LearningfromShǀgunJapanese
HistoryandWestern
Fantasy
Edited by Henry
Smith

Program in Asian Studies
University of California,
Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara,
California 93106

Contents

Designed by Marc Treib

Copyright © 1980 by Henry D. Smith II
for the authors
Distributed by the Japan Society,
333 East 47th Street, New York,
N.Y. 10017

Illustrations of samurai armor are
from Murai Masahiro, Tanki yǀryaku(A compendium for the mounted
warrior), rev. ed., 1837, woodblock
edition in the Metropolitan Museumof Art, New York

Contributors vi
Maps viii
Preface xi

1Part I: The Fantasy
James Clavell and the Legend of the British Samurai
Henry Smith

1

2

Japan, Jawpen, and the Attractions of an Opposite 20
David Plath3Shǀgun as an Introduction to Cross-Cultural Learning 27
Elgin Heinz

4

Part II: The History
Blackthorne’s England 35
Sandra Piercy

5

Trade and Diplomacy in the Era of Shǀgun 43
Ronald Toby

6

The Struggle for the Shogunate 52
Henry Smith7

Hosokawa Gracia: A Model for Mariko 62
Chieko Mulhern

This publication has been supported by
grants from:

8

Consulate General of Japan, Los
Angeles9Japan-United States
Friendship Commission

Learning Japanese with Blackthorne 79
Susan Matisoff

10

Northeast Asia Council,
Association for Asian Studies

The Paradoxes of the Japanese Samurai 86
Henry Smith

11

USC-UCLA Joint East Asia
Studies Center

Consorts and Courtesans: The Women of Shǀgun 99
Henry Smith

12

Raw Fish and a Hot Bath: Dilemmas of Daily LifeHenry Smith

Southern California Conference on
International Studies

Part III: The Meeting of Cultures
Death and Karma in the World of Shǀgun 71
William LaFleur

Who’s Who in Shǀgun 127
Glossary 135
For Further Reading 150
Postscript: The TV Transformation 161

113

vi

Contributors

Elgin Heinz is a consultant on the preparation of educational materials about Asia. He is a former teacher of Asian studies at the highschool level, and was a member of a team which wrote Opening
Doors: Contemporary Japan (The Asia Society, New York, 1979).
William LaFleur teaches Buddhism and Japanese thought in the
Department of Oriental Languages at UCLA. Mirror for the Moon
(New Directions) is his translation of poems by Saigyo, a monk of
twelfth-century Japan. He is currently working on a book entitled
The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval
Japan.
Susan Matisoff is an associate professor in the Department of
Asian Languages at Stanford University, where she has taught
since 1972. She is the author of The Legend of Semimaru, BlindMusician of Japan, and her research centers on the Muromachi
through Tokugawa periods with a particular interest in drama, oral
and folk literature, and popular culture.
Chieko Mulhern is associate professor of Japanese language andliterature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is
the author of Kǀda Rohan, a literary biography of a modern Japanese writer, and of “Cinderella and the Jesuits: An Otogizoshi
Cycle as Christian Literature” (Monumenta Nipponica, Winter1979). She is currently editing a volume entitled Female Heroes ofJapan.

vii

Sandra Piercy is a graduate student in English history of the TudorStuart period at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her
dissertation, “The Cradle of Salvation: Domestic Theology in
Early Stuart England,” is in progress. She is also co-editor of King,Saints, and Parliaments: A Sourcebook for Western Civilization,
1050-1715.
David Plath is professor of anthropology and Asian studies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For two decades hehas been studying modern Japanese lifeways, and his latest bookon the subject is Long Engagements: Maturity in Modern Japan,
issued by Stanford University Press in 1980.
Henry Smith teaches Japanese history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His current interest is the history of urban culture in Japan, and he has recently written “Tokyo and London:
Comparative Conceptions of the City” (in Albert Craig, ed.,Japan: A Comparative View). He is currently preparing a bookentitled Views of Edo: Transformations in the Japanese Visual
World, 1700-1900.
Ronald Toby is assistant professor of history and Asian studies at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches
Japanese history. Part of his current research on the interaction
between domestic politics and foreign relations in the Tokugawa
period has been published as “Reopening the Question of Sakoku;
Diplomacy in the Legitimation of the Tokugawa Bakufu,” Journalof Japanese Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (1977).

viii

European Voyages to Asia

Japan in the Era of Shǀgun

ix

Preface“History is today and tomorrow. You know, if
you don’t read history, you’re a bloody idiot.”
James Clavell in conversation
May 16, 1980

This book is intended for those who have read James Clavell’sShǀgun and who are curious about its educational significance as“A Novel of Japan.” Although Shǀgun, with its generous servingof sex, violence, and intrigue, is in the mainstream of current popular entertainment, it is set apart by a certain instructional tone. For
one thing, Shǀgun provides a wealth of factual information about
Japanese history and culture, information which is probably new tothe majority of its readers. But Shǀgun is informative in a prescriptive sense as well, since the gradual acceptance of Japanese culture
by the hero Blackthorne bears the clear implication that the Westhas something to learn from Japan.
We hope that the following essays will be of special interest to
those who, like ourselves, are professional teachers of Japanese history and culture. It was largely the influence of our students that
led us to consider Shǀgun for its educational uses. My own experience is perhaps typical: uneasy over the depiction of the Japanesesamurai as sadistic and uncaring of life, I was initially unable toread past the first two hundred pages of Shǀgun. Only when pressedby inquisitive students did I read the entire novel and come to understand that the initial image of the Japanese as “barbarians” was afoil for the hero’s eventual understanding that Japan is not only
civilized, but maybe even more civilized than the West. In short, thePREFACE

xii

central theme of the novel itself turned out to be exactly our business: learning about Japan.
For educators, it is useful to understand Shǀgun if only because
so many people have read it. 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 Shǀgun, andnot a few of these have become interested in Japan because of it.
With over six million copies of Shǀgun in print (and more sure tofollow after the television series), it would appear that the American consciousness of Japan has grown by a quantum leap becauseof this one book. In sheer quantity, Shǀgun has probably conveyed
more information about Japan to more people than all the combined writings of scholars, journalists, and novelists since thePacific War. At the very least, an understanding of Shǀgun may
help those of us involved in education about Japan to better understand our audience.
In the subtitle “Japanese History and Western Fantasy,” we are
drawing attention to two different aspects of “learning fromShǀgun.” Our approach to fantasy in Shǀgun is essentially anthropological, viewing the novel as a contemporary American phenomenon; in Chapters 2 and 3, David Plath and Elgin Heinz explore
some of the theoretical issues involved. We emphasize that we intend
nothing derogatory in our use of the word “fantasy.” After all, a
fertile imagination is an indispensable component of the historicalmind, whether that of a novelist like James Clavell or that of academic scholars like ourselves: how else can we gain real understanding of people in different times, or of different cultures? The realtask is to recognize, analyze, and reflect upon our imaginative projections into the past.
With Chapter 4, the emphasis shifts from the anthropological tothe historical, and to the specific problem of learning about Japan(and, for comparison, England) in the year 1600. This places us
squarely in an era of Japanese history unsurpassed for sheer humandrama. The period of Shǀgun is rich in all the staples of history inthe old-fashioned, popular sense: constant warfare, delicate diplomacy, colorful characters, political intrigue, and religious fervor. Of
particular importance for comparative purposes is the extensively
documented contact between Japan and the West in those years. In
detailing the correlation between the fictional world of Shǀgun andthe historical reality of the time (to the limited extent that we understand it), we have not intended to criticize James Clavell but rather
to lead interested readers into an historical “reality” which can beevery bit as fascinating as “fiction.”
For those of us who are historians, the; concern has been toemphasize the importance of change in the era of Shǀgun. In doing

so, we have tried to extend the point in time depicted in the novel
into a line of historical process extending over the century
1550-1650, and often beyond. This period of history is of great
importance in terms of institutional and cultural innovations, manyof which paved the way to the long Tokugawa peace and to what in
the twentieth century is generally understood as Japanese “tradition.” Whether tea ceremony, Confucianism, castle towns, screen
paintings, geisha, Zen gardens, or many other key features of theancien régime, each emerged out of the era of Shǀgun. So for the
professional as much as for the popular historian, the period ofShǀgun is of great interest, and focuses our attention on the fundamental question of how historical change takes place, and why.
I would like to put forth a personal suggestion that the idea of“learning from Shǀgun’“ may be relevant not only for a generalaudience but for the world of scholarship as well. Many academic
scholars of Japan will have much the same reaction to the title
Learning from Shǀgun as professional architects had to Learningfrom Las Vegas (by Robert Venturi and others, 1973), a sense of
surprise—and even indignation—at the thought of “learning” from
popular culture. The point, of course, is that architects should learn
from Las Vegas, and historians from Shǀgun, not because they are‘popular, but because popular culture helps professionals reflect on
their basic priorities—not unlike the way in which Blackthorne, inlearning from Japan, clarified his own values. For Venturi and hiscolleagues, the extravagant use of decorative signing along the Las
Vegas strip suggested the importance of communication and symbolism in architecture and served as a critique of the overemphasis
on purity and formalism among modernist architects. In much thesame way, I wonder if the effectiveness of Shǀgun in opening up
the world of traditional Japan does not suggest something about
the advantages of dealing with matters of immediate human experience in the writing of history.
Just as James Clavell tries to “make things real” in his attention
to personal emotions and the details of daily life, should not we ashistorians take a more sensuous approach to “ideas” and “institutions,” treating them less as disembodied abstractions and more ascorrelatives of concrete human existence? The lament of Frenchhistorian Lucien Febvre in 1941, while perhaps no longer so true ofWestern historiography, would certainly still apply to the case ofJapan: “We have no history of Love. We have no history of Death.
We have no history of Pity nor of Cruelty, we have no history ofJoy.” We also have as yet very little history of such basic mattersas sex, dress, disease, and food in Japan—all items of interest to
the readers of Shǀgun. By drawing our attention to human life as
it was experienced from day to day, Shǀgun suggests new areas forxiii

PREFACE

xiv

historical inquiry. In a related way, this immensely influential novel
about Japan should encourage academic specialists to rethink somebasic issues of communication: Who is our audience? What are wetrying to say? And how are we trying to say it?
Finally, we should mention that we have not attempted any
explicit approach to Shǀgun as literature, since we were interested
primarily in what the novel had to suggest about cross-cultural learning and historical change. We certainly recognize, however, thatShǀgun is a work of fiction, and those tempted to be disparaging
might refresh themselves with a reading of Prince Genji’s famous
defense of the art of fiction in The Tale of Genji (c. A. D. 1000):
If it weren’t for old romances like this, how on earth would you get throughthese long tedious days when time moves so slowly? And besides, 1 realizethat many of these works, full of fabrications though they are, do succeed in
evoking the emotion of things in a most realistic way. One event follows
plausibly on another, and in the end we cannot help being moved by thestory, even though we know what foolishness it all really is. Thus, when weread about the ordeals of some delightful princess in a romance, we may findourselves actually entering into the poor girl’s feelings. (Ivan Morris, The
World of the Shining Prince, p. 315)

We have also tried to bear in mind Genji’s further observation thatthe author of fiction “certainly does not write about specific people, recording all the actual circumstances of their lives. Rather it isa matter of his being so moved by things, good or bad, which hehas heard and seen happening to men and women that he cannot
keep it to himself but wants to commit it to writing and make it
known to other people.”
Finally, we promised James Clavell that he could have the last
word: when our conversation with him in May 1980 turned to thequestion of how he could so vividly portray what happened inJapan in the year 1600, he said, “You can say whatever you like,but in the end you should say: he must have been there!”
Although this book was written in anticipation of the television
adaptation of Shǀgun scheduled for September 1980, we haveaddressed ourselves to the novel alone. Even though we were able
to see a filmscript of the TV series through the courtesy of Paramount Studios, we were not able to preview the film series itself. In
any event, it has been our feeling that only the novel is appropriate
for learning purposes, since it is (to use one of James Clavell’sfavorite words) “finite”: it is cheap, portable, and easily available.
Most of what we say about the novel will apply to the film; we havemade note of obvious exceptions.

We have spelled all Japanese words according to modern romanization, which is sometimes different from (and often less historicallyaccurate than) some of the older forms that appear in Shǀgun (suchas Yedo for Edo [the modern Tokyo], or Kwanto for Kanto). As
Susan Matisoff points out in Chapter 9, the long mark over certain
Japanese vowels (calling for a longer duration, not a change insound) is an important part of the spelling, and we have included it
except for such familiar place names as Kyoto and Osaka (properlyKyǀto and ƿsaka) and except for those words which have passed
into the English language (such as ‘daimyo’ and ‘shogun’, whichappear in roman letters rather than italics). An exception to the
exception is the title Shǀgun itself, which, following the cover designof the novel, we have treated as a Japanese word, maintaining thelong mark. Japanese names appear, as in Shǀgun, in Japanese order,
with the family name first. All page references to Shǀgun appear initalics and correspond to the Dell paperback edition. Most quotations from James Clavell are from a conversation with the authors
in May 1980; a few are from NBC press releases, June 1980.
This book would not have been possible without the generous
support of the organizations listed opposite the title page. The editor
is grateful to Shelley Brody for editorial help and to Mary Dumont
for research assistance. Frank Gibney of the Pacific Basin Institutein Santa Barbara has offered encouragement and administrative
support. Peter Grilli, director of education for the Japan Society of
New York, has been of continuing assistance throughout the project; we are particularly indebted to the Japan Society for undertaking the distribution of this book. Finally, I owe a note of personal
thanks to the forty-odd students of History 187A, “The Era ofShǀgun” in Spring 1980 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their enthusiastic and challenging response did much to convince me that both student and scholar can indeed learn a great deal
from Shǀgun,Our last and most important acknowledgment is to James Clavell
himself, who was gracious enough to meet with five of the authors
on May 16, 1980 (appropriately enough, the 360th anniversary ofthe death of William Adams) and to talk about his views on Japanese culture and his intentions in writing the novel. We hope that
we have respected his claim that “I am a storyteller, not an historian,” although one of the lessons of Shǀgun is that perhaps historians and storytellers need not be such different breeds as they
appear to be today.
Henry Smith
Santa Barbara, California
August 1980

xv

1

James Clavell and the Legend of the British Samurai
Henry Smith. . . Then one afternoon in London he picked up one of his
daughter Holly’s schoolbooks and he came upon an intriguing bitof history. “It said, ‘In 1600, an Englishman went to Japan andbecame a samurai,” Clavell recalls. “I knew nothing about
Japanese history, so I thought I’d better start reading.” NBCpress release, May 1980
And so James Clavell began reading, widely, and then writing.
Four years and half a million words later, Shǀgun was published, inthe spring of 1975, and it has since become a remarkably durable
best seller. Although Clavell did not realize it when he stumbled
across the story of William Adams in his daughter’s schoolbook(nor, indeed, does he seem very conscious of it even now) he wasfollowing in the footsteps of at least five earlier Anglo-Saxon
novelists who were inspired by the story of “an Englishman who
went to Japan in the year 1600 and became a samurai,” Clavell’s
standard one-line characterization of Shǀgun. Until Clavell’s, noneof the novels based on the tale of Will Adams appear to haveenjoyed any great success, although one of them (Blaker’s The
Needlewatcher) is now back in print. But an understanding of thesources and symbols of the Will Adams story, which in its frequentSMITH: THE BRITISH SAMURAI

2romantic retelling constitutes a full-blown modern legend, leads toa better appreciation of the historical place of Shǀgun.
The Historical William Adams
Three historical coincidences serve to explain the enduring appealof the story of William Adams. First, he was undeniably the “first
Englishman in Japan,” indeed probably the first Englishman tosettle in Asia, a fact of considerable importance in the context ofthe history of the British Empire, of which Adams tends to becomea sort of symbolic founding father. This has led to his frequentcommemoration within the narrow context of modern AngloJapanese diplomatic and cultural relations, but also more broadly
as a symbol of the enduring self-ascribed values of the AngloSaxon in Asia: manliness, fair-mindedness, a sense of adventure,
bravery, and a dedication to the principles of free enterprise andfree trade.
Secondly, one is struck by the coincidence of the timing ofAdams’ arrival in Japan, in the spring of 1600, a momentous year
in the course of Japanese history. For it was six months later, at theBattle of Sekigahara, that Tokugawa Ieyasu established a decisive
hegemony over all Japan and began the process of solidifying theregime which he and his thirteen successors as shogun would perpetuate for over two and a half centuries. It almost seems as thoughfate were at work to join the destinies of the symbolic progenitor ofa great Asian colonial empire and the actual progenitor of one ofAsia’s most durable national regimes.
The final coincidence is that what we know about the real William
Adams is just enough in terms of the possibilities for imaginative
historical fiction. It is actually quite coincidental that we know anything much about Adams at all, since almost all the information
comes from six letters which he wrote back to England and whichmiraculously survived among the records of the British East India
Company. Scattered other bits of information are available fromthe correspondence and diaries of other Englishmen in Japan in theyears 1613-20, and a few more details from Japanese records, but
all add up to more of an outline for a character than a full historicalpersonality.
Of Adams’ four surviving letters, the first two are the mostimportant, one dated October 1611 and addressed “TO MYVNKNOWNE FRINDS AND COUNTRI-MEN,” and the other anundated fragment of a letter to his wife. The two letters differ conspicuously in a number of details (suggesting that they were written
at quite different times, the one to his wife presumably earlier) but
they both essentially tell of his voyage to Japan, of his first reception there, and, in the 1611 letter, a few details of his fate after thethree initial meetings with Tokugawa Ieyasu. Although written in aformal and reportorial style (the letter to his wife is notably lacking
in any note of real personal feeling), the letters of William Adams
are fascinating reading. In the 1611 letter, Adams introduces himself, not without a hint of pride:... I am a Kentish man, borne in a towne called Gillingham, two English
miles from Rochester, one mile from Chattam, where the Kings ships doelye: from the age of twelue yeares olde, I was brought vp in Limehouse neere
London, being Apprentice twelue yeares to Master Nicholas Diggines; andmy selfe haue serued for Master and Pilott in her Maiesties ships; and about
eleuen or twelue years haue serued the Worshipfull Companie of the
Barbarie Marchants, vntill the Indish traffick from Holland began, in which
Indish traffick I was desirous to make a littel experience of the small
knowledg which God had geven me. So, in the yeare of our Lord 1598, I was
hired for Pilot Maior of a fleete of five sayle, which was made readie by the[Dutch] Indish Companie ...

And to this about all that might be added is that Nicholas Diggins(whom James Clavell transformed into Alban Caradoc) was a wellknown shipbuilder of his day, that Adams is known to have sailed
against the Spanish Armada, and that he left a wife and two children in England. From the symmetrical division of his life into three
twelve-year terms, we see that he was about age thirty-six on arriving in Japan.
In both letters, Adams then recounts the hazardous journey of
the Dutch fleet which left Rotterdam in June 1598 in an effort toreach the West Indies via the Straits of Magellan and challenge thePortuguese trading empire there. Following a difficult winter in theStraits, the fleet moved on into the Pacific in late August of 1599
and was there separated by storms. The De Liefde, of which Adams
was pilot, proceeded alone up the coast of Chile, surviving various
encounters with suspicious Indians and hostile Spaniards. Finallyin late November, they rendezvoused with the one other ship of the
fleet which had survived the storms, the flagship Hoop. They thendecided to make for Japan, according to Adams, on the grounds
that its northerly latitude would make it a more promising market
for their cargo than the Indies, which “were hot countreyes, where
woolen cloth would not be much accepted.”
About two months later, halfway across the Pacific, in February
1600, the De Liefde was separated in another storm from its remaining partner, of which no more was heard. They doggedly continued
on their journey to Japan, supplies dwindling and sickness spreading, finally sighting land in mid-April (the exact date differing in
the two letters) off the province of Bungo in northeast Kyushu. By
this time, only twenty-four men of an original crew of over a hundred were alive, and of these only seven were able to walk—three3

SMITH: THE BRITISH SAMURAI

4

more were to die a day later, and another three shortly after. The
curious Japanese who met them “offered us no hurt, but stole allthings they could steale.” The real threat came about a week later,when “there came a Portugall Iesuite, with other Portugals, whoreported of vs, that we were pirats, and were not in the way ofmarchandizing.”
But somehow Adams managed to survive not only the slander of
the Portuguese, but also the treachery of two members of his crew,
and soon found himself being transported to Osaka to meet withthe “king”—who turned out to be Tokugawa Ieyasu. Adams waschosen as natural leader of the group because of his ability to speakPortuguese and because Captain Jacob Quaeckernaeck was too
sick to move.
Adams met with Ieyasu in Osaka on three occasions in May andJune of 1600, and his descriptions of these interviews provide themost fascinating and historically exciting vignettes of the entire
William Adams story. In Adams’ own words to his wife:
Comming before the king, he viewed me well, and seemed to be wonderfull
fauourable. He made many signes vnto me, some of which I vnderstood, andsome I did not. In the end, there came one that could speake Portuges. [Thisperson may in fact have been Joao Rodrigues, the model for Father Alvito inShǀgun,] By him, the king demanded of me, of what land I was, and whatmooued vs to come to his land, being so farre off. I shewed vnto him thename of our countrey, and that our land had long sought out the East Indies,and desired friendship with all kinds and potentates in way of marchandize,hauing in our land diuerse commodities, which these lands had not .... Thenhe asked whether our countrey had warres? I answered him yea, with the
Spaniards and Portugals, beeing in peace with all other nations. Further, he
asked me, in what I did beleeue? I said, in God, that made heauen and earth.
He asked me diverse other questions of things of religion, and many otherthings: As what way we came to the country. Hauing a chart of the wholeworld, I shewed him, through the Strait of Magellan. At which he wondred,and thought me to lie. Thus, from one thing to another, I abode with him till
mid-night.

From this point, our detailed knowledge of William Adams
becomes progressively sparser, and the opportunity for romancers
to embroider becomes correspondingly greater. His wife’s letter
goes only as far as a second interview with Ieyasu. The other letter
briefly mentions a third interview, then says that he was sent to Edo
by sea, probably sometime in July. Adams’ narrative at this point
abruptly switches to a time frame of years rather than weeks, andabout all we know of him, through this account and through otherbits of information, is essentially the following:• that he became a fairly trusted adviser of Tokugawa Ieyasu on
matters of commercial policy with the Protestant nations.

• that Ieyasu awarded him an estate in the village of Hemimura(part of the modern naval port of Yokosuka), valued at about 250
koku (a unit measuring the income of land in rice, about fivebushels) and with some hundred peasants under his jurisdiction.
• that he was known by the Japanese as “Anjin-sama,” or “The
Pilot”; he came eventually to be known by the surname Miura,
the peninsula south of Edo where his estate was located.
• that he either purchased or was given a house in downtown Edo,in an area which became known as “Anjin Street” sometime after
his death, remaining so until the 1930s.
• that he built two English-style ships at the request of Ieyasu, oneof 80 tons and one of 120 tons (slightly less than the 150-ton De
Liefde), the latter of which eventually passed into Spanish hands
and plied regularly between Acapulco and Manila.
• that he was active in setting up and working for the English trading station in Hirado (on Kyushu) from 1613 until his death in1620.
• that he married a Japanese woman, apparently the daughter of aprominent Edo inn-keeper named Magome Kageyu, and that they
had two children, Joseph and Susan—although none of thedescendants has ever been traced.
• that he died in Hirado May 16, 1620, and by his will provided
both for his Japanese family and for his wife and daughter
whom he had left behind in England.
Some Questions About William Adams
From these various facts, we can see that William Adams did
indeed lead a fascinating career, and that he was in a position of
considerable importance to the Tokugawa shogunate—although it
appears that he fell into increasing disfavor after the death of Ieyasu
in 1615. But there remains a great deal we do not know about
Adams, offering much latitude for fertile imaginations. Let us see
what the record does offer, however, about four particularly interesting issues:
1. What sort of a man was he? From the tone of his letters andfrom reports of his English contemporaries, it would appear that
Adams was a self-sufficient and standoffish man in personality,
quite formal in his relations with others. His letters suggest he wasnothing less than a devout Christian. He was originally hostile to
the Jesuits for their opposition to him, but later had friendly dealings with them. In terms of his basic instincts, he was first and foremost a man of commerce, eager to help develop trading relations
between Japan and the Protestant nations.

5SMITH: THE BRITISH SAMURAI

6

2. Did he become thoroughly acculturated to Japanese life?
While Adams’ letters give no indication of any special infatuation
with Japanese customs, he does provide this one revealing estimation of Japanese culture:
The people of this Hand of Iapon are good of nature, curteous abouemeasure, and valiant in warre: their iustice is seuerely excecuted without any
partialitie vpon transgressors of the law. They are gouerned in great ciuilitie. I meane, not a land better gouerned in the world by ciuill policie. The
people be verie superstitious in their religion, and are of diuers opinions.

He clearly respected the Japanese, an attitude that caused considerable friction between Adams and Captain John Saris, who arrived
in Japan in 1613 to open an English trading station. Saris noted, tohis annoyance, that Adams persisted in giving “admirable andaffectionated commendatyons” of Japan, so that “It is generally
thought emongest vs that he is a naturalised Japanner.” More specifically, Adams refused to stay in Saris’ English-style quarters in
Hirado, preferring the residence of a local Japanese magistrate. We
also have testimony that Adams wore Japanese dress, and of course
he became fluent in the Japanese language.
3. Did he strongly influence Tokugawa Ieyasu? It is here that theenthusiasm of later panegyrists and novelists—including, ofcourse, James Clavell—has outstripped the sketchy available evidence. Adams was indeed an adviser to Ieyasu, and apparently atrusted one, but one must remember that Ieyasu had many professional advisers, including a number of foreigners. Indeed, one of
Adams’ shipmates, the Dutchman Jan Joosten van Lodensteijn(c. 1560-1623), also became a confidant of the shogun, and was
likewise given a house in Edo—in a distinctly better part of town
than Adams, along what came to be called, after its Dutch resident,
the “Yayosu Quay” (and today “Yaesu-cho”). It is highly unlikelythat the relationship between Adams and Ieyasu was ever one ofgreat intimacy. Still, who knows . . . ?
4. Did he become a samurai? If by “samurai” we mean a bushi,
a member of the warrior class, then the answer must certainly be
no, Adams never became a samurai. It is true that he was provided
an estate by Ieyasu, for whom he thereby became a retainer. It isalso true, according to the account of the chief of the English trading station, that he left two swords—the customary mark of samurai status—to his son Joseph at his death. Yet in no surviving
records has any hint of military interest or prowess been ascribed toAdams. He remained a dedicated man of commerce—a callingwhich was anathema to the bushi class.
Adams’ status can be more persuasively explained as akin to doctors, scholars, priests, artists, and others of essentially professionalor advisory function. Such men were basically anomalies within theofficial Tokugawa four-class hierarchy of samurai-peasant-artisanmerchant. They were known generically as hogaimono, “those outside of the [normal] way,” a term applied primarily to priests, who
had presumably renounced the ordinary world, but extended toother anomalous categories. Their privileges were also nonstandard: doctors, for example, were permitted to wear two
swords, but in no sense were they considered samurai. Whenemployed by the shogunate such men often had far easier access tothe shogun than even high-ranking daimyo, precisely because of
their advisory function. So it was surely into this anomalous classthat Adams would have fit: it is almost inconceivable that any
Japanese would have considered him a samurai. At best he was an“honorary samurai.” As for the status of hatamoto, which was aspecific rank among the retainers of the shogun, there is no documentary record for Adams, although a fief of 250 koku mightbarely have qualified him for such status. Again, he was probably
considered simply the anomaly that in fact he was, a well-paid
foreign expert not unlike the “yatoi” of Meiji Japan (described in
H. J. Jones’ recent book Live Machines).
The Romance of “Will” Adams
In all records from his lifetime, Adams was never known as anything but “William” (although his family name does vary, from
Adams to Addames to Addams, all common in an era of unstandardized spelling). It remained for an obscure writer of adventurestories for youth, William Dalton (1821-75), to provide the familiarizing touch of “Will” in what was to be the first of six novels
over the next century based on Adams’ story: Will Adams, The
First Englishman in Japan: A Romantic Biography, published in
London in 1861.
In the almost two and a half centuries between his death andDalton’s “romantic” revival, Adams had not been completely
forgotten by his countrymen, for his all-important letters were published twice. The first was in Samuel Purchas’ remarkable earlyseventeenth-century compendium of accounts of Elizabethan overseas adventurers, known by its full grandiose title as Hakluytus
Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes; Contayning a History of theWorld in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen andOthers (London, 1625). Here, a scant five years after Adams’
death, four of his letters were preserved for posterity, and he wasenshrined as one of the adventurous “pilgrims” of England’s greatage of seaborne expansion. Nothing was heard of Adams for overtwo centuries until Thomas Rundall reprinted the letters (with somecorrections of Purchas’ versions) in 1850, together with some early

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travel descriptions of Japan, in a publication of the Hakluyt Society(a group dedicated to commemorating English exploration) entitledMemorials of the Empire of Japan in the XVI and XVII Centuries.
It was this volume which caught the eye of William Dalton and provided him the material for his romance. (It is also the Rundall edition of Adams’ letters, reprinted in 1963, that is the most accessible
version today.)
The first revealing thing about Dalton’s novel is its dedication to
James Bruce, Earl of Elgin and Kincardine, a distinguished English
diplomat who a scant two years earlier, in August 1858, had concluded a commercial treaty between Japan and England—one of
the group of five treaties forced on Japan by the Western powers
after the “opening” of the country by America’s Commodore
Perry in 1853-54. It was only natural that William Adams should be
revived in this context, since he, after all, had been instrumental innegotiating the first commercial agreement between Japan andEngland in 1613.
Of course the position of England in East Asia was now vastly
more powerful than in the era of the real William Adams. In theearly seventeenth century, English trading efforts had been whollyat the mercy of Japanese authorities and greatly hampered byrivalry from the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch. In the midnineteenth century, however, England had established a wholly
new and heavily one-sided system of commercial power in East
Asia. This became known after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 as
the “unequal treaty system” and was designed largely for theadvantage and profit of the emerging European imperialist powersin Asia. But Dalton could still call on the spirit of William Adams
as the first English trader in Japan, and in this way the first step
was made in forging the latent symbolism of Will Adams as a pioneer of modern British imperialism in Asia.
What of the content of Dalton’s novel? The arrival in Japan follows the lines of Adams’ letters, but the cultural encounter withJapan remains pretty much a case of the white hero versus the colored heathens: Dalton’s Will is not even persuaded of the pleasuresof the Japanese bath, which in all later novels was to be the opening
wedge in Japan’s progress to “civilized” status in the hero’s mind.
Will’s angry exit from the bath is also pretty much his exit from thenovel, and for the bulk of the book Dalton chronicles the entirely
imaginary adventures of his Dutch shipmate Melchior von Santvoort (a real historical character, of whom however almost nothingis known). Melchior’s primary exploit involves his connections with
the Japanese Christian community, centered around the “Queen of
Tango,” who is none other than Hosokawa Gracia, the eventualmodel for Shǀgun’s Mariko. Melchior is presented as a valiant

Christian hero in a land of hostile heathen, and he finally aids the
Catholic community in its escape from the Battle of Osaka. We are
finally brought back to Will Adams only near the end of the novel,by which time he has been made a “lord” and taken a Japanesewife—but with little account for his obvious change of heart.
If nothing else, Dalton’s novel serves to emphasize how very little
was understood about Japan in the West during the first years after
Perry’s arrival. Dalton himself had of course never visited Japan,of which he wrote as though it were any of a number of exotic lands
to which his Anglo-Saxon adventurers flocked in over a dozen suchnovels, including Lost Among the Wild Men: Being Incidents in theLife of An Old Salt (1868), and The Power Money; or, The Adventures of Two Boy Heroes in the Island of Madagascar (1874). In all,Dalton’s novels comprise a marvelous example of fantasizing about
the British in Asia. The key thing about Dalton’s Japan is that it is
irretrievably exotic, largely by virtue of being non-Christian. All is
topsy-turvy in this early version of Jawpen (see Chapter 2 below).
Dalton takes on with little change many of the attitudes of the early
Jesuits themselves, but now in a common front of Protestant andCatholic against a Japan which is somehow, ironically, even moredistant from the European conscience than it had been over two
centuries before.
Will Adams and the Anglo-Japanese AllianceIn the decades immediately after Dalton’s book, Japan moved
quickly to modernize and Westernize, making the country far lessexotic than it had been before—and, in many cases, far less exotic
than an emerging group of Western aficionados of Japanese tradition would have preferred. Although the dominant image of Japanin this period became that of a country adept at mimicking theWest, a small but distinct counter-image was already emerging—that of Japan and its “tradition” as the potential teacher of theWest (as outlined in a timely article by Robert Rosenstone in theAmerican Historical Review, June 1980). At any rate, knowledge
about Japan in the West grew by leaps and bounds in the late nineteenth century, and the one-sided image of Will Adams as the loneemissary of civilization, as cast by Dalton, became less and lesscredible.
The next chapter in the modern mythology of Will Adams was tobe written not by novelists, but by the British merchants and diplomats of the Meiji period (1868-1912). It all began in 1872, when
James Walter, a British merchant in Yokohama, rediscovered thepresumed tombs of Adams and his wife at Hemimura in a state ofextreme neglect and launched a modest movement to restore theburial site. This became a viable project, however, only in the years

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immediately following the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, a
pivotal event in the modern diplomacy of East Asia by which Japan
achieved the diplomatic equality and military security which had been
her major national goals ever since the imposition of the unequal
treaty system in the 1850s.
It should be no surprise that “Will” Adams, by now well-known as
the “first Englishman in Japan,” was summoned forth as the symbolicprogenitor of the twentieth-century alliance of Japan and England. This
status was eloquently conferred in a revealing speech at the Japan Societyof London in February 1904 (published in the Society’s Transactions
and Proceedings, vol. 6) by Arthur Diosy. Entitled “In Memory of Will
Adams,” the talk introduces Adams as a man who “lived in Japan fortwenty years, attaining to a position of great influence and dignity, anddied in the land where he had so well represented the best qualities of
his race.” After a detailed account of Adams through his letters, Diosy
sums up the man as:. .. a good Briton, and very probably a great Briton; a man who never
did aught in Japan to disgrace his country’s flag; a man who, on thecontrary, taught the Japanese much that was new and useful—a man
who taught them how to build ships in the European way, and indeed
may well be said to have founded that glorious Japanese Navy which has
just given us again proof of its excellence. It is, perhaps, not too great astretch of imagination to picture the spirit of Will Adams looking down[from his grave] on the Bay of Yokosuka, the Chatham of Japan, on the
splendid battleships and cruisers that lie there flying the flag of the
Rising Sun.

