne, from the very first episode when they stared at each other on that cliff, really are spiritually entwined. They are the same man, in a lot of ways, from two different sides of that culture. And so we love this buddy comedy that's kind of burgeoning between them, or tragedy depending on which way you look at it. But, you know, we, so we use that scene with his own man as a way of kind of forcing him into the arms of Yabushige. You know, which is something we really, I think, embellished and took beyond where it was in the book.

Emily Yoshida: So also in this episode we have the seppuku of Hiromatsu. And in this scene, in front of all Toranaga’s guys, all of his vassals, how much knowledge does Hiromatsu really have as to, like, what this big plan is for Toranaga or what he’s truly planning here? Or is Hiromatsu just actually protesting what Toranaga’s doing? Cause pretty much everyone at this point thinks Toranaga’s days are numbered.

Justin Marks: I think there are many layers to look at this scene. Having really worked very closely with the two actors at the center of it and the director of this, I can speak to what was played. Tokuma-san, who plays Hiromatsu, had a great idea for an adjustment that we made at the last minute for this scene which is that these three generals who are coming into this, who are wearing armor as a, as a demonstration of protest at a funeral—which is a very common historical phenomenon at that time—they're into this position where they're going to make a stand. And Tokuma-san wanted to play Hiromatsu's insertion of himself as a choice that he makes to spare their lives. Because if he could speak up to his lord and die in their place, then they won't have to commit seppuku. So he does it before they can do it as really a humane gesture to these three men who have served him as well as Toranaga all this time.

Because of that, there's a great moment in the scene between Toranaga and Hiromatsu where Toranaga turns to Hiromatsu in shock because he did not intend for Hiromatsu to do this. And I don't think Hiromatsu knew that Toranaga wanted these generals to commit seppuku, you know, in order to show his enemies that he had surrendered and truly given up and that he has no hope, right? But in order for that narrative to be perfect, his most treasured general really has to do it. And that's something that I don't think even Toranaga wanted to do.

And so when you look back on it from the place of understanding what you know at the end of the episode, that all of this was performance art for Toranaga, you know—which I recommend doing, is watching, especially this episode a second time because there's a whole other layer that emerges. You see that this scene is truly a tragedy on a level that is more than what it even appears to be. That not only does his best friend kill himself in front of him, but he really didn't have to.

Emily Yoshida: Emotions run high in this episode as the characters contend with their own beginnings and endings. Death is ever present in our story, but it's in this episode that we see the customs around it for the first time with the funeral of Nagakado.

Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour: That funeral scene. It's like three minutes on camera, but it's way more involved than you would think.

Emily Yoshida: Emotions run high in this episode as the characters contend with their own beginnings and endings. Death is ever present in our story, but it's in this episode that we see the customs around it for the first time with the funeral of Nagakado.

Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour: That funeral scene. It's like three minutes on camera, but it's way more involved than you would think.

Emily Yoshida: We’re now hearing episode eight's director, Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour, who like everyone involved in this show, sought to get all the historical details just right. But Emmanuel definitely had his work cut out for him in this episode.

Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour: From the chants that the lead monk was chanting, to the people that are involved in the procession. The order of people is very particular and necessary, and it's, it was painstaking. They would go through that list and would have to essentially wrangle over 80 people over the two days that we shot this work. And you know, just saying 80 people doesn't sound that bad, but when you're doing one take of like, let's say like there's this wide shot that you get before the burning of the coffin happens where we see, you know, people coming into that tent. But there's like 40 people in front and behind these two characters and if anything went wrong in a take, we would have to reset 80 people, which meant everybody had to go back, and, you know, we had a horse involved in that. We had this confetti that was being thrown. We had all this stuff happening and it was a small—I mean, we had a big lot, but it was, it was just a lot.

Emily Yoshida: So by the end of this episode, Toranaga has lost his son and his right hand man, his best friend, back to back. So how do you think he's feeling coming out of all of this? We were starting to see the fullness of his plan, but where do you think Toranaga is at emotionally?

Emmanuel Osei-Kuffor: I think he's lost everything. I, I think he's lost everything, but I also think that that just makes his resoluteness, his plan moving forward, that much more important. And, you know, Sanada-San helped us out at the very end of the episode.

He proposed having Toranaga say, ‘thank you for your sacrifice, Nagakado, my son. Thank you. Thank you, Hiromatsu. You've given me more time. That wasn't in the script originally. It was just supposed to be this quiet moment, but I think it's reflective of just how much these two people meant to him and there's no turning back now. He's now fully committed to Crimson Sky, you know, he's committed to taking down Osaka.

