Shōgun Podcast Episode 2 | FX's Shōgun

Father Domingo (Played by Joaquim de Almeida): Hear me my son, I alone will tell you the truth. If Toranaga claimed you as an ally, you'll never leave Japan alive.

Emily Yoshida: Welcome to Shōgun: The Official Podcast. My name is Emily Yoshida and I was a writer on the series. And after each episode, I’ll be diving 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 brought this story to life.

This week we're talking about everything that happens in episode two, so be sure to watch the show before listening because there are spoilers ahead. Okay, everybody caught up?

On the podcast today, I'll hear about what Blackthorne sees in Yabushige from actor Cosmo Jarvis. We'll learn why some characters' names in the original book had to be changed for the show from producer Eriko Miyagawa, and director Jonathan van Tulleken tells us why he thinks Ishido is actually a sympathetic villain.

But first, episode two introduces us to the many conflicts going on inside and outside of Japan as we open our story.

Rachel Kondo: We have almost 200 years that pass of civil infighting. Basically just all these warlords who were very powerful squabbling over who was going to be the guy.

Emily Yoshida: This is Shōgun executive producer and co-creator Rachel Kondo, and when she came aboard this project, it was her first time reading James Clavell’s novel.

Rachel Kondo: We spent a couple of weeks, you know, reading eight hours a day. And it was, you know, it might sound long and tedious but it was truly a page turner with unforgettable characters. We didn't really know what we were gonna go into it with but kind of made our way.

Emily Yoshida: So in adapting the show, obviously there was this huge language component of it, and we were working really really hard to make sure that the script was gonna be accurate when we translated it from English and sort of into a period language for the actors to read.

This is obviously a very complicated process and the dialogue could go through some real changes by the time it was spoken by the actors. So were there any cases you remember where the translation actually really changed what was said on the show?

Rachel Kondo: Well, one instance that comes to mind is at the end of episode one, when Toranaga is discussing with Mariko what is about to happen. He has come across this barbarian ship and he'd like her to translate for him.

And they get to this point in the conversation where he says to her, ‘I need to know, is this going to conflict with your faith to be, you know, basically translating for a heretic?’ And she says to him, and the what was in the script was, she says to Toranaga, ‘it would be a problem if I was only one thing.’

And how that came, it went to the Japanese and how that was performed by the great Anna Sawai, was that it came back, ‘I have more than one heart.’

Emily Yoshida: Mm

Rachel Kondo: And I thought that that was a beautiful, much more spiritually accurate way to put it. And so we stuck with it.

Emily Yoshida: We're talking about episode two this week, and this episode really kind of starts to get into the meat of both the political situation that Blackthorne has found himself in after washing up ashore in Japan, and kind of the dynamics between all of these different regents. So can you go into a little more detail about what kind of sets Ishido and Toranaga at odds with each other?

Rachel Kondo: So I think one of my favorite sequences of episode two is Ishido's morning routine. You know, it's a small little snippet that we kind of run through what he goes through in private, but it also kind of adds up to what exactly bugs Ishido about Toranaga. I mean, he looks at his battle armor in the beginning. And then at the end of that sequence he's looking to the Taiko’s battle armor, which is amazing, right? And Ishido’s battle armor… it's fine. It's like functional, but not that impressive. And I think he's just, you know, he feels the weight of that bureaucrat stamp as the difference between them. And, you know, I think that Toranaga who was born Minewara Minowara, you know, it's a legendary, almost mythological family clan who ruled for many, many years.

It's gonna just rankle someone like Ishido because Toranaga was that kind of guy who he's born a leader whereas Ishido has to become one. So he, he's gonna have that chip on his shoulder, I think.

Emily Yoshida: Yeah, I mean, I think some people might be surprised to know that Ishido—both the character in the series and the real life Ishida—was a peasant. He did not grow up as a samurai noble person and kind of, which is the same as the Taiko, right, too?

Rachel Kondo: Yeah, the Taiko also basically clawed his way into power. And I think that, um, that's a huge difference between how they did that versus someone like Toranaga who he is a person of legend in that society. And I think it goes into his style of, not ruling, but Toranaga is a strategist, right?