The naval “proof” which Diosy mentions is none other than thesurprise Japanese attack on Port Arthur which began the RussoJapanese War, victory in which was the final step in establishing Japanas a full-fledged member of the imperialist club of nations. Note that in
Diosy’s account Will Adams takes on two basic roles. First, in a spirit
akin to Dalton’s hero, he is a worthy representative of the “qualities of
his race”—no hint is made of his possible acculturation to Japanese
ways. Second, he is a teacher of Japan in the area of technology,
and, in particular, he is apotheosized as “the father of the JapaneseNavy.” Historically, this is pretty far-fetched, but the symbolism wasappropriate in the year 1904. Such doctoring of the Will Adams story
fits nicely with another image common in those years, the idea ofJapan as “The Britain of the East.” In other words, the common militaryand diplomatic interests of Japan and England take precedence overany lingering cultural differences. This symbolic position of Adams as
forefather of modern British diplomacy in East Asia has been
confirmed periodically in the twentieth century by the raising ofmonuments, first a cenotaph at Hemimura in 1917, then an obelisk
in his native Gillingham in 1934, and in 1947 a marker in Itǀ, where
Adams built the two ships for Ieyasu.
Enter the British Samurai
Just at the time that official diplomatic ties between Japan andEngland were souring in the 1930s because of Japan’s continental
expansion, further development of the Will Adams legend was salvaged by novelists, first in Richard Blaker’s The Needlewatcher(London, 1932, now available in a 1973 Tuttle reprint with an added
subtitle, “The Will Adams Story, British Samurai”), and then inJames Scherer’s Pilot and Shǀgun (Tokyo, 1935).
Of the two, Blaker’s recreation is by far the more detailed andconscientious. Indeed, The Needlewatcher (that is, a pilot, the“needle” being that of a compass) is clearly the most distinguishedin literary merit of all the Will Adams novels. Richard Blaker(1893-1940) was a talented and respected English writer, born inIndia the son of a high colonial official. Wounded in World War I,
he went on to write Medal Without Bar (1930), a much-praised
novel based on his wartime experience. His version of the Will
Adams story is without doubt the least romantic of the lot; indeed
he contributed more to the de-mythification of Adams than to his
continuing glorification, producing a carefully historical work offiction. Pilot and Shǀgun is more a pastiche of incidents thana novel, put together in a light-hearted manner. James Scherer(1870-1944) first went to Japan around the turn of the century as a
missionary-teacher, and later became a distinguished American
educator, serving at Cal Tech in Pasadena from 1908 to 1926. Heretained a lifelong interest in Japan, and his retelling of the Will
Adams story was one of his many books on Japan.
Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of both Blaker’s andScherer’s novels is the emphasis on the cultural confrontation ofWill Adams with Japan, and in both he is clearly described as metamorphosing into a full-fledged samurai, something quite different
from the lofty “lord” which Dalton envisioned. It is from this timethat the concept of the “British samurai” begins to take root, anidea which would see its fullest development in Shǀgun.
One would have thought that Blaker and Scherer would haveexhausted the market for the Will Adams story but, if so, not for
long, considering the dampening effect of the Pacific War. The
next version was a curious book by an American writer, Robert
Lund, entitled Daishi-san (New York, 1960). In an author’s note,
Lund provides a revealing explanation of the appeal of the Will
Adams story: “In Will Adams’ life and times I felt a close parallelwith our own life and times. I tried to keep the story simple, seeking

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to show the value of tolerance and understanding, and the necessity
for people of different cultures to learn to live with each other.”
Here we first encounter a distinct note of cross-cultural idealism in
retelling the Will Adams story—a note which, again, Clavell was todevelop even further. Note, however, that in the very title of Daishisan—”Great Teacher,” a title which Lund has bestowed on his fictional Will Adams (although in actual Japanese practice it was aterm reserved for high Buddhist priests, and posthumously at that!)—we see the recurrence of the theme that Adams is more teacher
than learner. In Daishi-san, he is not only a teacher of technology(particularly ship-building), but also of culture, when he ends upteaching the second Tokugawa shogun a few words of English!

statement about Japan as a mirror, if not an antidote, for twentiethcentury Western preoccupations about sex, in particular nudity,
homosexuality, and the problem of mutual dominance in sexual
partnerships.
But Will’s pilgrimage of self-discovery in Japan as he is converted into a loyal retainer of Tokugawa Ieyasu (the “Lord of theGolden Fan” of the title) is more than merely sexual: he is also
awakened to new levels of meaning in the same issue of life versus
death that would preoccupy Blackthorne. Particularly revealing is
Adams’ response late in the novel to a question from his old Dutch
shipmate Melchior as to whether he plans to stay in “this barbarous
country”:

Will’s Sexual Awakening
We can already see how most of the elements of Will Adams thatwould coalesce as Blackthorne were already present in earlier novels
about the pilot. But perhaps the most revealing precedent is thatoffered by the last Will Adams novel prior to Shǀgun, Christopher
Nicole’s Lord of the Golden Fan, which was published in London
in 1973, only two years before Shǀgun (and ironically bearing aplug for Clavell on the cover of the American paperback edition by
Bantam: “Not since Taipan has there been a novel of such tempestuous excitement . . .”). Nicole is an Englishman raised in
Guyana, a colonial background shared by Blaker and, at least spiritually, by Clavell: the appeal of Will Adams to Englishmen far
from home seems particularly strong. A prodigious writer ofthrillers, Nicole also writes historical novels, all, with the exceptionof Lord of the Golden Fan, set in the West Indies.
Lord of the Golden Fan depicts Will Adams as a man in searchof liberation from a variety of sexual hang-ups that we would
popularly call “Victorian”—no matter that the Elizabethans probably weren’t so hung up about sex (see Chapter 4). The book openswith Will desperately frustrated on his wedding night by a wife who
is convinced that “to be naked is to be lewd,” and that a wife’s
sexual duty is “to receive, not to give.” Chapter Two leads us
through a homosexual encounter with none other than Christopher(“call me Kitty”) Marlowe, and then, hang-ups unresolved, on to
Japan.
It is unnecessary to detail the long chain of systematically varied
sexual adventures which Nicole’s Will Adams experiences in Japan—ultimately to find some sort of satisfaction in his strong-willed andobediently passionate Japanese wife (a long-time staple of Westernfiction on Japan). Lord of the Golden Fan, while of no compelling
literary quality, is provocative light pornographic reading andof definite interest to the cultural historian as a well-developed“Barbarous, dear friend, certainly. But it is also true. Here at least there ishonour, unto death, and duty, unto death, and beauty, unto death. There issavageness, to be sure, but it is a simple human savageness. It lacks thesophisticated hypocrisy of Europe.” (p. 421)

In these lines, a further transformation of the Will Adams legend isalready underway, from a man who is primarily a teacher and an
Englishman to a man who is primarily a learner and very confused
about whether he is an Englishman—or a samurai. It remained forJames Clavell to develop this theme to popular perfection.
James Clavell As Will Adams
Although James Clavell is the sixth novelist to take up the Will
Adams story, he is only dimly conscious of the fact—and not particularly interested. He says (and there is absolutely no reason to
doubt him) that he never read any of the earlier Will Adams novels,and that in fact he “deliberately avoided them.” This absence ofany direct continuity makes all the more interesting the many parallels of theme between his recreation of the story and those of his
predecessors. One must remember of course that Clavell did readvery widely among non-fictional accounts of Adams, many ofwhich were written in celebration of the symbol as much as the man
and hence have strongly mythical elements (“first Englishman inJapan,” “British samurai,” “father of the Japanese navy,” and soforth).
But Shǀgun is of interest also because it is unique, drawing on
the Will Adams legend and yet creating a totally new version of it inaccord with Clavell’s own background, with his instincts as a storyteller, and with the particular message which he wishes to preach to
his late twentieth-century popular audience. To begin with thebackground: he was born in 1924 the son of Sir Richard Charles
Clavell, an officer in the Royal Navy, and is intensely proud of alineage of British military officers “stretching back to Walterus de

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Claville, armor-bearer to William the Conqueror.” In particular,
he feels himself to be bound by blood to the British naval tradition.
While he had no first-hand experience in Asia as a child (although
he was born in Australia, his family shortly returned to England),his father frequently told him tales of the English in Asia, including
the story of his grandfather, who served with a force of English
naval observers during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-5.
Clavell is also proud of his linkage, through the military, with thetraditions of the British Empire. Only half in jest, he explains that,
My forebears are all military, so I was brought up to be one of these people
who ruled the empire. You know, two or three people used to go out andthey used to rule the natives. And they used to dress in dinner jacket in thesweltering jungle. When the natives came and killed them, they said, “That’s
a terribly bad show, old boy.” And then the British, wisely, would send abattleship and knock off the leader, and say, “Now, look, please behave
yourselves, because we really are better than you, and we really know how
to look after you better.”

So it is easy to see how closely Clavell could identify with William
Adams, who was at once Elizabethan maritime adventurer, dedicated advocate of free trade, pioneer of English imperialism in the
Orient, and a man who, a native of Chatham and a sailor under
Drake, was involved in the very founding of the British naval
tradition.
Even more central to the conception of Shǀgun was Clavell’s
first extended encounter with Asia, as a prisoner of the Japanese inChangi Jail on Singapore. While reluctant to dwell on the details of
the experience, Clavell time and again comes back to its importancein molding his attitudes: “Everything goes back to Changi; it isGenesis.” In a literal sense, his prison experience provided thegenesis of his career as a novelist, King Rat (1962), which “is ofcourse an autobiography; that’s what happened to me in 1945, as
near as I could remember it fifteen years afterwards.” Prior to
King Rat, Clavell had been primarily a screenwriter, first in
England and then from 1953 in America, and he says it was the
Hollywood screenwriters’ strike in 1960 which enabled him to write
a novel. “King Rat sort of spilled out, like a dam bursting, because
I hadn’t told anybody about anything to do with those days.” King
Rat won critical acclaim, and Clavell’s career as a novelist was
launched.
As any reader of the trials of “Peter Marlowe” in King Rat will
grasp, Clavell’s experiences at Changi were harrowing. It was also
his first contact with the Japanese and their attitudes:
Well, I learned fairly young about the Japanese and their attitudes toward
life. I was barely eighteen, I was a teenager, right? We were surrounded bydeath and destruction, people died like flies. So I have different attitudes
towards things.

Clavell is of course often asked how, after three years of often brutal treatment by the Japanese, he could spend four years of his life
writing a generally sympathetic novel about his captors; his
response: “I just admire the Japanese. It’s possible to end up
admiring an enemy. The relationship of conqueror and conquered
can be an intriguing one; it doesn’t necessarily lead to hate.”
His prison experience heightened Clavell’s sense of identification
with Will Adams: “It occurred to me that he was a man rather likemyself, in an alien land.” Adams, like Clavell, first encountered
the Japanese as their prisoner, in fear for his life. If Part I ofShǀgun (and the first three-hour segment of the TV miniseries)
seems disturbingly like a catalog of stereotypes of Japanese
violence and barbarity from the Pacific War, one must rememberthat Clavell has real personal memories of undeniable Japanese
inhumanity. It is, of course, necessary for the discerning reader
also to appreciate the differences: it is highly unlikely, for example,
that the Japanese would ever treat helpless castaways on their own
shores with the sadistic tortures that Yabu devises in Shǀgun;Changi, one must remember, was an alien land for the Japanese as
well, under circumstances of total war.
Even more important than this initial identification of Clavell
with Will Adams—now Adams as “Blackthorne”—is the eventual
process of conversion which is so central a theme to Shǀgun. Just
as Clavell came in time to admire his captors and to understandthat their way of viewing things was not only different but perhaps
in ways better than that of the West, so the legend of Will Adams
as “British samurai” offered the plot outline and psychology of asimilar process of conversion. It was a remarkable mesh of thestory of a historical figure with a novelist’s own personal experiences, yearnings, and fantasies: in becoming Blackthorne, Will
Adams was also to become James Clavell himself.
But before his encounter with Will Adams, Clavell was first to
write Taipan (1966), a novel loosely based on the historical activities of Western traders in the new English colony of Hong Kong in
1841. As Clavell tells the story, he was inspired by the success ofJames Michener’s Hawaii (1959), and “there’s nothing like attaching to success, so I thought: Michener’s Hawaii—but on HongKong.” The resulting Taipan owed less to Michener than to a distinctive formula worked out by Clavell, consisting of a historicalsetting and lots of fictional characters, a short story-time spreadout over a large number of pages, a heavy quota of bloody action
and intricate intrigue, and a slangy, easy-to-read style. It was a

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formula that would be repeated in Shǀgun, but with the additionof the all-important themes of cultural conflict and valuetransformation.
The obvious bridge from King Rat to Taipan to Shǀgun was thetheme of Englishmen in East Asia, a theme which has led Clavell tocharacterize all of his novels, past and projected, as an interlocking“Asian Saga.” He is now completing Noble House, set in Hong
Kong in the 1960s, “which essentially brings Taipan up to date.”
After that, back to Japan and ahead to the 1970s, in a novel entitled
Nippon. And then back again to China—now entitled simply
China—and still ahead in time: “It may even be science Fiction.”
But the unifying theme of “Asian Saga” will remain simply “thestory of the Anglo-Saxon in Asia, from the first man, which is
obviously Will Adams. And that is what I am trying to do.”The Appeal of Shǀgun
While none of the earlier novels about Will Adams appear tohave enjoyed any great success, Shǀgun has become one of themost widely-read popular novels in recent American history. What
are the reasons for Clavell’s phenomenal success? Exactly what did
he do to the Will Adams story that no one else had done? The easyanswer, of course, is that he merely sensationalized the story inways that are obvious from the notices of reviewers: “Seldom doesa novel appear so packed with melodramatic action, so gaudy andflamboyant with blood and sin, treachery and conspiracy, sex andmurder;” another calls it a novel of “relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex,
excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths andbreathless haikus.” (For these and other reviews, see the cover ofShǀgun and Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 6, p. 114.)
But beyond the undeniable sensationalism—indeed, in spite of
it—one can say a variety of more interesting things about Clavell’sachievement in Shǀgun. Purely at the level of technique, one must
give Clavell credit for his ability as a storyteller. He is able, througha prodigious imagination, to hold the reader’s attention with only
occasional lapses: most who have read the novel testify to total
absorption over a relatively short period of time, to a sense of being
totally swept up into the world of Clavell’s fantasy. One important
secret to this ability to “capture” a reader is the author’s adherence
to a story time which is not radically different from actual reading
time. Only about five months in story time elapse in the twelve hundred pages of Shǀgun, not much longer than the length of a summer vacation, for which the book seems made to order.
The effect of this truncated story time is not only to heighten thealmost cinema-like sense of action (it is crucial to remember that

Clavell was a screenwriter before he was a novelist), but also to
reduce the real story of “Will” Adams’ experiences in Japan
from a number of years to a number of weeks. Perhaps this is
tailored to the American preference in the late 1970s for quick
conversions, but it is remarkable that it only takes Blackthorne acouple of months to reach the stage of “wa” necessary to attempt
ritual suicide. Everything is quickened, compressed, andintensified in Clavell’s treatment of the Will Adams legend, in
contrast to the longer and more painful process of acculturation
depicted in earlier novels.
Clavell was also the first author of a Will Adams novel to change
the names of all the characters. Some have criticized him for this(see, for example, Sheila Johnson’s review in the Journal of Japanese Studies, Summer 1976), arguing that most historical novelists
retain the real names of the historical models. Clavell, however,clearly wished for greater license: “I thought, to be honest, that I
didn’t want to be restricted by historical personality.” On morepractical grounds, he argues that the vast majority of American
popular readers would never have heard of the historical Japanesecharacters anyway, so he might as well take advantage of theopportunity to create names which in spelling and pronunciation
would be more accessible to his audience: Toranaga instead of
Tokugawa, for example, or Zataki for Satake. Whatever the motivation, the changing of the names of the obvious historical models
gave Clavell a license for fantasy which he exercised freely.
Clavell of course also changed many details of the story ofWilliam Adams: he arrives at Izu, for example, in the imaginary
village of “Anjiro” (derived, however, from Ajiro, an actual fishing village on the Izu peninsula: “I read it off a map”), rather thanon the coast of Kyushu. There are only a dozen survivors on the
Erasmus versus two dozen on the De Liefde (although the pedantic
will note that Erasmus was in fact the previous name of the De
Liefde, and that a carving of the famed Dutch humanist remainedon its stern decoration, preserved to this day in the Tokyo National
Museum).
But these are small differences: on the whole Clavell follows
closely the story of Adams’ arrival in Japan. It is in a different areathat Clavell makes the most dazzling innovation: he arranges a loveaffair between Blackthorne and the wife of one of the most powerful daimyo in Japan! This astonishing linking of the entirely separate legends of Hosokawa Gracia (see Chapter 7) and Will Adams
is at once the most historically implausible and most original contribution of Clavell’s. In a sense, this represents the Americanization of Will Adams, who in previous re-creations always, as a good
Englishman, knew his place and was content to consort with women

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of roughly his own status: maids, prostitutes, and merchants’daughters. But in Shǀgun, he is not only able to approach, but evento seduce, one of the grandest ladies of the land. If Mariko sometimes seems more like a JAL stewardess than a daimyo wife, it is
only a reflection of the diminished class consciousness which
Clavell has brought to the Will Adams legend.
James Clavell also went well beyond the conventional limits of
the Will Adams legend in his elaborate depiction of the internecine
politics among Japanese warlords in 1600. The very title Shǀgun isa sign of the heavy emphasis on Toranaga and his struggle forpower, which competes with the Blackthorne-Mariko affair as thecentral theme of the novel. Earlier Will Adams novels rarely strayed
into the complexities of Japanese domestic politics except as a foil
for the adventures of the English hero, whereas Clavell shows
daimyo rivalry as a theme of major interest in itself. While thedepiction of the struggle for the shogunate has been substantially
fictionalized (see Chapter 6), it nevertheless indicates a strong interest in Japanese history on its own terms. In this sense, Shǀgun is aless ethnocentric version of the Will Adams legend that its predecessors—although the essentially ethnocentric character of the Will
Adams legend itself of course remains. (It should be noted that the
TV miniseries version of Shǀgun greatly abbreviated the story of
the struggle for the shogunate, focusing largely on the BlackthorneMariko love affair and hence in a sense reverting to the format inwhich Japanese politics is simply the background for the cultural
encounters of the Western hero.)
But what finally sets Shǀgun most clearly apart from its predecessors is its instructional quality. At a purely descriptive level,Shǀgun 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, typically presented through the good offices of our tour
guide Mariko. In a sense, Shǀgun is a painless introduction to
Japan, and the large number of passengers who may be seenengrossed in the novel on any tourist flight to Tokyo suggests that it
is indeed a kind of travel literature. Although he denies any suchintention, it seems likely that at least subconsciously Clavell was
introducing his readers to Japan today as much as to Japan in 1600,
a feature of the book that helps explain some of the anachronisms.
But the instructional quality of Shǀgun is at the same time asmuch prescriptive as descriptive, since Clavell offers a critique ofWestern views on such essential matters as death and sex by presenting the Japanese attitudes as superior (see Chapters 2, 8, 11). In
earlier Will Adams novels, Japanese culture was depicted as at besta mirror for the West, whereas in Shǀgun it is elevated almost to thestatus of a model. This theme would seem to reflect America’s
growing sense of inferiority vis-à-vis Japan in recent decades, particularly in matters of economic productivity and social order.
Shǀgun in a sense is a popular-culture version of Harvard
sociologist Ezra Vogel’s controversial Japan as Number One(1979), which proposes that America has much to learn fromJapan in terms of social, political, and economic institutions.
Many critics have warned that cross-cultural borrowing is not as
simple and mechanical as Vogel implies, and the same caveats ofcourse hold doubly true for Shǀgun, in which Japan’s superiority
is extended to matters of fundamental spiritual values.
In the end, we see that James Clavell has performed three typesof operations on the Will Adams legend. First, he has synthesized
most of the earlier themes by weaving them all into the story of“Blackthorne”: the latent symbolism of the “first Englishman inJapan” is strong, the role of self-confident teacher of naval technology (if not actually the “father of the Japanese navy”) is whatin the end saves Blackthorne from his grief over Mariko’s death,and the transcultural ideal of the “British samurai” is of course
central. But Clavell has also expanded the Will Adams story by theincorporation of the Hosokawa Gracia legend and the complex
story of the internal Japanese struggle for power. By changing thenames and providing many imaginary characters, Clavell has written a less strictly “historical” novel than his predecessors, yet at thesame time he has incorporated far more history.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Clavell has also contracted things in various ways. The Will Adams story is compressed
into a bare six months. Cultural information is provided from periods after the year 1600, in what is better viewed as compression
than anachronism. And perhaps most importantly, the culturallearning of the hero is condensed into the message of simplicity
itself: in Japan, Mariko tells us over and over again, everything isso simple, whether it is a matter of food, death, sex, language, orwhatever. However much we might all realize that things are probably not quite so simple in the real Japan, the lure remains, and in
the end Shǀgun’s most original contribution to the legend of the
British samurai is the fantasy that maybe, after all, we really can“just change our concept of the world.”

19

2 Japan, Jawpen, and the Attractions of an Opposite
David PlathEverybody needs a good cultural opposite. We learn by making
comparisons, and the royal road to understanding our own way oflife takes us to where we can begin to see it as others do. Oftenenough we use a different “them” to define different parts of whatis “us”: we contrast our cooking with French cuisine, for example,
or our notions of the mystical with those of South Asians. But
again and again as we scan the rainbow of life-styles around theworld, our eyes are likely to fix upon one that attracts us by its special color. Western eyes have been drawn in that way to Japaneseculture for many generations, so that Shǀgun touches a soft spot in
our curiosity.
We can enjoy Shǀgun simply as an adventure story. But this one
is peculiar, an adventure yarn with a subtitle: “A Novel of Japan.”Yet this is deceptive. Shǀgun actually takes us beyond Japan into
an entirely different country. There we find a culture that resembles
sixteenth-century Japan—but with all the pieces rearranged. I callthat place “Jawpen”—this place of which so many Westerners
have jawed and penned. Jawpen is one of our cultural opposites,
transposed into the twilight zone of myth and epic. It is made up of
traditional Japanese parts, but it was invented and assembled here
in the West for domestic consumption. In Jawpen the whole worldis askew, the cultural geometry of life 180° out of phase with what
we had thought normal.
The zone of myth is not the place for facts but for beliefs. We get
confused about this because we like to call something a myth as away of branding it a phony idea that fools other people but not us.
But myths are the root ideas of any culture. As culture-bound animals, we need myths to live by, whether or not we can prove to anybody’s satisfaction that they are true. We learn them so early, andso thoroughly, that most of the time we are not even aware ofthem—we don’t need to think about them any more than we need
to be aware of the rules of grammar before we speak. An attractive
cultural opposite forces us to consider these root beliefs that we had
been taking for granted. As he learns the way of life in Jawpen,
pilot Blackthorne is of course put to tests of bravery and physicalstamina; an adventure tale can’t move forward without them. But
his toughest tests are of moral courage: he has to wrestle with his
own deepest myths of life.
Curiosity and a hunger for challenges seem to be built into
human nature. And I have a hunch that in their heart of hearts
many people who travel from the West to Japan today would liketo imagine that they are pilot Blackthorne storming into Jawpen.
Even now in this age of earth-watching satellites, we still seem tohold, in some corner of our Western minds, the idea that the islandsof Japan lie temptingly close to the twilight zone of myth.
Perhaps that idea got its start from early European maps thatshowed “The Japans” as the most far-out set of islands in the Far
East. Whatever the source, the idea was still dominant a century
after Blackthorne in the classic Gulliver’s Travels of his countryman Jonathan Swift. Part Three of the book is Gulliver’s voyage“To Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan.”
The idea surfaces even today: a few months ago I heard a U.S.
manufacturer of metal kazoos, in a radio interview, say that his
product “is sold all over the world—including Japan.” As if somehow Japan remains in a different category from the rest of theworld.
I’ve seen the disappointment on the faces of travellers arriving inJapan these days. Tokyo, they discover, looks pretty much like anyother industrial mega-city. “The Japanese,” they complain, “havesold out their tradition for a mess of transistors.” These travellers
may rush off to a remote mountain village where (according to theguidebooks) they still can find fragments of Jawpen (The “Real”
Japan). But the weed of doubt has taken root. For if Japan is not,after all, the cultural opposite that the travellers had expected, thenwhat had they been seeking? Was there once a “real” Jawpen—isShǀgun historically true? For if Jawpen happened once, maybe it

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can happen again. Not that we can turn back the pages of history.
It is rather that the basic principles of Jawpenese society, its lifegiving myths, are not just a fantasy but are within the realm of
human possibility. A better civilization could be built around themin the future.
If a cultural opposite is to keep on attracting us, it has to remain
distant. When people begin to behave pretty much like neighbors,then we may find them easier to understand (whether or not we likethem)—but their way of life is not much good as food for thought.
In Shǀgun the author is careful to remind us from time to time thatbehavior really does run in reverse in Japan. He reports, for example, that “Blackthorne ordered a servant to saddle his horse andmounted awkwardly from the right side, as was custom in Japanand China” (p. 720), Earlier, on page 191, Rodrigues summarized
the situation for Blackthorne by saying that “Japan’s an upsidedown world.”
The image of Japan as topsy-turvydom in fact was first widely
purveyed by the European visitors in the era of Shǀgun. A primeexample is a tract by Jesuit chronicler Luis Frois, Contradictions
and Differences of Custom Between the People of Europe and This
Province of Japan (1585), an entertaining (and often perceptive)
catalog of all the particulars in which Japan is a civilization inreverse, ranging from religious forms (“Our churches are high andnarrow; the Japanese temples are broad and low”) to matters of
intimate hygiene (“We pick our noses with our thumb or index fingers; the Japanese use their little finger”). The theme of reversal
was promptly revived in the mid-nineteenth century when contact
with Japan was resumed. The leading British diplomat of the time,for example, explains that “Japan is essentially a country of paradoxes and anomalies, where all, even familiar things, put on newfaces, and are curiously reversed. Except that they do not walk on
their heads instead of their feet, there are few things in which they
do not seem, by some occult law, to have been impelled in a perfectly opposite direction and a reversed order.” (Sir Rutherford
Alcock, The Capital of the Tycoon [1863], I, 357).
We shouldn’t swallow such statements whole, of course. In
dozens of little particulars, life in Jawpen does not look at all lefthanded. But in the case of Clavell, it is not a matter of some “occultlaw”: he is exaggerating for a purpose. Like an anthropologist—ora Utopian novelist—he accents what is different about the society
he is describing in order to define and even question our own
myths. Clavell may claim to be “just” a storyteller, but Shǀgun is astory wrapped around a sermon.
That sermon would be a lot more difficult to deliver if the story
were set in today’s Japan. People who write tourist guides to Japan

still like to include a section on Topsy-Turvy Land. A Japanese carpenter, for example, uses saws and planes that cut when you draw
them toward you—where ours cut when you push away. But
the reversals seem to become fewer day to day; the Japaneseeven mount their horses from the left nowadays, as astuteobservers of the TV version of Shǀgun may notice.
It’s not easy even to imagine that there could be a radically different civilization tucked away someplace on our planet now. It’s
been a long time since anybody discovered an unknown island or
found a lost valley. The twentieth-century Utopian novelist may still
try to persuade us that a more perfect society still could exist in aremote locale—in a valley in Tibet (Shangri-la, in James Hilton’s
Lost Horizon) or an island in Indonesia (Pala, in Aldous Huxley’s
Island). But even these imaginary cultural opposites have to copewith our same world of big technology, big science, and big government. In Island, for example, an aggressive nearby nation sends its
troops to demolish Pala and force the people there to join themarch of Progress. So if John Blackthorne were alive today andwent looking for Jawpen he would get nowhere on the Erasmus: hewould have to pilot the starship Enterprise across oceans of outerspace and crash-land on a distant galaxy.
That was not always the case. Once upon a time it was truly possible to set sail across a salt-water sea and land in the territory of
your cultural opposite. There was a moment in the tumble of world
events when people from Westernmost Europe and Easternmost
Asia saw each other for the very first time. And it was as if—astime is measured in history—the range of human types had mushroomed; All around the globe it suddenly seemed that mankind wasmore marvelously diverse than anyone had dreamed possible.
It’s not easy to reconstruct that feeling today. The range ofhuman types on earth now is pretty well documented, even if someof the types remain a bit puzzling to us. If we want to put ourselves
into the mind-set of a Blackthorne or a Toranaga we have to imagine answering the doorbell and there being greeted by a BEM.
BEMs are the bug-eyed monsters that populate science fiction. We
enjoy meeting them when it’s safe, in the pages of a book or on thescreen in Star Wars. But what if one of them actually walked into
your house, and could talk, and had some quite human qualities
and quirks? Would you want one to marry your sister?
So John Blackthorne shivers when he first encounters the Jawpenese. They in turn shudder at him, for he is the BEM in theirhouses. (In traditional Japanese folktales the BEM-like demons
had blue eyes, large noses, and red faces: an uncanny resemblance
to Anglo-Saxons. So much for the Hollywood fantasy that people
in many parts of the world fell prostrate before the first white man

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they saw because they thought he was one of their gods come backto life.)
Blackthorne is, indeed, the great WASP explorer, tough, clever,full of get-up-and-go. The personification of aggressive European
expansion, he has come to The Japans for trade and material treasure, a knight of early capitalism. But we soon find out that he is atrue knight after all, a man tender-hearted as well as tough. He has
a streak of poetry in him, a romantic side, a spiritual hunger. And
that spiritual hunger has not been adequately nourished in Europe.
Certainly not by what the Christian church has to offer. Blackthorne despises the clergy two times over: once for getting to the
Far East before he did and a second time on general principle. He
himself is a skeptic, the cool-thinking master of modern technology
and science. He is capable of being skeptical even about the myths
that are the base of his own way of life.
Blackthorne arrives in Jawpen with a kind of “reading
readiness.” Shown the book of life from his cultural opposite, hesoon is studying its pages on his own, eager to decipher them. For
he realizes that this upside-down world is not just a fun house. Yes,at times he does act like a kid at an amusement park: sampling new
foods, hot baths, and massages, playing house with Mariko. But in
Jawpen Blackthorne is no longer certain that he knows which
values of life are “backward” after all. He has to accept the factthat in this country he is the BEM: a backward European male.
If he is going to overcome his developmental disadvantages andbe mainstreamed into local society, then he must take its myths
deep into the core of his being. To accomplish that, he must be deprogrammed by ordeal, for only then can he be born again as asamurai and finally reach the goal that author Clavell sent him tofind: an understanding of the error in Western ways. As Blackthorne explains to his hostesses, “We’re taught to be ashamed ofour bodies and pillowing and nakedness and . . . and all sorts ofstupidities. It’s only being here that’s made me realize it. Now that
I’m a little civilized I know better” (p. 696).
Blackthorne doesn’t have much trouble when it comes to making
sense of the larger operations of Jawpenese society. True, thenatives have to coach him with regard to peculiarities in the politicalsystem and its daimyo rivalries. But the daimyo are men on themake who behave about the same as calculating princes and bishops and power brokers that Blackthorne has known in other partsof the world. What he can’t so readily grasp is the moral geometry,the myths that motivate people in their ordinary everyday relations
with one another. Here, too, Rodrigues summarizes the situation
for him: “All Jappos are different from us—they don’t feel pain orcold like us—but samurai are even worse. They fear nothing, leastof all death.” And in addition, “Jesu Madonna, the women are
something else, though, a different species, Ingeles, nothing onearth like them” (p. 140)
But learning to live by an opposite moral geometry is not something you can do in the classroom, or by quiet study. The natives of
Jawpen seem amazingly eager to serve as Blackthorne’s tutors, andare forever giving him lessons. But like any child he has to learnsome of the hardest lessons by experience. The hardest lessons,expectably enough, have to do with myths about love, death, andloyalty—central issues for any philosophy.
Consider two instances. In Blackthorne’s philosophy, God andmankind are fundamentally different orders of being. Every personowes his or her first loyalty to God; all persons, under God, areequal in that they all deserve God’s mercy and mankind’s charity.
Toranaga laughs at this Christian conscience that wants to treat allsouls as equal, that refuses to discriminate among persons. And
Mariko adds that until Blackthorne can shuck off this conscience
he will be “defenseless as a doll” (p. 576) in Jawpen. For in thiscountry there is no gulf between God and mankind, and all people
are not to be treated the same. You owe loyalty to your lord andyour family; other people can fend for themselves. Only those few
who are personally tied to you can be trusted. The rest of mankind
needs to be approached like a pit of vipers, and trust here is childish. To John Blackthorne the idea that a man should offer a godlike loyalty to another man is blasphemy. He can accept it only
after he first has desecrated his Christian values by attempting totake his own life—symbolically, that is, burying his Christian
conscience.
On the other hand, Blackthorne takes much more easily to theidea that sex can be guilt-free. In his philosophy there was a chasm
between body and soul, the soul belonging to God and the flesh
being a burden that one endures but does not try to enjoy. But in
Jawpen no wall separates soul from body, and there is no virtue tobe gained from abstaining from physical pleasures. Indeed, people
who are close to one another should help their partners into joy.
This is almost an obligation between pillow partners. Blackthorne
has to mull over this idea for a while, but soon he is taking it up
with gusto: one would think that he had just invented the wheel.
As I add up the cultural lessons that John Blackthorne learns in
Jawpen, he begins to look less and less like an Elizabethan who
went to the other side of the world in 1600, and more and more likean American who fell into a time-reverse warp about the year 1970.
He is solidly within the great parade of rugged WASP adventure
heroes, from the knights of Camelot to Captain Kirk of Star Trek.
But he probably is the only man in that whole parade who shuffles

25

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along being uncertain about his cultural roots, and who is ready to
trade them in for a new issue.
Blackthorne pilots us into an attractive civilization but one that ismore attractive to us than it would be, I suspect, to Shakespeare
and his contemporaries. We are the ones who are troubled aboutliving by myths that seem not to help us face death with composure,that make too much mystery out of human sexuality, that set us too
far apart from nature, that do not ease our feeling of being dwarfed
by towering and inscrutable technologies and bureaucracies. When
we are in Jawpen we seem to have gotten to a place where there are
better answers to these problems. And perhaps in time we can continue the journey beyond Jawpen. Perhaps Blackthorne or one ofhis descendants will pilot us back across the Pacific and land us inAmourica, the land we want God to bless so that we can love.

3 Shǀgun as an Introduction to Cross-Cultural Learning
Elgin Heinz

God help me, I’m so mixed up. Part Eastern now, mostly Western.
I’ve got to act like them and think like them to stay alive. And muchof what they believe is so much better than our way that it’s tempting to want to become one of them totally, and yet. . . home isthere, across the sea, where my ancestors were birthed, where myfamily lives, Felicity and Tudor and Elizabeth. Neh?
Shǀgun, pp. 718-9
The common recognition that societies, like individuals, bothteach and learn from each other is a recent one. Indeed, it has beensuggested that perhaps the most important fact about the twentiethcentury is that, for the first time in history, people of the world
have had to take seriously one another’s actions and beliefs. Such
recent phenomena as gas lines and flotillas of refugees have dramatically brought this lesson home to Americans, a people whohave traditionally taken pride in being self-sufficient shapers ofworld events, not passive respondents to circumstances beyond ourcontrol. In contrast, Japan has long since realized the reality ofinterdependence and the value of lessons learned from others.
James Clavell’s Shǀgun illustrates the teaching/learning processthat has taken place at the individual and, to a degree, at the societal

HEINZ: CROSS-CULTURAL LEARNING

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level when two cultural traditions have been thrust together by theforces of history. It does so in a spell-binding, personal way bymaking issues of cross-cultural contact and conflict come alive as
no textbook could do.
The lesson of knowing the self and one’s cultural “baggage”
only when confronted with a different way of perceiving the worldis also compellingly brought home by Shǀgun. This further underlines the value of having students read the novel and watch the TV
dramatization. Despite historical anachronisms and inaccuracies,
Blackthorne’s world is a fascinating telescope through which students may see themselves as well as the Age of Discovery, when the
global world first came into clear focus.
History or Romance?
Shǀgun is historically informative. It is set in 1600, when European voyages of discovery had recently determined the size of theearth and the locations of major land masses. England and Holland
were competing with Portugal and Spain for colonial empires.
William Adams, an English pilot, and a few of the De Liefde’screw had survived a stormy landing on the southwestern coast ofJapan after threading the Straits of Magellan and crossing the
Pacific.
In 1600, Japan was a seething cauldron of intrigue and civil war—nothing new, but Tokugawa Ieyasu was completing the task of
constructing a stable dictatorship that would provide internal peace
and isolation from external influences for the next two centuries.
Shǀgun, in a six-month slice of the action, shows the kind of plotting and fighting that was typical, even though some of the eventswere shifted and characters changed for dramatic effect. But,
explicitly labelled as fiction, it takes no more liberties with the facts
than the TV “docudramas” of the last few years that claim to betrue accounts of their subjects.
Shǀgun also is a romance, a version of the classical cross-cultural
encounter in which passion defies cultural norms only to end, inevitably, in tragedy. Lower-middle-class Adams is transformed into
Blackthorne, heroic amalgam of John Wayne and John Carter,
Warlord of Mars, who changes the course of history and mourns
the death of his even more heroic lover, Mariko, wife of a great andcruel samurai. But in the end he has his grief assuaged by the award
of noble rank, two beautiful women to replace Mariko, and a great
estate. Mariko, exquisitely beautiful and intelligent, and, despite
her conversion to Catholicism, totally dedicated to her samurai
responsibilities, embodies the values of Japanese feudal aristocracy
as Blackthorne epitomizes those of middle-class England.

Because of its romantic elements, some academic historians dismiss Shǀgun as false both to the real circumstances in Japan and tothe character of William Adams. Clavell does not bother to refutethem. He subtitled his book “A Novel of Japan” and invented newnames for those characters that can be identified with historical figures. Thus, he felt justified in making them behave according to thelogic of his theme instead of according to the frequently tediousand sometimes mystifying accounts of written chronicles. Would
anyone deny that the struggle for power is clarified by telescoping
several interacting governing bodies into a single Council ofRegents?
Other historians, more lenient, note that many of the novel’s
apparent anachronisms are acceptable, given its pivotal time frame.
Enormous changes took place in Japan within a single lifetime centered around the year 1600. Who can tell precisely when a particular phenomenon began or ended? An English historian, Hugh Ross
Williamson, writing on the whole problem of taking liberties withthe “facts” of history, argues plausibly that all of academic history
is a “combination of myth, propaganda, and guesswork . . . .
Even when the writer has grasped the fact that history is the interaction of character and not the invention and propagation of myths,. . . he cannot invent speeches and thoughts for his people; he canonly record what he can prove.” The historical novelist, on theother hand, like the great Greek dramatists, working With known
outcomes, can interpret the facts so that “an aspect of truth
emerges which should compel the audience’s belief” (Historical
Whodunits [1956], pp. 12-22).
The reader can use Williamson’s provocative views and the testof Shǀgun to approach theories of history as well as to argue
whether Clavell has produced a work of historical fiction that compels the reader’s belief or a costume romance that seduces the uninformed reader while infuriating the scholar.
What differentiates Shǀgun from other costume romances is aset of philosophical convictions and life-style preferences for which
the story is the vehicle (for example, the constant references to“karma”). In this sense, Shǀgun can be compared with Utopiannovels that use a remote place and time or elements of fantasy to
express the author’s arguments. In this it resembles, for example,
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger
in a Strange Land, both of which use a mixture of fact, fantasy,
utopianism, and symbolism specifically designed to promote thewriter’s particular value system in a setting that will give it greater
impact than if it were presented directly on its own merits. The
reader is made a participant in the value judgments by identification with the characters and their actions.

