This essay has been updated to reflect news developments.
As we prepare to pick our next president, America remains sharply, disconcertingly divided. Yet there is one leader about whom a great many Americans seem to agree. He isn’t a politician, an American or even real. His name is Yoshii Toranaga, and he is a fictional warlord from feudal Japan.
Toranaga, who’s based on the real-life Japanese warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu, is the character at the center of “Shogun,” the TV series that won best drama on Sunday and three other awards, having already earned a record 14 creative arts Emmys last weekend. It’s quite a trick for a show set at the dawn of 17th-century Japan, featuring mostly Japanese dialogue.
This isn’t the first time that the story of “Shogun” has been told to an American audience: The 1975 novel of the same name by James Clavell inspired a similarly lauded mini-series in 1980. But the current telling is different in crucial ways — and its popularity demonstrates how sharply America’s attitudes toward Japan have changed over the past 50 years. If American audiences once regarded Japan as an alien land, compelling in all its differences, we’re now able to see in the series a common experience that feels strikingly relevant to our own tumultuous times and polarized politics.
The 1980 version of “Shogun” earned record ratings for NBC and won several Emmys, including best limited series. But that “Shogun” centered squarely on the viewpoint of John Blackthorne, played by Richard Chamberlain, a shipwrecked English sailor who finds himself on Japanese shores. Through his eyes, Japan is depicted as having exotic customs and cruel punishments, counterpoints to the civilized West. Blackthorne served as the audience’s avatar in the Japan of “Shogun,” a strange and, to Blackthorne, often enigmatic land.
The show’s tone was consistent with the attitudes of the era. In 1980, many middle-aged Americans still remembered Japan as an adversary in the war in the Pacific. (Clavell, a British officer who served in the Royal Artillery, spent the latter part of World War II in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.) As a flood of Japanese products imperiled American manufacturing industries, tensions over Japan’s rise as an economic power fueled an epidemic of Japan-bashing of the figurative and sometimes literal variety.
Presidential candidates on both sides railed against Japanese companies for what they saw as unfair trade practices. Talk-show hosts targeted Japan with endless jokes. In widely publicized stunts, workers and politicians smashed Japanese products with sledgehammers. And the specter of Japan as a threatening rival proliferated in pop culture; in his 1992 follow-up to “Jurassic Park,” Michael Crichton penned “Rising Sun,” a novel that featured anti-Japanese screeds and depicted an America brought to its knees by a rapacious Japanese company.
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