I think that the Ishidos of the world and the Taikos of the world, they would fight tooth and nail and take what they want and claim for themselves what they feel is their due. But someone like Toranaga has a completely different strategy.

Emily Yoshida: Yeah. Um, did you have any favorite moments from this episode? Or, you know, fun memories from the production of it?

Rachel Kondo: Well, I guess, that opening scene, would probably be my favorite moment, simply because immediately you're just drawn into this beautifully lit scene and this, this decadence. It's just visually decadent. And,our director, Jonathan Van Tulleken, I think did a great job of bringing us into this moment that visually looks so different from anything we've ever seen.

Uh, you can hear the chanting in the background, and then we kind of bring it down to almost a child's level and we watch a very human thing pass before us. And so yeah, I would say that was my favorite of the, of the episode.

Emily Yoshida: Yeah, I, I love that scene and I think it's so nice because oftentimes Toranaga, especially in this first part of the story, can seem so distant and calculated and kind of this unreadable person, but you know, his, his friendship with the Taiko was real, and you can really see that in that moment.

Rachel Kondo: Oh, and that, the other great thing about that scene is how it establishes the tensions between Toranaga and Ochiba

Emily Yoshida: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Rachel Kondo: I mean, those dagger eyes.

Emily Yoshida: Yeah, yeah.

Rachel Kondo: Oh wait, can I say one quick thing? Cuz I, really, it's this one moment in the episode that someone might easily miss. In which, um, Mariko and Blackthorne are discussing bathing.

And in the background you see Tsetsu, who is Mariko's lady in waiting, and she basically glides across the floor in this… She was like a liquid, she just glides across the floor and she just moves in this way that is so stunning because you can't fake that kind of stuff. You know, she's, I mean, I tried it myself. I was not able to even bow, you know, the way that they bow and to do that whole fluid moment or movement all at once was, I think, something to point out. So.

Emily Yoshida: Yeah. Yeah. The movement training is something that once you know about it, you really appreciate it.

Rachel Kondo: Yeah. And that specific person who played Tsetsu, Akiko Kobayashi. She was one of the Shosa instructors, and she exists like that in real life. I mean, she would glide in and out of the production office, and you can't help but you can't help but marvel.

Emily Yoshida: Caught in the center of a political storm is John Blackthorne, the pilot who charted a course around the world and washed up on the shores of Japan.

Cosmo Jarvis: My dad's a, he's a celestial navigator. He's a seaman. And he tried to explain how celestial navigation works, and my mathematics is pretty substandard, so a lot of that went over my head.

Emily Yoshida: Playing the role of Blackthorne is actor Cosmo Jarvis.

Cosmo Jarvis: But I did learn that the planet was not a sphere. It was an oblate spheroid, which means it's not a perfect sphere, which I, I didn't know.

Emily Yoshida: To embody the character, Cosmo looked to better understand the pilot-slash-pirate Blackthorne.

Cosmo Jarvis: You know, at the time I was sort of trying to look at the practical aspects of what his occupation entailed, like being a pilot. And looked into the state of the Protestants and Catholics at the time, and how the Pope allocated land.

Emily Yoshida: So episode two kind of starts off with this first meeting between Toranaga and Blackthorne. It's such an interesting scene both in terms of, you know, these are gonna be our two characters, this is kind of their first impression of each other, but also in terms of the way the translation works in it. I mean, you know, they can't understand each other but there is this, you know, something is happening there in that scene. What do you think that Blackthorne sees in Toranaga in that first meeting?

Cosmo Jarvis: I think he straightaway sees that Toranaga is a force to be reckoned with. I think Hiro really wears Toranaga very naturally and thickly, and he's a presence in and of himself. And so when all of that happened, there was nothing else to inform any of that from the point of view of the person whose job it was to portray Blackthorne. It felt like a very long period of sussing each other out.

We did a lot of that. And finding non-verbal common ground through other forms of communication, like body language and the sincerity of the decorum that Blackthorne might have, or lack of decorum in some cases that Blackthorne would've displayed toward him.