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All three writers built their imaginary cultures on real foundations—Swift and Heinlein on the England and United States of
their own times and Clavell on seventeenth-century Japan, so that,
often, only artful selection of unexaggerated facts is needed tomake the reader infer the intended point. Immersed in these believable details, the observer is led to recognize the deficiencies of his
own culture and to appreciate the values of the alien one in which
he must try to survive. Clavell, as a romancer with a cause, takes
feudal Japanese society and distills the whole complex of two centuries of Tokugawa culture into stereotypes of personal honor andthe complementarity of life and death. To his credit, he does it well.
Mishima Yukio, the great novelist who was “Japan’s last samurai”
and who ritualistically disemboweled himself in 1970 after failing torevive the samurai spirit in an appeal to the army, would haveappreciated the value system by which Shǀgun’s characters lived.
It is this skill that makes many American academic specialists on
Japan feel nervous. Nǀ reader of Gulliver’s Travels is likely tothink of Lilliput as an actual place, however remote. And, on theother hand, any reader of Stranger in a Strange Land can apply thecorrective of his own experience and observation to Heinlein’s
characterization of today’s American society. But who among us
has had experience with the real Japan of 1600? Scholars can citestereotypes and anachronisms in Shǀgun but, on any given detail,would have to admit that their general knowledge does not rule out
the possibility of some specific action by a particular individual.
Cultural ComparisonsShǀgun, as a Utopian novel with a following large enough to justify making it into a TV series, encourages classroom comparison
with other books that, in criticizing our current social behavior,have amassed cult-like followings of devotees to various Utopian
systems. Students can be invited to name other examples of utopianism, found today in what is usually classified as science fiction.
They can speculate on the particular appeal that makes some people
try to model their life-styles and value systems on those exemplified. In the social studies classroom, these books can be extraordinarily useful—they are entertaining and thought-provoking
introductions to sociology, cultural anthropology, historical cause
and effect, use of and adaptation to natural environments, value
examination and identification, and (though in disrepute becauseof unskilled use) values clarification.
In addition to its ideological message, Shǀgun provides a threeway comparison of seventeenth-century England, seventeenthcentury Japan, and our present-day local culture. In it, students
may find that similarities outweigh the startling differences. Clavell

challenges readers to examine their own cultural assumptions in the
mirror of Blackthorne’s reactions to Japanese behavior (or, moreaccurately, Clavell’s version of Japanese behavior). Blackthorne
learned to accept Japanese values for the Japanese, if not always
for himself. Can we? Should we? Here is material for really significant classroom exploration. It is never the “facts” of history thatare the reason for social studies education; it is the way in which
students learn to use data to make decisions and value judgmentsthat will guide their attitudes and behavior.
With the drawing of comparisons, the whole subject of stereotypes becomes a problem that must be examined, particularly
because Shǀgun has been condemned as an enormous pastiche ofbest-seller stereotypes. What is a stereotype? It is simply a generalization that, through carelessness or ignorance—or, occasionally,
malice—has been pushed too far, has become the polarized symbolfor items, or ideas, or people that, when we examine them, show
distinct differences among themselves. It is useful to recognize andreject stereotypes but folly not to use generalizations. If we had totreat each situation in life as a set of independent variables, wewould be paralyzed by the need to attend to an infinity of insignificant details. We must generalize, but we must learn to do it not bypolarizing, but by grouping whatever or whomever we are dealing
with on a continuum. If we polarize Japanese as small, then, bycomparison, we polarize ourselves as large—a manifest absurdity
when we compare a Japanese sumo wrestler with an American
jockey. If we put Japanese and Americans on a size continuum, we
see substantial overlap, with less differentiation every year.
Applying a continuum to Shǀgun, we can find endless Westernparallels, correspondences, overlaps, and duplications. Loyalty
and honor are concepts that have meaning in both cultures. Differences are never in kind, only in degree. We can accept Clavell’s
descriptions of certain kinds of behavior as a deliberate placement
nearer one end of the continuum than it would normally occupy
because we can recognize that it is done for dramatic effect—for
example, the treatment of seppuku.
This, however, does not answer a larger question that is increasingly troublesome to social scientists, particularly cultural anthropologists. Are there real cultural characteristics that differentiate
peoples from each other? Or do we ascribe “national character” on
the basis of superficial but highly visible customs—highly visible
only because they differ from our equally superficial customs? At
this point, perhaps it is enough to recognize that we inevitably wear
the tinted glasses of our own culture. We must make conscious
efforts not to polarize, and to recognize that positions on the continuum are constantly changing.

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Clavell, like most competent novelists, does not kill his philosophical theme by overexposure. He supports it by using life-stylecomparisons. One that runs throughout the book and film is the
exposure of Blackthorne to Japanese customs and attitudes, withhis gradual conversion to the former but only partial comprehension of the latter. This is a subject of fascinating potential in theclassroom, for, with Blackthorne’s Europe and seventeenth-century
Japan equally remote, students can, by comparing them, begin to
become conscious of their own value systems without feeling threatened by a need for self-exposure. One example of confrontation isthat between Mariko, who speaks as often for Clavell as for Japan,
and Rodrigues, the Portuguese pilot, on the subject of who’s a barbarian (pp. 435-6).
Another, more complex, confrontation is between Mariko andBlackthorne on male-female roles, money, and family honor(pp. 367-71). Honor and its inseparable corollary, duty, are implicit
or explicit (usually explicit) in nearly every scene of Shǀgun. One
thread of this complex strand is the character of the widow, Fujiko,compelled by Toranaga to be Blackthorne’s consort (pp. 471-3).
She displays complete control of her personal feelings in assuming
the distasteful duty of managing his household, compensating for
his wildly unpredictable behavior, and guarding his honor(pp. 497-8, 500-503, 1178-80). Even after Toranaga gives her permission to commit an honorable suicide and join her husband, she
performs the final duty of arranging the most advantageous terms
for Blackthorne’s estate and personal welfare after her. demise(pp. 1190-91).
Continuity and Change
A comparison of seventeenth-century attitudes with modern ones
leads to our last and most challenging question: how valid are
Clavell’s characterizations today? To what extent does seventeenthcentury Japan persist into the twentieth century? If it seems to, is ita vestige of tradition, of habit not yet discarded, or a real continuation? Is it a reconstruction by modern Japanese for their presentday purposes? Or is it simply illusion, our own failure to change
our habitual, ethnocentric views? In short, is Shǀgun, as someAmericans have used it, a guidebook for travellers to Japan?
In Shǀgun, Fujiko is a tragic figure of feminine fortitude, a paragon of wifely virtues—and, it appears, an exemplar of ideals thatstill persist in Japanese society. Japanese soap operas show her
modern counterpart waiting up patiently for her husband to comehome late from the office party so she can put him tenderly to bed.
Statistical surveys show the husband automatically turning over his
weekly paycheck to her with the expectation that she will manage

all the household expenses, pay the fees of special schools for theirchildren, and provide him with an allowance that will permit him todrink in proper style with his office colleagues. And yet there aresigns of change: instances are appearing of women who refuse to betea-pourers when hired as secretaries or who even put their own
careers ahead of marriage.
In For Harmony and Strength (1974), anthropologist Thomas
Rohlen details the organization, lifelong commitment, and mutual
responsibilities in a Japanese bank. Similarities to samurai loyalties
are plain, as are the rigors of training. What is not clear is whether
these are unbroken continuations from the Tokugawa era or modern reconstructions by managers who see the advantages of a loyal
and dedicated work force. Although the latter is more probable,
the existence of the phenomenon can be used to support the case of
those who want to use Shǀgun as a guide to modern Japan—butonly until they notice that lifetime loyalty now is being eroded as
Japanese companies begin to raid each other for managerial talent.
Continuity and change are the two ends of a continuum. Shǀgun
gives us a dramatic introduction to the eternal-values pole, a picture that so reinforces our own romantic ethnocentrism that we
may not want to admit that it is a polar view—until, with Shǀgun in
hand, we walk from the plane into one of the world’s busiest airports, ride traffic-choked miles into Tokyo, have a quick hamburger at McDonald’s, and check into the skyscraper hotel where
all signs are in Japanese and English, indistinguishable from a hotelin Los Angeles where all the signs are in English and Japanese.
Which is really Japan? Both, of course. And everything in
between. As with the simple continuum of size, the complex continuum of cultural behavior is the same as the American—we, too,have company loyalty and women who manage the family household, myths of chivalry (did you ever see a Western movie in which
the sheriff shot the villain from ambush?), and philosophical composure in the face of death. But, there are differences in location on
the continuum—and the locations are constantly changing. As thisis being written, more Japanese than Americans, when asked toexpress an opinion, would begin an answer with “We” instead of“I”—but “we” no longer necessarily includes all Japanese. Modernization, affluence, and leisure have multiplied choices. One’s
work is no longer necessarily one’s total field of interest.
In 1975, a group of Japanese college students, all of whom had
visited the United States, were asked how they defined “self”—aconceptual problem that confronts Blackthorne time after time inShǀgun. After some discussion, they agreed that “in America ‘I’
am always ‘I,’ no matter what the circumstances. In Japan, there is
no absolute or constant ‘I’; who or what ‘I’ am depends on and33

HEINZ: CROSS-CULTURAL LEARNING

34

varies with the situation. When I am with a superior, I am in a different relationship than when I am with a peer, and my attitude andlanguage vary accordingly. Instead of thinking first of myself, I
must think first of the situation and the others in it to know how toadjust and behave.” Their answer could almost be one of Mariko’s
mini-lectures to Blackthorne. But do Americans really ignore thesituations they are in? Note that here, too, is a continuum!

4 Blackthorne’s England
Sandra PiercyShǀgun is the story of an Englishman, John Blackthorne, whosailed to Japan seeking wealth and glory. Blackthorne emerged
from Elizabethan England, a state in the midst of a period of
expansion fueled by a fervent Protestant faith. Even for those who
did not hold strong religious beliefs, Protestantism was identified
with English prosperity and independence, and there were an
increasing number of those who, having grown up under Elizabeth,
had a profound commitment to the Protestant faith.
Many Englishmen interpreted the defeat of the Spanish Armada
in 1588—a battle in which Blackthorne took part—as a sign that
God’s blessing was on their enterprises. This resulted in an outpouring of national confidence and pride, and nowhere was thisgreater than in the commercial classes to which Blackthorne
belonged. The English and their fellow Protestants, the Dutch, whowere engaged in their own struggle against Spain, shared the senseof a great crusade against their national and religious enemies. The
desire to fight for their religion was blended with the desire to break
the Catholic hold on rich trading routes and colonies. It was thisimpulse that sent Blackthorne and those like him across the sea tolands where no Englishman had gone before.

PIERCY: BLACKTHORNE’S ENGLAND

36

English Society
When Blackthorne arrived in Japan in 1600, he would havefound a society in many ways similar to his own. Both England andJapan had agricultural economies and social hierarchies based oncontrol of the land, but social and political developments in
England were a few generations in advance of those in Japan. A
century earlier, England had been ripped by warring noble factions
each seeking the crown or at least control of the reigning monarch—much like Japan in the sixteenth century. But unlike Japan, where
the emperor remained an impotent figurehead, the English monarchy reigned supreme, and won the cooperation of the landedclasses.
Blackthorne would have instantly recognized the status groups inJapanese society. He would have found a large peasant class ruledby a privileged aristocracy comparable to the peers and gentry backin England. The English gentry shared many characteristics with
the Japanese samurai. They prided themselves on high ideals ofhonor and service to the crown, a survival from the feudal age. The
predominantly military role of the peers and gentry had changed bythis time, but gentlemen were still expected to practice the arts of
war and alone were considered honorable enough to bear arms anduse swords.
The leading characteristic of a gentleman was that he was richenough not to have to work with his hands, but otherwise this classwas not rigidly defined. It included all university graduates, army
officers, and professional men such as doctors, lawyers, and clergymen. As in Japan, those whose wealth was based on commerce
were regarded as less honorable, although wealthy merchants could
buy land and set up as country squires.
There were still large tracts of waste and forest in England. Agriculture there was much less intensive than in Japan, and, where theJapanese had no space to permit the grazing of animals, English
farmers engaged in animal husbandry, especially the cultivation of
sheep for wool. English peasants worked the land owned by gentlemen as tenant farmers. They lived in small villages which were,apart from families, the most important units in English society.
Village order was maintained by the gentry, and peace in the countryside was only occasionally marred by outbreaks of violence.
Clavell’s depiction of Blackthorne’s astonishment at the Japanesepeasants’ lack of weapons (p. 29) gives the mistaken impressionthat English peasants carried them. Long years of domestic peace
under Elizabeth made it unnecessary for peasants to go armed, andeven when they needed weapons they relied on agricultural tools
rather than swords or muskets.

Blackthorne as a Townsman
Blackthorne hailed from the densely populated and economicallyadvanced area around London. His home, Chatham, was one of
the many seafaring towns on the Thames estuary. It was a bustling,prosperous region where the most radical form of Protestantism
had a firm hold. It would thus be likely that Blackthorne’s wife,
Felicity, who is described as “devout and filled with fear of the
Lord” (p.697), was a Puritan.
Although Clavell leaves Blackthorne’s social and economic statusundefined, some determination of his place in society can be made.
The trade of pilot was neither prestigious nor lucrative. Despite hisskill in his craft, Blackthorne would not have achieved recognitionor acceptance among the gentry. He was not a peasant, but he was
not much better than one. His grandiose conception of his role atsea (p. 11) would not correspond to his relatively humble place insociety. Blackthorne was definitely not a gentleman in the classusage of that term. His claim to be a knight’s heir (p. 111) is
obviously a bluff designed to increase his status with the Japanese.
His dreams of being knighted by Elizabeth (p. 357) are illusory,
too: he was too petty a bourgeois for such an honor. He does not
own land, has not been to a university, and is evidently not well-off
financially. The description of his house is an indication of his low
social status: it has but three rooms, no chimneys, little furniture,and rushes on the floor (p. 696-7). His family tolerated an unusual
amount of grime in their home (p. 697). It sounds as though Felicity
was a poor housekeeper.
If commerce did not command honor it did command respect.
The wealthiest of the merchants were great men indeed, andyounger sons of the gentry often entered the great merchant associations. Blackthorne’s career is far less grand. He followed theusual course of entering a trade or craft as an apprentice (p. 16) for
the typical term of seven years. If he were lucky, the apprentice
would be taught to read, write, and do simple sums. The most fortunate of them would, like Blackthorne, end up marrying his master’s daughter and being taken into the business.
Considering his low status, Blackthorne’s education is very unusual, especially his fluency in Latin. By this period Latin was nolonger, as Clavell claims (p. 264), the only language of learning.
Nevertheless, it is very likely that a pilot would know the languages
used by England’s trading partners. Blackthorne grew up in
Antwerp, where he could have easily picked up Dutch and Spanish,
and Portuguese would have been extremely valuable on his many
voyages. Most English townsmen were literate, and a comparatively

37

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38high degree of literacy existed even in the countryside close to
London.
Blackthorne would have found Japanese cities completely new
and different. England had nothing, not even London, to compare
to the great castle towns then taking shape in Japan. Blackthorne
would have certainly been overwhelmed by the sheer size of Osaka,
whose population in 1600 was well in excess of London’s estimated200,000. Many English cities had originally been built with militaryconsiderations in mind, but defensive functions had by 1600 been
replaced by commercial ones.
In contrast to the carefully planned castle towns of Japan, suchas Ieyasu’s capital of Edo, London grew haphazardly, and neither
the Queen nor the peerage had the resources or the sustained desire
to regulate urban population or land use. The city itself had grown
rapidly in the Tudor era, and the result was filth and overcrowding.
Most of the buildings were rickety structures built of wood andthatch. Fires were as disastrous in English towns as in Japanese,but there was no organized way of fighting them. Like other European cities, London featured open sewers and cesspools. The
custom in most English towns was for people to dump refuse of allsorts into the street to await weekly collection.
English Family Life
Families were a microcosm of the larger hierarchical society. The
English father’s authority over his wife and children was very great—but seemingly less than in Japan, where inheritances could betaken away at the arbitrary whim of the patriarch, at least in thesamurai class. Parental authority was strongest in England where
there was an inheritance involved, so that younger sons of the gentry, for instance, depended on the good will of their fathers to set
them up in honorable livelihoods, and daughters needed good dowries if they were to marry well.
The general rule was for each conjugal unit to have its own
household. The classic problem of the mother-in-law which Clavell
depicts so graphically for Japan (p. 655) was rare in Western
Europe, where most could not marry until they were in the financial position to set up households of their own, usually in their middle or late twenties. While this is the usual practice today, in the
1600s such a pattern was apparently unique to Western Europe.
Blackthorne claims (p. 534) that Englishwomen married at fifteen
or sixteen, but in fact not even the gentry married so early. While
instances of child marriage did exist, they were rare and met withgreat disapproval. Felicity’s marriage at age seventeen makes sense
only in view of the fact that she was an orphan—her father having
been killed that year in the battle of the Armada.

The position of women in early modern Europe was not high.
They had few legal rights, and their property was totally under thecontrol of fathers, brothers, or husbands. Women were not welleducated or taught any skills beyond housekeeping and needlecraft.
Gentlewomen could read and write, but usually not very well.
Blackthorne would not have been surprised by the broad household
financial responsibilities attributed to the samurai women (p. 262).
Even the highest ladies in England had the duty of looking after
their households. Felicity must have done this often as her husband
was away so frequently, and Blackthorne would have been quite
comfortable turning over management of his household to his consort Fujiko.
There seems to have been no notion of birth control in Elizabethan England, and women were at the mercy of their natural
fertility, though conception could be hindered by lactation or illhealth. Methods of abortion such as those ascribed to Kiku andGyoko (p. 935) were unknown in England. Methods of prenatal
care and midwifery were primitive. Childbirth was always dangerous, and many women and their babies died. Infant mortality was
high, estimated to have been as great as fifty percent before age
five. But those who did live could survive to an advanced age.
Blackthorne’s grandmother was seventy-five, which would havebeen considered venerable but not astonishing.
Romantic love flourished among all classes in Elizabethan
England. Research on Elizabethan sexual mores has just begun, butsome information has already emerged. The Elizabethans enjoyedsex, and even the devoutly religious regarded it as an essential andpleasurable part of marriage. It is surprising to find Blackthorne so
prudish on this subject. The Elizabethans, while hardly as refinedas Clavell’s samurai about bedroom matters, were quite frank
about sex, and some segments of the population, for instanceseafarers such as Blackthorne, were notoriously bawdy.
If sex within marriage was seen as a positive good, sex outside
marriage was strictly prohibited by religious and social authorities.
The church emphasized chastity and restraint not so much because
sex was sinful, but because in the absence of birth control sex outside marriage produced bastards. Premarital pregnancy was disgraceful in the eyes of most people only if the girl did not eventually
marry her lover. Society was outraged if such women did notmarry, mostly because it was likely that they and their children
would become a charge on the parish poor rate.
Adultery occurred with the same dismal regularity as it does
today. The church did its best to weaken the double standard, but
women were nearly always held more guilty than men. In Europe,
unlike Shǀgun’s Japan (“How sensible divorce seemed here,”39

PIERCY: BLACKTHORNE’S ENGLAND

40

p. 657), a marriage was regarded as a union sanctified by God, andconsequently divorce was nearly impossible. The lower classes took
refuge in desertion and bigamy. Unhappily married upper-classwomen devoted themselves to their children and religion while theirhusbands took mistresses. Most “kept” women were serving maids,
rewarded with little gifts of clothes, money, or trinkets. Rich city
men would keep courtesans in high style, but prostitution was notorganized at all, even in London. Blackthorne would have beenamazed by the training and status of a women like Kiku and thesystem that supported her. Most of the prostitutes he would have
known were poor country wenches looking to pick up a few extra
shillings.
It is difficult to determine whether Blackthorne’s attitude towardhomosexuality was typical. It probably was not, but his extreme
hostility (p.330) can perhaps be explained by an early experience on
shipboard when he was nearly raped (p. 334), Homosexuality wascertainly regarded by the Church of England as an unnatural andtherefore sinful act. But the common reaction among ordinary people
seems to have been ridicule rather than horror. Homosexualacts were crimes punishable by death, yet most were reluctant toturn others in, and the authorities rarely imposed the full penalty of
the law.
Diet and Health
Apart from sex, the English probably liked eating and drinking
best. The diet of all Europeans was nutritionally unbalanced, but
the English diet was the worst. The lower classes ate wheat bread,some cheese, meat when they could afford it, a few vegetables inthe spring and summer, and, of course, beer. Fruit was expensive
and rare. Both the English and the Dutch ate a wide variety of fish,
but, as Blackthorne and his crew demonstrate in their rejection ofJapanese fare (p. 44), they liked red meat much better—usuallymutton or pork. During the winter it would be salt meat, sincenothing fresh could be stored and there was no fodder to keep livestock alive to be butchered. Alcohol in some form was the major
beverage. In England wine was drunk only by the rich, but all ages
and classes enjoyed beer and ale and drank a staggering amount ofit. Because of the high consumption of meat and beer and the scarcity of fresh foods, bladder and kidney problems were widespread.
Nearly everyone had vitamin deficiencies and little resistance toinfection. Skin ailments were commonplace, and scurvy was notconfined to shipboard.
The English generally had a higher degree of cleanliness thanClavell gives them credit for. Soap was a big commodity in Englandand someone must have been using it, mostly for washing clothes.

But keeping one’s body clean in Elizabethan England did present
problems. Because of the cold climate and the difficulty of heatingwater, people bathed infrequently.
But Blackthorne’s
Granny Jacoba, who insists that a bath at birth and once again
when laid out for burial is enough (p. 273), is not representative.
Baths were not considered dangerous in themselves but becausesome rather foul diseases could result from entering contaminatedwater. Blackthorne resisted his first Japanese bath because of his
fear of the flux (that is, dysentery), which could be caught frombad water. But babies were bathed regularly and sometimes the
sick were bathed as a cure. Even though the lower classes did nothave the facilities for bathing, the gentry valued good hygiene.
The superior cleanliness of the bodies and clothes of the upperclasses was one of the things that set them apart. The peasants wore
wool or leather, which could not be washed easily, and, since they
had few changes of clothes, the same outfit would serve for months
without being washed. The satin, velvet, and fur outer garments ofricher people would not wash either, but underneath they wore
linen underclothes which were changed often and which they tookcare to keep clean.
In spite of their best efforts, however, not even the upper classes
could escape infestations of lice and fleas, which came not fromdirt but from animals: livestock, pets, rats, and even servants.
Everyone had them. They did not know that this was one way thatdisease could spread. People believed that contagion was caused by
noxious vapors from the earth, hence Blackthorne’s care in closing
the portholes of Rodrigues’ sickroom to avoid “bad air” (p. 187).
Western medicine was hardly past the witch doctor phase, but
Blackthorne slandered doctors when he said they were dirty anduncouth (p. 322). Doctors merely prescribed treatment and thetasks of surgery and pharmacy were performed by specialized
craftsmen, the barber-surgeon and the apothecary. It is likely that
Blackthorne himself never saw a physician, since their services werebeyond most people’s means. Blackthorne was really referring tobarber-surgeons, who were trained and licensed to pull teeth, setbones, and perform simple operations such as cutting for bladderstones. For these operations there was no anesthetic besides alcohol, so the barber-surgeon had to be strong rather than genteel.
Current medical theory stated that health existed only when thefour humours of the body, representing qualities of heat, cold, andmoisture, were in balance. Excessive heat meant an excess of the
hot humour, blood; hence the enthusiasm of Blackthorne and hiscrew for bleeding at the first sign of a fever. Purges and enemas
were also common remedies to restore the balance of the humours(p.322).

41

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42

The English World View
The great majority of the people had no way to explain natural
phenomena scientifically. The English believed devoutly in the
supernatural and tended to see sickness, death, storms, famine, andaccidents as the result of direct intervention by God in their lives.
The attitude of the English toward such phenomena as earthquakes
would have been very like that of the Japanese peasant who called a
big earthquake a sign from the gods (p. 469). Blackthorne, insteadof just shrugging and saying “karma,” would surely have seen theearthquake as a judgment on the village for permitting the death of
an innocent old man. The characteristic European outlook appears
when the crew of the Erasmus draw lots. They say, “Let God
decide” (p. 81).
Country folk also believed in nature spirits somewhat like theJapanese kami (p. 652). Blackthorne would recognize the Japaneserelationship to these spirits, since it was so like the English. They
told each other stories about fairies and pixies who could do people
harm if they were angered, and who needed to be placated withsimple rites and charms. People also used charms to make theircrops grow better and to increase the fertility of their animals andspouses. Young people desired love potions. Victims of crime
wanted to divine who the guilty party was or to take revenge.
The Europeans of this era held the idea of a “great chain ofbeing” in which everything in the universe, from angels to stones,
had its proper place in the scheme of things. This hierarchy was created by God, and disruption of it was held sinful. Thus, the respectof peasants for their betters and of the gentry for the crown was
founded not only on economic or political power, but also on the
belief that God had ordained the political and social structure.
One gets a sense of resignation in some areas of Elizabethan life.
The people of sixteenth-century England accepted chronic illness
and discomfort as a natural part of their existence. Food, clothing,and shelter were often inadequate in England’s cold, damp climate.
Death was ever-present. Disease was rampant, accidents and serious injury frequent. There was little empathy among the English
for the physical suffering of others. People had a taste for public
whippings, brandings, and other violent punishments. The English
did not say “Karma, neh?” but they could have, leading one tosuspect that in this, as well as in other areas, Japanese and English
attitudes were closer than Shǀgun would have us believe.

5 Trade and Diplomacy in the Era of Shǀgun
Ronald TobyAt the heart of Shǀgun lies the rich novelistic opportunity offeredby the arrival of the first Englishman in Japan at the historicalmoment of 1600: Japan was at the peak of the most expansive, outgoing period of its pre-modern history. Open to trade, and eager
for it, Japan was excluded by Chinese law from direct access to themarkets of China. Japanese merchants and seafarers had responded
in the late sixteenth century by moving further outward to trade,advancing into Southeast Asia in search of Chinese goods.
Only sixty years before “John Blackthorne” arrived, Japan had
been reached by the farthest extension of the European Age of Discovery, first by Portuguese traders and then by Jesuit missionaries,
who came east from Africa and India. They were later joined by
Spanish traders and missionaries coming west from Mexico andthen north from the Philippines. Blackthorne, a northern European and a Protestant, thus landed in a country where Iberian
Catholics and Japanese were in the midst of a century of vigorous
economic, cultural and religious competition. As a result of a halfcentury of Jesuit proselytization, the Iberians of the CounterReformation were deeply entrenched, with several hundred
thousand converts to Catholicism and a critical role in Japan’s
external trade to support their position.

TOBY: TRADE AND DIPLOMACY44

Japanese Traders in East Asia
China had been the focus of all Japanese foreign relations—diplomatic, cultural, and even economic—for centuries prior to thearrival of Europeans in East Asian waters in the sixteenth century.
China, with vast material resources and generally more advanced
culture and technology, was Japan’s major source for silks, medicines, books, fragrances, and spices—many of the same “exotic”
goods that drove Europeans such as Blackthorne to seek passage tothe Indies.
But in the year 1600, China had been relatively passive in maritime trade for some time. Until 1567 Chinese were forbidden tovoyage abroad in search of commerce, and even after that they
were specifically prohibited from travelling to Japan, viewed withgood reason by the Chinese as the home of pirates and marauders.
Instead, the Ming dynasty relied on the attraction of Chinese culture and the appeal of Chinese goods to bring foreigners to China.
Ideologically, the Ming rulers were not eager for trade, being moreinterested in serving as the centerpiece in a morally conceived worldorder. So foreigners, if they wished to trade, had to come to Chinaas “tributaries,” explicitly recognizing the superiority of the “Central Kingdom,” as the Chinese termed their land.
Many East Asian countries, notably Korea and Vietnam, had
accepted this China-centered vision of the world, but Japan presented special problems. Japanese mythology claimed that the Japanese imperial family, and indeed the Japanese islands themselves,
were descended from the gods. Japan was therefore, as Mariko
instructs us (p. 436), the “Land of the Gods,” the “Divine Country.” This ideology made it difficult for any national Japanese government to enter into official diplomatic relations with any Chinese
dynasty without exposing itself to charges of treason against theemperor. Nevertheless, such relations had in fact existed during therule of the later Ashikaga shoguns, from 1432 until 1547, during
which eleven official missions were dispatched to the Ming court.
In return, the Japanese were given “tallies,” licenses to trade in
China. This “tally trade” was entirely one-way, since Chinese ships
were still not allowed to leave their own country. Within Japan,
control over the tally trade gradually passed from the shogunate
into the hands of Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and local
daimyo of Western Japan, finally coming to an end in 1547.
But this did not stop Japanese from continuing to try. Now they
simply turned to forms of piracy, raiding coastal market towns in
China and preying on coastwise shipping. Many of these pirates,
known as wakǀ (see Shǀgun, p. 666), were manned by Chinese
seeking to circumvent Ming laws against maritime trade, but theyseriously disrupted the China coast, and further alienated China
from Japan. The Ming government, with its anti-maritime orientation, was ineffectual in suppressing the piracy. And since there wasno effective central authority in Japan either, these Japanese freebooters ranged freely along the China coast and into the Indies insearch of trade or plunder.
It was in this volatile atmosphere in the mid-sixteenth century
that the Europeans first appeared in East Asian waters. This helps
to explain why Father Sebastio’s charges of piracy against Blackthorne (pp. 57-58)—charges which the Jesuits and Portuguese actually made against William Adams on his arrival in Japan (seeChapter 1)—would have found such a ready audience in both Omi
and Toranaga.
Japan’s alienation from continental East Asia, which began withthe end of the tally trade and the resurgence of the wakǀ, becamealmost total in 1592, when Hideyoshi (the Taikǀ) dispatched nearly
160,000 Japanese troops to subjugate Korea, as the first step in hisplanned conquest of China. He had quelled western Japan only a
few years earlier in 1587, and the Kanto in 1590, so he was now in aposition to bring the wakǀ under central control for the first time.
Nǀ truly convincing explanation has yet been given for this invasion. Some have written it off as the action of a megalomaniac, andthe Taikǀ did indeed speak of his dreams of sitting on the throne ofChina (as in Shǀgun, p. 1039). It has also been suggested that, since
the Taikǀ had managed to bring an end to the century of civil war
by his victory over the Hojo (the “Beppu” of Shǀgun), he was now
seeking a way to dissipate the energies of the large warrior classoutside Japan, rather than allowing them to erupt in a civil war thatmight topple his regime. But whatever Hideyoshi’s motivation,
geography, logistics, and the combined Korean and Chinese armies
ensured the failure of the Korean invasion. Even the large contingents of Japanese musket troops were not a sufficient advantage.
In the end the Japanese armies, fighting on hostile territory withoverextended supply lines running across dangerous seas, werebeing badly beaten when Hideyoshi died in 1598. The Council ofRegents claimed to be acting on his dying wishes when they ordered
the troops home in the fall of the year, and Japan’s first historicalforeign war came to a close.
Direct access to China was now quite out of the question. This
gave the Portuguese, based in Macao on the coast of South China
since the 1550s, an even more important role in Japan’s foreign
trade. But contrary to the picture painted in Shǀgun, they did nothave a monopoly, for Japanese traders had also ventured into thewaters of Southeast Asia. By 1570 a small Japanese community had
been established on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, boasting45

TOBY: TRADE AND DIPLOMACY

46

a population by 1595 of as many as one thousand. Similar Japanesecommunities appeared in other locations in Southeast Asia. Japanese
ships, with crews and traders sometimes numbering as many as threehundred, traded there with Chinese merchants, who after 1567 wereallowed to voyage anywhere but Japan. So the Japanese did havelarge ocean-going vessels in the era of Shǀgun, and they engaged in a
far-flung network of trade, even though they could not trade directlywith China.
The Europeans’ Arrival in JapanThe first European contact with Japan, in the 1540s, precededBlackthorne’s arrival by nearly sixty years, but the forces thatbrought them to Japan were over a century older than that. Starting around 1415 Portuguese mariners had pressed down the west
coast of Africa, and Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good
Hope to reach India in 1498. In large part, they were trying to outflank the Arab/Levantine/Italian monopoly on “Oriental” silks
and spices coming into Europe by seeking new routes to the Indies
and “Cathay” (China). Although Marco Polo had alerted Europe
to the existence of “Zipangu” in the thirteenth century, Japanremained a peripheral interest. In 1542 or 1543, a Portuguese ship,
driven north by a storm, accidentally landed in southwesternJapan. The three Portuguese aboard were the first Europeans to set
foot there, and with them came firearms. A few years later in 1549,
Francisco (later St. Francis) Xavier landed in Satsuma, also in thesouthwest; and introduced the other great European export of thesixteenth century: Christianity.
At the same time that the Portuguese were moving around Africa
into the Indian Ocean, Christian Spain, in what may be called acontinuation of the Crusades, was fighting to expel the Muslims
from the Iberian peninsula, a campaign which was completed by
1492. In the burst of energy that followed, Spanish expeditions discovered the Americas (1492) and thence a westward route to Asia
via the straits that came to bear the name of the expedition’s captain, Magellan, reaching the Philippines and Moluccas in 1522.
Thus the two Iberian peoples, expanding in opposite directions,
met in the waters of Southeast Asia at the opening of the sixteenth
century, in the very spot where the Japanese commercial expansionof the later part of the century would be focused. Papal mediation
attempted to keep these two competing young empires from open
conflict, starting with the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), assigningeach a separate sphere of colonization and evangelization, much as
Blackthorne outlined to Toranaga (pp. 259-276).
Quite another sort of crusade also motivated European expansion after 1517 when the Protestant Reformation split Europe into

hostile religious camps, largely along north-south lines. This challenge raised a new wave of zeal in the Catholic Church, and a newpriestly order emerged to lead the charge: Ignatius Loyola, Francisco Xavier, and a few others founded the Society of Jesus in 1540
to be the “army of the Church militant.” Founded along strongly
centralized, tightly disciplined lines, the Jesuit order has been
described as “a sort of ecclesiastical Green Berets.” Forming apartnership with Portuguese commercial expansion, it was theJesuits who led the proselytizing assault on Japan.
The Society of Jesus was from its inception elitist and intellectual. These qualities were to serve the Order well in Japan, for its
priests were far more adaptable than their predominantly Spanish
colleagues in the mendicant Franciscan and Dominican orders.
Thus, for example, it was acceptable to the Jesuits to compromise
on matters of dress, going in the garb of Buddhist priests so as to fit
in with Japanese custom and taste.
The Jesuits also had among their number novices and priests who
were willing and able to learn the Japanese language. Priests like
Joao Rodrigues, the model for Father Alvito, could preach inJapanese without relying on interpreters, as Xavier had been forced
to do. Not content with European priests preaching to the Japanese, either directly or through interpreters, the Order early established institutions to train Japanese catechists, starting with anovitiate founded in 1580. Such institutions trained numerous
young Japanese converts to enter the Order, teaching them Latin
and basic doctrine.
But the initial enthusiasm of Xavier and some of his early successors for the Japanese had been partially displaced by a suspicion of
their alleged “duplicity,” and the curriculum at the training institutes came to be tailored to those assumptions. Japanese students
were thus restricted to the “safe” parts of Catholic theology: Aquinas, for example, to say nothing of the pagan philosophers, was
not in the course of study. Although two Japanese were eventuallyordained as priests, most found their advancement blocked. Many
resented the suspicion with which they were regarded, and some
rebelled in apostasy. Brother Joseph of Shǀgun was driven to apostasy and reversion to his identity as Uraga Tadamasa (pp. 751-753)
by the same issues that angered actual Japanese catechists of thetime, and we may well imagine a conversation between a rank-andfile priest and Luis Cerqueira, the bishop of Funai, very like theone between Fathers Alvito and dell’Aqua (p. 756).
Still, by 1582, there may have been 150,000 converts in Japan,
and 220,000 by 1609—although some Jesuit accounts claim as
many as 750,000. The rising success of the Jesuit mission was notwithout opposition, however, from the established religions. Jesuit

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48

success was greatest in Kyushu, where they succeeded in converting
several daimyo, one of whom, ƿmura Sumitada, ceded the port townof Nagasaki to the Jesuits in 1580. When Hideyoshi subjugated
Kyushu in 1587 and saw at first hand the extent of these successes,
he issued an order expelling the Jesuits from the realm. “Because
Japan is the land of the Gods,” he decreed, “it is not proper for the
Christian countries to propagate their pernicious doctrines” in Japan.
At the same time, he confiscated the city of Nagasaki from theJesuits. The order was not actually carried out, but it was a harbingerof the strong latent hostility to the Christian advance in Japan.
Japanese suspicion was much exacerbated by the arrival in 1592-3 ofthe Spanish Dominicans and Franciscans, whose acrimonious
religious disputes with the Jesuits undercut some of the unified
appeal of Christianity. This suspicion gave way to outright hostility
in the first serious incident of persecution in February 1597, whentwenty-six Christians—including Spanish Franciscans and Japanese
Jesuits and laymen—were crucified in Nagasaki (as recounted inShǀgun by Friar Domingo, pp. 238-9).
Trade versus Christianity
While it was the prospect of Christian converts that had originally lured the Portuguese to Japan, it became the opportunity forvast trading profits that in fact kept the ships plying the watersfrom Nagasaki to Macao and back, encouraging what historianCharles Boxer has termed “an unholy alliance of God and Mammon.” Chinese silks were, as Shǀgun suggests, the major Japanese
import item in the sixteenth century, and they continued to bethroughout the seventeenth. Most of the silk was imported in theform of raw silk thread, to be woven into kimono cloth in Japan.
Portuguese traders’ profits on this silk were about seventy to eighty
percent in ordinary years and in the best years topped one hundred
percent. Gold was also a major item brought from China by thePortuguese, who took advantage of national differences between
relative valuations of precious metals to make immense profits
exchanging Japanese silver for Chinese gold.
Although merchants were involved in the trade of all countries,
the Japanese side was increasingly dominated by daimyo, and ultimately by Hideyoshi after he confiscated Nagasaki in 1587. On thePortuguese side, the Jesuit mission was actively involved in the
Macao-Nagasaki trade, both as bankers and agents for Japanese,and on their own account (pp. 200-201). The participation of anarm of the Church in banking and commerce on so blatant a scale
made these activities a matter of controversy, even among thesenior Jesuits in Japan. It was a particularly thorny issue, since
official Jesuit participation tempted individual members of theOrder to play the market for personal advantage as well. But theSociety’s role in trade was a crucial source of income for its missionary activities, as suggested in Shǀgun by the conversation
between Father dell’Aqua and Captain-General Ferreira (p. 406). So
when King Felipe III of Portugal banned Jesuit participation in the
trade in 1607, he had to replace the lost income with a royal subsidyof 2,000 cruzados per year.
The enthusiasm of the Japanese for silk was substantial andaccounts for its importance in the overseas trade, but silk was neither
the only fiber the Japanese used, nor was it the cornerstone of theeconomy, as Clavell sometimes implies. In fact, one reason
Hideyoshi, Ieyasu, and many lesser daimyo sought to purchase silk
may have been that it was a storable form of wealth, as well as aprofitable commodity to trade. It was not as safe as gold, which
would not burn, but neither could silk rot, like rice.
The arrival in Japan in 1600 of William Adams—Blackthorne’s
model—came at a critical moment in the development of this foreign
trade. Frequent contact between the Spanish Philippines and Japan in
the late 1590s had raised the prospect of competitors to thePortuguese and hence possible benefit to Japan’s trading position.
Despite the martyrdom of 1597, Hideyoshi responded favorably to
the Philippine embassy later that year, and especially to the great
black elephant they brought him as a present. Hideyoshi wasparticularly interested in improving his own situation in trade vis-àvis the daimyo of Kyushu, the center for the Portuguese trading
operation in Japan. Favorable treatment of the Spanish from thePhilippines might well bring foreign trade directly to the KyotoOsaka area, further enriching the Taikǀ’s coffers.
Shortly after Hideyoshi’s death in 1598, Tokugawa Ieyasu took
steps to encourage such a trade relationship with the Philippines,
being interested in enriching himself at the expense of the heir
Hideyori in Osaka. When the Franciscan friar Jeronomo de Jesus
smuggled himself back into Japan in 1598, less than two years after
he had survived the Nagasaki martyrdom, Ieyasu not only received
the friar in audience—to the dismay of the Jesuits—but also suggested that Spanish galleons bound from Luzon to Mexico use
Uraga, in Ieyasu’s own Kanto domain, as a port. He also requested
that the Spaniards lend him some mining technicians and mariners —he could not foresee the arrival of William Adams—to train his
people in these strategic skills. To cap the offering, he permitted theFranciscans to open a church in his capital city of Edo.
Tokugawa Ieyasu was thus every bit as eager for foreign trade as
Clavell’s Toranaga, and any tolerance of Christian missionary
work in his domain was a tool to achieve that end. The arrival of
William Adams in a Dutch ship in the spring of 1600 offered Ieyasu

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new ways to advance his trading interests without going throughthe missionaries, for neither the Englishman nor any of his Dutch
companions seemed interested in spreading their religion in Japan.
They were interested only in trade, Ieyasu’s main interest as well.
Shortly after the wreck of the De Liefde (“Erasmus”), Ieyasu
received Adams in Osaka, much as described in Shǀgun, and questioned him closely about trade, nautical technology, and international
affairs. Adams became instrumental in establishing English andDutch trade in Kyushu under Ieyasu’s protection after 1609.
Numerous Chinese traders were also active in Kyushu, in violation of
the Ming ban on trade with Japan, and trade had been reestablishedwith Korea and with the kingdom of Okinawa by the mid-1610s. So
there was no further need for Ieyasu to tolerate Catholic missionary
activity, which he considered subversive and acceptable only as anecessary evil for trade. So, within months of the arrival of English
traders in 1614, Ieyasu proclaimed the expulsion of all foreign priests
and missionaries. This edict, unlike Hideyoshi’s order of 1587, wasenforced, and the age of Christian persecution in Japan began inearnest. Many Japanese Christians were forced into exile in Manila,
Macao, or elsewhere.
The Restriction of Foreign Trade
From this time onward, the freedom of Europeans in Japan was
progressively restricted, until, by 1641, the only ones left were theDutch, who were restricted to a trading post on the small manmade island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor. Chinese merchants
were also restricted to Nagasaki, which became the principal port
for Japan’s foreign trade until the nineteenth century. The English
had decided to close their operations in Japan at the end of 1623,
over 5,000 pounds in the red. The following year the bakufu ended
relations with the Spanish in Manila because of mounting (andentirely justified) fears that Spanish ships were smuggling missionaries into Japan. Fear of Christian infiltration also led to the prohibition of Japanese travelling abroad, a ban which was nearly total
after 1635; only a few Japanese were especially licensed to go to
Korea and to the kingdom of Okinawa for trade.
A mounting campaign of persecution followed the expulsion of
the missionaries in 1614 and almost completely stamped out Christianity in Japan by 1640. The count of martyrs to the faith between
1549 and 1639 lies somewhere between 2,100 and 4,045. But thesefigures do not include those who died in the great Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-38, in which some 37,000 peasants are said to havedied. Some of them were rebelling against excessive taxation andoppressive rule, and some were Christians, but in the eyes of the
shogunal government this was a Christian uprising. It was certainly

the final blow to any hopes of commerce with the Catholic countries. A year after the fall of Shimabara, the Portuguese too were
expelled from Japan, leaving only the Dutch as a link between
Japan and Europe.
The untrammeled foreign voyaging of the sixteenth century, theunrestricted involvement of provincial daimyo in foreign trade, andthe widespread access of foreign traders and missionaries to Japan
which characterized the country on the eve of the age of Shǀgun
were all very much the results of Japanese disunity. With no effective central authority, there could be little chance to control anyone’s activities in international affairs. But with the advance ofcentral control, from Oda Nobunaga (“Goroda”) to Hideyoshi,
and thence to the Tokugawas, central power once more became a
reality in Japan, and it was the most effective national power Japan
had seen in over half a millennium. To be a truly effective government, the Tokugawas had to bring foreign affairs as much under
their control as domestic affairs, and in that endeavor the ideal of
one-port foreign trade had to become a reality. This did not meanthat the Tokugawas were opposed to trade: they simply sought tobring all aspects of national life, including trade, under theircontrol.

