Samurai Pt. 1

Representation and Appropriation in James Clavell's Shōgun

Sometimes you read a book and it stays stuck in your head even though you didn’t like it. You can’t help thinking about it at the grocery store, before falling asleep, or doing the dishes. It frustrates you. Perhaps because you feel like you wasted your precious time or perhaps because everyone else seems to like something you didn’t. 

Shōgun by James Clavell did that to me. 

People love Shōgun and it was an enormous cultural phenomenon in the 70s and 80s. One of your parents, or some of their friends, has probably read it or seen the tv miniseries. It still has a powerful cache in online literary circles, evidenced by its 5,000 Goodreads reviews and 170,000 ratings.  I first came across it in seventh grade when one of the only other bookish boys in class told me I had to read it and that it would take over my life. 

And I finally did. 

Allow me to set the scene. It was late March so my students were on Spring Break and I had two weeks off. I was with my Mom at the bookstore desperately trying to find something to sink my teeth into. I saw it and knew that it was finally time. Shōgun’s doorstopper length, 1,200 pages, felt comforting and I thought I would devour it in two weeks. On the back blurb, someone said it was so engrossing that it almost ruined their marriage because they couldn’t put it down. It seemed like pure literary escapism. FX was even doing a new miniseries on the show. 

For those who aren’t familiar, Shōgun is a book about Japan set in 1600. It follows an English ship pilot, James Blackthorne, as he washes up on a Japanese shore. Although he and his crewmates are initially horrified by the “barbarism” (more on that later) of his Japanese captors, Blackthorne eventually becomes an advisor to Yoshi Toranaga, president of the Council of Regents, who is trying to unite Feudal Japan. The novel describes Blackthorne as he slowly comes to respect and admires Japanese culture while Toranaga becomes the Japanese Shōgun through force and cunning.

A still from the 1980 miniseries

Shōgun, with some other important examples such as Ezra Vogel’s “Japan as Number One”, signaled the American fascination with Japan at the end of the 20th century. Both texts hold up Japanese thinking as a model for Western culture with Vogel focusing on the economic and Clavell on the cultural. Shōgun is published thirty years after the end of WWII, when young people, oftentimes because of the book, are becoming interested in Japanese culture as opposed to their parents many of whom harbor some racism towards the Japanese because of the war. 

Clavell himself was a Japanese POW in Singapore during the war and he cites this as a formative experience where he gained respect for the Japanese people and their culture, “I just admire the Japanese. It’s possible to end up admiring an enemy. The relationship of conqueror and conquered is an interesting one; it doesn’t necessarily lead to hate.” 

As I began reading, the novel did live up to the hype. The first 100 pages were a breeze and I became hooked. I enjoyed that the story got going quickly, that the plot felt unpredictable, and that because it was so long it had such an epic scale. However, by the back 500 pages, the book seemed to go slower and slower. I began falling out of love with it. What I set out to be a 2-3 week adventure turned into a four-month endeavor. The only thing keeping me going was the knowledge that I had come too far to give up and the promise of an epic climax, which would never actually materialize. 

By now you may be asking yourself why am I spending so much time writing about a book I didn’t like very much. Great question. Once I finished the book I realized that my criticism of it usually took a political angle, and once I started investigating the politics of the book the discussion about it got a whole lot more interesting. 

An excerpt from my Goodreads Review

Now, one other thing you should know is that Shōgun is controversial because it is a white man writing about Asian culture and because it has tropes that many consider Orientalist. One of the major examples people bring up is that James Blackthorne is depicted as a white savior while the Japanese people are depicted in a racist manner. 

The definition of Orientalism is “the representation of Asia in a stereotyped way that is regarded as embodying a colonialist attitude”. So is Shōgun orientalist? It’s complicated. Blackthorne is the archetype of a white savior in a foreign land. Blackthorne’s life is heavily based on Will Adams, an English pilot who lived in Japan whom much has been written about. It’s likely that Clavell is playing with that stereotype. However, Blackthorne is a buffoon most of the time who usually only gets ahead by sheer luck and occasional bravery. Blackthorne is also used as a pawn by Toranaga and is outmaneuvered politically by almost everyone else in the book except for his Dutch crew. 

Also, Blackthorne does not Westernize Japan, the only value that he adds to the Shogunate is that he can pilot a boat, much of the novel is about Blackthorne realizing that his own English culture is barbaric and disgusting and that Japanese culture is superior in a myriad of ways. 

While this is all true it might be at too small a scope to make a difference. At the end of the day, Blackthorne is a white protagonist in a white man’s novel about an Asian country and the nuance of how he behaves might not save the novel for you.