Emily Yoshida: I mean, it's such a delicate relationship I think it must have been to act between you two and to grow over the course of the series. Was there anything you guys did on set, you know, just off-camera to kind of maintain that dynamic or build that relationship?

Cosmo Jarvis: We didn't spend a lot of time chit-chatting, which I think was very good because it meant that when we got to those kind of introductory scenes between Toranaga and Blackthorne, the process of being in each other's company as characters began to take shape naturally as it would with all of the sort of mysticism of being strangers that we had anyway, and that worked out well.

Emily Yoshida: So Blackthorne experiences some serious whiplash in this episode - I mean, first he’s dragged into Toranaga’s court, basically like one of the most powerful men in Japan. And then from there, he's tossed into this filthy prison in Osaka, it’s just a lot. So, what was it like to be taken from one extreme to the other while shooting this episode?

Cosmo Jarvis: I mean, initially when we got to the Father Domingo scene, I was finding it difficult to reconcile the fact that in the book, he spends a huge amount of time in this prison it was quite hard to nail down the amount of fictional time that he was supposed to have been there in this adaptation. In the book the sheer misery of the conditions in that prison have a profound effect on him. And they have a profound effect on how he relates to Father Domingo. the whole prison could almost just be a book in the book.

Emily Yoshida: I mean, it does make you think about the fact, like in episode one, he spent a lot of time in a pit getting fish guts dumped on him. You know, there's a lot of brutality toward Blackthorne and his men in the first couple episodes. It does feel like it maybe negatively impacts Blackthorne's idea of, you know, this culture.

Cosmo Jarvis: Yes, and I think that those parts in particular must have come from James Clavell's experience as a prisoner of war. I only found out that he was a prisoner of war afterwards. And then it made sense about how those particular parts were so brutally realized. But Domingo seemed like a nice chap. So, and I think he is one of the few truly helpful and sort of semi-caring presences that Blackthorne comes across in those early days. But then he gets removed from the prison quite quickly anyway and onto the next problem.

Emily Yoshida: So he is eventually rescued by Yabushige. And the relationship between Blackthorne and, and Yabushige is just so rich. How do you see their relationship and how it grows over the series? What do they see in each other?

Cosmo Jarvis: They both recognize that the other one is sort of fighting as hard as the other one. Not fighting anything in particular, but just in a fight with their own life, I think. And it's obvious by the situations that they both find themselves in, and the sort of renegade quality of Yabushige. I think Blackthorne finds that fairly relatable because, again, everything is sort of trans linguistic or, or non-verbal, all their communication.

But it's very prevalent with Yabushige that there's so much fight in him and so much sort of, enigmatic kind of, well, it's like he's, he's a villain that can't be a villain because nobody should like a villain that much, as much as you like Yabushige. And I think that's what happens to Blackthorne. And I think that on the cliff, the communication between them that transcends anything that could ever be put into words, it's that. There's something just very human about him.

And there's something about the way that Yabushige kind of toys with Blackthorne that I think Blackthorne recognizes from his own attitude towards Catholics and I think he kind of can't help but respect the fact that Yabushige gives him the same kind of shit for being a foreign barbarian and making him bark like a dog and, or, or, you know, call himself a dog and these kinds of things. And I think that, in some kind of beautifully messed up way, their worst traits bring them together.

Emily Yoshida: What was the kind of offscreen relationship like with Asano? I heard there was a lot of improv on set.

Cosmo Jarvis: There was, yes, there was, at times. We were sort of always trying to find stuff in between the written lines. Which is something I wasn't used to but Tadanobu kind of, he kind of sucks you in. He's, uh, the improvised kind of noises that he makes in between words convey more in some cases than, than any line ever could. And, uh, it was, it was great. I loved working with him. He's amazing.

Emily Yoshida: It must have been kind of a meta experience to both be playing this character who is one of the only people who doesn't speak Japanese in the story, but at the same time also be on a set where you’re one of the only actors who doesn’t speak Japanese. I was just wondering if that real life experience that you were experiencing every day. Did that inform your understanding of what Blackthorne was going through?