51

6 The Struggle for the Shogunate
Henry Smith

very special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one,which is never known to anyone except himself alone” (p. 193).
Although here voiced by a Portuguese pilot, these words, with only
minor changes in phrasing, come directly from the historical writings of Joao Rodrigues, the model for Father Alvito, who goes onto elaborate:
But they do not use this double dealing to cheat people in business matters,
as do the Chinese in their transactions and thieving, for in this respect theJapanese are most exact; but they reserve their treachery for affairs of
diplomacy and war in order not to be deceived themselves. And in particular when they wish to kill a person by treachery, they put on a great pretence by entertaining him with every sign of love and joy—and then in the
middle of it all, off comes his head. (Michael Cooper, They Came to
Japan, p. 45)

One might wonder, of course, whether there is anything uniquely
Japanese in duplicity—and its corollary: a demand for fierce loyalty—or whether any country which has been in a state of off-andon internecine war for over a century would not reveal similar
traits. But there is little doubt that both treachery and loyalty werethe central themes of sixteenth-century Japanese politics, andClavell can scarcely be accused of exaggerating them, particularly if
we are to believe the accounts of contemporary Western observers
like Valignano and Rodrigues,
On all sides they are pulled asunder by wars, torment each otherwith continuous carnage: tremble constantly at some pernicious
conspiracy arising: promiscuously defraud and deceive each otherin turn, with artifice, fraud, and strategem everywhere dominant:the servitor does not keep faith with his master: men’s facts andtreaties are violated: in such fashion that there is perceived among
them no sense of duty, and of compassion none, nor of charity.
Alessandro Valignano, Catechismus Christianae Fidei, 1586
(quoted in Elison, Deus Destroyed, p. 41)
If one places any trust in this opinion of Jesuit Visitor-General
Valignano—the model for Carlo dell’Aqua in Shǀgun—then James
Clavell was scarcely deviating from historical reality in his heavy
reliance on the theme of duplicity to build the plot and create thedriving suspense of his novel. While this undeniably perpetuates theWestern stereotype of the Japanese (and other Asians) as “inscrutable,” one must realize that the stereotype itself was in full flower
in the era of Shǀgun. Consider the advice of the pilot Rodrigues toBlackthorne: “Never forget Japmen’re six-faced and have threehearts. It’s a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his
mouth for all the world to see, another in his breast to show his

From Chaos to Order
But the theme of duplicity must not obscure another characteristic of Japan in the era of Shǀgun, one also frequently stressed byforeign observers: the prevalence of law and order among the populace at large. William Adams himself, for example, observed thatJapanese “justice is seuerely excecuted without any partialitie vpon
transgressors of the law. They are gouerned in great ciuilitie. I
meane, not a land better gouerned in the world by ciuill policie.”
Details in Shǀgun confirm this depiction through a somewhat exaggerated emphasis on the tyrannical power of the samurai class. The
tone is set early in the novel when Kashigi Omi lops off the head of
an Anjiro villager who fails to show proper respect. It is in fact truethat samurai had the right to do so, as codified in the “Legacy” of
Tokugawa Ieyasu himself: “If fellows of the lower orders go
beyond what is proper toward samurai, there is no objection to cutting such a one down.” So behavior like Otni’s was certainly possible and doubtless happened from time to time. What must be
added, however, is that a samurai had to have a very good reason
for such an action and would immediately be required to produce
full justification to his lord. It is not as though samurai marched

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54

about slicing up commoners on a whim, as Clavell not infrequently
suggests: indeed, unjustified samurai killing of commoners wasviewed as an even greater threat to the social order than the killing of
fellow samurai, particularly under Tokugawa rule when samurai
were viewed as models of proper behavior for the population atlarge.
But the line between lawless and lawful behavior was by no means
always clear. It must be stressed that the era of Shǀgun represents a
crucial transition from the utter chaos of the mid-sixteenth century to
the amazingly stable and well-ordered regime of the Tokugawa
shogunate a century later. It is precisely this process of transition thathelps us better understand the seemingly contradictory mixture of acountry which is alternately described as in total political chaos andat the same time as a paragon of law and order. The very fact ofcontinued civil war led to the evolution of increasingly effective
techniques of civil control in order to mobilize and supply the large
armies required by sixteenth-century developments. We can also
detect clear class distinction between chaos and order: it was
primarily among the tiny daimyo elite that duplicity was such anorm, and among commoners that strict order was increasingly indemand. In a sense this split presaged the actual political structure of
the Tokugawa shogunate: a rather loose system of military checks
and balances at the national level, but a tightly repressive civil
regime within each autonomous domain.
The Road to Unification
Whatever institutional and technological developments accelerated
the unification of Japan in the late sixteenth century, no one would
deny the personal importance of the three successive warrior lords
who masterminded the process. It was an era of heroes, rare in anation in which political leaders have on the whole preferred to wield
their power either behind the scenes or as part of a group effort;
James Clavell is in the right spirit when he calls it “an era when
giants walked the earth.”
First of the giants was Oda Nobunaga (1534-82), a small lordfrom central Honshu who in the 1560s began a process of regional
conquest that finally led to the capture of Kyoto in 1568 and thereplacement of the current Ashikaga shogun with a new one of his
own choosing. In Shǀgun, Clavell renames Nobunaga “Goroda,”
which, while unusual (if not impossible) for a Japanese family
name, conveys in its menacing combination of consonants a good
sense of the character of the historical Nobunaga, the man whom
English historian George Sansom tagged “a cruel and callous
brute.” It was Nobunaga, for example, who prescribed for awarrior-monk with the misfortune to have fired on him (andmissed) the punishment of being buried to the neck and graduallymutilated with a bamboo saw by passersby—until death after threedays. Clavell, by means of his handy technique of “just taking itfrom where it was and putting it somewhere else,” metes out thispunishment to Ishido at the end of the novel. (The historical Ishida
Mitsunari was simply beheaded: such a gruesome penalty would
probably never have been imposed on a daimyo, no matter how
treacherous.)
So also Clavell’s choice of the name “Nakamura” for the second of
the great unifiers Toyotomi Hideyoshi is in a way very appropriate,
since Nakamura is an ordinary name in contemporary Japan andconveys a sense of the humble origins of the man who came to be
known by his highest title of “Taikǀ” (a rank within the ancientbureaucratic system awarded to a retired regent for the emperor). In
actual fact, Hideyoshi was born without any family name at all, foruntil the nineteenth century very few commoners in Japan werepermitted surnames, and he arrived at the name “Toyotomi” only
after experimenting with several others. Hideyoshi took over the
mantle of power by avenging Nobunaga’s assassination in 1582, andin the period until his own death sixteen years later he clearly
demonstrated his genius for both military strategy and civil administration. Only in the realm of foreign policy, in the ill-fated Korean
expeditions, did he clearly fail. While Hideyoshi’s complex personality has never made him a popular favorite in Japan—although his
rags-to-riches success story enjoyed a certain vogue before WorldWar II—most serious historians would be willing to make him aleading candidate for James Murdoch’s label of “the greatest man
Japan has ever seen” (A History of Japan, II, 386). The details of his
career may be found in a number of standard histories; suffice it to
say that the details about the Taikǀ offered in Shǀgun are generally inaccord with accepted historical fact.
Hideyoshi’s death in the autumn of 1598 created the highly
unstable political situation which provides the stage for the drama of
1600—both in Shǀgun and in reality. Since Hideyori (“Yaemon” inthe novel), the Taikǀ’s heir by his consort Lady Yodo (“LadyOchiba”), was only a child of five at the time, a council of five“Regents” (in Japanese, tairǀ, literally “great elder”) had been set up
to govern until he came of age.
It would be well to emphasize the highly complex situation
with regard to political legitimacy in Japan at this stage in history, the background for which Clavell provides the reader in oneof his “instructive” passages (pp. 72-74). Just substitute Taira for“Takashima,” Minamoto for “Minowara,” and Fujiwara for“Fujimoto” (with the crucial provision that the Fujiwara were acourtier, not a samurai, family), and one has a pretty good55

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56

summary of the actual historical situation. The only exaggeration
which Clavell makes here (and for good literary effect) is the volatility of the position of “shogun,” the title first assumed byMinamoto Yoritomo in 1190. He gives the impression of one shogun after another being toppled while only the position of emperor
remained “inviolate and unbroken.” But in point of historical fact,
only two lineages of shoguns, both at least officially unbroken, preceded the Tokugawas. Indeed, the position of shogun came in time
to be much like that of the emperor himself: a figurehead who was
simply manipulated by the real holders of power. So, in itself, thetitle of “shogun” was not necessarily “the ultimate rank that amortal could achieve” (p. 72), and, in assuming the position in
1603, Ieyasu had to take special care to assure that for him and hisline it would not again become an empty title.
This pattern of the “devolution” of political power, leaving
figureheads of legitimacy at the top and the real wielders of power
in lesser positions, has long been stressed by scholars of Japaneseinstitutions. It was understandably one of the most confusing
things about the political scene for the Westerners who visited
Japajn in this era. William Adams, for example, in describing his
interview with Ieyasu in Osaka, refers to the daimyo as “Emperor”
and was probably unaware of the powerless figure in Kyoto who
was the “real” emperor.
The Events of (he Year 1600
In Shǀgun, the author takes the general political situation of1600 as the basis for his plot, although he makes no attempt at any
very precise correspondences. Of all the various daimyo thatappear in the course of Shǀgun, only the scheming “Ishido” has aclear model. This is Ishida Mitsunari, who was indeed an inveterateplotter and implacable enemy of Tokugawa Ieyasu and was ultimately defeated in the Battle of Sekigahara in the fall of 1600. The
historical Ishida was not one of the five Regents, but rather a member of a separate and lower-ranking five-man board known as the“Commissioners” (in Japanese, bugyǀ), which was in charge ofday-to-day administrative matters and which left issues of high policy to the Regents.
Clavell uses the institution of the Council of Regents as an effective plot device in Shǀgun, but in the actual historical events of 1600
the Regents were no longer functioning as an effective body. The
year and a half between Hideyoshi’s death and the arrival of William
Adams in April of 1600 had seen a series of political plots andcounterplots which if anything were more dramatic and fantastic
than any devised by Clavell, who indeed simply transposes some of
their details to the summer of 1600. In summer 1599, for example,

Ishida, after botching a scheme to assassinate Ieyasu, incurred thewrath of some rival daimyo on a visit to Osaka Castle and wasforced to escape in a lady’s palanquin and dress—the ruse which
Clavell provides for Ieyasu himself in Shǀgun!
By the spring of 1600, the unity of the Regents had been shattered both by their mutual hostilities and by the scheming of Ishida.
Ieyasu increasingly took authority into his own hands, reverting to
two techniques that Hideyoshi had expressly prohibited among theRegents: the arranging of political marriages and the taking of hostages. (For example, the heir of Hosokawa Tadaoki—“Saruji” inClavell’s novel—was not in Osaka in 1600, but was rather being
held hostage in Ieyasu’s capital of Edo.) The denouement began
when another of the Regents, Uesugi Kagekatsu, returned to his
fief to the far north and began openly fomenting revolt against
Ieyasu. This forced Ieyasu to leave Osaka and move to Edo to
defend his lands against Uesugi. Well knowing that he was freeing(in actual fact, forcing) Ishida to plot against him in his absence,
Ieyasu feigned indifference and made a leisurely trip north, conspicuously indulging in his favorite sport of hawking along theway, and arriving in Edo on August 10.
While Ieyasu supervised the campaign against the enemy to thenorth with one eye, he kept the other on the scheming Ishida to thewest through an elaborate network of informants. It was in theseweeks that Ishida moved to seize as hostages the families of thosedaimyo who had accompanied Ieyasu to Edo. His first target was
Gracia, the wife of Hosokawa Tadaoki, who as an obedientdaimyo wife steadfastly refused to leave her mansion and—asdetailed in Chapter 7—died with her mansion in flames, providing
the kernel of the story which James Clavell would use in creating
Mariko.
In Shǀgun, the author (with a screenwriter’s instinct?) thankfully
simplifies matters by dressing the opposing forces of Ishido andToranaga in contrasting uniforms of Gray and Brown, enabling thereader to provide some visual sense of who’s who during the chaotic
battle scenes. In reality, samurai armies were not fitted out withuniforms (which even in Shǀgun were explained as exceptional, amark of the punctilious discipline of Ishido and Toranaga [p. 557]),
and the problem of distinguishing friend from foe in battle wasoften solved by the use of secret signs, like strips of paper knottedin special ways around the sword sheaths. The historical Ishida
Mitsunari was also a considerably lesser lord than the Ishido ofShǀgun, his own personal army being but a small fraction of thetotal confederation which was to gather at Sekigahara: Ishida wassimply the nucleus about which the larger anti-Tokugawa lords
clustered. The situation of constantly shifting alliances in Osaka

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during the summer of 1600 was so confusing that it indeed cries out
for the clarity of Brown versus Gray to retrieve any account of theplotting from hopeless boredom.
The inter-daimyo rivalries in Shǀgun are more strongly colored by
Christianity than they were in historical reality. In a sense, thisemphasis reflects the accounts of the contemporary Jesuit missionaries, who tended to emphasize the prominence and number of theChristian daimyo. Whereas in Shǀgun “there were a number of very
important Christian daimyos” (p. 59), historian James Murdoch (witha possible Scotch-Protestant bias of his own) has stressed that the
openly Christian daimyo in 1600 in fact numbered only six, with a
combined koku assessment of merely four percent of the national
total (History of Japan, II, 390). Nor were any of them on the rulingcouncils at the time. What James Clavell did to enhance the drama of
his plot was to invent two Christian Regents, “Kiyama” and“Onoshi,” both of whom from the sound of their names (neither ofwhich qualify as identifiably Japanese family names) seem to beversions of Konishi Yukinaga, the most powerful and famous of all
the Christian daimyo. For additional color, Onoshi was made a leper,a transfer from the non-Christian lord ƿtani Yoshitsugu (whose wellknown disease may in fact have been syphilis).
At any rate, through August and on into September of 1600, Ishida
Mitsunari forged a massive confederation of daimyo in opposition to
Ieyasu. The military campaigns leading up to the Battle ofSekigahara in September, in both the north and the west, are complex
and may be found detailed in a variety of texts (Murdoch, Sadler,
Sansom, Trumbull). Although there is no proof of it, one may
imagine that the weapons and ammunition which Ieyasu confiscatedfrom the De Liefde (and Toranaga from the Erasmus) served him
well in these campaigns. It might be mentioned, however, that
Yabu’s dream of a musket regiment had already been realized inJapan, and guns were a standard part of Japanese warfare by thistime—indeed, they were a decisive factor in changing the nature of
war in Japan in the late sixteenth century. One of the persistent
fantasies of the Will Adams legend (although a relatively modest one
in Shǀgun) has been to see Adams as the importer of wholly new andadvanced means of gunnery. In fact, in the year 1600 the Japanese
were among the world leaders in the quality, quantity, and tacticaluse of guns—a position they were rapidly to surrender with thecoming of peace and the lack of any necessity for further
development of such weapons.
Ieyasu as Toranaga
Yoshi Toranaga is not only the most interesting and fullydeveloped character in Shǀgun—at least in the minds of mostreaders whom I have asked—he is also the most provocative incomparison with the historical model. This is doubtless a mark of
the relatively plentiful and colorful material available in English
about the historical Tokugawa Ieyasu (notably Sadler’s biography,
Maker of Modern Japan) on which the author had to draw—incontrast, for example, to the rather sketchy and bland records
which history has left us concerning William Adams and Hosokawa
Gracia. But the complexity and fascination of Toranaga is equallya genuine reflection of the many-faceted personality of the historical Ieyasu.
The personalities of great heroes in any national history tend
often to be reduced to one or two key characteristics, typically supported by nicknames or colorful anecdotes (which are as often as
not apocryphal, the classic case being George Washington and thecherry tree). So it is with Tokugawa Ieyasu, whose quintessential
qualities of craftiness and patience are supported by any number ofexamples. The former is epitomized by the nickname “tanuki
oyaji,” the Old Badger (more precisely, the old “raccoon dog,”
but at any rate an animal known for being clever and devious—yetgenerally likeable). The quality of patience is captured in an oftquoted set of Edo period haiku; all begin Nakanakuba (“If you
don’t sing”) and conclude Hototogisu (“nightingale”), with thevariant middle lines providing the imagined responses to such an
uncooperative bird:
Nobunaga: Koroshite yarǀ—”I’ll kill you”
Hideyoshi: Nakashite yarǀ—”I’ll make you sing”
Ieyasu: Naku made matǀ—”I’ll wait until you sing”
In Shǀgun, James Clavell has provided us in the character ofToranaga a fine elaboration upon both the craftiness and patienceof the historical Ieyasu. While some historians might suggest thatthese qualities have been overemphasized in the traditional Japanese mythology of Ieyasu, in certain ways these images are the“real” Ieyasu. As Clavell claims in the introduction to the Japanese translation of Shǀgun (to appear in September 1980), “If they
will open their minds to me, I will tell them the legends that they’ve
learned in their schools in dry form. And I can re-create it.”Yet Ieyasu, as befitted the role of most great generals of his day,could at the same time be quite ruthless, notably with members of
his own family whenever they stood in the way of his considerable
ambition. The depiction of Toranaga’s complex family situationand of the way in which he manipulated his wives, children, andother relatives is if anything considerably less involved than in thecase of the historical Ieyasu. His three mature sons as of 1600—
Hideyasu, Hidetada, and Tadayoshi (Noboru, Sudara, and Naga in

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the novel)—all provided him with numerous granddaughters whoenabled a diversity of marriage alliances. He was still to father three
more sons (the child with whom Lady Sazuko is pregnant in thesummer of Shǀgun was one of them, born in real life two months
after the battle of Sekigahara), for all of whom he provided large
domains in solidifying his regime after 1600.
In general, then, Ieyasu was skilled at manipulating people andseems only rarely to have been moved by any deep personalemotions. James Clavell’s use of the metaphor of hawking todescribe the way in which Toranaga manipulates others is an effective way of conveying this quality of the historical Ieyasu, who wasin fact a great devotee of falconry. Rather less true to Ieyasu’s
character as we know it is the religious attitude of Toranaga, as
capsulized in an inspired passage in which the general lapses into astate of meditation:“Now sleep. Karma is karma. Be thou of Zen. Remember, in tranquility, that
the Absolute, the Tao, is within thee, that no priest or cult or dogma or bookor saying or teaching or teacher stands between Thou and It.” (p. 622)

Here Toranaga seems to have parted ways with his historicalmodel and become one with his creator in a distinctively Clavellian
sermon on the power of individualized salvation in defiance of allorganized religion. The historical Ieyasu was far more solicitous ofpriests, cults, and dogmas, and indeed devoted much of the lastyears of his life to setting up institutions which would deify his
memory and protect his dynasty. He relied heavily on priests
among his advisers, notably Suden and Tenkai, the one of the Zensect, the other of the Tendai; he simultaneously encouraged theapostate Buddhist scholar Hayashi Razan to develop a whole set of
moral dogma rooted in the teachings of the Chinese Neo-Confucian
school. Yet in all these efforts, Ieyasu was in fact motivated moreby a spirit of manipulation than by any extreme personal piety, andone might indeed argue that in his heart of hearts he was perhaps
not all that distant from Clavell’s Toranaga.
After Sekigahara
James Clavell relates that when he began writing Shǀgun he had
every expectation of recounting the Battle of Sekigahara; indeed,
he had anticipated completing the siege of Osaka Castle in 1615.
But the narrative developed day by day rather than year by year,
and even Sekigahara was left to a brief epilogue. If time and space
had allowed, the Battle of Sekigahara would have been a match
even for the talents of Clavell, for it was an encounter of epic proportions, involving an estimated 150,000 troops, with both sides
fairly equally divided. If one includes other troops en route or

stationed in ready elsewhere, historians have estimated there weresome 230,000 men in the field at any one time, making the scale ofSekigahara considerably greater than that of Waterloo over two
centuries later. Ieyasu’s final victory after a tense two days wasmade possible primarily by the defection of two critical contingentsfrom the Western confederation in the heat of battle. In the aftermath of Sekigahara, Ieyasu proved himself proverbially patient,and only two of the opposing generals were executed, the Christian
Konishi (probably just because he was Christian) and of course thescheming Ishida, both of whom were beheaded in the dry riverbed
in Kyoto. Many of the other conspirators found their fiefs diminished, but all were permitted to live.
The conclusion of Shǀgun depicts Toranaga contentedly meditating on his “karma” and the future. Although the historical
Ieyasu had no such clairvoyance or even intentions in the autumnof 1600, things did work out for him pretty much as Toranaga predicted: Ieyasu was indeed given (or, for all intents, took) the title ofshogun three years later, and he did indeed retire in favor of his heir
Hidetada (Sudara) in 1605. And he did also in fact wait patientlyfor Hideyoshi’s heir and his mother Yodo to “make a mistake,”although the actual pretext for the siege of Osaka Castle in 1614
was pretty much cooked up by Ieyasu himself. The exterminationof the Taikǀ’s line, the last threat to the Tokugawa dynasty, camewith the fall of the castle and the annihilation of all its defenders inthe summer of 1615.
We can probably read into Toranaga’s last lines, “I did notchoose to be what I am: it is my karma,” a decided irony, since inpersonality both Toranaga and Ieyasu appear to have very muchchosen to be what they were. This was at least true of the historical
Ieyasu in the fifteen years of his life that remained after Sekigahara, a fulfilling period during which he assiduously constructed apolitical system of incredible ingenuity, resting on a complex set ofchecks and balances among the great lords. To provide ideologicalcement for this system, he encouraged the study of Confucianism
and initiated the course of conversion of the samurai class from apracticing warrior elite to a nascent civil service. When Ieyasu diedat the advanced age of 75, just half a year after the fall of Osaka
Castle, he was certainly the most successful political leader in Japanese history until that time, and the stability of his dynasty for overtwo centuries after his death would only serve to reinforce thejudgment of history.

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7 Hosokawa Gracia: A Model for Mariko
Chieko Mulhern

One enduring variation of the romantic formula “boy meets girl,boy gets girl, boy loses girl” goes something like this: a man ventures into an alien world, receives aid and comfort from an exotic
woman, and reestablishes his self-identity, but inevitably loses her
in the process. Hollywood westerns never tire of this cinematic
staple, and science fiction has left many a nonterrestrial beauty
transfigured or dematerialized on behalf of a solitary human hero
who had invaded her world in some unique conveyance.
So it is no surprise that the Dutch ship’s pilot-major Blackthorne
is provided with Mariko, who guides, protects, educates, and loves
him, much as her contemporary Pocahontas (1595-1617) did herEnglish Captain John Smith in Virginia and died so very young. In
the romantic convention, the exotic woman is expected to be beautiful and high-born within the context of her own society, even if thehero is a mere fur trapper or a stranded sailor. Mariko is a lady ofthe daimyo class, who has such noble attributes as “beauty, brilliance, courage, and learning” (p. 261) lavished on her by Toranaga’s wise old ex-consort. Voluminous surviving records in both
Japanese and Western languages happen to suggest a perfect model
for such a romantic heroine.

The Christian Noblewoman
Japan’s history can boast but one Christian noble lady versed in
Latin and Portuguese: Hosokawa Tama (1563-1600), baptized Gracia. The fictional heroine’s name happens to be an apt parallel: mari(ball) corresponds to tama (jewel, ball) and is homophonous with
“Maria,” the name by which the Virgin Mary was known to theSouthern European missionaries and their early Japanese converts.
As reflected in Mariko’s background as provided in Shǀgun
(pp. 599-600), Lady Gracia was born to a fateful life made of the
stuff of historical romance itself. Her father Akechi Mitsuhide(1526-1582) was depicted as the Japanese equivalent of Benedict
Arnold in the popular entertainment of the Edo period, if not of
her lifetime. The Mitsuhide that she knew—and objective history
confirms it—was a cultured, sensitive, dignified man and a competent general with highly technical skills in castle construction andmilitary strategy (as in Shǀgun, p. 1199). His services were so
greatly valued by his overlord Oda Nobunaga (Goroda) that in 1579
the latter ordained the marriage of Akechi’s daughter Tama to
Hosokawa Tadaoki, the heir of another trusted general, to bindtheir loyalties even more tightly.
A scant three years later, Akechi led a sudden coup in Kyoto
against Nobunaga, who then perished in the flames engulfing thetemple of Honnǀji. Akechi was promptly awarded an imperial
appointment to the position of shikken (“regent,” second only to
shogun in the samurai political hierarchy), but was killed within afortnight of his coup by looting peasants as he was on his way tofight Hideyoshi’s forces, thereby earning the derisive title of Jusan
Kubo,” the “Thirteen-Day Shǀgun.”
Most of the Akechi family, including Tama’s sisters and theirhusbands, perished in battle or died by suicide in the aftermath.
Hideyoshi, claiming most of the credit, lost no time in gaining
hegemony and went on to become the Taikǀ, but Tama’s husband
Tadaoki and his father Yǌsai also managed not only to emerge
from this dire family crisis unscathed but even to prevail in theprocess. Immediately after Nobunaga’s fall, the Hosokawa father
and son promptly shaved their heads to become lay monks andsecluded themselves in mourning, thereby effectively circumventing
Akechi’s desperate plea for assistance. Tama was sent into hiding
in a remote mountain village for fear of summary execution if discovered alive. For nearly two years (but less than Mariko’s eight
years in Shǀgun, p. 605) she was officially “missing,” until,
through the intercession of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the Taikǀ ordered
her brought back and installed in the new Hosokawa mansion justoutside Osaka Castle, obviously as an unofficial hostage.

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By the time of the birth of her third son, Tama was seeking spiritualsolace in the newly imported Christian faith, which she had
adopted under the influence of her lady companion Kiyohara
Maria, daughter of a high Kyoto court noble who had been one of
the Jesuits’ earliest converts, and of Takayama Justo Ukon, thedevout Christian daimyo and Tadaoki’s close friend. Unlike thefictional Mariko, whose language instructor (p. 334) and personal
confessor (p. 312) were both European Jesuits, Tama had but one
fleeting personal contact with a Spanish priest and the Jesuitchurch. On Easter Day in 1587, she slipped out of the house to visit
the church and pleaded with Gregorio de Cespedes to baptize heron the spot. Perhaps suspecting the strange noble lady to be theTaikǀ’s consort, the cautious Father declined to take such a precipitous action and instead left her with Japanese Brother Cosme to
discuss religion and logic. Cosme later reported his amazement at
her “intelligence, knowledge, and power of comprehension such as
he had never seen before in Japanese women.” Soon retrieved by
frantic retainers, Tama was destined never again to leave her house.
She continued to study Christian doctrines by way of Maria.
While her husband was away on Hideyoshi’s Kyushu campaign in
1587, Tama had herself baptized at home by Maria, who was acting
under instructions from Fathers Cespedes and Organtino. Thus shecame to be known to history as Gracia. Even Tadaoki’s rage upon
his return failed to make her renounce the faith, and all he could do
was order even tighter security around the house to prevent her
from giving the retainers the slip again.
A Fiery Death
In 1600 Tadaoki set off to spearhead Ieyasu’s punitive expedition
against Uesugi Kagekatsu in the north, part of a ruse to lure Ishida
Mitsunari into showing his hand. Ishida responded by attempting to
make hostages of the families of those lords whose loyalties in theimpending confrontation remained uncertain. Ishida’s five hundred
troops surrounded the Hosokawa mansion, demanding that Gracia
move into Osaka Castle. They could not have chosen a worse
target. Gracia flatly refused to leave the house without her
husband’s permission and chose death to safeguard his samurai
honor and loyalty to Ieyasu. According to an extant account by awoman attendant named Shimo, who was the last to leave thepremises, Gracia ordered her aged chamberlain to stab her chestwith a halberd. As Shimo made her escape under orders to deliver
Gracia’s last letters, the chamberlain sprinkled gunpowder aroundthe room, set fire to the mansion, and duly committed seppuku
in the blaze along with the other defenders. Mariko’s death inan explosion in Shǀgun is an equally dramatic transposition andprovides the dramatic advantage of allowing her to die in Blackthorne’s presence.
The ensuing public outrage and mass exodus of intended hostagesin Shǀgun parallel the actual situation in Osaka following Gracia’s
death. Ishida had secured all exits from the city, imposed a six
o’clock curfew, and ordered daimyo families into the castle. Yet
most of them escaped, thanks to the general confusion created by
Gracia’s spectacular self-sacrifice as well as to their own vassals’desperate efforts. Some were able to flee in boats after the river
guards had been drawn to the flaming Hosokawa mansion.
As a result, Ishida was forced to abandon the hostage plan altogether, while Ieyasu unwittingly reaped the full benefit of Gracia’s
tragedy. Ieyasu’s allies were not only spared the painful moral
dilemma of choosing between familial emotion and political allegiance, but they also became irrevocably committed to his cause now
that they could no longer play both sides. The vigilantly guarded
Gracia did not actually meet Ieyasu in person, let alone work for him,
as Mariko does for Toranaga; but, from his point of view, it was as if
she had died on his behalf at the critical juncture of his military andpolitical career. Two months later he won a decisive victory at theBattle of Sekigahara and promptly rewarded her husband Tadaoki bymore than doubling his fief, from 180,000 koku to 399,000 koku.
Mariko, whose body manages to remain more or less intact after
the explosion, is sent off with a grand-scale, mixed-religion funeral(with the rather un-Japanese public viewing of the corpse and biercremation), but the historical Gracia also was given an impressive
Christian memorial service two months after her death. Legend has itthat Father Organtino sent Kiyohara Maria back to the smolderingruins to collect Gracia’s bones (identifiable because no retainer daredto die in the same room) and officiated at a service attended by alarge crowd of mourners.
The Hosokawa Heritage
The plot necessities and moral cosmos of Shǀgun are such thata romantic love interest would have been invented even had thehistorical Gracia not existed. Once brought together by Toranaga to serve his purpose, Mariko and Blackthorne fit into eachother’s karma with natural ease, but such a union is expected tocreate just the right sense of jeopardy and ultimate doom thatmake for high romance. So in Mariko’s wake looms the ominous
shadow of Buntaro, a “short, thickset, almost neckless” (p. 345)
“baboon” (p. 371), a “squat ugly troll” (p. 596) with an “apelikeface” (p. 587), who appears “hateful, ugly, arrogant, violent”(p. 261) even to other Japanese. Such a portrayal of the husband

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of Mariko-as-Gracia will come as something of a jolt to Japanesereaders. It is comparable to being told that Robin Hood actually
was closer in appearance to the Hunchback of Notre Dame than tothe dashing Errol Flynn. Lady Gracia’s husband Hosokawa Tadaoki (1563-1645) was one of the most glamorous young lords ofMomoyama Japan, certain to rate an actor of the Tyrone Power or
Robert Redford class in cinema. Extant portraits and historicalaccounts picture him as tall, lean, and sensitive yet masculine inappearance, and he was well-known for his aristocratic hot temper.
While the fictional Buntaro shares nothing with his father Hiromatsu but their common viciousness (p. 351), the historical Tadaoki had more positive qualities in common with his father, the illustrious Hosokawa Fujitaka (1534-1610), better known by his artisticname Yǌsai. Both were the epitome of the samurai ideal of bunbu
ryǀdǀ, the “tandem ways of the literary and martial arts,” the concept that the warrior must cultivate both in equal proportions.
Yǌsai himself made history in his own inimitable way. Soon after
Gracia’s death, Ishida launched an all-out offensive against
Ieyasu’s allies. Besieged in Tanabe Castle in the Hosokawa fief
north of Kyoto, Yǌsai managed to hold off the Osaka horde fornearly sixty days with his garrison of only five hundred troops,
until at last Emperor Goyǀzei sent an imperial emissary to order
Ishida to lift the siege and Yǌsai to open the castle gate. One of themost learned men and talented poets of his day, Yǌsai had in 1572
been accorded the unique honor of receiving the oral transmissionof the poetic secrets of the great imperial anthology Kokinshǌ( A . D . 905). It was the threat of the termination of this culturallineage by Yǌsai’s death that moved the emperor to make his
unprecedented intervention in samurai political affairs.
Unlike the fictional Hiromatsu, who is credited with having a
number of consorts (p. 586), Yǌsai was a rare monogamist among
the warrior lords of the day (Gracia’s father Akechi was another).
Whereas Hiromatsu’s only son Buntaro is said to have killed his
consort mother for her alleged infidelity (p. 586), Yǌsai’s wife bore
him four sons and four daughters. One of their sons, Okitomo,
became Christian in 1595; Yǌsai’s wife was also converted, to bereferred to as “Donna Maria” in the Jesuit annual report of1600-1.
Hosokawa Tadaoki achieved a level of distinction worthy of
Yǌsai’s heir in his military and cultural accomplishments. By theyear 1600 he had already emerged as a member of the elite coteriethat served as the primary arbiter of aesthetic taste and social decorum in the privileged circles of Momoyama culture. In particular,
he had been one of the famed Seven Disciples of Sen no Rikyǌ,
the great tea master who did more than anyone else to define thespiritual tone and rules of form which have been religiously upheldto the present day by the schools of tea ceremony. In accord withthe spirit of tea, which is essentially a synthesis of many different
arts, Tadaoki also distinguished himself as a noted poet, as an
authority on protocol and ritual precedent, and as a fine artist—as
demonstrated by a handmade gift to his wife, a set of playing cards
bearing the “One Hundred Poems” collection and his own gorgeous gilt paintings, some of them extant. In matters of tea, he wasthe author of two important books, and after his retirement he wasin particular demand as a master under the name of Sansai, theonly survivor among Rikyǌ’s famous “Seven.”
Tadaoki’s cultural fame is easily matched by his military reputation. By age fifteen he had already earned a commendation written
in Oda Nobunaga’s own hand (and surviving today) for his successful campaign in the provinces of Yamato and Kawachi. After his
marriage to Gracia he was granted as a fief the 120,000-koku province of Tango, which he had conquered himself. By 1600 he held anadditional 60,000 koku in Kyushu and Junior Third Rank, all independent of his father’s heritage.
A Model Husband
It is tempting to conjure up a full-scale rivalry and decisive confrontation between a gallant, blue-eyed soldier of fortune and afiery epitome of samurai nobility over a tragic and patrician Christian beauty. Alas, the married lover of an Elizabethan Protestantmust of necessity be a distressed near-virgin (p. 605), persecuted bya brutish husband whose savage wife-beating is witnessed by thehero himself. To ensure that Mariko is not blamed for inviting such
mistreatment, Buntaro is further discredited by other atrocious
deeds in his past: he executed his own mother, did terrible things to
his consorts (p. 586), used courtesans and let his wife pay the bills(p. 677), and was not known for his manners (p. 585).
But when it comes to the historical Tadaoki, even modern feminists are nearly unanimous in lauding him for his unrestrained
demonstrations of conjugal love and his steadfast refusal to take onanother wife—unusual among feudal lords. In secreting Gracia for
two years following her father’s uprising, he actually risked untold
dangers not only to his own personal safety but also to the very
existence of the Hosokawa clan. During Gracia’s absence he did infact take a consort, but only to support the official family claim that
his wife was missing. After Gracia’s death he took another consort
and fathered four children by her, but he never made her his official
wife, so that some historical records list these later children as Gracia’s!