He's, he's now committed. But, you know, I think it's very very interesting because, and it was fun to shoot that moment before he gets to the grave site, because before he, like, when he wakes up in bed, and he has this moment before he opens the door and goes to the grave site, I really wanted to have another moment where it's his first day after the loss of his best friend.

And it's a, I think in that moment before he opens the door, I think is the first true moment of vulnerability that he has. Um, this is the first real emotion we see in an episode where everything is more calculated.

Emily Yoshida: Another really, you know, I imagine as a director, an interesting challenge in this episode is the tea ceremony, which is such an important moment for Buntaro and Mariko. Can you talk a little bit about that scene and, and how you approached it?

Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour: Yeah, that was one of my favorite scenes. Justin, at the very beginning of production, he made it clear that he really wanted this moment to feel symbolic and emotional. He said he wanted it to feel like, a little bit like chef's table in the way that they really imbue every shot with this emotion and this intentionality with all these extreme closeups and there's this poetic nature to a lot of those, the scenes in that show.

And Buntaro, he's not just a highly accomplished Samurai. He's also a tea ceremony expert, and there's a backstory that we never really touch on, but he had done this for Mariko before, this wasn't the first time he did it. Which is quite an interesting dichotomy for that character. But I think for this scene, it was his attempt to reset their relationship. There was a lot of conversations about just where we could insert emotion without destroying the integrity of that ceremony and making it feel as accurate as possible.

Emily Yoshida: But for them, it's kind of this attempt, this sort of olive branch between them. It's them, kind of, making the movements toward maybe repairing their relationship, but then it ends with this really powerful declaration from Mariko. And, after this point, it really feels like she has made a decision about her marriage and really who she wants to be going forward. So how did you and Anna kind of work that out in this scene?

Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour: It was a challenging, challenging scene because even when Buntaro invites her to the tea ceremony, you see this intense resentment towards Buntaro. And so coming into this, one of the things that I did talk to Anna about was those moments when she's in the room alone before Buntaro comes in are quite key in setting up her internal state.

There's this moment where she realizes that, you know, the level of thought that he's put into like the words that are on that wall scroll, the choice of that plant with a, with a drop of water on it. It all takes her back to moments where Buntaro wasn't as abusive.

But it also acknowledges just where her frame of mind is and this very, very same things that she's worried about, like the whole poem that she starts to recite when Buntaro first comes in, begins to neutralize her hatred for Buntaro and allows her to take in the ceremony.

When Buntaro actually starts to conduct the ceremony, I think even she's surprised by just how it's allowing her in that moment, just like the precision and the magic of the tea ceremony, it's allowing her to see her husband differently, even just for a moment. It's not that she likes her husband again, it's not that she is remembering their love. It's not about that at all. But it's almost they're acknowledging their fate and they've forgotten their anger towards each other, and they're just kind of resting in the sadness of what the future is.

Emily Yoshida: As Mariko enters the Tea House, she and Buntaro are both desperately in need of a time out and the kind of intimacy that can be found in the formality of a tea ceremony. The tea house is a world unto itself where she and her husband can exist without judgment outside their daily lives. In Episode 8, we see the tea ceremony presented from a husband to a wife, but the ceremony has been used in many different contexts over the years.

In the Sengoku era, the ceremony would be performed by warlords and their generals as a test of intimacy and trust for their guests. Guests would lay down their weapons, entering the teahouse unarmed. At that very moment, all people would become equal. Rank, class. It all fell away.

In a way, the ceremony began before anyone even set foot in the room. As they approached the teahouse, guests would take the time to consider their surroundings, no detail being too small to be observed and appreciated. From the small garden outside the structure, to the sounds of nature that surrounded the space.

The interior of the teahouse was constructed with exposed, natural wood, allowing the calm of the garden to fill the house. A carefully chosen scroll, called a kakejiku, would hang on the wall.

Every bit of decoration was chosen with the guests in mind. Every element mattered, from the brushstrokes of the calligraphy on the scroll, to the drop of dew on a flower petal, as we saw in Buntaro’s ceremony.

The ritual itself would begin with the host carefully washing each utensil in front of the guests, until not a speck of dust was seen. Preparation of the tea was an exercise in balance and grace, and every movement of the host during the serving of the tea was to be appreciated. The cups were picked out specifically for the ceremony, leaving behind the everyday dishware to display the tastes of the host.

It wouldn’t be until after the serving of the tea, when trust had been established between allies and friends, that informal conversation could start up again.