Cosmo Jarvis: One of the things that I noticed from being on set is if somebody was translating something in Japanese to a Japanese person that I had said in English, the only thing that I could really do to gauge how what I said might have been penetrating the person's brain that I was saying it to was the expression on their face. And it was very much the same with this because you, you could kind of gauge the quality of your translator by the look on the person's face that you were speaking to.

Emily Yoshida: Shōgun’s bilingual production mirrors the complex, layered communication of the characters in the story. From poetry to translations to delicate wordplay, the power of language hangs over all the events unfolding in Osaka. In the middle of it all is Blackthorne, at the mercy of those who can communicate for him.

The Japanese language is not easily translated into English. Among the challenges is that courtesy and manners are imbued into speaking in a way that has no direct English equivalent. An early European missionary in Japan once wrote, “it is impossible to learn the language without, at the same time, learning to speak with dignity and respect.”

The art of proper respect is a delicate matter. In Japanese, prefixes and honorifics are added to denote familiarity, superiority, and inferiority. When referring to an object that belonged to someone of a higher station, a samurai would start with the prefix O-, go-, or on-. For instance yashiki, or mansion, becomes O-yashiki when a samurai refers to his lord's residence.

Japanese also uses honorifics on people’s names to denote their standing. In contemporary Japanese, you may hear people use “san” at the end of a name to signal respect, which is more or less equivalent to “mr, mrs, or miss”. During the Sengoku period the more formal "-sama" was used, which is why we often hear the name "Toranaga-sama." on the show. A lack of any honorific, to just say Toranaga, either indicated extreme familiarity …or contempt.

Eriko Miyagawa: There are so many ways to say one thing in one language, and then, you know, there's no such thing as direct translation. Never a dull moment.

Emily VO: This is producer Eriko Miyagawa, whose job it was to oversee the use of Japanese language throughout the show.

Eriko Miyagawa: You know, our goal was to make it a historically authentic show. So I think in terms of language and dialogue front, I think what we really focused on, pushing the authenticity of it, but also making sure that modern audiences can find it accessible.

Emily Yoshida: So much of the show revolves around a character who is entirely Japanese-speaking, Lord Toranaga. And the actor who plays him, Hiroyuki Sanada, was also a producer on this show. So I was wondering, was he like an on-set producer? Like, what was he doing on the set to ensure this kind of accuracy?

Eriko Miyagawa: Yeah. Um, it's sort of like, what is he not doing? He wears so many hats. I still remember like the day one, he shows up in sort of all black. He, he looks like he could be in the grip department, you know, black tracksuit and, you know, baseball cap, and it's covid, so everybody's masked up.

And, and so nobody knew who he was and, you know, he's kind of wandering around getting coffee from crafty and listening to all the dialogues, you know, fixing background if they're walking funny or carrying swords in the wrong way. He's like getting in there.

Emily Yoshida: There's so much into about language and about, you know, getting into kind of these very, um, specific like titles and the way that people speak to each other and show respect to one another.

Can you explain some of, for, for viewers who are kind of all coming to this for the first time, like what are all these different titles that we're hearing and and what do they mean?

Eriko Miyagawa: It's considered rude to address somebody just by their names. Like Hiro in English, I would call him ‘Hiro’ but in Japanese I would always call him ‘Sanada-san’.

And then Dono, which is still very respectful but slightly more equal. So you would notice, you know Ishido um, addressing Kiama as Kiama-dono or Sugiyama-dono because they're sort of colleagues. Sometimes they switch around depending on who's talking to who and you know, what the relationship is and it's tricky. It's never, um, there are a lot of gray areas to that as well, so even for us, like on set, we're like, wait, should it be tono or should it be, we're constantly adjusting and making decisions.

You know, even like simple words like I, there could be multiple ways to say it depending on your class or gender or you know, who you're talking to.