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But this positive image of Tadaoki in the popular Japanese mind
also has a darker side, suggesting that the characterization of Buntaro was not the result of literary necessity alone. True to theepisode-rich Hosokawa tradition, Tadaoki left more than his shareof dramatic incidents to be recounted not only by his own countrymen but even by Westerners. For example, he disinherited his eldest
son, whose young wife was related to Regents hostile to Ieyasu, andthe son lived out his life as a lay monk hermit. Even more tragic
was the case of his second son, who fought on the Osaka side in1615 and was found alive after the fall of the castle. Much as Hiromatsu is forced to arrange his beloved grandson Usagi’s seppuku inShǀgun (p. 219), so Tadaoki had to submit his son’s head to Ieyasu
so as to allay any suspicion that the Hosokawa might have been
betting on both sides (as indeed some other daimyo families haddone successfully).
Similarly, just as the relationship between Hiromatsu and Buntaro is strained and even antagonistic in Shǀgun (p. 351), so the historical Tadaoki is said to have been estranged from his father after
Yǌsai had committed the “unsamurai-like disgrace” of yielding his
castle to the enemy, even though at imperial command. The actual
reason for their possibly pretended estrangement was most likely acommon desire to consolidate the Hosokawa into a single powerfuldomain through an anticipated reward for their combined exploits
in the great battle of 1600. Such suppression of personal feelings in
the face of political necessity is not an uncommon theme in the livesof heroes, whether in Japan or elsewhere. It was in precisely thesame era (1601), for example, that Queen Elizabeth had her beloved
but overambitious Earl of Essex executed. But whatever the motives
actually involved, such episodes undeniably add a touch of ruthlesscruelty to the popular image of their protagonist.
As for Tadaoki, whether he was a cold-blooded schemer or acool-headed survivor, he himself would be the last to deny that
he was subject to fits of anger similar to the one confessed by Buntaro (p. 619). The actual incident took place in 1587. Upon learningthat his wife had just been baptized in his absence, Tadaoki banished her seventeen lady attendants, all of whom had preceded Gracia in converting to Christianity. He is further said to have sliced
off the ears and nose of his son’s wet nurse, also a Christian, forassisting in having her young charge baptized along with hismother. (The removal of the ears or nose was at the time a legal
punishment, routinely handed out by judges.) Kiyohara Maria,
who actually performed the baptism, was not physically punished,perhaps because she was a daughter of Yǌsai’s maternal uncle (ascholarly court noble and an early Christian convert) and alreadya Christian when she first became Gracia’s companion. By theJapanese standards of the day, Tadaoki’s behavior on this occasion
was well within reason and within his rights as head of the clan andfamily. The Jesuit records, however, picture him as all but the devil
incarnate. Their 1587 annual report depicts him as “violent by
nature, excessively jealous, and so strict in family discipline thatwhile away on military campaigns he posted two elder vassals tokeep watch on his wife.”
Tadaoki had not always been antagonistic toward Christianity.
In fact he had often related to Gracia the religious beliefs of his
close friend Takayama Justo Ukon and had adopted Christianmotifs to decorate his personal belongings. His seemingly arbitrary
change of heart on learning of Gracia’s baptism can best be blamedon the official Japanese policy toward Christianity, which kept
shifting with bewildering frequency. Indeed, Gracia’s baptism
could not have occurred at a worse time for Tadaoki. The Christian
Proscription Edict issued by the Taikǀ only a few months earlier
had prompted her to take the irrevocable step. The Taikǀ, whose
attitude toward the Christian Church had been ambivalent at best,is generally believed to have been alarmed by the incautious offer
of Gasper Coelho (then Superior of the Japanese Mission) to order
all Christian lords to come to the Taikǀ’s aid in his expedition
against the powerful Kyushu daimyo Shimazu. Alarmed by thethreat of an alliance of Christian lords under foreign command, theTaikǀ issued the proscription even before returning to Osaka. It
was just at this time that Hosokawa Tadaoki came home from
Kyushu to find his own wife and a son newly baptized. Had her
attendants been male, they would have suffered a punishment far
worse.
The Hosokawa Clan after Gracia
Tadaoki outlived Gracia by forty-five years. In his new Kyushu
fief he extended hospitality and assistance to Christians, even providing a haven for those fleeing persecution in other domains. But
with the death in 1611 of Father Cespedes, who had been Gracia’s
first Jesuit contact and the priest most trusted by Tadaoki, thedaimyo began to turn against the Christians at the same time thatshogunate policy moved swiftly from lenient enforcement of theproscription edict toward the stage of mass executions.
In the siege and final destruction of Osaka Castle in the summerof 1615, Tadaoki and his son rendered Ieyasu distinguished service.
By 1620, he retired and handed the clan over to his third son (Mariko’s Saruji—but without the hand deformity), who already had thehonor of calling himself Tadatoshi after the shogun Hidetada,whose adopted daughter he had married. Tadatoshi had been baptized along with his mother Gracia but later recanted. In 1632 the69

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Hosokawa clan was transferred to the still larger fief of Kumamoto(also in Kyushu), which at over half a million koku was one of thelargest domains in the country. There the lineal descendants ofGracia and Tadaoki reigned as daimyo for the remaining two centuries of Tokugawa rule. In an ironic twist of fate, it was the Hosokawa clan under Tadatoshi that claimed the distinction of killing
Amakusa Shiro, the youthful leader of the Christian uprising at
Shimabara in 1638.
With characteristic adroitness, the Hosokawa family managed toremain aloof from the coalition of great western domains which
finally toppled the Tokugawa regime in 1868 and at the same time tosurvive into modern times as dukes under the prewar peerage.
Gracia’s line counts among its contemporary descendants a numberof prominent politicians and scholars. The historical William Adams,
Blackthorne’s model, never had the pleasure of meeting Lady
Gracia, much less conversing with her in Western languages. But thesaga of Gracia was memorialized by Jesuit writers soon after her
death in a story modeled on the Italian Cinderella cycle. Her life has
also been dramatized in numerous tales, novels, stage plays,
biographies, and scholarly treatises.

8

Death and Karma in the World of Shǀgun
William LaFleur“It’s all so simple, Anjin-san. Justchange your concept of the world.”Shǀgun, p. 528
In reading Shǀgun I could not shake off the impression that it
was the most didactic novel I had read in many years—as strange as
this might seem in so swashbuckling a tale. I asked myself exactly
what it was that the author, in addition to telling a good story,
wanted to say or teach. My first answer was that Clavell in Shǀgun
wanted to provide something of an induction into Japanese civilization, that he intended to convince his readers in the West that, when
understood, Japan has been as civilized a culture as our own. But I
later revised this opinion and concluded that the author’s didactic
program is even more ambitious, for he holds that certain aspectsof Japanese civilization—basic attitudes about life and death, forinstance—ought to be not only appreciated but also adopted by us
in the West.
My hunch about this was confirmed by Clavell himself. In conversation he openly acknowledged his belief that Asian people as awhole have “a better attitude toward life and death—death being apart of life . . . ” He went on to say:

LAFLEUR: DEATH AND KARMA72

Why should we be afraid of death when it is inevitable? I mean, that’s
pretty stupid. That thought has been implanted into us by ourforebears . . . . It’s the Jewish-Christian ethic for some reason or another.

What is especially interesting to me is that, perhaps for the firsttime in Western history, we seem to be ready to entertain the possibility that Clavell’s judgments on life and death—completely apartfrom any artistic or historical problems in Shǀgun—may be correct.
Given such an ambitious objective, Shǀgun deserves quite serious
scrutiny—not only in terms of how well it represents sixteenthcentury Japan but also, I think, as a book which reflects aspects ofthe cultural interchange between Japan and the West in our own
time. Here I merely wish to explore and clarify a few historical andphilosophical issues which I think are raised by discussions of deathand of karma in Clavell’s book.
“There’s a very easy solution, Anjin-san. Die.”
There is a point fairly late in Shǀgun when Blackthorne looks
back over the training he has received—largely from Mariko—andmuses about himself:
He was no longer afraid to die. Her courage had shown him the uselessnessof that fear and he had come to terms with himself long ago, on that night inthe village with the knife. (p. 1027)

Since Clavell holds that fear of death is a useless and dispensable
part of the “Jewish-Christian ethic,” it would seem that in Shǀgun
the successful mastery of this fear is the crucial element in Blackthorne’s deep initiation into Japan as a superior form of civilization. It is also then the key to Clavell’s hope of effecting a change inthe world view of the West.
Over the years it has become the (sometimes unpleasant) task of
Asianists like myself to raise red flags of warning when we observe
too easy and too comprehensive a contrast being made between“the West” and the various cultures of Asia. I am worried about
the implication in Shǀgun that a continual fear of death grips theWestern heart whereas virtually every man, woman, and child ofsixteenth-century Japan could face death without flinching andeven with pleasure. Indeed, Shǀgun often gives the impression thatsuch a mastery over fear was a fait accompli in Japanese society,something so worked into the world view and education of theentire populace that it had become a “natural” part of their lives
and outlook.
It is possible, however, to give quite a different interpretation to
all the talk about “the honor of a noble death “ in the writings of latemedieval Japan. The frequency and insistence of such referencesmay, in fact, suggest that for the Japanese themselves such an attitude could be made to appear “natural” only through constant justification. The instinct for self-preservation has, after all, throughmillions of years remained fundamentally “natural” to creatures
still in the prime of life. There can be no difference between Eastand West on this. A fear of death was, then, as “natural” for thelate medieval Japanese as it is for any other people; what is interesting about their society in that period was the elaboration of cultural mechanisms to contravene such natural fears. “Bushido” is inmany ways precisely this. But its existence as a code or norm does
not in any way indicate that reality in the sixteenth century, forinstance, was anything like the ideal or that large numbers of Japanese—as Clavell depicts in Shǀgun—walked willingly into death.
We can blunt the edge of too sharp a contrast between Japan andthe West by working from the other direction as well. It is helpful
to remember that, although the West never created anything quite
like the Bushido ritual of dying, there has always been an admiration for persons who had personally conquered death. Socrates’
tranquil acceptance of the hemlock inspired others at least to think
about the possibility of “dying philosophically.” Likewise, deeply
rooted religious convictions carried many early Christians throughmartyrdom with relative tranquility and made it possible for someJews to conceive their forced deaths as opportunities for “sanctifying the name of God.” It is, then, somewhat risky to assume theexistence of a Western attitude which clearly and always contrasts
with something else assumed to be the Japanese attitude concerning
death and life. The novelist has the power, perhaps even the right,
to fashion different cultures into virtually opposite worlds. The historian, however, has to call attention to the fact that reality is seldom, if ever, quite like that.
Nevertheless, Clavell’s novel and the warm reception it hasreceived may be indirectly saying something extremely interesting
about changing attitudes toward death in our own time. The vivid
presentation of persons deliberately and painfully dying throughseppuku, in what must be the epitome of courage in facing death,
implicitly invites Western readers to see how this contrasts with themultiple means we have devised, especially through modern medical technology, to anesthetize ourselves as much as possible as we
die. In vivid contrast, seppuku if anything heightens the dying person’s awareness of his or her death: it makes dying an unusuallyconscious act. It has, therefore, sometimes been championed as aneminently human way to die. Until now, what we usually called“hari-kari” seemed to be a bizarre practice that was gross andnihilistic. Clavell has raised an awareness that there may be much
more depth and dignity in seppuku than the West had assumed.

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Clavell seems to be making the point that in the modern era wehave swung too far in the opposite direction, treating dying as anembarrassment and death as something to be eliminated eventually
through technology. It is no longer a natural part of our culture but
something hidden away from public view as though it really ought
not to be taking place. When interviewed, Clavell told a story of adying woman who had written him because reading Shǀgun had“made her remaining days happy.” Her thanks to him for writing thenovel clearly gratified him and he went on to comment, “Thisattitude toward death and life, life and death, you know, in a funnysort of way is a wonderful thing. It’s there for all of us to grab. I’m
not unique. Anybody can do it.’’ Obviously both the author and hisreaders see Shǀgun as something more than mere entertainment.
“A great word, ‘karma.’ And a great idea.”
Most readers of Shǀgun may be fascinated but, I suspect, also
confused by one word which appears repeatedly in the novel eventhough its exact meaning remains unclear: karma. Even readers who
have lived in contemporary Japan will be puzzled by the constantrepetition of “karma,” a word which appears rarely, if ever, in theconversation of modern Japanese. Even the Japanese equivalents ofthis Indian word—such as go, in, or inga—are anything but
household terms; if they occur at all, it will be in the more reflective
conversation of older people, in the temple homilies of Buddhist
monks, or in the last novels of Mishima Yukio. It is ironic that“karma” is more likely to appear in the dormitory conversation ofAmerican university students than in the parlance of contemporary
Japanese—even though it is the latter who have in a millennium anda half of their own intellectual history a long record of debate overthe concept. Such are the paradoxes of our times: things which one
culture seems ready to forget become items of curiosity and fascination to another.
But this still leaves unanswered the question of whether or not
Clavell was justified in so liberally sprinkling the word throughout
the pages of Shǀgun, a novel set in the sixteenth century. Although I
doubt that even then samurai and others would have dropped theword “karma” at every turn, Clavell is correct in his assumption that
this Indo-Buddhist concept was important in the mental furnishingsof the medieval Japanese. So, although the word has virtuallydisappeared from the speech of modern Japanese, karma as a concept
definitely affected the way their ancestors viewed reality. Yet theexact meaning of karma never comes very clearly into focus inShǀgun, which is understandable in light of the wide diversity ofinterpretations the Japanese have given to the concept. Having
probably absorbed these multiple meanings through his readings

about Asia, Clavell presents us with a kaleidoscopic karma, an idea
which seems to shift and turn with each usage. It may be helpful tosort out some of these meanings and try to place them in the context of medieval Japanese thought.
One meaning of the term karma is quite accurately depicted inthat passage where Clavell defines it:
Karma was an Indian word adopted by Japanese, part of Buddhist philosophy that referred to a person’s fate in this life, his fate immutably fixed
because of deeds done in a previous life, good deeds giving a better positionin this life’s strata, bad deeds the reverse. Just as the deeds of this life would
completely affect the next rebirth. A person was ever being reborn into thisworld of tears until, after enduring and suffering and learning through many
lifetimes, he became perfect at long last, going to nirvana, the Place of
Perfect Peace, never having to suffer rebirth again, (pp. 219-20)

As part of the Buddhism which the Japanese began to absorb from
China in the fifth century, the idea of karma fascinated them evenas earlier it had appealed to the Chinese when they learned of it
from the Indians. As understood at that time, karma was part of afundamental lawfulness in the universe and implied that every
being makes or breaks his or her own future. There is, then, reallyno injustice in the world since every being is and has exactly what
he or she has merited through the morality or immorality of pastactions. Every being, through a sequence of births (transmigration), was continually moving up or down along a ladder stretching
between high and low forms of life.
At a time when the concept was still fairly new to the Japanese,
we can see it reflected in a drinking song of the eighth-century
Man’yǀshǌ, by the poet ƿtomo Tabito, who was at once both
intrigued by this new notion and skeptical about it:
Getting my pleasures
This way in my present life
May make me turnInto a bug or a bird
In the life to come
Later writers were much less flippant. The Nihon ryǀiki, an
important work of the early ninth century, presented the notion ofkarmic rewards and punishments through vivid stories which madethe whole system concrete and intelligible to the masses. Its author,a monk by the name of Kyǀkai, was thoroughly convinced that,once karma was understood by all his countrymen, the Japanese asa people would simply decide to stop doing evil. Kyǀkai was completely optimistic about the possibility of this: once people came torealize that each person is the architect of his or her own future75

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destinies, they would simply choose to do good and receive their
happy rewards.
Kyǀkai. however, if he had been given an opportunity to readShǀgun, would have been either perplexed or indignant at the finaleof the novel when Toranaga smiles and muses, “I did not choose to
be what I am. It is my karma” (p. 1210). Kyǀkai would have seen
things as quite the opposite; he would insist that Toranaga fails to
grasp that it was precisely the pattern of choices which Toranaga
himself had made over a number of lifetimes that had brought him
now to the point of becoming shogun. In the Nihon ryǀiki, forinstance, Kyǀkai argues that the various emperors fully deserved
their status because they had earned it through the good deeds ofearlier lives. For Kyǀkai the concept of karma made the whole universe appear “rational” and was, therefore, an exhilarating new
idea.
Within a few generations after Kyǀkai’s time, karma had cometo be accepted as a proven fact of life and the universe. The entire
body of medieval Japanese literature and drama simply assumes its
truth. Watsuji Tetsuro, an important modern thinker, has reminded
his contemporaries that “Belief in transmigration . . . made complete and common sense to our medieval ancestors; it lay at thebasis of their ordinary observations about life.” The prime example of this would be the vast repertoire of Nǀ plays in which theconcept of karmic rebirth is a key element in the dramatic action.
And since Nǀ was the art form officially sponsored and subsidized
by the Tokugawa shoguns, a karma-centered world view was
repeatedly presented and reinforced as true in that era as well.
But karma did not remain the relatively simple and straightforward notion it had been for Kyǀkai. Nor did all later Japaneseshare the early monk’s optimistic vision of man’s ability directly tofashion a good future for himself. On the contrary, much evidence
suggests that the majority of Japanese came to find the notion ofkarma a fairly depressing one. Once they began to think of theirpast and present lives, they became impressed—sometimes overwhelmed—with the probability that the accumulated evil deeds ofthe past would still bear their “fruit” in the future. In Clavell’s apt
phrase, they started to “bewail their karma” (p. 749).
One response to this depressing problem was the idea that negative karma could somehow be either cancelled or reduced throughthe actions of a saving deity such as Amida, the Buddha of theWestern Paradise. Much of Buddhist piety in medieval Japanconsisted of actions designed to undo the threatening effects ofpast evil. Appeals to Amida and the chanting of various sutras
were among the many ways in which Buddhists of the medieval
period sought release from karma. Most samurai, for example, in

preparation for seppuku would have called on the name of Amidafor help; they would certainly not have moved on to death andrebirth with anything as flip as “Sayonara, Tadeo” (p. 569).
But another way of dealing with this sense of imprisonment by
one’s karma was a deliberate refusal to be obsessed by such things.
In Japan this happened particularly under the influence of that
Chinese Buddhist development which the Japanese called “Zen.”
In Zen it was religiously important to avoid elaborate intellectual
concepts, which were viewed as impediments to enlightenment.
While Zen Buddhism by no means rejected the notions of karma
and transmigration, it did encourage people to avoid the spawningof theories of the universe. Emphasis in Zen was placed rather
upon the importance of the present moment. If Kyǀkai had encouraged people to take a broad conceptual overview of many lifetimes,
the Zen masters took a radically different approach and encouraged people to jettison all intellectual concepts as so much ballast
and to focus instead upon the immediacy of the present. Karma
was true but ought not become an obsession.
In the pages of S h ǀ g u n i t s e e ms t h a t t hi s ve r s i o n o f
karma—rather than Kyǀkai’s—is the prevalent one. It is clearly the
one employed when Mariko, perhaps the most expert synthesizer ofworld religions in our popular literature, counsels Blackthorne:“Leave the problem of God to God and karma to karma. Today you arehere and nothing can change that. Today you’re alive and here and honored, and blessed with good fortune. Look at this sunset, it’s beautiful,neh? This sunset exists. Tomorrow it does not exist. There is only now.
Please look.” (p. 499)

It is important to recognize that both of these views of karma—
the broad view of Kyǀkai and the immediate view of Zen—are present in the pages of Shǀgun. Consider, for example, the scene inwhich Blackthorne, with the help of Mariko and a hot bath, puts
aside some memories of England which had surfaced in his mind:“I’d rather not remember,” he said with a lazy smile, turning his mind
back to the present. “I can’t remember. Here is where we are and here iswhere we’ll eat, and I enjoy raw fish and karma is karma.” He sank deeper
into the tub. “A great word, ‘karma.’ And a great idea. Your help’s beenenormous to me, Mariko-san.” (p. 534)

It is important to recognize that this is ambiguous and confusing.
Blackthorne summons karma as a “great word” not to explore but
only to dismiss immediately! It’s a “great idea” but, apparently,
especially great when it is not permitted to get in the way of Blackthorne’s enjoyment of his bath, his woman, and his sushi. It’s afine concept, but all concepts have become barnacles to his increasingly enlightened mind and ought to be discarded.

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Blackthorne sometimes receives from Mariko and others theadvice that karma is something with which he need not deal. But
this argument can be—and in Shǀgun frequently is—carried one
step further: karma may also be something with which we reallycan not deal. According to this understanding, karma is somethingover which an individual has absolutely no control. At one point, inorder to clarify his intention to Father Alvito, Blackthorne makes
the easy equation: “That’s karma—in the hands of God—call it
what you will” (pp. 786-7). This seems to be the implicit notion in
the many passages in Shǀgun in which karma is roughly equivalent
to the modern colloquial phrase shigata ga nai (“there’s nothing to
be done”), a clear statement in Japanese that events have gotten
totally beyond the control of the speaker. In such an interpretation,
karma consists of a fixed state of affairs and the only possible
response is one of resignation. It is more like “fate” or the “will ofGod” and is undeniably a notion of karma that has its place among
the others in the course of Japan’s history.
The discerning reader will have noticed that by now we havecome to a definition of karma that has moved a full 180 degrees
away from that of the early monk Kyǀkai, who had celebrated
karma as a principle by which each and every being has total freedom over himself—somewhat like the celebrated verse of William
Ernest Henley in which “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” The often contradictory meanings of karma
which we encounter in Shǀgun thus reflect the diverse range ofmaterial which history itself presented to Clavell. This serves to
explain why the main characters in Shǀgun seem at one moment tohave the whole of their destinies in their hands, and yet at the next
to accept a kind of genial fate which is totally beyond their control.
But Clavell has a distinct advantage over those of us whose
karma it is to be historians and philosophers. He has an enviableomnipotence as the author—that is, auctor or creator—of theworlds of his imagination. He is the maker of novel—that is, new—worlds. So even though his theories stretch the facts of history andthe ways of logic, Mariko and then her pupil Blackthorne are madeto synthesize the great religious traditions of the world. Often it
seems they do so a bit too quickly and easily. How they ultimately
put all these things together lies within the subtle structure of theirown minds or, more precisely, within the mind of Clavell, theirmaker, to whose thoughts we finally have no direct access. Even
after twelve hundred pages much still seems to lie off-stage, in aplace hidden from our view and our analyses. Perhaps that’s theway it ought to be, for it leaves us the anticipation of future revelations by the author in some later incarnation, world, or book.

9 Learning Japanese with Blackthorne
Susan Matisoff‘This is the key to Japan, neh? Language
is the key to anywhere foreign, neh?”Shǀgun, p. 786
The hero of Shǀgun John Blackthorne, in these remarks to apriest who has presented him with a long-awaited dictionary ofJapanese, reveals the delighted enthusiasm of a language student
imbued with curiosity, intelligence, and supreme motivation. For
Blackthorne, language is indeed the key to Japan, and, for the readers of Shǀgun, James Clavell’s use of Japanese and approximatedJapanese does much to establish the mood of the lone Englishman’s
encounter with an alien culture.
At the beginning of chapter one, the dazed, shipwrecked sailor
awakens in a strange world where the first words he hears—goshujinsama, gokibun wa ikaga desu ka? (p. 25)—are left untranslated
for the English reader who can, therefore, directly taste the fear
and fascination that grip the uncomprehending pilot. ThroughBlackthorne’s ears, as it were, the reader who knows no Japanese
will pick up words and phrases. The first of these words, prophetically enough, is onna (woman) and soon thereafter (though in adifferent context) kinjiru (forbid). The former word Blackthorne

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learns through gestures, the latter through the dramatically clear
context of the actions of sword-drawn samurai: “extralinguistic
cues,” the language teacher might say.
The pains and pleasures of language learning are not frequent
subjects of concern in popular novels, with the exception, perhaps,of certain works of science fiction, and there’s much to be praisedin Clavell’s decision to take the readers along on Blackthorne’s
odyssey into an unfamiliar language. Gradually the reader learns a
few words. When kinjiru reappears some sixty pages later, surfacing from Blackthorne’s memory in one of those moments of extreme
stress in which Shǀgun abounds, this cross-linguistic device conveys
the hero’s state of mind to intense novelistic effect. Language ascommunication and the need for this communication, however difficult, are major themes of Shǀgun; and in many cases the major
points concerning language raised by Clavell are valid. If this werea work of science fiction and the language a total invention, we
might simply praise the skill with which the author builds his readers’ vocabularies. Still, the reader who acquires a smattering ofJapanese from Shǀgun might wish to know something about thevalidity of his newfound knowledge.
These comments won’t be relevant for the TV film, in which
Japanese actors will be speaking their own language. The TV series
was made using a script “based on a concept that may well spell
success or failure: the Japanese in ‘Shǀgun’ speak in their own language, without any translation. So the viewer will be in the same
situation as Blackthorne and will learn what is going on just as hedoes” (Neil Martin in American Film, April 1980). Differences inpacing and in the essential effects of the two media may well meanthat the viewer will experience Blackthorne’s language learning lessvividly than does the reader, but the Japanese emerging from theTV set will presumably be accurate.
Specific details make the novel teem with life; small errors in language don’t really detract from its effectiveness as a novel, though
they do limit its usefulness as a language textbook. This might bethought a dead issue, but Julian Barnes in The New Statesman(November 21, 1975) commented, “personally, I enjoyed Shǀgun
as a basic primer of Japanese; . . . [the words] seem to be arrangedin accordance with the standard learning principle of graded
reinforcement.” Some examples may serve to show that thiseminently successful novel, whatever else it may be, is not a primerof Japanese. While some of its Japanese is totally correct, andsome basically correct though anachronistic, other phrases are utter
gibberish and much of the Japanese is subtly wrong, for interestingreasons which illustrate basic differences between Japanese andEnglish.

Consider, for example, “neh.” This little sentence-ending tag
peppers the pages of Shǀgun, rounding off the speeches of all sortsof Japanese characters, and is even assimilated into the English sentences, as in Blackthorne’s comments quoted at the beginning of
this chapter. The reader quickly gets a correct feel for the meaningof the particle: something like the French n’est-ce pas, it asks thelistener’s agreement or confirmation of the sentence. But the tone isoff. Anyone can use neh speaking Japanese, but it’s more used by
women than men; it is only sparingly used by really articulate Japanese speakers, and the unsuspecting English speaker who acquires
an overfondness for neh runs the risk of sounding rather too much
like a contemporary bar-girl.
For those who know Japanese, reading Shǀgun produces othersimilar minor annoyances. Some of the spacing of words and a few
of the romanizations are idiosyncratic to Clavell. Neh for ne, andgoziemashita for gozaimashita, for example, while kamikazi forkamikaze certainly reproduces the wartime anglicized pronunciation, not the Japanese. The frequently occurring expression oh ko
is utterly mysterious.
Other than such problems of style, and typographical errors (ofwhich there are relatively few), there are certain difficulties in Clavell’s Japanese which reflect differences between Japanese andEnglish that go beyond mere words. A Japanese-language review ofthe book (Hokubei mainichi shimbun, May 28, 1980) calls the language “classroom Japanese,” objecting to the overpoliteness ofsome of the common phrases like wakarimasu ka (“do you understand?”), which does sound peculiar in exchanges we are to take as
gruff speech between soldiers. And though there are occasionalcorrect, complex Japanese sentences in Shǀgun which must result
from Clavell’s asking a Japanese how to say such and such, muchof the Japanese reflects not a “classroom” but a “phrasebook”
approach to the language.
Perhaps the clearest example of this is dozo (which properly
should be dǀzo, not dozo: vowel length matters in Japanese, as thetitle Shǀgun itself illustrates). Early on in his experience in Japan
Blackthorne realizes his desperate need to learn the language;
thrown in prison, he meets Friar Domingo, a fellow prisoner who
gives him some basic language instruction: “Domo is thank you
and dozo is please. Water is mizu” (p. 241). Yes, but. Water iswater the world around, we might say—though mizu actuallymeans only cold water—but “thank you” and “please” are not,always, no matter what the phrasebook may tell us. Dǀzo as“please” is correct only in situations of invitation: “please comethis way,” “please be seated,” “please help yourself,” andso forth. In other situations where an English speaker may use

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82“please”—asking for a favor (“please pass the salt”) or entreaty(“please, don’t hurt me!”)—dǀzo would strike the Japanese
speaker as wholly inappropriate, or even incomprehensible.
Clavell has plugged in dozo as if it corresponded one-to-one withevery English “please.’’ So there are many instances of dozo gomennasai, meant, apparently, for the English “please forgive me.”There are also some examples of the impossible combination dozo
goziemashita, where it’s unclear what is meant. In one case dozo
seems to represent the British “please?” for “Huh?” or “What?”(p. 1197). When Blackthorne requests that a bottle of sake bepassed to him, saying, “Here, give it to me. Dozo” (p, 443), dozo
is inappropriate enough, but when Fujiko levels a cocked pistol at
Omi and shouts, “Ugoku na. Dozo” (p. 502), apparently to represent “Don’t move—please!”, there’s danger of disastrous confusion. All this could mean is “Don’t move! Please do!”Plugging in words straight out of a dictionary or phrasebook has
produced a number of uncomfortably contorted passages. When
Clavell wants to describe a ship as “seaworthy,” he ends up withsonkei subeki umi (p. 854), roughly “a sea worthy of respect.” And
when Blackthorne presents his sword to Toranaga saying, “Karasamurai ni samurai, neh? Please, Lord Toranaga, from a samurai
to a samurai, eh?” (p. 650), the impossible word order in the Japanese produces a ludicrous effect, rather than the high drama clearly
intended. In Japanese, words which correspond to English prepositions follow their nouns, so the only possible order would be “samurai kara samurai ni.”
Near the midpoint of Shǀgun there appears a passage we canview as “the language lecture.’’ In this interchange between Mariko
and Blackthorne, Clavell attempts a basic statement on the differences between Japanese and English. Her native language seems
easy to her, and, though Blackthorne “felt his frustration rising,”
Mariko assures him, “Oh no, Anjin-san. Japanese is very simple tospeak compared with other languages. There are no articles, no‘the’, ‘a’, or ‘an’. No verb conjugations or infinitives. All verbs are
regular, ending in masu and you can say almost everything using
the present tense if you want” (pp. 527-8). The lecture is at one andthe same time charming and confused.
True enough, there are no articles, and conjugational patterns
are regular—but enormously complex. Five or six endings may be
added in a row to a verb root and -masu is only one of these, serving to make the verb more polite. Like ne, it is especially characteristic of feminine speech. The systems have changed somewhat since
1600, and the range of verb endings was even more complex thenthan it is now. In fact, the point about -masu endings is immediately contradicted by the next Japanese sentence in the book, oneof the perfectly, elaborately correct Japanese examples, the equivalent of “Lord Yabu does not require to see you tonight” (p. 532). It
contains two verbs, but neither, appropriately, ends in -masu.
Clavell realizes, in general, the gulf between English and Japanese, and, despite the extensive errors in detail, the general effecton the reader who simply takes the Japanese as it comes is a sympathetic understanding of Blackthorne’s difficulty in his incomplete
piercing of the veil of confusion he finds in Japanese. One aspect of
this which is quite clearly conveyed is the matter of Japanese“respect language.” Friar Domingo tells Blackthorne, “Always
r e m e m b e r t ha t J a pa n e r s p u t a gr e a t p r i c e o n m a n n e r s a n dcourtesy” (p. 241). This good, blunt advice from the mouth of thefictional character is reminiscent of the words of the real-life Jesuit
linguist João Rodrigues, who commented that “it is impossible tolearn the language without at the same time learning to speak withd i g n i t y a n d c o u r t e sy ” ( M i c h a e l C o o p e r, T h e y C a m e t o J a p a n,p. 173). Passing references in Shǀgun comment on differences
between men’s and women’s speech and rightly note that it is possible to be inappropriately overpolite as well as to err on the side ofrudeness. Yet Clavell often falls into overpoliteness, putting -masu
forms of verbs into the mouths of rough male speakers in nonpolite
situations.
Clavell does much to establish the relative status and respect due
different characters through the use of suffixes to names: -san, chan, and -sama. The first of these is generally used today after
names as a kind of neutral-respect title; -chan is its diminutive or
intimate equivalent, and -sama is the formal suffix from which
both -san and -chan were derived. But for 1600 both -san and chan are anachronistic, being modern colloquialisms, while -sama
was in wide use at the time. The effect is especially jarring when
Toranaga addresses an inferior samurai as -san and when Toranaga
and his mistress Kiri address each other as “Tora-chan” and “Kirichan” (p. 222). Clavell has the right idea but the wrong execution.
One final linguistic detail requiring mention is the matter of thenames of the characters. Nearly all of the names are Clavell’s
inventions, of course, though a few are true to their Japanese originals. Names as author’s inventions may bring the characters alivein the writer’s mind and certainly allow him a greater novelistic
freedom. As Clavell has said, “I changed the names deliberately,
because I thought it was pretentious for me to say, about a realcharacter, Ieyasu Tokugawa, that he got up on top of the castle andpeed, you know!” In changing the names, Clavell gave thought to
his choices, feeling, “you have to choose a name, a Japanese name,that looks good.” Toranaga, he knows, “sounds strange to Japanese ears,” but “in English, to my eyes, it looked good, and that83

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was the only thing that bothered me. And it sounded good to me, in
my ears.”
Some of the resultant names do, indeed, sound strange to Japanese ears. Naga, for instance, is a common element in longer
names, but sounds odd alone. Usagi (“rabbit”) as a surname forBlackthorne’s wife Fujiko put me irreverently in mind of a Playboy
bunny. “Fujiko,” for that matter, has an anachronistic sound, as
does “Mariko,” since women’s names in the sixteenth century generally had the prefix O-, not the suffix -ko, which came into common use only within the past century.
Aside from the question of “natural-sounding” names, there’s
the problem of differentiating surnames and given names, and agreat confusion as to what to do with the name of a married
woman. The most complex example is Mariko. The variations on
her name are extraordinary. At times she is Toda Mariko, using thesurname of her husband, Toda Buntaro, and her given name, Mariko, in normal Japanese order. No problems here, nor can one findfault with the elderly female character who calls her Akechi Mariko, reverting to the surname of her childhood, as daughter of Akechi Jinsai. But when Clavell seeks formality, particularly in writingof Mariko’s last days, various parts of the names of her husband,her father, and even her father-in-law are inserted, inappropriately,
into her name as if the author were seeking something similar to
Spanish or Portuguese naming patterns. She is “Toda Buntaro Mariko,” “Senhora Mariko Buntaro,” “Toda Mariko-noh-Buntaronoh-Jinsai,” and “Toda Mariko-noh-Buntaro-noh-Hiromatsu” ondifferent pages. In this at least, the real Japanese would indeed
have been “very simple.”
It is easy enough to enumerate the linguistic faults of Shǀgun,but we should not lose sight of the postive side. Blackthorne’s burning need and desire to learn the language are evoked to wonderful
effect. Motivation is always a key element in language training andno contemporary student need worry, as Blackthorne does, that his
language teachers will all be crucified should he fail to progress
rapidly enough. Blackthorne’s longing for a dictionary and grammar of Japanese and his thrill when the dictionary is finally placedin his hands should properly warm the heart of every language
teacher who reads Shǀgun. In this the novel reflects accurately thehistorical realities of Japan around 1600, when the Jesuits were
working up basic grammars and word lists to aid them in their missionary work. A real Latin-Portuguese-Japanese dictionary of 1595
may be taken as the model for the book that so excited Blackthorne.
As a sympathetic review of Shǀgun in a Japanese journal has
pointed out, though contemporary Japanese is rife with English
words and expressions and Japanese students of English today arelegion, there was once a time when there was only one English
speaker in Japan: William Adams (Bungei shunjǌ, June 1978,
p. 186). For all its flaws, Shǀgun captures the problem of the voyager into a strange language and culture to splendid effect.
Shǀgun is, after all, a novel, not a primer, and one which could
not exist were we to insist that it be utterly true to life. Were it written in the appropriate Dutch, Portuguese, Latin, and Japanese,
there would be no Shǀgun. The novelistic effect of battered English
like “But first, please must see Lord Ishido. Very important”(p. 1106), to convey the idea of battered Japanese, works well, nomatter how uncomfortable we may feel over the many “so sorry” ‘sscattered throughout the book. And the salty Japanese-English pidgin of the pilot Rodrigues is an inspired example of enthusiasm andself-confidence as effective elements in communicating through animperfectly mastered language. “Toady-sama” for “Toda-sama,”
Rodrigues says, and in his exuberance, I feel, we find the character
who most directly reflects the author’s own attitudes. Clavell neverloses his awareness of language as “the key to anywhere foreign,”
and through his insightful portrayal of the agonies and ecstasies oflanguage learning he creates much of the realism of Blackthorne’s
experience.