Clavell, I think, deserves some credit for dealing with moral ambiguity. For example, at the beginning of the book, Blackthorne’s captor Yabu is painted as brutal and violent, but by the end, Blackthorne and Yabu gain a mutual respect for each other despite him being an antagonistic force in the novel. 

Then there is the bad stuff. Specifically around the way the female love interest Mariko is portrayed. She is depicted as being married to a very hotheaded man and needing to be rescued by Blackthorne. There’s also Blackthorne’s penis that gets brought up more than it should and causes quite a stir in Japan because of its size, that part is quite bad. There are inaccuracies with the way Clavell uses the Japanese language and the mischaracterization of Seppuku as something that the average Samurai was willing to do at the drop of a hat. 

However, for a book written 50 years ago, I think it’s normal and even good that parts of it feel outdated by modern standards. The real question is are the bad parts so bad that the book is impossible to justify? 

For me–and I can’t speak for anyone else–my hating on Shōgun phase was that him being a white man writing about Asian culture was essentially a way of saying that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This is an easy criticism to make because it sets up the argument that he is playing into racial stereotypes and moves away from the work to more broad questions about cultural appropriation. 

But Clavell did actually know what he was writing about. In doing my research for this piece I came across this collection of essays, “Learning from Shōgun: Japanese History and Western Fantasy” (which you can read here). It is a collection of essays from professors in Asian and Japanese history all about the history of James Clavell’s Shōgun, and according to them a lot of the book is historically accurate, given that it is changed to be made into more exciting fiction. Many of the writers of this collection are white but they are also experts on the topic, so if you already think Shōgun is racist garbage I don’t think this collection will necessarily persuade you. 

Great cover page for an academic book imo

There is some interesting stuff in these essays. One thing that I found profoundly interesting, and will come up later, is the scale of how many people read Shōgun who then became students in these departments and interested in cultures other than their own. 

I mean just listen to this quote, “Based on our own experience, anywhere from one-fifth to one-half of all students who currently enroll in college-level courses about Japan have already read Shōgun….it would appear that the American consciousness of Japan has grown by a quantum leap because of this one book. In sheer quantity, Shōgun has probably conveyed more information about Japan to more people than all the combined writings of scholars, journalists, and novelists since the Pacific War.” 

“But what finally sets Shōgun most clearly apart from its predecessors is its instructional quality. At a purely descriptive level, Shōgun is a virtual encyclopedia of Japanese history and culture: somewhere among those half-million words, one can find a brief description of virtually everything one wanted to know about Japan.”

So what do we do with all of this information? Do we consider James Clavell to be fetishizing (people love to use this word when talking about this stuff I find this word to be so off-putting so please know me putting it in here is for a laugh) Japanese culture? Do we disregard Shōgun entirely because of its whiteness? 

I would argue that we shouldn’t. I’ll make two final arguments. 

First, Orientalism has been a concept in Western European and American culture for hundreds of years. I agree that it’s very problematic, has been used to racist ends, and has often centered white people in Asian stories and that’s not a good look. However, Clavell does take the demand for orientalist “pulp” fiction, and imbues it with facts and history. The central thesis of Shōgun is that there is a lot that the West can learn from Japan specifically, and that Western Europe should not be so arrogant in its buffoonery. That’s more progressive than people give it credit for. 

Second, Clavell is someone we could learn a little bit about forgiveness from. He was 18 when he was a POW, and shortly after he said he would be the first one to throw a brick through a Japanese embassy erected in England. A few years later and he has overcome his own ignorance, and if you do read the book you see a real empathy for even the antagonists in Shōgun. I think Clavell truly does respect Japan, and not only that he has inspired lots of people to learn more about it too, and that’s laudable. 

I think in today’s culture we are often afraid that a piece of media we enjoy will be publicly seen to be problematic and we will be shamed for enjoying it. I think people who are on the left are afraid of being attacked or “canceled” by people farther left than them.

My own biases might be playing a role here too as I’m a white man who didn’t even like Shōgun that much but am in such a rush to defend it. I also might feel like I have to defend my position as someone who lived in Asia for three years and would one day like to write a book set in China. 

The debate about Shōgun raises many questions about the nature of authenticity and representation in literary works, and while I don’t have the answer on how to strike a balance between authentic representation and appropriation, reading the book helped me work through the contours of that discussion. In that way, I’m grateful I read this book. it’s possible for Shōgun to have both positive and problematic aspects and by reading, writing, and engaging with those two nuanced ideas at the same time helps you grow as a reader, writer, and thinker. 

I hope this article helped you think about those things too. Thanks for reading. 

-Luke

P.S. Part II is coming soon where I write about the album “Honor Killed the Samurai” by Ka and “Ran” by Kurosawa and where they draw their references from.