Emily Yoshida: I was gonna ask about that because I just always noticed what people are referring to themselves as, and I noticed, you know, and maybe this is more of a historical thing, but a lot more of the men say Watakushi than like boku, like people aren't saying—

Eriko Miyagawa: Oh yeah, boku is, boku is modern. Like Samurai, uh, would address oneself as sessha or {Japanese}. Kind of all depends on the setting and you know, the context. So, yeah, it's always like when, you know, on set when sort of Justin or actors have requests to, you know, for last minute dialogue change or, you know, request to improvise and we're like, oh, give me one minute. But luckily Hiro has such a great handle of, he's done so many period shows, so he has a very good handle of these type of language.

Emily Yoshida: So readers of Clavell's books and people who'd seen the miniseries before will notice that almost none of the names are the same besides our three leads. They've all been changed, and that was a, I think that was a very big creative decision on the part of the show for Justin and Rachel.

Can you kind of explain how some of those original names, like Fujiko for example. What were the things that needed to be changed about the names and how would a period-accurate Sengoku person be addressed?

Eriko Miyagawa: Yeah, that is a big decision. But I think it was the right decision ultimately, because, with due respect, a lot of the names in the novel were too modern or, sometimes it's names of a place or sometimes it's a last name is used as a first name. So, I think it's important that all the names feel historically authentic while respecting the novel. Right? So Fujiko is Fuji.

Emily Yoshida: Because "ko" which is, I mean, that's a very common ending for a woman's name now, but that was not really a kind of format for a name.

Eriko Miyagawa: Not at that time. It's, it's not completely out of the question and also Mariko being such an iconic part of the novel, I think, I think it was good to keep.

Emily Yoshida: At the time of our story, Mariko, Toranaga and all of the Japanese characters in Shōgun have been living in a period of constant war.

Jonathan Van Tulleken: There is a sort of simmering tension running through the entire piece where we are not sure if any of our lead characters might die.

Emily Yoshida: This is episode two director Jonathan Van Tulleken.

Jonathan Van Tulleken: Everyone's trying to be inscrutable and everyone's trying to also read what everyone else is thinking. And of course, this is a world where death, death is happening on a regular basis at this moment in time. That it was, there was a lot of war, there was a lot of civil unrest.

And so I think we were always trying to find that and find moments of that in the background. In the prison scene, we put an execution happening in episode two. And that wasn't originally scripted, but it felt important to show to Blackthorne in that moment, that death is present, death is near. And the same with the beheading in the village in episode one.

And then on the other side, of just a sort of historical side of things, I think because it was a period of substantial change in sort of sitting between two different periods, we really spent a lot of time trying to speak to experts about, you know, what this exact period was like.

Emily Yoshida: Yeah. I mean, another huge aspect of the period is that it's when you have the Portuguese influence there. You have the Christians coming in. So I just wanted to, you know, get in a little bit of that, those sort of two worlds colliding.

Jonathan Van Tulleken: What I really had taken away from the novel and when I read Justin and Rachel's first script was that we are the savages. That we are the barbarians. And I think when we wanted to depict the Christians and depict the Portuguese and the Jesuits, we really wanted to show the Japanese world as light and open and embracing nature and the food, you know, the cleanliness of the food. And I think when we showed the Jesuits what we wanted to show was that actually it's dark and it's feted fetid and they're eating greasy meat and we had the dog licking hands, uh, the food off the priest's hands and things. Something that would just be abhorrent, you know, which actually is, it is totally disgusting.

And so I think that was, that was where we really lent into it. And it, to be honest, it wasn't difficult to do. It was, you know, we just looked at the historical references and it immediately opened itself up to us. We see so many stories of kind of, the westerner coming in and teaching everyone else how to live their lives, um, and being the kind of savior. And what's great about Shōgun is that that is not the case. That really isn't, that isn't how it plays out at all. And I, and I felt that that was not only correct but super intriguing as well. There's a new perspective on it.

Emily Yoshida: And Toranaga in particular is such a complicated character to both direct and act because there's so much going on inside and not necessarily things we see. And I, you know, I was just like marveling at how he still kind of indicates that and we see the wheels in his head turning particularly in that first interview scene with Blackthorne which is just great on so many levels. What were you kind of thinking going into that scene, that first meeting of Blackthorne and Toranaga?