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10 The Paradoxes of the Japanese Samurai
Henry Smith

The depiction of the samurai in Shǀgun is often contradictory,
and for good reason: the actual historical evolution of Japan’s
traditional military elite presents us with a complex pattern of paradoxes. In Shǀgun we see the samurai both obsessed with the idealof blind loyalty and yet willing at a moment’s notice to betray
others for personal advantage. We see samurai who can be vicious
sadists and yet refined masters of poetry and the tea ceremony. And
we see samurai who habitually act on sudden, unthinking impulse
and yet who seem to be constantly calculating every future move.
Historical records provide plentiful support for this kind of paradoxical behavior, and indeed more: if anything, James Clavell has
simplified the complexities of the samurai class to present a clearer
and more dramatic image.
What we need, then, is some framework for sorting out thesecomplexities and resolving—or at least clarifying—the paradoxes.
One basic distinction, obvious but too often overlooked, is between
the ideal and the reality of the samurai. Of course, it is not as
though the ideal and the reality were two separate worlds: each hasconstantly influenced the other throughout the course of history.
One might also argue that the ideal of the samurai has become incertain ways more “real” than reality, particularly for modern
Americans, who are subjected almost exclusively to mythicizedforms of samurai behavior in films, in writings about Zen, and in
the mystique surrounding the martial arts. Shǀgun fits generally
within this mythology, particularly in its portrayal of ordinary samurai as blindly loyal to the point of inhumanity. And yet at the sametime Clavell manages to humanize samurai behavior, describing theinner workings of the samurai mind.
The Samurai Facing Two Ways
Another explanation for contradictory samurai behavior is thatthe class underwent a radical change midway through its sevencentury career as Japan’s ruling elite. It just happens that the year
1600, in which Shǀgun is set, represents the pivotal point of thistransformation. The samurai at this time was a Janus-faced creature, looking back at an era of constant war and looking forward toan era of constant peace. Behind him lay bloody battles, treachery,
and rapid mobility: ahead of him lay a life of increasingly bureaucratic normalcy and a fixed, hereditary place in a closely orderedsociety. Purists might insist that Rodrigues’ observation to Blackthorne that the “Whole country’s split up into castes, like in India.
Samurai at top, peasants next important” (p. 141) is less accurate
for 1600 than for fifty years later. But by 1600 the direction ofchange was already clearly established, especially because of the allimportant process of removing the samurai from direct control
over the land and placing them in castle towns under the immediate
control of the daimyo.
One way to dramatize this historical shift is to compare two wellknown samurai films, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962). In Seven Samurai, we see the military classas a motley assortment of individuals, drawn together in part bysheer love of violence and in part by an idealistic devotion to thecause of justice; never is any mention made of loyalty to an overlord, for these samurai have none. The film reflects Kurosawa’s
expressed preference for the chaotic conditions of sixteenth-century
Japan: “It’s my favorite period. People were straightforward andunpretentious then. It was a time of great ambitions and great failures, great heroes and equally great scoundrels” (New York Times,
April 27, 1980, p. D15).
In stark contrast is the image of the samurai in Harakiri, which is
set just a few decades later in the year 1630. The samurai is now
locked into a rigid system of oppressive control by the new Tokugawa government, and the hero, an impoverished masterless samurai (rǀnin), has been reduced to making umbrellas for a living. He
manages in the end to expose the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the
new peacetime regime—but only for the film viewer, since we areleft to understand that “history” left no trace of his protest. Of

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course, Kobayashi and Kurosawa—and, in turn, Clavell—are notdocumentary historians but artists with a message for a modern
audience. Still, the contrast between the two films suggests in a dramatic way the tremendous change which the samurai class wasundergoing around the year 1600 in the transition from war topeace.
The historian would make one further warning: the term “samurai” is used in Shǀgun, as in many books, to cover an extended
hierarchy, ranging all the way from lowly footsoldiers (a substantial number of whom were recruited from the peasantry on a temporary basis) to the daimyo class. In Shǀgun all these are describeduniformly as “samurai,” and it might make things a bit clearer if
we bear in mind the technical distinction between a bushi, a fullfledged warrior with the privilege of riding a horse and having
direct audience with a lord, and an ashigaru, a footsoldier with far
less status. For example, the rowers on Toranaga’s galley or the
sentries lolling about half-naked (p. 871) should be considered ashigaru and not true samurai. But what matters is not so much the terminology as an appreciation of the fact that the “samurai class”(including ashigaru) was very large in size (as much as six to sevenpercent of the population) and very diverse in rank and privilege.
The ashigaru, who accounted for as much as three-quarters of thecombat force in this era, rarely aspired to the most idealized standards of samurai behavior, nor indeed were they expected to do so.
Loyalty versus Ambition
In her frequent reminders of the importance of total loyalty to
one’s lord, Shǀgun’s Mariko is articulating what is without doubt
the central theme in the code of the Japanese samurai. Although inthe era of Shǀgun there did not yet exist the formal ideology whichcame to be known as “Bushido” (“the way of the warrior”), all thebasic components of the creed had already been given expression ina variety of ways. Take, for example, the “family instructions”(kakun) which the heads of leading samurai clans began to compose in the Kamakura period. These lists of precepts, often lengthy,
were mostly of a practical nature, but did include passages on thegeneral duties of the samurai, among which loyalty to a feudal
overlord was of course emphasized.
It was especially in epic war tales of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries that the samurai virtues of bravery, loyalty, and honor
were singled out and glorified. Above all it was The Tale of the
Heike, the chronicle of the Taira defeat in the Genpei War(1180-85) and the greatest of all the military epics, that set the precedent for stirring accounts of loyalty and valor among samurai. A
provocative argument has been made that the earliest writtenversions of The Tale of the Heike had little such emphasis, but that
it was rather the fertile imaginations of wandering storytellers thatprovided the heroics, many years after the events of the war had
passed from living memory. This raises the interesting possibility
that many documented instances of obsessive loyalty among later
samurai—of which Shǀgun provides its own share of fictional
examples—were at least in part a case of life imitating art. Such isthe power of fiction!
But if feudal loyalty was so deeply ingrained an ideal by the sixteenth century, how are we to explain the omnipresence of “treachery” in the politics of the period? In Shǀgun, of course, we are
given examples of both loyalty and treachery which in frequency
and degree tend to be considerably exaggerated for dramatic effect.
And yet in fact the themes of treachery and constant reversal of
fortunes have long dominated the historiography of the Sengoku
period in Japan. The phrase commonly used to depict this phenomenon is “gekokujǀ,” literally “the lower overcoming the higher”—
in a word, the betrayal of one’s lord. Still, if we put to one side themoralistic judgment implied by the word “treachery,” we can view
this period in Japanese history as one of tremendous social mobility
and opportunity.
Of course gekokujǀ never got completely out of hand. For one
thing, treachery and disloyalty were pretty much limited to the top
levels of the samurai class and did not become typical of the populace at large. When popular unrest did appear, the samurai unifiers
were quick to respond. One of Nobunaga’s first military targets
was the Ikkǀ sect of Buddhism, which had established itself in several large territorial bases; the only other case of large-scale commoner control of territory was the exceptional (and abortive) Shimabara Rebellion in 1638. For another thing, we must not forgetthat however much the ideal of loyalty may have been violated inpractice, it was a living part of the samurai mentality. The highly
moralistic tone of the samurai code as a whole may in fact have
served to keep treachery at a fairly low level, considering the revolutionary times, and to prevent absolute rogues and hoodlums fromwinning any lasting political power.
Finally we must remember that feudal loyalty in Japan, as in any
such society, was mutual, owed as much by a lord to his vassal asvice versa. One would have difficulty appreciating this solely on thebasis of Shǀgun, in which samurai obedience often seems blind to
the point of fanaticism, and in which daimyo authority appears
unconditional to the point of whimsy. History does of course
provide examples of fanatic loyalty, but in general a samurai, likeanyone else, was motivated to a great extent by self-interest and by
the instinct for self-preservation. Death of a lord often meant

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immediate loss of employment and estate for all his retainers, sothat seemingly extreme measures to protect one’s lord were simply
common sense. In Shǀgun, for example, the decision of one ofYabu’s men to jump off a cliff in hopes of saving his lord’s life
(p. 182) makes sense at least as the collective decision of several
retainers (although the “Bansaiiiiiii!” scream, literally “Long live[the Emperor],” is a product of modern militarism rather than traditional feudalism and has the unfortunate effect of conjuring up
World War II stereotypes).
So also the lord for his part was obliged to protect and reward his
retainers. Tokugawa Ieyasu himself was highly attentive to theproper compensation and encouragement of his closest vassals, as
we can sense in this passage from his famous “Legacy”:
The vassal samurai of the Tokugawa house, great and small, all have shown
the utmost fidelity, even suffering their bones to be ground to powder, andtheir flesh to be chopped up for me. In what way soever their posterity may
offend—for anything less than actual treason—their estate may not be
confiscated.

Bun versus Bu
A theme which appears from an early point in the “house instructions” of medieval daimyo concerns the duty of the samurai to cultivate the literary (bun) as well as the military (bu) arts. Eventually
expressed as the slogan bunbu ryǀdǀ, “the twin ways of the literary
and military arts,” the concept of the basic complementarity ofcivil and military pursuits was central to the samurai class throughout its history, both as an ideal and as a practice. This emphasis on
the importance of literary pursuits reflects the strong influence of
two role models, the Chinese literati and the Japanese courtier class,both of which the samurai strove to emulate in cultural achievement. It was an idea of great importance in the era of Shǀgun andwas to be codified as the very first provision of the basic Tokugawa
code, the Laws Governing the Military Households (Buke shohatto,
1615): “From of old the rule has been to practice ‘the arts of peaceon the left hand, and the arts of war on the right’; both must be
mastered.”History confirms that most Japanese samurai, particularly thoseof the upper ranks, worked hard to perfect their literary skills. The
type of “literacy” which they sought entailed not only a basic ability to read and write Japanese, but, given the mixed nature of written Japanese in this era, a mastery of Chinese as well. Of equal
importance were the two artistic skills central to the idea of bun, calligraphy and the composition of poetry. Beyond this, samurai were
expected to have keen aesthetic judgment in all the arts, both fineand applied, an ability that was brought to bear in the most highly
developed way in the tea ceremony. It was precisely in the era ofShǀgun that the Japanese tea ceremony saw the creative burst ofinnovation that brought it to the state of perfection in which it survives today. A fusion of both courtier and Buddhist traditions, thetea ceremony was assiduously cultivated by samurai.
In Shǀgun, we are given descriptions of both poetry composition
and tea ceremony as practiced among the samurai, although the net
impression is that bloody bu was far more their central concern
than tasteful bun. Still, the very contrast suggests the element oftension inherent in the expectation that samurai be adept at bothkilling and culture. In the idealized formula, bun and bu are complementary but practiced separately (with different hands, in themetaphor quoted above). Shǀgun, in its rather more down-to-earth
portrayal of the samurai as a man of culture, suggests that perhaps
psychologically the division of labor was not so neat.
A good example would be the single depiction of the tea ceremony, which Toda Buntaro performs for his wife Mariko (pp.
766-77). The superficial effect of the ceremony is one of idealized
detachment and beauty; yet lurking just below the surface andimparting dramatic tension to the scene is Buntaro’s jealousy andhis everyday behavior as an ugly brute. This reminds us that the tea
ceremony and other such cultural pursuits were often carefully calculated to provide respite from the constant tensions and hostilities
of war. While examples of daimyo pacifying their wives in the manner of Buntaro are unknown historically, the tea ceremony was frequently used between daimyo themselves as a way of making peace.
In ways that the conventional English translation “ceremony” fails
to convey, the practice of chanoyu (literally, “hot water for tea”)
was a means of easing communication in an era of constantly confused intentions. This social aspect of the cult of tea helps explain
the fierce rivalries among the leading lords of the time for the bestin tea utensils. Indeed, this trade came to have major economic significance in the era of Shǀgun, since a single tea caddy could in fact
be traded for a virtual kingdom (p. 773).
Just as culture itself came to be a political business, so also did
military matters come to be a matter of artistic concern, as best
exemplified in the incredible attention lavished on the design anddecoration of swords and their accoutrements. What does all thissuggest about the psychology of the samurai? After all, a sword ismeant for killing, for chopping off heads and hacking up bodies.
(Incidentally, the practice of testing swords by chopping up corpses
was a common one, although it was done with great ritual, not in
the casual and irreverent way described in Shǀgun [p. 229] andnever legally on living commoners as alleged by Rodrigues [p. 141].)91

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Isn’t there something contradictory about the practice of butcheryand the espousal of super-refined aesthetic ideals?
In particular, the personality of Yabu, although a fantasy ofJames Clavell’s, suggests that there was indeed a seamy side of thesamurai psyche. The most chilling example is the “Night of the
Screams,” the slow boiling in water of one of Blackthorne’s shipmates, which is related through the sadistic ecstasy of Yabu as helistens from a distance. What is interesting here is Clavell’s use of
stereotyped images of Japanese aestheticism—composing poems tofalling petals in a Zen-like trance—to describe a scene of outrightbrutality. Connoisseurs of the refined standards of Japanese court
poetry will have good reason to be scandalized by such a scene. And
yet isn’t Clavell, by following his instincts as a novelist, suggestingsomething about the relation between sadism and aesthetics in thesamurai personality? Perhaps the high-minded ideal of the complementarity of bun and bu could sometimes in real life degenerate
into cruelty as an art.
Heart versus Head

For any professional warrior, the need to respond to a threat“without thinking” is a simple matter of self-preservation. But in
the Japanese samurai class, this instinctive need was elevated into arefined philosophy, largely under the influence of Zen Buddhism.
This way of thought is quite accessible in America today, thanks tothe popularity of the Asian martial arts; for a fully developed exposition, the interested reader can turn to such classic works as Eugen
Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1953) or to D. T. Suzuki’s Zen
and Japanese Culture (1959). What is interesting about this philosophy of the samurai military arts is the way in which it resolves theparadox of the Buddhist respect for life with the warrior’s professional need to kill. The ultimate solution is that a total concentration and spiritual preparedness to meet the enemy will in fact serve
to deter all actual conflict. A number of Zen stories convey thispoint, none better than the legend illustrating the superior qualityof the swords made by the master Masamune (as recounted in Zen
and Japanese Culture, p. 92):
As far as the edge of the blade is concerned, Masamune may not exceed
Muramasa, one of his ablest disciples, but Masamune is said to have something morally inspiring that comes from his personality. The legend goes
thus: When someone was trying to test the sharpness of a Muramasa, heplaced it in a current of water and watched how it acted against the deadleaves flowing downstream. He saw that every leaf that met the blade wascut in twain. He then placed a Masamune, and he was surprised to find thatthe leaves avoided the blade. The Masamune was not bent on killing, it wasmore than a cutting implement, whereas the Muramasa could not go beyond
cutting.
In Shǀgun, however, the sense of Zen-like spontaneity and intuitive readiness among the samurai is often conveyed in a somewhat
less lofty manner, and the effect is to show the samurai more as an
unthinking automaton than as a man whose superior spiritual
power serves to “go beyond cutting.” Perhaps the best way to supplement the picture of samurai behavior in Shǀgun is to consider
the ideal of sincerity in samurai tradition: whereas “heart” inShǀgun seems to mean simply “not using the head,” a more positive understanding of the term may be found in Ivan Morris’ The
Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (1975).
According to Morris, “sincerity” (makoto) is the “cardinalquality of the Japanese hero” and is characterized by “purity ofmotive,” manifested as a certain innocence, even foolhardiness,
and a general contempt for practical or material concerns. Equallyimportant, “sincerity” and its stress on an individual’s intuitive
moral sense could often work against the ideal of loyalty, should
one’s overlord act immorally. It is no surprise, then, that the concept of makoto was used as often as not as an excuse for rebellion,
or at least protest, against the status quo. Readers of Morris’ bookwill find a provocative account of the ways in which this ideal could
lead samurai as often to extreme disobedience as to extreme loyalty.
But whether we interpret “heart” as a reliance on blind intuition
or as a commitment to selfless idealism, we are left asking, where is
the “head” in samurai tradition? This question is left largely unanswered not only in Shǀgun, but also in much of the more romantic
and idealistic writing about the samurai. Was there no place in the“way of the warrior” for careful thinking, for pragmatic concerns,
and for long-range planning? The answer is yes, indeed there was,and it provides a major, if not very glamorous, element in the history of the samurai class.
In Shǀgun, for example, we are given few glimpses of what was
the everyday function of upper samurai in the medieval period, themanagement of landed estates. True, military responsibilities wereheavy, particularly in a year of large campaigns such as 1600, buton the whole samurai were less accustomed to lopping off heads
than to negotiating with peasants for the proper tax yield, supervising the construction and repair of castles, and sitting on committees
for the administration of justice. Competent daimyo had to be as
expert in matters of flood control, road repair, and personnel management as in the appreciation of tea bowls or the technique of
seppuku.

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From the viewpoint of an institutional historian, the most important thing about the era of Shǀgun is the transition of the samurai
from a landed warrior to a stipended bureaucrat. This transformation was gradual and would continue throughout the Tokugawa
period, but it had its start in the consolidation of large domains in
the late sixteenth century and in the assembly of the samurai classin the new castle towns of the daimyo. Not unexpectedly, this process was reflected in an official emphasis on typically bureaucratic
standards of performance. Medieval family instructions had longstressed the importance of prudence, frugality, neat appearance,and scrupulous performance of one’s assigned duty. But it was only
during the Tokugawa period that there evolved, under Confucian
influence, a virtual ideology of bureaucratism, stressing measurable
and efficient performance in matters of practical administration. In
such circumstances, a good pragmatic “head” was in the long run
to prove more valuable to the samurai than “heart” or “sincerity.”Life versus Death
Much is made in Shǀgun of the samurai as one who can facedeath with complete equanimity. This is indeed a central theme
within the historical tradition of the samurai, although it should beemphasized at the outset that Clavell clearly departs from the historical ideal when he characterizes the samurai as a “death-seeking
warrior” (p. 48). We see this in practice, for example, when Buntaro is ordered to cease his preparations for seppuku and thereby“cast himself back into the abyss of life” (p. 397), or in the queryof Yabu’s death poem, “What is life but an escape from death?”(p. 1188). While such an exaggeration may help dramatize Clavell’s
personal message about facing death (see Chapters 2 and 8), it has
little basis in Japanese history. Indeed, the historian presented withsuch a characterization feels compelled to stress that the Japaneseare fundamentally a life-affirming people and that the ideal of thesamurai was to face death not with yearning, but with indifference.
The more appropriate emphasis, and one which finds ample
expression in Shǀgun, is that for a samurai honor was more important than life. This is a common idea among many traditional
military elites, but there is little doubt that it was practiced withparticular rigor by the Japanese samurai. Persuasive evidence is tobe found in the accounts of European visitors to Japan in the era ofShǀgun, who stress time and again the samurai attachment tohonor and consequent fearlessness of death. Francis Xavier observedthat the Japanese “are much concerned with their honor, which
they prize above all else,” while the Italian traveller Francesco
Carletti asserted bluntly that “there is no nation in the world whichfears death less.” While some such reports were undoubtedly

exaggerated for the benefit of European readers, the emphasis is so
consistent as to leave little doubt that samurai preference for deathover dishonor was an impressive reality at the time.
One extreme dishonor for a samurai was capture by the enemy,
as Mariko instructs Blackthorne:
A samurai cannot be captured and remain samurai. That’s the worst dishonor—to be captured by an enemy—so my husband is doing what a man, asamurai, must do. A samurai dies with dignity. For what is life to a samurai?
Nothing at all. All life is suffering, neh? It is his right and duty to die withhonor, before witnesses (p. 394).

Although the historian might wish to tone down the machismo
in Mariko’s emphasis on “man” (in Japan, the same would be
expected of a samurai woman) and the rather nihilistic stress on life
as “nothing at all,” the passage is basically valid as a description of
the historical samurai. Suicide as a way of avoiding capture probably originated in the fear of torture, but it did in fact become standard practice.
If anything, Shǀgun underemphasizes the specific practice of
seppuku, or ritual suicide by disembowelment (known more commonly in the West by the less elegant term “harakiri”). The act is
described once in detail (pp. 568-9), but is in no way sensationalized. On the whole, Clavell seems more interested in the psychology
leading up to suicide than in the act itself, particularly in the detailed
descriptions of aborted seppuku on three separate occasions, firstby Buntaro (pp. 393-7), then by Blackthorne (pp. 509-14), andfinally by Mariko (pp. 1044-50).
The readers of Shǀgun are thus spared any excessive contemplation of the blunt physical reality of self-destruction by means ofslicing open the abdomen and spilling out the intestines. The careful
reader will even note that Blackthorne’s “near-seppuku” would notactually have been seppuku, since his blade was aimed at his heartand not his bowels (p. 512). This disparity helps explain one
important element in the origins of seppuku, the conception thatthe bowels (in Japanese, hara) serve as the place of the spirit—therole of the heart in Western belief—and that death by disembowelment was thus a way of displaying one’s soul for all to see that itwas clean and pure. Hence, as Mariko stressed, the importance ofdying before witnesses.
But beyond this rather abstract explanation of the symbolic
meaning of seppuku, we really know very little about the history
and psychological structure of what is after all a very bizarre custom. The practice of ritual suicide in any form is fairly rare in humanhistory; when found, it is usually a form of sacrifice of servants on
the death of a ruler or of the wife on the death of a husband (as in95

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the Hindu custom of suttee). One Japanese anthropologist, breaking an apparent taboo on the scholarly investigation of seppuku,
has recently proposed that the practice may in fact represent a formof sacrifice, specifically the offering of the entrails of captured prey tothe gods, a ritual widely practiced in hunting cultures. Whatever its
primitive meaning, seppuku first appeared in the tenth or eleventh
century among the Minamoto warriors of northeast Japan,
members of a strongly hunting-oriented clan. After the Genpei
War, the practice then spread to the samurai class as a whole, probably encouraged by glorified depictions of seppuku in medieval war
tales. (For a particularly awesome example, see the description of .
the death of Satǀ Tadanobu in the fifteenth-century chronicle
Yoshitsune, translated into English by Helen McCullough.)
In actual practice, seppuku tended with time to become more andmore a matter of formality, with the cutting of the abdomen abbreviated or even eliminated, and death coming with decapitation by
the second (in the manner denigrated by Hirasaki Kenko just before
his more traditional form of seppuku in Shǀgun, p. 568). This wasparticularly true during the Tokugawa period, when seppuku
became essentially a form of execution reserved for members of thesamurai class. Yet the fact remains that the practice survived formany centuries, and Western eyewitness accounts from the nineteenth century confirm that samurai were indeed able to disembowel themselves without flinching. Seppuku survived as a traditionin the modern military class and was given a spectacular revival in
the rigorously traditional suicide performed by the writer Mishima
Yukio in 1970.
Given its uniqueness and long survival in practice, seppuku perhaps deserves closer attention by scholars of Japan. One line ofinquiry has been proposed by Ivan Morris in his suggestion that
seppuku may involve “the transformation of a sadistic fantasy intoa masochistic one” (The Nobility of Failure, p. 367). This would
certainly provide logical consistency to the behavior of the sadistic
Yabu, whose suicide is described by Omi as “the best I have everseen . . . . The two cuts, then a third in the throat. Without assistance and without a sound” (pp. 1184-5).
The Formulation of Bushido
In the era of Shǀgun, the “code of the warrior” was largely amatter of unwritten rules about which all samurai tended to agree,whether or not they adhered to them in detail. Constant warfare
meant that bravery, loyalty, and an ability to face death coolly werefairly basic to survival. Likewise, the absence of warfare during thelong Tokugawa peace after 1615 created a need to shore up theideals of the samurai class against perceived erosion. The result wasa variety of articulate and often impassioned writings about the“way of the samurai,” which came eventually (mostly in the twentieth century) to be known as “Bushido.” Precisely because of theirpolemical quality, these versions of the samurai “code” tended tobe even more rigid and extreme than earlier practice had been anddid much to widen the gap between the ideal and the reality of thesamurai class.
Among the writers on Bushido, there were differences of emphasis. Yamaga Sokǀ (1622-85), who is often known as the “father ofBushido,” was a rǀnin anxious to prove himself and worked hardat the military arts. His primary intellectual bent, however, wasConfucian, as reflected in his stress upon the importance of decorous moral behavior among samurai. He placed particular emphasison the hierarchical relationships prescribed in Neo-Confucianism,
not only that of samurai to lord, but also of child to father, wife tohusband, and younger to older brother. He justified the samurai’s
lack of any obvious productive function (a lack which was especially conspicuous in peacetime) on the grounds that a true warrior
should be engaged in full-time practice of the moral “Way” andthereby serve as a model of behavior for the rest of society.
Rather different in tone is a work which in modern times hascome to be widely known as the most uncompromisingly pure tract
on samurai behavior, the collection of thoughts and anecdotes
entitled Hagakure (now available in a new translation by William
Scott Wilson). This work was compiled from 1710 to 1716 fromconversations with an aging samurai named Yamamoto Tsunetomo(1645-1716) of the Nabeshima clan in Saga (Kyushu). Hagakure isless a systematic philosophy than a collection of random thoughts,
and it is best known for its forceful opening lines: “The Way of theSamurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only
the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult.” It is herethat we get about as close as history will permit to the idea of deathfound in Shǀgun; but note that even in Hagakure, death is not
something to be actively sought out: at best, it is a matter of flirtation. Hagakure, although known in traditional times only in thesecret circles of Saga warriors, has acquired a devout following in
the modern period, both among the military and most recently inthe person of Mishima Yukio, who wrote a book-length commentary on it (translated into English by Kathryn Sparling as The Wayof the Samurai).
Through other less extreme and more popular attempts to rationalize the existence of the samurai class in an era of peace, the valuesof this military elite gradually spread throughout Japanese society
as a whole. This is in distinct contrast to the West, where older aristocratic values were rejected by the rising middle class. One milestone

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in the popularization of samurai values was the glorification of thestory of the Forty-Seven Rǀnin, a group of samurai who in 1703
avenged the death of their lord for an alleged insult and died byseppuku as a result. Through the influence of various dramatic andliterary re-creations, particularly the play Chǌshingura, the commoner class of Japan came to internalize the ideal forms of samurai
behavior.
The greatest relevance of samurai values for the historian lies inprecisely the fact that they did spread, in varied dress, to otherclasses, and thereby managed to survive the sudden demise of thesamurai class itself in the few years after the Meiji Restoration of1868. Indeed, it was probably the very diffusion of samurai-likevalues that best explains the ease with which the class itself waseliminated. In a rough sense, Japan became a nation of samurai, sothat all the traditional bushi dilemmas of loyalty versus ambition,
heart versus head, and life versus death are still with many Japanese today.

11 Consorts and Courtesans: The Women of Shǀgun
Henry Smith(Note: This chapter relies heavily on ideas and information provided by Chieko Mulhern, Final responsibility for facts and interpretations remains with the author. H.S.)
From an historian’s point of view, the depiction of Japanesewomen in Shǀgun has a panoramic quality. The author draws
details and images from a millennium of history, ranging from theworld of the Heian court in the tenth century to the Edo pleasurequarters of the seventeenth century and even to the bars and cabarets of contemporary Japan. From a literary point of view, such atelescoped portrayal is effective, since it increases the diversity andcomplexity of the female characters and their attitudes. But it isalso of use to draw the telescope out to its full length again, in order
to appreciate a few of the ways in which the role and status of
women have changed over the course of Japanese history.
“In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun”
These words, which became the rallying cry of the modern Japanese women’s movement when they appeared as the motto of the
new magazine Seitǀ (Bluestockings) in September 1911, call attention to the prominent role of women in the mythical origins of

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Japanese history. The image of the woman as sun is a direct reference to Amaterasu, the sun goddess and progenitor of the Japaneseimperial line and, by extension, of the Japanese nation itself. The
importance of this role is symbolized by the tale of the darkening of
the world when Amaterasu shut herself up in a cave and so alarmed
the assembled multitude of gods that they staged a dance to lure her
forth. It was also a goddess who was chosen to perform the dance
and who, in a manner expressive of early Japanese attitudes toward
sexuality, “became divinely possessed, exposed her breasts, andpushed her skirt-band down to her genitals.” Here we find the prototype of the shamaness figure so important in this early age.
This mythic power of woman extended into historical times in
the frequent mention of female political rulers. The earliest historical account of Japan, a Chinese record of A. D . 239, describes thecountry as ruled by a shamaness-queen “Pimiko,” and, according
to imperial chronology, Japan was ruled by an empress for fully
half the period from 592 to 770, in eight separate reigns. In a turning point in the transformation of woman from “sun” to “moon,”
however, the tradition of female rulers was terminated in the wakeof a scandalous involvement of Empress Shǀtoku with a handsome
Buddhist monk whom she attempted to promote to political power.
Of the ensuing seventy-six emperors of Japan, only two were
women and neither had any real political influence, although one
may be of interest to the readers of Shǀgun: Empress Meishǀ
(r. 1629-43), the first ruling empress in almost one thousand years,
was the granddaughter of the second shogun Hidetada and his wifeOgǀ (Sudara and Genjiko in the novel).
The eclipse of female imperial leadership by no means presaged
the end of women as a leading force in Japanese history, however,for the talented court ladies of the tenth and eleventh centuries
emerged to play a preeminent cultural role. Required to be of goodbirth, skilled at literature, and ready with wit, the ladies of the
Heian court produced an impressive amount of literature, including
the great classical novel The Tale of Genji (c. A . D. 1000). Yet interms of political and economic power, women were at a clear disadvantage. The legal codes of the period, based on Confucianmodels, relegated women to a distinctly inferior status. But perhaps
because of the lingering influence of earlier matriarchy, the codes
were not always followed, and women could, for example, own andinherit property, although they were almost always at the mercy ofmen for the actual management of their estates.
The Samurai Patriarchy
The replacement of the court aristocracy by the rising samurai class as Japan’s ruling elite in the late twelfth century had

contradictory implications for women’s rights: advantageous in the
short run but detrimental in the long run. Probably as a reflectionof the highly unsettled social situation in the early Kamakura period(1185-1333), women of the samurai class enjoyed a substantial
degree of personal and legal freedom, greater than that of the Heian
court ladies. They could inherit and bequeath property and in somecases actually managed their own estates. Adultery was not treatedas harshly as it would be later, and women could even petition for
divorce. When Mariko claims, in an important statement about
women in Shǀgun, that “We own wealth and property, our bodies
and our spirits. We have tremendous powers if we wish” (p. 368),
she could be referring only to an era about four centuries earlier
than her own.
By the fifteenth century, the position of women was clearly indecline, completing the shift from the mythic woman-as-sun to therole of woman-as-moon against which twentieth-century feminists
were at last to rebel. Samurai men, too busy with politics to indulge
in the leisurely game of Heian courtship, were concerned above allwith a verifiable line of succession. Marriages became in medieval
Japan what they were in medieval Europe, political alliances offamilies under total patriarchal control. Polygamy continued to be
the accepted practice for men, although the Chinese legal precedentof a single main wife and all the rest “consorts” came to be morestrictly enforced than in the Heian court. But for women, monogamy was the ironclad rule and, by the Shǀgun era, female chastity
was regarded as a matter of life and death, so that, in his involvement with Mariko, Blackthorne was courting mortal danger, as
well as moral condemnation by his Protestant conscience. Samurai
law made no distinction between rape and love affair or between
contemplation and consummation, nor did it allow for mitigating
circumstances. As Mariko warns Blackthorne (p. 367), a husband
indeed had the right and even the obligation to kill his unfaithful
wife and her male partner, although to do so he needed the consent
of his relatives.
Much further from historical reality, however, is Mariko’s simultaneous claim that “We may leave our husbands if we wish, divorcethem” (p. 368). It is true that women of all classes could effectively
divorce their husbands by seeking refuge in nunneries (known as“dash-in temples”). And since so many failed to escape the hot
pursuit of husbands, the rules were eased to the point that a sandal
thrown within the temple precinct was deemed sufficient to ensurea woman legal sanctuary! But because a woman had to become a
nun and remain in the nunnery for at least three years, the “dash-in
temples” were a last and desperate resort. In addition, a number ofclans refused to recognize these temples as legal sanctuary, and there

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are hardly any known cases of samurai women winning divorces inthe era of Shǀgun.
In sad fact, the situation of marriage and divorce was precisely
opposite from Mariko’s explanation. Far from being free to determine such matters, many hapless ladies were married, divorced,
torn from their children, and remarried at the whim and convenience of their fathers, brothers, and even overlords. One of themost pathetic examples was the Taikǀ’s own sister Asahi (mentioned but unnamed in Shǀgun, pp. 454, 657), who was first married to a peasant, widowed, married again to a samurai, and in her
forties finally reclaimed by her brother to become the reluctant
Ieyasu’s main wife and a virtual hostage. Sudden divorce continued
to be a constant threat to the Japanese wife throughout the Tokugawa period, when what was commonly known as a ‘ ‘three-and-ahalf line letter,” addressed to a woman’s father or former guardian,constituted legal grounds for turning her out of the house overnight.
The husband could choose from a long list of widely accepted reasons for divorce, including infertility, unfiliality toward in-laws,
and—believe it or not—overindulgence in the drinking of tea.
So also Mariko’s boast that “We own our own wealth and property” (p. 368), while true to a degree for the Kamakura period, wasin historical fact a distant memory by the year 1600. Even daimyo
did not technically “own” the land within their fief, but instead
merely derived income from it, so that they were neither able nor
expected to make gifts of land as dowries. Although a very few
high-ranking women were given their own incomes—Ieyasu, forexample, provided a stipend for the Taikǀ’s widow (“Yodoko” inShǀgun)—most women owned nothing in their own names, so that
Mariko’s offer to Blackthorne of funds from her “personal estate”
to build his ship (p. 1179) would only have been possible much earlier (or much later, in the modern era).
And finally what of Mariko’s assertion that “We can go freely
where we please, when we please” (p. 368)1 It is true that Westernobservers around 1600, particularly those from southern Europe,
where unmarried women were vigilantly guarded from public exposure, were appalled by the sight of Japanese women walking freely
outside and enjoying flower-viewing parties in public. But thesewere commoner women, and ladies of the samurai class were nofreer than the Catholic maidens. Hosokawa Gracia’s confinement
at home for the last sixteen years of her life (see Chapter 7) was far
from an aberrant case, for daimyo wives were rarely allowed toleave their homes. Common to the codes of nearly all the clans wereprohibitions against samurai women going out-of-doors, receiving
male visitors, or even attending religious services without their
menfolk. In all likelihood, the average daimyo never saw the femalefamily members of his friends or even his vassals. One daimyo’s
20,000-koku estate was confiscated and his line abolished by Ieyasu
for having looked into a lady’s palanquin on the street, so that inreal history Ishido would have been resorting to a desperate measure when he insisted on raising the curtain of the palanquin bearing the disguised Toranaga (p. 359).
But apart from Mariko’s remarkable independence of mind andmovement, the sense of samurai women conveyed in Shǀgun isquite close to historical reality in suggesting their generally subordinate place in society. One character who is, if anything, extreme inthis respect is Fujiko, whose self-abnegation and masochistic urge
to obey make her almost a caricature of the reality. Mariko counsels Blackthorne to treat Fujiko, if he wishes, “as nothing—as thiswooden post or the shoji screen, or as a rock in your garden—anything you wish . . . . If you won’t have her as consort, be merciful.
Accept her and then, as head of the house, according to our law,
kill her” (p. 498). Well, samurai law was certainly harsh withwomen, but not quite that extreme. The head of the house could
kill a wife or consort only for adultery; any other offense would
mean simple divorce. But Fujiko’s position is of course exceptional;
she seems to have no immediate family to defend her, and being theconsort of a foreigner was certainly no ordinary position.
One must not forget, of course, that samurai women comprised
only a tiny percentage of Japanese female society. We have very little
information about the lives and rights of the commoner women,
who accounted for the great majority, and can only assume thatthings were not much better for them. Yet there did remain a few
specialized roles for women which offered them a bit more than theordinary amount of freedom. As nuns, for example, thousands ofJapanese women dedicated their lives to charitable works, religious
training, and writing. Still another professional niche for women
was that of the wet nurse (called “foster mother” in Shǀgun, p. 577),
who was often relied upon for the upbringing of a samurai. Most
famous of these was Kasuga, the wet nurse of the third Tokugawa
shogun Iemitsu (son of Sudara and Genjiko in the novel). It was infact her own political maneuvering that led to the choice of her“milk son” as shogunal heir.
Mediators and Survivors
In spite of their legal situation, a few women were able to exert
personal influence in the era of Shǀgun, and some famous examples appear in the pages of Clavell’s novel. Readers with a preconceived view of Japanese male-female relations as wholly “feudal”—
a view for which the Tokugawa period offers plentiful evidence—
may be tempted to discount as a Western male fantasy the relatively