Near the end of the Sengoku period, the ceremony was elevated by an innovative tea master named Sen-no-rikyu . Hosokawa Tadaoki, Lady Gracia’s husband and the real life inspiration for Buntaro, was one of this Tea Master's most accomplished students.

The Japanese tea ceremony was and is to this day a setting where every detail matters. So naturally, every detail mattered to our research team as well – both in this scene and another pivotal moment in Episode 8.

Fredrik Cryns: The art department has done an enormous effort to recreate the funeral as accurate as possible.

Emily Yoshida: Returning to the show is historian Frederick Cryns, here to tell us a bit more about the customs surrounding a high ranking samurai’s funeral.

Fredrik Cryns: So it's, after the body is washed, it is put into a coffin, and that coffin is put into a palanquin. And then the palanquin is brought in a procession outside of the city. Mostly in, in the mountains, where there is a cremation site. The palanquin would go a few times around the site before being put on the pit. And then you have the monks because it's a Buddhist funeral, and a Buddhist funeral is a cremation because the Buddha himself was cremated.

Emily Yoshida: This episode also, in the middle of all of this, is our first introduction of Edo, which is, you know, the city that will become Tokyo. How long had Edo been around at this point? Like, was it started by Tokugawa Ieyasu or did it have a kind of previous life as a smaller village?

Fredrik Cryns: So it's, after the body is washed, it is put into a coffin, and that coffin is put into a palanquin. And then the palanquin is brought in a procession outside of the city. Mostly in, in the mountains, where there is a cremation site. The palanquin would go a few times around the site before being put on the pit. And then you have the monks because it's a Buddhist funeral, and a Buddhist funeral is a cremation because the Buddha himself was cremated.

Emily Yoshida: This episode also, in the middle of all of this, is our first introduction of Edo, which is, you know, the city that will become Tokyo. How long had Edo been around at this point? Like, was it started by Tokugawa Ieyasu or did it have a kind of previous life as a smaller village?

Fredrik Cryns: Yes, it had a long history already as a small castle, but at the time when Ieyasu got into Edo, there was almost nothing left, I think. It was really a small village and an old castle in ruins, to say so. So, he started to build it from scratch. It was conveniently located because on the roads you had the river, the Sumida River, you had the sea. So it, it was at crossroads, and I think that Ieyasu envisaged that it would become the new capital of Japan in the future.

Emily Yoshida: So in Edo, we see Blackthorn finally, after a very long time, get to reunite with his crew. I was wondering if you knew what happened to William Adams’ crew, in real life. Did they survive? Did any of them stay in Japan?

Fredrik Cryns: Yes, more than ten survived, and so they all settled in Japan. Most of them, I think, married Japanese, got children. We know from the documents at the time that, for example, one Dutchman married the daughter of the master of an inn. You have one who settled in Sakai, which was a merchant city south of Osaka. He became a trader. So, they all have their own stories, but they really settled in Japan and married Japanese and probably all learned Japanese and spoke it fluently, I think.

Emily Yoshida: So we hear some of Mariko's skill for poetry this week, in the tea ceremony scene, of course, and then also at the very end of the episode. And I understand that you wrote the Japanese versions of the poems that we hear in the show. So how did you go about capturing this style of poetry?

Fredrik Cryns: Yes, I did. So I first studied hundreds of poems from the time to be able to compose something that would be acceptable for the samurai.

It was the linked verse, which is called Renga in Japanese. Linked verse poetry was enormously popular among the warlords. Because if you're not good at poetry, you're not accepted as a samurai. This is something people in the West, and even in modern Japan, don't understand completely.

You also had a lot of classical references. And the people who responded to the first poem, had to have knowledge of that. Otherwise, he would be seen as a barbarian. So you had to have a lot of knowledge, wisdom, and skill, and also ability to quickly grasp the situation and communicate with the others.

Emily Yoshida: Nobody appreciates Mariko’s way with words quite as much as Toranaga. And just as she carefully constructed her verses, Tokugawa Ieyasu meticulously planned the city of Edo from the ground up. But it’s hard to believe the swampy fishing town we see in this episode will someday be the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo.

Helen Jarvis: The biggest thing for us was to convey a city that's being built.

Emily Yoshida: Back to talk us through capturing the beginnings of the most populous city in the world is production designer Helen Jarvis.

Helen Jarvis: The first thing was to understand what state the city would've been in in 1600. It wasn't as large. It was very much in development. It had existed before our Toranaga character comes. So, there was some form of a manor house or some very low lying building when he would've first taken over and it was not suitable. So he then set about building.