Jonathan Van Tulleken: I think just making it very first person and also really trying to get inside both their heads that feel what Blackthorne's feeling about it all, and that intimidation of this new place and this person and both of these very smart men taking each other in and thinking about what to say next and that all of this is pivotal, that Blackthorne missteps he will die.

Yeah, and I think, again, I think Cosmo was great at that in that Cosmo deliberately sort of didn't really want to know, like didn't wanna know what was being said to him all the time. That worked hard at trying to get his Japanese better as the show went on so that he would try and understand more and more as Blackthorne did.

Emily Yoshida: I remember when we were in the room that we really started to think in a way about Toranaga and Blackthorne's relationship being a kind of romance of sorts and a very complicated one, one that's sort of a dance back and forth.

How did you kind of work with that relationship between Cosmo and Hiroyuki? Because, you know, as we were talking about, there's a language barrier there, and how did you kind of get that to work? Because it's such an electric moment in that episode.

Jonathan Van Tulleken: I think that relationship, we talked a lot about that relationship beforehand and, and I think they both felt it with each other. I think they are two actors that come in hugely prepared. I mean, everyone did.

And I think that in itself, you know, from the very first day of filming, kind of brought a level of respect and engagement from each other that I think does show on screen. And also we shot an order, you know, a lot of the time we did those scenes in the castle were some of the last things we shot of that episode one and two block.

And so I think when we got there, Blackthorne had already experienced for real a lot of these things. You know, and filming was not easy. It was a very rainy, muddy exterior thing. And you know, he's getting covered in gunk and really having to live it. And I think it was when Cosmo gets to that place, when he gets those warm sets inside, that actually that did have an effect as well. I was very pleased we got to shoot it in order.

Emily Yoshida: Is there any scene other than ones we've gotten into already that you had a lot of fun with or that, you know, thought were particularly, uh, a meaty…

Jonathan Van Tulleken: I really liked, actually into the humor of it, I really liked the scene of Ishido sort of getting armor envy and kind of being jealous. It felt very human that someone discovering that being in power is actually not fun. Being in power is work, being in power is like a desk job. You're a bureaucrat.

And I think Ishido feeling like Toranaga was this rockstar and he's this guy stamping documents and doing administration and bogged down in this formality and, you know, and he's got his armor, but he sort of wishes he had slightly better armor. And, you know, I, I just felt, it felt very true to life.

Emily Yoshida: How did you approach Ishido as a villain? Because he doesn't, at first glance, check a lot of the boxes of somebody that you're rooting against necessarily.

Jonathan Van Tulleken: Yeah, I think that's what's so interesting about him is that in many respects, he should be the hero of the story a little bit. And so that was the kind of fascinating thing to take someone who in lots of ways is right. He's not wrong about a lot of the things he's saying and appealing to people, but he's so frustrated that you can't just be saying the right thing.

You also need to be the right person to say it. And I think also we really went out of our way to cast someone who felt like they would be a formidable enemy to Toranaga. Not sort of an old man who maybe can't, quite haggard, who's maybe on his last wind. I think that was why we got Takehiro that I think we really felt like he brought this very unusual energy of someone who feels like by rights, he should be, he should be thought of as great like Toranaga, and yet just kind of falls short.

I think that's what makes the narrative so compelling. That's what makes it exciting to direct that these aren't two-dimensional characters, that it also has contemporary resonance. You know, careful who your leaders are. Careful who we choose. We often pick people for the wrong reasons.

And in fact, that's almost the richest thing, is that how do people feel at the end of this story about all our characters? You know, how do you feel about Blackthorne? That there are whole moments, I think, where Blackthorne is just wrong. He's just racist and wrong and muddle headed and, and pigheaded and stubborn. But we'll love him anyway. Or will come to love him. And I think we love people in spite of their issues or maybe even because of their issues that no one loves someone who's just great.

Emily Yoshida: That's all for this week's episode of Shōgun: the official podcast. Next week: How will the Osaka court react to the assassination attempt? What will the Catholics do now that the Black Ship can’t set sail? And will Blackthorne ever bathe again? Tune in next week when we discuss episode three of FX’s Shōgun.

You can find a link in our description to episodes one and two of Shōgun. And if you wanna 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.