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positive image of women in Shǀgun. But in the far more unsettled
and mobile society of the Momoyama period depicted in Shǀgun,opportunities for women to wield political power did indeed occasionally present themselves. It is true that, by the sixteenth century,
high-ranking samurai women rarely engaged in battle alongside
their men as they had sometimes done in earlier feudal times (asdid, for example, the famed female warrior Tomoe, the consort ofa Minamoto leader of the twelfth century who became the protagonist of a Nǀ play bearing her name). But even in less physically
active roles, women in the time of Shǀgun still won fame for theirpolitical, if no longer their military, achievements. Four such historical personalities appear in Shǀgun in relatively minor roles, andreaders may be interested in knowing more about their real-lifemodels.
Next to Mariko, the most endearing female character in Shǀgun
is surely Kiritsubo-noh-Toshiko, affectionately known as “Kiri”(p. 222). Her model is Acha-no-Tsubone (1555-1637), a consort
who came to enjoy Ieyasu’s confidence and often served as his
political mediator and adviser during his rise to shogun. Married
young to a middle-ranking samurai, she was widowed at the age oftwenty-two and entered Ieyasu’s service two years later, in 1579.
She gradually came to win Ieyasu’s trust and affection, and evenaccompanied him on his military campaigns. Kiri’s role in Shǀgun
as Toranaga’s spy and contact within Osaka Castle was doubtless
inspired by the key part played by Acha in negotiating the truce following the winter siege of Osaka Castle in 1614-15. She persuaded
the Toyotomi forces to agree to some tricky terms regarding the disposition of the outer moat; Ieyasu promptly misapplied the treaty
to fill the inner moat as well, turning the castle into a sitting duckfor his troops. The final annihilation of the Heir and his mother thefollowing summer thus owed much to Acha’s diplomatic efforts.
Considering that Ieyasu had two wives, fifteen consorts, nineteen
children, and no shortage of competent male vassals, Acha musthave been an exceptional woman to earn so much trust from one of
the most cautious men in Japanese history. Her career thus demonstrates that women could achieve positions of considerable influence, and a number of other such cases are known among the wives
and consorts of leading daimyo.
A rather different course was the one followed by the Taikǀ’s
wife Nene (1541-1624), who appears in Shǀgun as “Yodoko.” Thedaughter of a footsoldier, she was married to Hideyoshi in 1561
when he was little more than a footsoldier himself, and she remained
until his death his only wife and trusted confidante. Hideyoshi
valued her opinion highly and treated her with the utmost respect,even though for consorts he preferred women of blue blood (incontrast to Ieyasu, all of whose women after his first wife underranked him). In Shǀgun, Yodoko mercifully dies before the tragic
fall of the Toyotomi, but in real life Nene proved to be a pertinacious survivor. Known after 1585 by the title Kita-no-Mandokoro
and after the Taikǀ’s death in 1598 by her nun’s name of Kǀdaiin,by 1614 she was living safely distant from Osaka Castle and circumspectly avoided lifting a finger to save the lives of the Heir and his
mother. As if to assure her future silence, Ieyasu had earlier built
the temple of Kǀdaiji for her retirement in Kyoto. She lived into thereign of the third Tokugawa shogun, enjoying her court title ofJunior First Rank.
But by far the most renowned of all the historical models forthe women in Shǀgun—with the possible exception of Mariko’s
counterpart Hosokawa Gracia—was the Heir’s mother (“LadyOchiba”). Born in 1567 and given the personal name of Chacha, she
was known as one of the most beautiful women in Japan and, as
Hideyoshi’s favorite consort, came to be addressed as Yodo-dono(the Lady of Yodo, after the castle which Hideyoshi built for her).
If Gracia was a romantic heroine victimized by circumstances
beyond her control, Yodo more closely resembled a Greek figure
whose fall is brought on by her own tragic flaw, A haughty andwillful woman with a tendency to act impulsively, Yodo’s prestigious connections made her many enemies: as Nobunaga’s niece,
she was coveted by a number of ambitious warlords; as the Taikǀ’sfavorite, she was envied by many; as a sister-in-law of Ieyasu’s heir,
she was feared and suspected by Ieyasu himself; and as the motherof Hideyoshi’s heir, she was both placated and manipulated by the
Toyotomi loyalists. Even while alive, she suffered many malicious
rumors about the parentage of the heir Hideyori, whose elegant
good looks were in disconcerting contrast to the simian features of
the Taikǀ. (The suspected father was not Ishido-as-Ishida, as intimated in Shǀgun, but rather ƿno Harunaga, who led the Osaka
forces in 1614-15 and acted as Yodo’s second at her suicide.) Even
after her death, she continued in disrepute and came to be knownin Edo-period chronicles as “Yodo-gimi”—”-gimi” commonly
denoting a low-ranking lady of the night.
Considerably less flamboyant than Yodo was her younger sister
Ogǀ, the “Genjiko” of Shǀgun, who was more the survivor type,managing to advance in position in spite of a long string of personaldisasters. Orphaned by the age of ten, she was married off to aminor lord at twelve at the order of Hideyoshi. But after a few
years of apparently contented marriage, she was ordered divorcedby the Taikǀ and remarried to his own nephew. This new husband
was soon killed in the Korea campaign, and Ogǀ, now twenty-three,
was once again married off at the Taikǀ’s command to Ieyasu’s

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seventeen-year-old heir Hidetada (Shǀgun’s Sudara). This strange
match at last brought stability and even some distinction to the longsuffering Ogǀ, who was to be the only main wife of a Tokugawa
shogun to give birth to a future shogun: all the rest were the issue ofconsorts. Her several other children also made distinguishedmatches, one daughter marrying the Taikǀ’s heir and another thereigning emperor.
Is “Love” a Barbarian Word?
In an important passage in which Mariko is instructing the bewildered Blackthorne about the customs of Japan, she turns to the
topic of love:“Love is a Christian word, Anjin-san. Love is a Christian thought, a Christian ideal. We have no word for love’ as I understand you to mean it. Duty,
loyalty, honor, respect, desire, those words and thoughts are what we have,
all that we need.” (p. 370)

Well, it all depends on what Mariko has in mind when she speaks of“Christian love.” Often, she seems simply to mean love of thegarden-variety type featuring affection, desire, and a longing to be
together. So it is when, three hundred pages later, she is offered theprospect of a divorce from Buntaro: “Oh to be free, her spirit sang.
Oh, Madonna, to be free!”—but “Remember who you are, Mariko, remember what you are. And remember that ‘love’ is a barbarian word” (p. 670).
If all Mariko means is spontaneous affection, as she seems to,then she is dead wrong, for simple love was one of the most ancientof themes in Japanese literature and could be expressed with a richvocabulary: the Japanese “have no word for love” only in the sensethat they have many, many words for love. Nor should the unsuspecting reader be lulled into thinking that the Japanese in 1600, orat any other time in their history, were incapable of falling in love
without instruction from abroad.
Still, if we permit the author his due in dramatizing by exaggeration, we find that, from the historian’s point of view, Mariko may
be suggesting some interesting differences between Japan and theWest in the evolution of the ideal of “love.” The Japanese side of
the story would probably begin with what is conventionally known
as “the oldest poem in Japanese,” quoted for us by Mariko on
page 603 of Shǀgun: “Eight cumulus arise / For the lovers to hide
within . . . .” Mariko uses the poem to illustrate the psychologicalneed of the Japanese for an “Eightfold Fence” to mask the emotions, but the original emphasis of the poem is rather on the secluded
passion of two newlyweds. From the same period comes the greatest

repository of early Japanese love poetry, the Man’yǀshǌ, an eighthcentury anthology which includes some of the most expressive andintense love songs in world literature.
In the following Heian period, love remained central to Japanese
literature, as seen in the novels and diaries of the ladies of the Heian
court. The common theme of all these writings was the relationshipbetween the sexes; The Tale of Genji, for example, details three
generations of courtship and seduction, yet related with exquisiterefinement and scarcely a hint of erotic interest. Already one candetect the dampening effect of Buddhism. Although not in general
as “sex-negative” a religion as Christianity, neither is Buddhism,
which views all human passions as futile and fleeting, particularly
sex-positive. We might hypothesize that such pessimism about thisworldly attachments, which became a central motif in medieval literature, worked in the long run to diminish the preoccupation withromantic love in Japanese elite culture.
So also the rise of the samurai class and its concern with duty,
loyalty, and the subjugation of personal emotions may help explain
the decline in the status of love in medieval Japan. Still, as the mostbasic of human emotions, love continued to appear as a common
theme in the military epics and popular stories of the time. But forthe samurai class itself, it seems fair to say that romantic love was
not a central cultural concern.
It is here we find an interesting contrast with the West. In many
respects, feudal Europe was quite similar to feudal Japan. But just at
the time that a cult of courtship was on the wane in Japan, a similar
tradition was emerging in Europe. Somehow, for reasons which arestill hotly debated among historians, there appeared in late eleventhcentury France the curious literary phenomenon of “courtly love,”which was to have a profound and lasting influence on Westernnotions of romantic love. Perhaps this is what Mariko had in mind
when she referred to “Christian love,” since courtly love was infact strongly bound up with Christianity (one theory connecting itto the worship of the Virgin Mary). One can doubtless find within
the Japanese literary tradition certain themes and forms whichapproximate the structure of “courtly love,” but never did it
become as pervasive an influence as in Europe.
“We’re Taught to Be Ashamed . . .”At one point in his initiation into Japanese sexuality, Blackthorne
feels obliged to apologize to the courtesan Kiku:“We’re taught to be ashamed of our bodies and pillowing and nakedness and… and all sorts of stupidities. It’s only being here that’s made me realize it.
Now that I’m a little civilized I know better.” (p. 696)

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Once again, Shǀgun presents us with a clear-cut contrast between
the two cultures. The Japanese see the body and its sexual functions
as “so simple” and “natural,” pleasant but nothing to get steamed
up about, while the West—as personified by Blackthorne—is ridden with guilt and shame about such matters. This is doubtless acomplex issue, but here as elsewhere it may help to point out a few
ways in which the historical contrast is not quite as stark as Shǀgun
might have us believe.
First, some historians would stress that the sexual attitudes
ascribed to Blackthorne are anachronistic for the year 1600 andreflect instead nineteenth-century Victorian views. Secondly, as one
recent critic has suggested, the Western “repression” of sex may beof less historical importance than the “great sexual sermon,” chastising ourselves for all that repression (with Clavell, one might add,
as one of its most eloquent preachers), which has swept over theWest in recent decades (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality,p. 7). In other words, what is important is not so much the content
of Clavell’s sermon as the question of why he should be so worked
up over the matter at all.
Third, on the specific issue of nudity: the idea that “they don’t
notice nakedness and that’s totally sensible. You’re in Japan”(p. 455) is correct in the sense that there are few moral or religious
proscriptions against nudity among the Japanese. But as a matterof social decorum, the Japanese traditionally have been among themost discreet people in world history when it comes to the unclothedbody. In the historical era of Shǀgun, notwithstanding the fantasy
of a nude Mariko slipping nonchalantly into the bath with an agog
Blackthorne (to be re-enacted by Shimada Yǀko for the delight ofoverseas viewers of the feature film version of Shǀgun, but—thanks to good old Victorian prudery!—not in the American TV
series), Japanese rarely entered the bath without a loincloth formen and an underskirt for women. Even in the erotic art of theTokugawa period, when mixed bathing became popular among thelower classes, lovers are inevitably shown heavily clothed, with only
the (greatly magnified) genital union exposed. In striking contrast
to the West, the Japanese have virtually no tradition of the depiction of the nude in art. So, although not ashamed of nudity, neither
did the traditional Japanese ever find it especially proper.
The Willow World
Although prostitution, as “the world’s oldest profession,” wascommon in Japan long before the era of Shǀgun, it was precisely inthese years that it became highly organized, with the establishment
of officially licensed pleasure quarters. The unification of Japan in
the late sixteenth century involved the concentration of large anddisproportionately male populations in the mushrooming castle
towns of the daimyo, and the feudal authorities viewed the inevitable rise in the demand for prostitution as something to be tolerated—but segregated. The first such legal district was the Shinchi areaof Osaka, recognized by Hideyoshi in 1585. Then in 1589 a patent
was issued to two rǀnin for a similar operation in the Shimabaraquarter of Kyoto. The famed Yoshiwara of Edo, which the colorful
Gyoko of Shǀgun envisions as her pet project (p. 1180), was in fact
created in 1616 by a samurai named Shǀji with permission from theTokugawa shogunate. The only detail really at odds with history in
the Shǀgun version is the sex of the proprietor: all of the traditional
Japanese pleasure quarters were founded, owned, and operated bymen, originally samurai, and the image of Gyoko as a rough-andtumble, foul-mouthed “Mama-san” is straight out of the GI bars
and cabarets of Occupied Japan.
Within these licensed pleasure quarters, particularly in the threegreat cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, the type of courtesan known
as the “geisha” (literally, “a person of artistic accomplishment”)
emerged. This “Willow World” was a strange realm of fantasy andplay, in which self-conscious efforts were made to imitate thearistocratic game of courtship as depicted in The Tale of Genji.
Courtesans were ranked like Heian ladies, and each was called by aprofessional name chosen from a list of Genji characters. Wealthy
customers were entertained with such courtly pursuits as poetry
contests, incense-guessing games, and mock weddings. Yet beneathall the ritual play lay the simple fact of prostitution, for the Willow
World was in the end a world for satisfying male lust. But it was
satisfaction in style, and men competed with each other in making
sexual activity a matter of technical virtuosity. Mariko’s insistence
to Blackthorne that “giving pleasure to the woman is equally the
man’s duty” (p. 554) may seem enlightened, but in fact giving pleasure to the woman was considered an entertaining challenge in the
Willow World, certainly not a duty.
Some of the flowery vocabulary used in Shǀgun in matters of sex
may sound quaint, but it is a good reflection of a rich and ancient
Chinese tradition of literature about sex, a tradition which wasperpetuated in Tokugawa Japan. The very term “Willow World”(karyǌkai in Japanese) was taken from an ancient Chinese poem,
as was the expression “Clouds and Rain” (p. 693), which was firstused in a Chinese text of the third century B.C. and became the standard Chinese literary expression for the sexual act. Under the influence of Taoism and Yin-Yang theory, the Chinese from an earlydate evolved systematic and detailed sex manuals. The oldest surviving version of these is preserved, interestingly enough, in Japan,
as a chapter on “The Bedchamber” in a medical text of the Heian109

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period (Ishinhǀ, A.D. 984). Here one can find, for example, the“classic ‘six shallow and five deep’ rhythm” (p. 811, actually “onedeep and nine shallows” in the classic version) and the elaborate
variety of coital positions of the sort found in Mariko’s “pillowbook” (p. 898), many with poetically exotic names. The sexual
vocabulary of Shǀgun follows this model, although the actual
sources are diverse: some terms are authentically Chinese (“JadeGate,” p. 657), most are Clavellian (“Steaming Shafts,” p. 706, or“Pellucid Pestle,” p. 810), and only one is indigenously Japanese,the “Heavenly Spear” (p. 50) being the phallic instrument which inthe mythical accounts gave birth to the Japanese islands themselves.
The ingenious sexual devices which Kiku displays for the astonished Blackthorne (pp. 694-5) are also essentially Chinese in origin(although the Chinese themselves preferred to insist that all suchmechanical aids were of barbarian origin!), but came to be used aswell within the pleasure quarters of Tokugawa Japan. As for “harigata” (in Japanese, normally harikata) or dildos (p. 693), it is very
unlikely that a high daimyo lady in the year 1600 would be as accustomed to such instruments as Mariko appears to be, but they did
come to be used a century later in the shogunal harem by the many
women (attendants, maidservants, and even consorts themselves)
who were isolated from men on pain of death. In the era of Shǀgun,available evidence suggests that harikata were used primarily forthe training of male prostitutes, and perhaps for the use of theircustomers.
“The Sin That Does Not Bear Mentioning”
In the course of Blackthorne’s painful efforts to shuck off his
guilt-ridden attitudes toward sex, probably the most memorable
detail is his livid outrage at Mariko’s innocent suggestion that “Perhaps you would prefer a boy?” (p. 330). While his reaction seems
implausibly extreme for a hardened sailor, it does reflect the attitudes of many of the more moralistic Western observers of Japan at
the time. Although in the same scene Mariko claims knowledge ofsimilar habits among Catholic priests, it was actually the Jesuits
who were the most bitter in their denunciations of Japanese homosexual practices. Father Alessandro Valignano, the model for Father
dell’Aqua in Shǀgun, wrote, for example, that the Japanese had alamentable addiction to sensual vices, but:Even worse is their great dissipation in the sin that does not bear mentioning. This is regarded so lightly that both the boys and men who consort withthem brag and talk about it openly without trying to cover the matter up.
This is because the bonzes teach that not only is it not a sin but that it iseven something quite natural and virtuous and as such the bonzes to a certain extent reserve this practice for themselves. They are forbidden undergrave penalties by ancient laws and customs to have the use of women andso they find a remedy for their disorderly appetites by preaching this pernicious doctrine to the blind pagans. (Cooper, They Came to Japan, p. 46)

Homosexual practices were indeed widespread in the Buddhist
priesthood in Japan and often respectable. It is not surprising,
therefore, that many customers of the houses of male prostitution
which began to spring up precisely in the Shǀgun era were monks.
But of perhaps even greater interest was the spread of homosexual
practices within the samurai class itself during those years of constant warfare and consequently long periods of isolation fromwomen. Oda Nobunaga, for example, who sired numerous sonsand daughters, was also noted for his fondness for handsome boys,
and popular belief has it that he was assassinated by Akechi Mitsuhide because he had promised to reward his favorite page with a fief
which happened to belong to Akechi at the time. Many other leading warriors had similar interests, and Mariko is absolutely right in
implying that homosexual behavior was never viewed as sinful or
improper.
With the establishment of the Tokugawa peace after 1615, organized male prostitution flourished along with its female counterpart, particularly under the reign of the third shogun Iemitsu,
whose preference for men was coincidentally much like that of his
near-contemporary, James I of England. Iemitsu even jeopardized
the continuation of the Tokugawa bloodline with his exclusive interest in males until, persuaded at last by his loyal wet nurse Kasuga to
do his duty, he took a wife and, eventually, seven consorts. The
shogunate cracked down on male prostitution after Iemitsu’s deathin 1651, less from specific disapproval of homosexual practices thanfrom a feeling that any conspicuous indulgence in pleasure was bad
for the morale of the samurai class. A period of tolerance and evenencouragement then followed during the rule of the eccentric fifth
shogun Tsunayoshi (r. 1680-1709), whose homosexual behavior wasconsidered scandalous only because he attempted to promote someof his male favorites into positions of power. It was in Tsunayoshi’s
reign that the great writer of fiction of this era, Ihara Saikaku, who
had until then devoted himself exclusively to depictions of heterosexual love for a townsman audience, wrote a collection of stories ofsamurai love entitled Nanshoku ǀkagami (The Great Mirror of
Manly Love, 1687), perhaps in a calculated effort to appeal to asamurai readership.
Although in general homosexual love was merely accepted without censure among the samurai, one does find in certain instances apositive and even idealistic justification of homosexual practice as
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as a sort of tutorship in Bushido, with the younger lover imitating
the older in the cultural and martial arts, much as among the warriors of ancient Sparta. In particular, such relationships were considered invaluable for teaching the virtue of loyalty, and samurai
lovers generally proved dependable comrades in battle, loyal vassals, and trustworthy bureaucrats. The text most revealing of thisidea is Hagakure, an early eighteenth-century collection of reflections on the way of the samurai (see Chapter 10). In one passage, asamurai master “who understood the foundation of homosexuality[shudǀ, ‘the way of young men’]” is asked to summarize his understanding: “It is something both pleasant and unpleasant.” Heelaborates:

12 Raw Fish and a Hot Bath: Dilemmas of Daily LifeHenry Smith

To lay down one’s life for another is the basic principle of homosexuality.
If it is not so, it becomes a matter of shame. However, then you have nothing left to lay down for your master. It is therefore to be understood assomething both pleasant and unpleasant. (William Scott Wilson, trans.,
Hagakure, p. 59)

It is interesting that this conception of samurai love for one
another corresponds surprisingly well to Mariko’s expositions of
the true meaning of love in Japan, as for example:“Pillowing always has its price. Always. Not necessarily money, Anjin-san.
But a man pays for pillowing in one way, or in another. True love, we call it
duty, is of soul to soul and needs no such expression—no physical expression, except perhaps the gift of death.” (p. 555)

This idealistic interpretation finds reaffirmation in the views ofMishima Yukio, the modern Japanese novelist who was profoundly
influenced by the ideas of Hagakure on love and death and who wasin the end to die by seppuku with a young man acting as his second.
Three years before his death, in a book-length commentary on
Hagakure, Mishima wrote: “Romantic love as seen by Jǀchǀ [theauthor of Hagakure] is always reinforced by death. One must die forlove, and death heightens love’s tension and purity. This is the ideal
love for Hagakure” (Mishima, The Way of the Samurai, trans.
Kathryn Sparling, pp. 23-4). In these words we can sense a certain
affinity between Mishima Yukio and James Clavell in their common
idealization of the samurai tradition for its relevance in modern life.
It remains only to stress that scholarship in both Japan and theWest has so far provided us with no more than a tentative understanding of the many complex issues in the history of sexual attitudes and behavior in Japan. By insistently raising these issues,Shǀgun encourages us to ask new questions and seek new answers
in the effort to develop a comparative history of human sexuality.

For visitors to an alien culture, the most pressing dilemmas stemfrom the mundane mechanics of daily life: eating, dressing, sleeping, washing, and getting about. And so with Blackthorne, who is
as perplexed by Japanese customs as by such abstractions as wa andkarma. Here again we can detect an unmistakable sermon by James
Clavell, having as its major themes the perils of meat-eating and thevirtues of bathing. If life in Southern California is any indicator of
current American culture, the message should strike a sympathetic
chord with many readers of Shǀgun. It was here in Santa Barbara,for instance, that the “California hot tub,” a cultural amalgam of
the Japanese bath and Sunset life-style, was born. And few Californians—or indeed New Yorkers—will have trouble identifying the“slivers of raw fish on balls of tacky rice” in Shǀgun (p. 150) as theincreasingly popular Japanese dish of sushi. So also will the growing band of vegetarians in America find powerful support for theircause in the meatless diet preached by Mariko.
The historian as well finds these cross-cultural dilemmas of daily
life intriguing. At one level, they reveal basic differences in religious
belief and philosophical outlook among different cultures. At thesame time, such matters as diet and hygiene—closely related as they
are to population change, patterns of nutrition, and the incidenceof disease—are of concern to the social historian. Unfortunately,

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the systematic study of such topics is still in its infancy among historians of Japan, and is made especially difficult for the era ofShǀgun by the widespread destruction of records for that period, in
contrast to the relatively rich documentation available for Europe.
One unique source of evidence, however, does survive in Europe
itself, the detailed and often perceptive accounts of European visitors to Japan at the time. Particularly useful because of their comparative insights, these European accounts (of which a fine crosssection may be found in Michael Cooper’s anthology, They Came to
Japan) were also of evident use to James Clavell in writing Shǀgun.
The Population Riddle
Diet and hygiene are intimately related to the fundamental question of how many people are being supported by a given amount of
resources. It is here that we encounter our first big stumbling block,for we have only the haziest idea of the population of Japan in theyear 1600. There are theories, to be sure. The conventional view is
voiced by Shǀgun’s Rodrigues, who, in providing the newcomer
Blackthorne with a comparative overview (p. 192), indicates thatthe population of “twenty-odd million Japmen” amounted to“more than the population of all Portugal, all Spain, all France, theSpanish Netherlands, and England added together, and you could
almost throw in the whole Holy Roman Empire as well to equal it.”
Turning to such a recent work as Colin McEvedy and Richard
Jones’ Atlas of World Population History (1978), we find that thenormally bombastic Rodrigues is only slightly exaggerating. For
the year 1600. the atlas gives Japan’s population as 22 million, andthe combined total for the five nations mentioned comes to lessthan 27 million; only by throwing in the Holy Roman Empire, witha population of 20 million, was he wide of the mark.
Confident of his sources, Rodrigues assures the astonished Blackthorne, “Why should I lie? There was a census ten years ago. Father
Alvito said the Taikǀ ordered it and he should know, he was there.”In historical fact, Hideyoshi did indeed order a national survey ofboth land and people in 1591, but it was never carried out except inscattered domains. Thus we have no official contemporary recordof Japan’s national population in 1600. The figure of 22 million in
McEvedy and Jones’ atlas is apparently derived from an estimate
made for the period 1572-93 by Japanese historian Yoshida Tǀgǀin the 1930s; on the basis of official rice production figures in koku,
Yoshida came up with a national population figure of 18.5 million.
But contemporary scholarship has been critical of the questionableassumptions upon which Yoshida based this estimate; a different
approach recently tried yielded the much lower figure of 12.3 million
for 1600. (For a discussion of the issue, see Susan Hanley and Kozo

Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial
Japan, 1600-1868, pp. 43-45.)
These conflicting population estimates have important implications for the issue of population change. The first national census
figure which we have for Japan is 26 million for the commoner population in 1721; if we add ten-odd per cent (a rough guess) for thesamurai class, the national total would be in the range of 30 million. Comparing this figure with the traditional estimate for 1600 of
approximately 20 million, we see that the population of Japan musthave been growing steadily during the seventeenth century. And if
we were to accept the revised estimate of about 12 million for 1600,
this would indicate an extraordinary pace of growth for a traditional society. Whichever way, Japan’s population was clearly
expanding in the era of Shǀgun, a fact corroborated by documented
increases in the productivity of agriculture and in the area of land
under cultivation.
Even with room for growth in 1600, Japan by European standards
was already a very densely settled country. It is doubtful, however,that the Japanese themselves, whose usual standard of comparison
would surely have been China, felt uniquely populous. Still, Mariko’s statement would basically hold: “We’re a frugal people—wehave to be, only so little of our land, perhaps a fifth of our soil, canbe cultivated—and we’re many. With us it’s a virtue to be frugal,
even in the amount of food we eat” (p. 365). European accounts ofthe time confirm the frugality of the Japanese, although it should
be stressed that among the samurai class this reflected less a sensitivity to limited resources than an ethic of dietary restraint common
to many military elites. Only later, especially in the twentieth century, did the Japanese come to have the acute sense of ecologicallimits implied by Mariko.
Another important dimension of population change in Japanaround the year 1600 was the dramatic expansion of the urban sector, thanks to the boom in castle-town building by the daimyo.
Indeed, the century 1550-1650 in Japan was one of the most intensive periods of city-building known in world history, and one about
which historians still have much to learn. The contrast with Europe
is effectively conveyed by Blackthorne’s reaction on viewing Osakafrom a distance: “I thought London was the biggest city on earth,but compared to Osaka it’s a small town” (p. 189). Blackthorne
exaggerates, of course, as does Rodrigues in response (“They’ve
got dozens of cities like this one”), but not by much. In every
domain of Japan in this era, substantial cities were under construction, many with populations in excess of ten thousand. To man thismassive building operation, the various daimyo had to recruit large

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numbers of laborers, artisans, and merchants, most of them fromthe countryside.
Never Meat?
Clavell’s nicely drawn contrast of the eating habits of the Western“barbarians” with those of their Japanese hosts in Shǀgun dramatizes an issue of fascination to the anthropologist and historianalike. On the one hand, we have the Japanese practice, as capsulized
by Mariko: “We don’t eat foods like you do, so our cooking is more
simple. Just rice and a little fish, raw mostly, or cooked over charcoal with a sharp sauce and pickled vegetables, a little soup perhaps. No meat—never meat” (p. 365), And so all of Blackthorne’s
meals in the novel follow this plain pattern, “a sparse meal, neversatisfying and never meat” (p. 531).
On the other hand, we have the European diet, typically described
as an orgy of alcohol and cholesterol, best depicted in the scene inwhich the overindulgent Blackthorne “lay in a semicoma on thefloor, retching his innards out.” There on the table lay the cause of
his misery, “the remains of a mutilated haunch of roast beef, bloodrare, half the carcass of a spitted chicken, torn bread and cheeseand spilled beer, butter and a dish of cold bacon-fat gravy, and ahalf-emptied bottle of brandy” (p. 427). Few readers will find thisvision of the Western diet an appetizing one, and here we may detect
a lecture on the errors of the contemporary West in overreliance on
animal fat and alcohol. Indeed, the West already seems anxious tolearn the lesson, as evidenced in the clear Oriental influence on
French nouvelle cuisine, in the vogue for “lightness” which has
swept through the American beverage market, and, of course, inthe growing popularity of Japanese food in the West.
But let us turn to history to ask, how great was the dietary contrast in the year 1600? In the accounts of Western observers at thetime, we find persuasive evidence that it was indeed great. Father
Valignano (the model for Father dell’Aqua) reported, for example,
that “Their victuals and ways of cooking them are such that they
are quite unlike European food, both in substance and taste. Untila man accustoms himself to their food, he is bound to experiencemuch hardship and difficulty.” As for the content of the diet,
Father Luis Frois’ description is close to that of Mariko’s: “Thisnation feedeth sparingly, their usual meat is rice and salads, and,near the sea side, fish.” (Cooper, They Came to Japan, pp. 192-3).
In certain matters of detail, however, the historian might wish toqualify the extremes found in Shǀgun, On the European side, forexample, the gross and unmannered eating habits of Blackthorne
and his shipmates seem more a mark of sailors’ behavior in a foreign port than of general European barbarism: even the common

people in the West would certainly have been more genteel in theirtable manners. Still, in matters of etiquette, the Japanese of thetime unfailingly impressed even the most cultured European visitors. No contrast was more impressive than the Japanese use ofchopsticks, never letting the fingers touch the food, as opposed to
the European practice of eating with the fingers.
When it comes to the eating of meat, we learn from French historian Fernand Braudel that European levels of consumption wereindeed unique. For the world in general, he points out, “man’s dietbetween the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries essentially consistedof vegetable foods,” but:
Europe, which was wholly carnivorous, was the great exception to all this.
For several centuries from the middle ages its tables had been loaded withmeat and drink, worthy of Argentina in the nineteenth century. This was
because the European countryside, beyond the Mediterranean shores, hadlong remained half empty with vast lands for pasturing animals. (Capitalism
and Material Life, 1400-1800, p. 67)

Braudel goes on to note that meat-eating declined in Europe in theseventeenth century under increasing population pressure and roseto the previous level only with the availability of salted and thenfrozen meat imports from America. This explanation of European
trends helps pinpoint two obvious ecological reasons for the lowlevel of meat consumption in Japan: the relatively high population
density since the medieval period and the shortage of land for pasturing animals.
In addition, as Mariko explains when offered a gravy-ladenchicken leg by a Portuguese sailor, there were strong cultural constraints as well: “To eat meat—to eat meat is forbidden. It’s against
the law, and against Buddhism and Shintoism” (p. 426). In reality,
however, the situation was not that simple. There were no explicit“laws” against eating meat, but there were religious restrictions.
Shinto, the indigenous Japanese religion, did not specifically forbid
the eating of meat, although the Shinto abhorrence of blood pollution probably discouraged it. Buddhism, however, clearly banned
the eating of meat as a corollary of its general prohibition against
the taking of life. Although the avoidance of animal flesh (including fish) was practiced faithfully only by the Buddhist clergy, such
beliefs strongly influenced the Heian aristocracy in the form of ataboo against eating any four-legged animals—birds were always adifferent matter. Kyoto nobles were known to indulge from time totime in venison or wild boar meat for “medicinal purposes,” buton the whole the taboo was scrupulously observed.
It was a very different matter with the samurai and indeed with all
Japanese outside the tiny court aristocracy at Kyoto, As a hunting

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class, the samurai had always consumed their prey and continued
to do so in the era of Shǀgun. Animal flesh was in fact greatly
prized by samurai and formed a regular part of their diet whenavailable; some historians have even related the dynamism of theJapanese warrior to a diet rich in animal protein. European reports
in the era of Shǀgun confirm the widespread consumption of wild
game in Japan, as for example Don Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco,
governor of the Philippines, who visited Edo in 1608 and observed“the market where game is sold: there was a vast quantity of rabbits, hares, wild boars, deer, goats, and other animals, which I
never saw before” (Rundall, Memorials of the Empire of Japan,
p. 176). To this list might be added such delicacies as bear, otter,and raccoon dog.
Don Rodrigo continues with an important qualification: “TheJapanese rarely eat any flesh but that of game, which they hunt.”
Although horses and oxen were widely (and, in this period, increasingly) used in Japan as beasts of burden, they were rarely eaten.
There were exceptions, of course. In the Edo period, for example,
horsemeat was prized under the euphemism of “sakura-niku”(“cherry-blossom meat,” after its color), and several of the specialty
restaurants that served it survive in downtown Tokyo today. Closer
to the era of Shǀgun were reports of daimyo who experimented witheating beef. We have proof that Hosokawa Tadaoki, the model for
Buntaro, ate beef on at least one occasion: it is recorded that Hideyoshi, after his victory over the Hǀjǀ at Odawara in 1590, treatedsome of his daimyo allies, including Tadaoki and his friend Takayama Ukon, to a celebratory feast of beef. But this was a passing
fad, and the Japanese were not again to consume beef in any conspicuous way until the Meiji period (1868-1912), when beef-eating
again became a craze and eventually a normal (but minor) part of
the Japanese diet, particularly in the Meiji invention known as“sukiyaki.”
We must also stress that, except among the Buddhist clergy, theprohibition against eating meat referred only to four-legged animals. It obviously never applied to fish, which have always provided
the overwhelming bulk of animal protein in the Japanese diet, butneither did it apply to birds. Indeed, fowl ranked only slightly below
fish as the most prized food in the era of Shǀgun. Japanese of allclasses, including the Kyoto aristocracy, have always been fond of
bird flesh and it seems safe to say that almost no winged species
was safe from being served up on the tables of traditional Japan.
Pheasant in particular was considered a great delicacy, and Mariko’s reluctance to sample such a representative dish as “small
pheasant, cut into tiny pieces, barbecued over charcoal with a sweet
soya sauce” (p. 688) can be explained only as a peculiar personal

preference: it was certainly not a national trait. Even European visitors were astonished by the variety of fowl consumed by the Japanese, although here we find the same qualification as with fourlegged animals: as an early observer noted, “they never eat hens,because, as it seems to me. they breed them and they never eat anything they breed” (Cooper, They Came to Japan, p. 191). It wasless the eating of meat than the raising of animals to be eaten whichmost clearly set the Europeans apart from the Japanese.
During the seventeenth century, the eating of meat was probably
on the decline in Japan, both because of increasing population pressure on available game reserves and because of the separation of
the samurai from the land and hence from easily accessible hunting
grounds. Not until the resumption of Western influence in the latenineteenth century did the Japanese begin to raise animals for food,and even then economic constraints made red meat impractical
except as a luxury item. It has only been in the past two decades,with the rapid rise in living standards, that a dramatic increase in
the eating of meat has occurred in Japan, and even now the Japanese remain a people nourished primarily by rice, fish, and vegetables. In this sense, not much has changed since the era of Shǀgun.
Staples and Frills
From the European point of view in 1600, the most peculiar feature of the Japanese diet may have been its heavy reliance on rice as
the overwhelmingly favored staple. Rice had for centuries been themain crop in Japan, and its high nutritional value and ease of storage made it the mainstay of the economy. Only with increases in
productivity in the medieval period, however, were the majority ofJapanese able to eat rice on a daily basis. Still, much of the peasantry was too poor to eat rice alone and often mixed it with millet,
barley, and beans. The rice of the era of Shǀgun was unpolishedbrown rice, or at best semi-polished for the courtier class. The
thorough polishing that produces the “white rice” we know today
became possible only with technological developments of the later
Edo period—bringing with it a marked increase in the incidence ofberi-beri.
To the extent that reliance on rice was heavy, the Japanese diet
was indeed, as Mariko suggested, “simple.” And the diet of thesamurai in particular was “frugal” in that they were morally discouraged from overindulgence of any kind. For the rest of the population, however, frugality was less a virtue than a necessity, as it
was for most people in the premodern world. One should add thatJapanese of all classes strove to supplement their diet of rice andother grains with a great diversity of vegetables, seaweeds, nuts,
fruits, mushrooms, seafood, and game: in this sense, the Japanese

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diet was far from “simple.” The banquet menus of the samurai
were incredibly varied in ingredients, in visual arrangement, and inmethods of preparation—including grilling, sauteeing, deep-frying,boiling, steaming, drying, smoking, salting, and pickling.
Because of their regular contact with Europeans, many Japanesein the era of Shǀgun became interested in imported foods and foreign cuisine. Many American readers of Shǀgun will have recognized the “bamboo basket of deep-fried fish in Portuguese style”(p. 320) as tempura, although few may have realized the Portuguese
influence on the creation of the dish. The word “tempura” itself isof European origin, probably from the Portuguese temporas, the“Ember days” of abstinence on which meat was replaced by fish.
Tempura apparently became quite popular in Kyoto in the 1610s, as
one sad story suggests. In early 1616, the aging Tokugawa Ieyasu
heard of the latest Kyoto delicacy, seabream deep-fried in sesameoil, and immediately ordered it prepared for his table. The aging
samurai ate more than usual, and four hours later began to suffer
sharp intestinal pains. Although historians believe that Ieyasu wasalready terminally ill with stomach cancer, his death not long after
has always been linked anecdotally with the eating of tempura!
The seventeenth century was a period of unprecedented international exchange of food plants, and foreign traders brought manyother new foods to Japan at this time—some from other parts ofAsia, some from Europe, and some from the New World. Many of
the Japanese names for these foods reflect their foreign origin.
Squash was called kabocha from association with Cambodia; potatoes seem to have been linked to the trade with Jakarta, for they were
known as jaga-imo (imo being any edible tuber); a sweet poundcake
which is still highly prized in Japan was called castella, after the Portuguese word for “Spain” (cf. Castille); and the sweet potato cameto be known as the satsuma-imo because it was imported from the
Ryukyu Islands via the southernmost domain of Satsuma. Some of
the imports, such as potatoes and bread (known as pan, after thePortuguese pão), never really caught on until the renewed fad forthings Western in the Meiji period. But others, like yams and watermelons, came to be widely cultivated under the Tokugawa regime.
The exchange of stimulants was another aspect of trade in thisperiod. The major East Asian export in this category was of coursetea, although it became popular in Europe only later in the seventeenth century. As reflected in Shǀgun, the drinking of tea wasnearly universal in Japan by the 1600s. Originally imported from
China, it had occasionally been used by the Heian aristocracy, but
it was not until the thirteenth century that, with the encouragementof Zen monks, tea-drinking became common in Japan. As for European influences on Japan, tobacco would certainly head the list,

and it is surprising to find no mention of its use in Shǀgun, because
it was “welcomed and adopted with an almost frenzied enthusiasm”
after its introduction in the 1590s (Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural
History, p. 433). Despite disapproval by Confucian moralists andoccasional bans by the shogunate (the earliest in 1609, a full decade
before James I’s crackdown in England), tobacco came to be afamiliar commodity in Tokugawa Japan.
Cross-cultural influences in the area of alcoholic drinks are lessconspicuous, perhaps because both Japanese and Europeans were
too attached to their own preferred varieties. For the most part,samurai stuck to sake, although a number of daimyo are on record
as having experimented with brandy, whiskey, and wine. We evenhave one account of a group of daimyo sipping red wine following
a tea ceremony! (If that sounds like an implausible combination,
consider the “original blend of sake and white-grape wine” which
Suntory International tested in the American market in early 1980
under the name of—you guessed it—”Shǀgun.”)
And What About Raw Fish?
Near the end of Shǀgun, Blackthorne hears the voice of his
departed lover Mariko speaking to him, gently urging him on to cultural understanding: “Oh, Anjin-san, one day perhaps we’ll even
get you to like raw fish and then you’ll be on the road to nirvana—
the Place of Perfect Peace.” Blackthorne’s problem is shared bymany in the West today: “raw fish” has emerged as a symbol for all
those things in Japanese culture which Westerners find particularly
difficult to assimilate. Logically, we might ask why this should be
so. Don’t we eat clams and oysters on the half shell, a feat morechallenging by common-sense standards than slipping down a pieceof tuna sushi? But no matter: until they try it, most Westerners tend
to be horrified by the idea of eating raw fish, and most Japanesehappily reciprocate with an unshakable conviction that only themost peculiar foreigner can master this unique custom.
It is the business of the anthropologist to figure out why raw fish
should be such a potent mark of Japanese exclusivity. The historiancan simply confirm that the Japanese have indeed eaten fish raw, orat least near-raw, for centuries. Francesco Carletti, an Italian visitor to Japan in the late 1590s, observed that the Japanese “usuallyeat [fish] in a practically raw state, after having dipped it in boiling
vinegar” (Cooper, They Came to Japan, p. 191). Carletti probably
exaggerates in claiming that the Japanese “usually” ate fish raw,
for records show that various forms of cooking and curing weremore common. Since it is dangerous to eat fish raw unless it is perfectly fresh (particularly in the summer), raw fish in both traditionaland contemporary Japan has always been something of a delicacy.