So much of Osaka is aged and, you know, weathered and is long established, but to try to convey so many things about Edo, that it was not—the castle would not have been decorative.

So early on we decided to keep everything into wood tones. We had wooden floors, we didn't have tatami mats. All the decorative screens, we didn't have any for Edo. They were all different types of woodwork, wooden screens, to create a very different feel to the interiors.

And also in terms of the, the gardens and vegetation we decided that we were going to keep everything less manicured, you know, more in the state of flux, and there were people building and using tools and such, and scaffolding around buildings. So again, we were just trying to paint this very different, very new place that was being built.

Emily Yoshida: I was wondering because now, you know, we've seen Osaka, we've seen Edo and, of course, Ajiro. These are kind of our, you know, our main settings here, and they all have their different profiles as we've been talking about. I was wondering just from the angle of color though, if there was any thought into kind of how the palettes of all these different places...

Helen Jarvis: Yeah. You touched on Ajiro. we actually had two slightly different parts of Ajiro. We decided early on that we needed a beautiful bay. We found a great location some distance outside Vancouver. Again, in conversation with Frederik, he pointed out a few films that had been made that were fairly authentic and we looked at these houses and they were very weathered and gray. So that seemed to suit the waterfront existence.

And then the upper part of the village, we had a different location and it was in a wooded area as if this is where the more well-to-do or the samurai class would live up there. Those sets had much more of a richer wood tone. So we went quite gray and weathered for the lower part of the town and very much richer with thatch roofing. And so deeper, richer wood tones. Again, being conscious that you've got episodes rolling one into the next, and that it's important to differentiate where you are.

Emily Yoshida: So I wanted to talk about a scene in episode eight that I’m sure was a huge feat from the production design point of view which is the tea ceremony.

Helen Jarvis: It's funny you say that because it's actually one of those things that was relatively easy to construct because there are tea houses still in existence. So there was a lot of information about the tea house, and it's so specific. You're not gonna deviate. You could take a little license with some sets, but the tea house had to be exactly a certain measurement. It had to have exactly a certain layout and the action is incredibly choreographed.

And we have a lovely lady who came throughout and was our mistress of the tea ceremony. Every step of the way was carefully, carefully vetted. So in an odd sort of way, it was quite easy because it was all there, you know. It was there to be discovered, you know, it was there for us to follow examples and certainly paintings and actual drawings with dimensions of tea houses.

Emily Yoshida: So were most of the kind of elements of it more curated by the teahouse expert?

Helen Jarvis: Yes and no. I mean, there were some oddities. There were these double-sided shoji that were—I think they were paper on both sides. They had these strange little depressed handles unlike any other shoji. Also the use of rice paper around the base of the walls. There had to be certain areas had plain cream, you know, off-white rice paper and certain areas had a bluish gray-blue paper. And also the ceremony itself is so extraordinary.

Emily Yoshida: I'm curious what the most interesting aspect was for you designing the sets for this show?

Helen Jarvis: It may have been in the gardens. Our interior sets were all on stage, but so much of the interiors were reliant on the exterior, on seeing outside. So if you're just looking through a portal into a beautiful garden, that's one thing. But when you take characters out into the garden and you play a scene in the garden, the garden needs to be really good and it needs to be quite realistic. And it's also about how it's lit, you know, to make it really feel as if you're outdoors.

Emily Yoshida: And the garden in Blackthorne's house, that's outdoors as well, yeah?

Helen Jarvis: That was an interesting location. It was just a little car park, if you can believe that. A car park in between two sort of slightly hilly, you know, it was a little bit of a valley, if you will. And again, we looked at that thought, ‘well, there's a good location. There's something we can actually build houses up the hillside a little bit, create a little bit more of a dynamic to it.’ Yeah that garden, that was, that was a lot of fun doing the exterior gardens on location.

A lot of it came down to seasonally what could we plant and how much of the garden was actually real and how much of it was artificial. And also the protocols of how you arrange stones, how you arrange pathways. Fascinating stuff.

Emily Yoshida: That's all for this week's episode of Shōgun: The Official Podcast. Next week: What secret mission has Toranaga sent Mariko to carry out in Osaka? Where do Yabushige's loyalties really lie? And how will he and Blackthorne try to escape their destinies? Tune in next week when we discuss the penultimate episode of Shōgun.

You can find a link in our description to episodes one through eight of Shōgun. And if you want to dive deeper into the world of our story, check out the official Shōgun viewers 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.