Many of us grew up with hardcover books. Shogun They are lined up on various bookshelves across the country. James Clavell’s famous and profound novel While it’s questionable how faithfully it portrayed 17th century Japan, you may have seen the original television version, which aired on NBC in 1980. Starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune (with narration by Orson Welles), this 10-hour miniseries offered American home audiences an unprecedented cinematic experience, providing viewers with things they’d never seen or heard on television, especially a large amount of dialogue spoken in untranslated Japanese.
According to screenwriter Eric Bercovici, the idea was to put the viewer in the shoes of Chamberlain’s protagonist, John Blackthorn, a British sea captain who is shipwrecked in Japan and does not know the local language. During the show’s airing, newspapers published a glossary of Japanese words most relevant to the story. ShogunThe Last Night, which aired on FX earlier this year, does something differently from other films, starting with the way it utilizes a convenient device: subtitles, a device that over the past 45 years has become not only acceptable but demanded by Western audiences (even for native-language productions).
This choice, as Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak puts it: His new video ShogunLike an omniscient narrator in Clavell’s novel, “leads us into the minds and conversations of the Japanese characters.” Puszczak emphasizes that the series “uses the act of translation to explore the possibilities and limits of cross-cultural communication, and communication itself.” One notable example is the depiction of various bilingual characters who serve as Blackthorne’s interpreters, each of whom does so in a different way depending on their own motivations. Shogun contained several such scenes, but their dramatic irony was not accessible to monolingual audiences.
Even if you speak both English and Japanese, you know how useless that can be when it comes to cultural misunderstandings. ShogunDramatizing that truth was undoubtedly a winning combination for the show. More Emmy awards than any other season of a TV show. Comparison with the 1980 editionrepresents the pinnacle of drama television at the time, and it highlights how expectations for drama have changed over time. Shogun The most daring is to use English instead of Portuguese, the language with which Japan first came into contact with the West. Clearly, Portugal has a challenge to raise a generation of actors ready to take on leading roles in the next film adaptation by the late 2060s. Good luck! Boa Sorte.
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Based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his projects include the Substack newsletter. Books about cities And books A city without a state: Walking through 21st-century Los Angeles. Follow us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