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In being served “raw fish, as always” (p. 594), Blackthorne wasbeing treated like a special guest.
Actually, the majority of fish dishes in traditional Japan which a
Westerner would have described as “raw” were in fact pickled insalt or vinegar. The two most common terms for raw fish were sushi
and namasu, both of which are probably related etymologically tosu, “vinegar.” Sushi, for example, seems to have originated as amethod of preserving fish by natural fermentation, either by mixing it with rice or simply by salting it lightly. The sushi which has
become so popular in America today—perfectly raw fish layered onvinegared rice—was concocted in the city of Edo in the late Tokugawa period as a way of showing off the freshness of the produce of
Edo Bay. The dish of plain raw fish seasoned with soy sauce known
as sashimi is of older origin and seems to have just been coming
into fashion in the 1600s.
“You’re All So Clean!”
Much like “raw fish,” the “Japanese bath” has become a symbol of something very difficult to approach—but absolute nirvana
once you get used to it. For Americans today, the greatest anxiety
associated with the Japanese bath seems to be caused by a lingering
Victorian resistance to mixed bathing. Many nineteenth-century
Western visitors to Japan were scandalized by mixed bathing, and it
was in part their disapproval which led the Japanese to gradually
abandon the custom. But even though mixed bathing survives inJapan today only in remote villages, the Western response lives on,
now transformed from moral indignation to sheepish inhibition—asdemonstrated by a recent television commercial in which a young
American couple (the kind that has just lost their travelers checks)
is paralyzed with embarrassment to find a Japanese gentleman in
the bath with them.
For Blackthorne, however, the bath provoked a rather different
reaction, a sort of cultural resistance to cleanliness which we are led
to understand was characteristic of Elizabethan England. By theend of Shǀgun, the reader is left with an image of the filthy, liceinfested Europeans sharply contrasted to the immaculate, sweetscented Japanese. Blackthorne of course eventually learns his lesson: midway through the novel, as he is reflecting on the squalid
living conditions back in England, he blurts out to Mariko, “Whata stinking bloody waste! . . . you’re all so clean and we’re filthy
and it’s such a waste, countless millions, me too, all my life . . .
and only because we don’t know better!” (pp. 697-8).
What light does history shed on this contrast? On the Europeanside, we find that the year 1600 indeed represented something of alow point in the vicissitudes of bathing, and nowhere was it lower

than in England. We must note that the history of bathing rarely
exhibits steady progress from barbarous filth to civilized
hygiene, but rather a constant series of ups and downs,
depending on religious attitudes, the availability of water, andsimple fashion. Everyone knows, for example, of the astonishingsophistication of the Roman public baths, a reflection of anadvanced hydraulic technology and a cultural interest in the morehedonistic aspects of bathing. Public bathing thus became a wellestablished tradition in the Mediterranean world, particularly in
Islamic cultures. Who has not heard of the “Turkish” bath?
With such a strong tradition of bathing in the Mediterranean
and Near East, why were the English in 1600 so averse to thehabit? One factor was the antagonism of the Church to Romanstyle public bathing as licentious and hedonistic—which indeed
it often was. But even the Church seems not to have been able toprevent a widespread revival of bathing in medieval Europe.
Why then did a decline occur again from about the fifteenth
century? Fernand Braudel offers this explanation:
The West experienced a significant regression from the point of view of bodybaths and bodily cleanliness from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
Naked public bathing was general for both sexes in the middle ages. The
public baths disappeared, we are told, as a result of sixteenth-century contagions and of the terrible syphilis: At Frankfurt-am-Main they decreased
to nine in 1530 from thirty-nine in 1387. Was this the result of fear or becauseof a new modesty? We cannot make a clear division. In any case the wholeidea of bathing began gradually to disappear in the West at the same time as
the public bath . . . . However, public baths were retained in Finland andRussia, even in villages, with a sort of medieval innocence. They reappearedin the West in the seventeenth century, but public baths at that time meantmuch the same as brothels for rich clients. (Capitalism and Material Life,
1400-1800, p. 240)

These speculations are reflected in the attitude of Blackthorne, who
resists his first bath for fear of dysentery (p. 51). But as stressed by
Sandra Piercy in Chapter 4, the English were not inalterably opposed
to bathing, and in the Elizabethan era the famous waters at Bathand elsewhere continued to attract those in search of cures. Still,there can be little doubt that the English were not, in general, abathing people in 1600.
What about the Japanese? In terms of religious belief, the Japanese have always been well-disposed to bathing, as Mariko suggests
when she tells Blackthorne that “The bath is a gift to us from God
or the gods, a god-bequeathed pleasure to be enjoyed and treated assuch” (p. 527). But the real religious justification was considerably
less hedonistic than Mariko implies. In Shinto belief, bathing was amatter neither of pleasure nor of personal cleanliness, but rather a123

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symbolic act of ritual purification. Daily bathing was thus not areligious necessity for the Japanese. Among the Heian aristocracy of
the tenth century, “bathing, at best a rather perfunctory process,could take place only once in five days—and then only if the day
was auspicious” (Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince, p.
140). Heian records indicate that the ceremonial bathing of newborn
children was a matter of considerably greater concern than was daily
bathing for hygienic reasons. Nor is there any evidence of publicbaths in the capital at this time.
It was probably Buddhist rather than Shinto influence that contributed most directly to the spread of both personal and publicbathing in Japan after the Heian period. Cleanliness was highly valued for both ritual and practical purposes in the Buddhist monasteries, which generally had a separate building for the bath. The
timing is unclear, but it would appear that the habit of daily bathing
was gaining popularity most rapidly in Japan in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, particularly in the cities—at precisely the timethat bathing was passing through its “regression” in Europe. The
contrast of bathing habits depicted in Shǀgun thus may represent
more an historical coincidence than a fundamental cultural dichotomy between “filthy” Europeans and “clean” Japanese.
From paintings, from European accounts, and from one surviving
Momoyama-period bath in a Kyoto temple, we know that the
predominant type of Japanese bath in 1600 was the steam bath, notthe soaking tub enjoyed by Blackthorne, which became dominant
about a century later. The bath consisted of a small wooden chamber,entered through a low door, with steam rising through a slatted floor.
Men normally wore loincloths in the bath, and women entered inunderskirts. After sweating loose the dirt, a bather would have bathattendants scrape the skin with bamboo sticks (in much the same way
the Romans used curved metal tools) and rinse off the remaining dirtwith wooden buckets of water. The soap lavished on Blackthorne inShǀgun would have been unusual; soap was a recent import to Japan
from Europe (first mentioned in a 1596 letter by Ishida Mitsunari, themodel for Ishido) and was such a luxury that it would probably nothave been wasted on a visiting barbarian. For cleansing, the Japanesetraditionally used lime, lye, clay, soapberry, and, for the hair, egg
whites mixed with flour or volcanic ash. As in Europe, the publicbaths in the cities of Japan often doubled as houses of prostitution.
The female bath attendants (yuna) were eventually banned bymoralistic Tokugawa officials and replaced by men, known assansuke, whose back-scrubbing services disappeared from the publicbaths of Japan only in the 1960s.
We still know very little about the precise dynamics of the evolution of bathing into the refined and widespread custom that it had

already become among the Japanese by the seventeenth century. It
is likely that the increased popularity of bathing owed much to thebuilding of the castle towns, where concentrated populations created a demand for public baths and where, thanks to efficient city
planning, water was plentiful and uncontaminated. As for theeffects of frequent bathing, we may speculate that superior Japanese bodily cleanliness, in conjunction with the practice of recycling
human wastes for fertilizer (see Shǀgun, p. 533), helped reduce thefrequency and severity of epidemics in Japan. For although theJapanese did suffer the ravages of dysentery, smallpox, and influenza, on the whole the impact of communicable disease seems tohave been less than in medieval Europe. Contact with the Westbrought new diseases to Japan: syphilis (the “Chinese pox” ofShǀgun) arrived as early as 1512 (over three decades before theEuropeans themselves!), smallpox after 1822, and the bubonic
plague later in the nineteenth century.
Ritual Pollution
Just as the ritual ablution stressed in both Shinto and Buddhism
helped encourage the habit of bathing, so its obverse, a belief in
ritual pollution, fostered a much less admired feature of Japanesesociety, the outcastes known in Shǀgun as “eta.” This connection
is made clear in one of the most effective scenes in the novel, in
which Blackthorne (who by now “knows better”) visits his Dutch
shipmates in the eta sector of Edo—the place they feel most at
home. This is a marvelous play on the reversal of cultural values, bywhich those things most despised by the Japanese (filth and meat)are precisely what the Europeans find most congenial.
Just as purification rituals influenced the development of bathingin Japan, so also various religious convictions, from the Shinto
abhorrence of death to the Buddhist proscription against the killingof animals, laid the basis for the evolution of the outcaste class.
Because of these taboos, such tasks as the butchering of animals
and the manufacture of animal products came to be relegated to
specialized groups. It was during the tenth to twelfth centuries thatorganized discrimination began, with the Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples overseeing the segregation of the tasks in question. In
the Tokugawa period, the eta were in charge of disposing of thedead at execution grounds, as described in Shǀgun. Despite an active
liberation movement over the past several decades, there is still an
outcaste class in modern Japan. The term “eta” is highly pejorativein contemporary Japan, and has been replaced by various euphemisms, of which the most common is burakumin (“villagers”).
The eta class as conveyed in Shǀgun seems more like an ethnic
minority than the ritually and professionally segregated class that125

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they in fact were. It seems unlikely, for example, that the Japaneseof the time would have used the word “eta” as a curse, and certainly
not as frequently as do the characters in Shǀgun. In all probability,
actually saying the word would have been avoided. One must also
remember that ritual pollution does not necessarily mean literalpollution, so that the sentiment of one of the Dutch sailors that
“Eters’re the best heathen we’ve seen here. More like us than theother bastards” (p. 870) is not entirely plausible: it is likely thatJapanese outcastes would have been just as mystified by the Europeans’ love of meat and fear of baths as were other Japanese.
So as Blackthorne takes leave of his unregenerate crewmen, who
are most at ease among the most despised in Japan, we can understand how much “his mind was locked with confusion. Nothing was
wrong with eta and everything was wrong with eta” (p. 871). But
finally, of course, he breaks down and opts for the Japanese way:“Jesus God, I’d love a bath right now!”

Who’s Who in Shǀgun

This list includes all the major characters in Shǀgun and, in addition, most of the minor characters for whom there are clear historical models. Most of the models are only approximate, and might bebetter understood as “sources of inspiration”; James Clavell himself
has indicated that he sometimes drew on more than one historicalpersonage to create a single character. The page numbers in italics
indicate where characters are introduced or their backgrounds
described in Shǀgun (Dell paperback edition); all other page andchapter references are to Learning from Shǀgun.
Akechi Jinsai (father of Mariko and assassin of Goroda; pp. 599,
1199) § Akechi Mitsuhide (1526-82), daimyo and assassin of Oda
Nobunaga; father of Hosokawa Gracia. See pp. 63, 111.
Alvito, Father Martin (“Tsukku”; Jesuit priest and interpreter
for Toranaga; pp. 162, 191, 301 ff.) § João Rodrigues, S.J.
(1561?-1633), known as “Tçuzzu” in Momoyama dialect; interpreter for both Hideyoshi and Ieyasu. See pp. 47, 53, 83. Rodrigues
was the author of an authoritative book about Japanese culture,translated by Michael Cooper as This Island of Japan. For a detailed
biography, see Michael Cooper, Rodrigues the Interpreter: An
Early Jesuit in Japan and China.
Beppu Genzaemon (lord of Odawara, defeated by Nakamura andToranaga; p. 476) § Hǀjǀ Ujimasa (1536-90), daimyo of Odawara, defeated by Hideyoshi with Ieyasu’s aid in 1590. See p. 45.

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Blackthorne, John (English Pilot-Major of the Erasmus; pp. 16,
133, 553) § William Adams (1564-1620), English pilot of the De
Liefde, arrived in Japan in 1600, came to be known to the Japaneseas Miura Anjin. See Chapter 1. The most detailed biography ofAdams is P. G. Rogers, The First Englishman in Japan.
Braganza, Friar (Franciscan priest whose tale is related by Friar
Domingo; pp. 238-240) § St. Pedro Bautista (Blanquez), O.F.M.
(1542-97), martyred at Nagasaki in February 1597. See p. 48.
[Toda] Buntaro (husband of Mariko and son of Hiromatsu; pp. 346,
586, 619) § Hosokawa Tadaoki (1563-1645), son of Yǌsai and husband of Gracia; a leading ally of Tokugawa Ieyasu. See pp. 63-70,
91, 95.
Caradoc, Alban (English shipbuilder and pilot, Blackthorne’st e a c h e r ; p . 16) § N i c h o l a s D i g g i n s , a we l l - k n o w n s h i p b u i l d e rof Elizabethan England, under whom William Adams served asapprentice. See p. 3.
Chano-Tsubone (Naga’s mother; pp. 740, 883) § Saigo-noTsubone, consort of Ieyasu and mother of his fourth son Tadayoshi (see Naga). The name in the novel appears to come from Chaa-no-Tsubone, another of Ieyasu’s consorts and the mother ofTadateru (see Tadateru).
[Yoshi] Chikitada (Toranaga’s grandfather; p. 76) § Kiyoyasu,
Ieyasu’s grandfather, who was killed at age twenty-five; for the historical incident, see Sadler, The Maker of Modern Japan, pp. 38,
95. “Chikitada” seems to be modelled on the name of Ieyasu’s
great-great-great-grandfather Chikatada.
Chimmoko (Mariko’s maid; p. 791), Fictional. The name is unusual
in Japanese and was perhaps inspired by the word chimmoku(“silence,” the title of Endǀ Shǌsaku’s well-known novel on Christianity in early seventeenth-century Japan); it also bears a strong
resemblance to chimpoko, a l i t t l e boy’s word for his penis, which
may explain why the name was changed to Chimoko in the filmscript for television.
dell’Aqua, Father Carlo (Jesuit Father-Visitor of Asia; p. 302)
§ Alessandro Valignano, S.J. (1539-1606), an Italian Jesuit who in
1574 became Visitor-General to the missions in Asia and visited
Japan on three occasions (1579-82, 1590-92, 1598-1603). See pp. 47,
52. 110.

Doming o, Friar (Franciscan friar whom Blackthorn e meets inprison; p. 231). Fictional.
Elizabeth (Blackthorne’s daughter; p. 719) § the daughter ofWilliam Adams, whom he left behind in England, whose name isgiven in East India Company records as “Deliverance.” See pp. 3, 5.
Felicity (Blackthorne’s wife; p. 697) § William Adams’ wife,
whose maiden name was Hyn, and whose given name was probably
either Mary or Elizabeth. See pp. 2-5.
Ferriera, Captain General (Captain of the Portuguese Black Shipfrom Macao; p. 302). No direct model; the historical CaptainMajor for the Great Ship from Macao in 1600 was Horatio Neretti,
acting on behalf of the Governor of Macao, Dom Paulo de Portugal; the voyage has been described as “most successful and profitable” (Charles Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, p. 46).
[Usagi] Fujiko (Mariko’s niece, widow of Usagi, and eventuallyBlackthorne’s consort; pp. 395, 443, 656). Fictional. See pp. 84,103.
Fujimoto (a samurai clan; p. 73) § apparently the Fujiwara, who
historically were not a military family, but rather the most powerful clan in the Kyoto court aristocracy during the Heian period(ninth to twelfth centuries). See p. 55.
Genjiko, Lady (wife of Sudara and sister of Ochiba; pp. 279, 517)
§ Asai Ogǀ (or Kogǀ), wife of Tokugawa Hidetada and later
known as Sǀgen’in. See pp. 105-106.
Go-Nijo (the reigning emperor of Japan; p. 368) § Go-Yǀzei
(1571-1617), the 107th emperor of Japan (r. 1586-1611); the historical emperor Go-Nijǀ reigned 1301-08. The prefix “Go-” means“later” and indicates a second emperor of the same name. See p. 66.
Goroda (dictator of Japan, assassinated by Akechi Jinsai; pp. 215,600) § Oda Nobunaga (1534-^82), first of the three great unifiersof Japan in the sixteenth century, killed in a coup by Akechi Mitsuhide. See pp. 54-55, 63, 111.
Gyoko (Mama-san of the Tea House in Mishima; Kiku’s mistress;
pp. 98, 676). Fictional. See p. 109.
Harima Tadao (Christian daimyo of Hizen in Kyushu; pp. 239,964) § Arima Harunobu (1567-1612), the Christian daimyo of the129

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130

fief of Arima in Hizen, near Nagasaki (but not, as in the novel,
including it).
Heir, The. See Yaemon.
[Toda] Hiromatsu (daimyo of Sagami and Kozuke, old ally of
Toranaga; father of Buntaro; p. 119) § Hosokawa Fujitaka(1534-1610), daimyo of Tamba and leading cultural figure of hisday, better known by his artistic name “Yǌsai.” See pp. 63, 66-68.
Ikawa Tadazuki (daimyo of Suruga and Totomi who held Toranaga
hostage as a youth; father of Jikkyu; p. 223) § Imagawa Yoshimoto (1519-60), a leading daimyo in whose house Tokugawa Ieyasu
spent his childhood as a hostage; the Imagawa were defeated by
Oda Nobunaga at the Battle of Okehazama in 1560.
Ishido Kazunari (daimyo, one of the five Regents, implacable
enemy of Toranaga; pp. 213, 420) § Ishida Mitsunari (1560-1600),
the daimyo who organized the confederacy against Tokugawa
Ieyasu in 1600; the historical Ishida was not a Regent, but rather amember of a board of five “Commissioners.” He was executed in
Kyoto following the Battle of Sekigahara. See pp. 55-58.
[Ikawa] Jikkyu (Christian daimyo, enemy of Toranaga; son of
Tadazuki; pp. 60, 223). Fictional; the Imagawa clan had alreadybeen destroyed (see Ikawa Tadazuki).
Joseph, Brother. See Uraga-noh-Tadamasa.
Kiku (courtesan at the Tea House in Mishima, under the employ of
Gyoko; p. 98). Fictional. See pp. 108-110.
Kiritsubo-noh-Toshiko (“Kiri,” matron of Toranaga’s ladies-inwaiting; p. 222) § Acha-no-Tsubone (1555-1637), an early consort
and later a trusted political adviser of Tokugawa Ieyasu. See p. 104.
Kiyama, Lord (Christian daimyo, one of the five Regents; pp. 225,999) § roughly, Konishi Yukinaga (?-1600), leading Christian
daimyo who sided with Ishida Mitsunari at Sekigahara; the historical Konishi was not one of the Regents. See pp. 58, 61.
[Toda] Mariko (Christian wife of Toda Buntaro, secret love ofBlackthorne; pp. 259, 599-600) § Hosokawa Gracia (1563-1600),
wife of Tadaoki and leading Christian lady of Japan. See Chapters
7 and 11.

Michael, Brother (Japanese Jesuit acolyte; pp. 753, 1110) § Chijiwa Seizaemon (c. 1569-?), christened Don Michael, one of two
young nobles sent to Europe in 1582-7; also the model for “Brother
Joseph” (see Uraga-noh-Tadamasa).
Minikui (Toranaga’s vassal spy; p. 290). Fictional. The namemeans “ugly” and was changed to Sasuke in the television filmscript.
Minowara (an ancient military clan; p. 74) § the Minamoto, thewarrior clan which came to power in the late twelfth century andestablished the Kamakura shogunate; the first shogun, who is called“Yoshitomo” in Shǀgun, was Minamoto Yoritomo (1147-99). Tokugawa Ieyasu claimed Minamoto ancestry. See pp. 56, 96.
Mura (village headman of Anjiro, in reality a samurai spy for Toranaga named Akira Tonomoto; pp. 46, 220, 469, 1205). Fictional.
The name means “village” and was changed to “Muraji” in the television filmscript.
Naga (one of Toranaga’s sons, aged seventeen; pp. 198, 740) §Tokugawa Tadayoshi (1580-1608), fourth son of Ieyasu. See p. 59.
Nakamura (“The Taikǀ,” previous leader of Japan, died a year
before Blackthorne’s arrival in Japan; father of the Heir, Yaemon;
pp. 49, 51, 74, 190, 215, 337) § Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98),
second of the three great unifiers of sixteenth-century Japan; see
pp. 45, 48-49, 55, 63-64. For a biography, see Walter Dening, The
Life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
Noboru (eldest living son of Toranaga; suffers from the Chinesepox; pp. 227, 258) § Tokugawa Hideyasu (1574-1607), second sonof Ieyasu; died of syphilis at the age of thirty-four. See p. 59.
Nobunaga (Toranaga’s first and favorite son, forced to commit
seppuku at age nineteen; p. 658) § Tokugawa Nobuyasu (1558-78),
ordered to commit suicide at age nineteen because of his mother’sscheming (see Tachibana, Lady).
Ochiba, Lady (consort of the Taikǀ, mother of the Heir Yaemon;
pp. 216, 283, 517) § Asai Chacha (1567-1615), Hideyoshi’s favorite consort, known as “Lady Yodo”; mother of the Toyotomi heir
Hideyori. See pp. 55, 61, 105.
[Kasigi] Omi (samurai in charge of Anjiro, nephew of Yabu; pp. 33,
90). Fictional. See p. 53.

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Onoshi, Lord (Christian daimyo from Kyushu, one of the five
Regents; a leper; p. 225) § an apparent composite of the Christian
daimyo Konishi Yukinaga (also the model for Kiyama) and ƿtani
Yoshitsugu (1559-1600), who is thought to have suffered from leprosy, ƿtani, who sided with Ishida Mitsunari at Sekigahara, committed suicide during the battle. See p. 58.
Rodrigues, Vasco (Portuguese pilot; pp. 135, 142). Fictional.
Saruji (son and heir of Buntaro and Mariko; p. 635) § Hosokawa
Tadatoshi (1586-1641), heir of Tadaoki; later married a daughter ofthe shogun Hidetada (“Sudara” in the novel). See pp. 57, 69.

to death in 1579. For details of the incident, see Sadler, The Maker
of Modern Japan, Ch. IX.
Tadateru (Toranaga’s youngest son, aged seven; p. 740) §Tokugawa Tadateru (1592-1683), Ieyasu’s sixth son.
Taikǀ, The. See Nakamura.
Takashima (an ancient military clan; p. 74) § the Taira, the samurai clan which was defeated by the Minamoto in the Genpei War of1180-85.

Sazuko, Lady (Toranaga’s newest consort, aged seventeen; p. 280)
§ O-Kane, consort of Tokugawa Ieyasu and mother of Yoshinao(1600-50), Ieyasu’s seventh son, who was born two months after
the Battle of Sekigahara. See p. 60.

[Yoshi] Toranaga (Lord of the Kwanto, President of the Regents;
pp. 199, 656) § Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), unifier of Japanand first Tokugawa shogun. See pp. 2-6, 49-50, 57-61. For a detailed
biography, see Sadler, The Maker of Modern Japan: The Life ofShǀgun Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Sebastio, Father (Jesuit priest who interprets for Blackthorne inAnjiro; p. 30) § the unidentified “Portugall Iesuite” who confronted William Adams and his crew after their landing in Kyushu.
See pp. 4, 45.

Tudor (Blackthorne’s son; p. 547) § the son, name unknown,
whom William Adams left in England; since no son is mentioned in
Adams’ will of 1620, it is presumed that the son had died in themeantime. See p. 3.

Sen-no-Nakada (Japan’s most famous tea master; p. 773) § Senno-Rikyu, the great innovator and synthesizer of the tea ceremony.
See p. 66.
Spillbergen, Paulus (Captain-General of the Erasmus; p. 13)§ Jacob Quaeckernaeck (?-1606), Dutch captain of the De Liefde,
known as “Jap Quaeck.” He later joined a Dutch fleet and was
killed in a sea fight with the Portuguese. See p. 4.

Uraga-noh-Tadamasa (previously Brother Joseph, a Japanese Jesuit
acolyte who apostasized and became a retainer of Blackthorne’s;
pp. 750, 918, 1110) § Chijiwa Seizaemon (c. 1569-?), christened
Don Michael (hence also the apparent model for Brother Michael),sent to Europe in 1582-87 as representative of the Christian daimyo
Arima (see Harima Tadao) and ƿmura; he apostasized after his
return from Europe. See p. 47. For historical details, see Cooper,
Rodrigues the Interpreter.

Sudara (Toranaga’s second living son and heir, aged twenty-four;
pp. 227, 886) § Tokugawa Hidetada (1579-1632), Ieyasu’s third
son and his successor as shogun (r. 1605-23). See pp. 59, 106.

Usagi (grandson-in-law of Hiromatsu, husband of Fujiko, who isforced to commit seppuku; pp. 200, 217-19). Fictional. The namemeans “rabbit.”

Sugiyama, Lord (one of the five Regents, richest daimyo in Japan;
p. 225) § roughly, Maeda Toshiie (1538-99), daimyo of Kaga,second only to Tokugawa Ieyasu as the wealthiest daimyo. Maeda
was one of the five original Regents and his death in 1599 weakened
the council in much the same way as the resignation of “Sugiyama”
in Shǀgun (p. 624).

[Kasigi] Yabu (daimyo of Izu; uncle of Omi; p. 67). Fictional. See
pp. 15, 92, 96.

Tachibana, Lady (Toranaga’s first wife, put to death twenty years
earlier for plotting against Goroda) § Lady Tsukiyama, first wifeof Tokugawa Ieyasu; plotted against Oda Nobunaga and was put

Yaemon (“The Heir” of the Taikǀ, son of Lady Ochiba; p. 72)§ Toyotomi Hideyori (1593-1615), the son and heir of Hideyoshi(but widely rumored to have been fathered by someone else; seep. 105) and his consort Lady Yodo; perished with his mother at
the fall of Osaka Castle in 1615, ending the Toyotomi line. See
pp. 55, 61.

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Glossary
134

Yodoko, Lady (widow of the Taikǀ; p. 277) § Nene (1541-1624),
widow of Hideyoshi, known in 1600 by her nun’s name Kodaiin.
See pp. 104-105.
Yoshinaku, Captain (samurai captain, escort of Blackthorne andMariko to Edo and then to Osaka; p. 790). Fictional.
[Saigawa] Zataki (daimyo of Shinano; half brother of Toranaga;
pp. 625, 733). Nǀ apparent model. The name may have been derived
from “Satake,” the daimyo of Mito in 1600.

This glossary provides a) definitions of basic Japanese terms
appearing in Shǀgun and Learning from Shǀgun; b) brief comments
on historical aspects of some of the Japanese customs depicted in
the novel; and c) relevant page references to Shǀgun (in italics,
from the Dell paperback edition) and to Learning from Shǀgun (inroman type). The editor is grateful to Chieko Mulhern for providing detailed information on the history of Japanese customs.
abortion. For the courtesan Kiku, abortion may have been a simple
matter of drinking a “weird-tasting cha” (p. 1189) which involved“no risk to her” (p. 935), but most women of the time had to resort
to far more dubious and life-threatening measures, such as drinking
lye or inserting objects into the uterus. It was only in the late twentieth century that abortion became such a casual and low-risk operation as that depicted in Shǀgun. Abortion, and infanticide as well,
were nevertheless common in premodern Japan, particularly in thelater Tokugawa period.
Amida Tong (pp. 284-94). This secret band of religious assassins is
a fictional amalgam of Chinese secret societies, known as “tongs,”
and the Japanese Pure Land Buddhist sect known as “Ikkǀ” (“single mind,” indicating not fanaticism, as is sometimes suggested, butrather total faith in the Buddha Amida). Although the Ikkǀ sect did
have independent military power until it was crushed by Nobunaga(see p. 89), it was never known for clandestine activity. The Buddha
Amida, on whom Pure Land believers called for salvation with thechant “Namu Amida Butsu” (“Hail to the Buddha Amida”; cf.

GLOSSARY

136

pp. 286, 1037), was a symbol of all-embracing compassion, so
the association of Amida with assassins is a bit incongruous. See
pp. 76-77.
anjin (p. 128). Japanese for “pilot” (literally, “contemplating theneedle [of the compass]”) and the name by which both Blackthorne
and the historical William Adams were known; see p. 5.
Anjiro. The fictional village where the Erasmus lands, inspired by
the real fishing port of Ajiro; see p. 17. Ajiro is located on the Izu
peninsula just north of Ito, the port where William Adams built
two ships for Ieyasu; see pp. ix, 5.
ashigaru. A footsoldier; see p. 88.
bamboo saw, death by. This punishment, inflicted on Ishido inShǀgun (p. 1211), was the most sensational but probably the least
practiced mode of public execution prescribed by Japanese law,apparently for want of passersby willing to pull the saw. See pp.
54-55 for its best-known historical use.
bansai! [normally banzai] (p. 182), Literally, “ten thousand years,”
this word traditionally appeared on the funeral banners of the aristocracy. It was not until modern times that it came to be used in thesense of “three cheers,” or, as in Shǀgun, as a military cry meaning“Long live [the emperor]”; see p. 90.

Black Ship (pp. 70, 241). The name given by the Japanese to theannual Portuguese trading ship from Macao, probably because of
the color of the hull. Known by the Portuguese as the “Nao delTrato” (p. 161), or “Great Ship of Trade,” these carracks were ofimmense size, reaching as much as 1600 tons. For their history, seeCharles Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon (1959). The term
“black ship” was revived in the nineteenth century to describe thefleet of Commodore Perry.
boiling enemies (pp. 95-96, 112). Although boiling one’s enemies
does not appear to have been a common practice in Japan, the most
famous example occurred, in fact, in the era of Shǀgun, when thelegendary burglar Ishikawa Goemon was thrown into a pot of boiling oil for attempting to break into Osaka Castle and steal theTaikǀ’s fabulous hoard of gold. The round iron tubs which latercame into use for bathing (see Shdgun, p. 527) were thus known as“Goemon baths.”
bushi. A warrior; a more formal term than “samurai”; see p. 6.
Bushido. Literally, “the way of the warrior”; loosely or generically, the code of behavior of the Japanese samurai, emphasizing
loyalty, bravery, and honor. In a more narrow sense, the term
refers to Tokugawa period writings on proper samurai behavior;see pp. 88, 96-98.

battle cries. In Shǀgun, samurai shout the names of their leaders
as battle cries, such as “Kasigi!” or “Toranaga!”, (pp. 478, 561,
etc.), but in feudal Japan it would have been disrespectful to speak
the name of one’s lord (especially his personal name) under any circumstances. The traditional prebattle invocation to the war god
went “ei, ei, ǀ” (pronounced “ay, ay, oh”), rising gradually in crescendo; if any name were used, it would probably have been that of
the enemy. Some Christian daimyo were known, however, to emulate the Spanish custom of invoking the names of Christ, Santa
Maria, and Santiago against their infidel enemies.

calendar. As explained by Tsukku (p. 340), the Japanese counted
years by reference to special “era names,” which were changed periodically for any of a variety of reasons; the average length of an era
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was about four years. In
addition to era names, as Tsukku also explained, a cycle of twelve
years, each named after an animal, was also used; to further complicate matters, this was joined with a secondary ten-year sequence(named after the Chinese five elements, in “junior-senior” pairs)
which, when used in parallel, combined to create a longer sixty-year
cycle. The traditional Japanese calendar was based on the lunar
year, in contrast to the Western solar calendar.

birthdays. The birthday reception for Lady Ochiba in Shǀgun
(pp. 972, 983 ff.) is unusual, since the Japanese had no custom ofcommemorating one’s day of birth. The birth of an heir was celebrated, and the attainment of the ages 60, 77, and 88 called for congratulatory ceremonies, but not for women and not on the day ofbirth: by traditional Japanese counting, everyone’s age changes
with the beginning of a new year and not on the exact birth day.

carrier pigeons (pp. 468, 546, 622). Although indispensable to theplot of Shǀgun, carrier pigeons apparently were not known in Japanin the sixteenth century. Imported from the West during the Tokugawa period, they appear to have been used primarily for amusement, although one anecdote does tell of an Osaka merchant who
made a killing on the rice market by using carrier pigeons to getearly warnings of price fluctuations. Military use of carrier pigeons137

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138

in Japan began in 1899, when three hundred birds were imported
from China; pigeons were widely used by the Japanese for communications in World War II.

(silk would have been reserved for a daimyo). Cotton was grown inJapan in the sixteenth century, but was used primarily for tents,
banners, and, most importantly, the tapers to ignite matchlocks.

castle town. The conventional term used to describe the large cities
which grew up around the castles of the daimyo in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries; see pp. 115-6.

courtesan (pp. 151, 682, etc.). A conventional term for a prostitutecatering to the wealthy, later known in Japan as “geisha.” See pp.
108-110.

census. The national census ordered by the Taikǀ in 1591 (p. 192)
was never carried out, but the practice of keeping careful population
records became well-established in the course of the Tokugawa
period. The registration system described by Mariko (p. 713) was
developed only after the suppression of Christianity in the 1630s,
when the practice of requiring all commoners to register at Buddhist
temples was begun. Initially a device for controlling Christianity, thetemple registration system provided the basis for the first national
census in 1721; see p. 114.

courtier. A term conventionally used to refer to members of the
traditional civil aristocracy of Japan, who resided in the capital of
Kyoto; a small class, it was replaced by the samurai as the ruling
elite after the twelfth century. In Shǀgun, Ogaki Tamamoto (pp. 95,
1133) is an example of the courtier. See pp. 55, 90, 100.

cha (pp. 321, 689, etc). In Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, “tea.”
The English “tea” comes from a Chinese dialectical variant of thesame word. See p. 14.
chanoyu (pp. 263, 766-77). The Japanese “tea ceremony”; see pp.
66-67, 91.
Chinese pox (pp. 258, 373, etc.). Syphilis, introduced to China byWestern voyagers and thence, probably by wakǀ, to Japan; the earliest documented case of syphilis in Japan occurred in 1512—only
two decades after the outbreak of the disease in Europe following
Columbus’ return from America. Also known in Japan as the“Ryukyu pox.” Ieyasu’s son Hideyasu (“Noboru” in Shǀgun) was
one of the better-known victims of the Chinese pox. See p. 125.
Clouds and Rain (p. 153, etc.). An ancient Chinese literary term forthe sexual act; see p. 109.
consort (p. 69). Under traditional Chinese and Japanese law, a man
was permitted only a single legal wife, and all other wives were
known as “consorts” or “concubines”; see p. 101. In Japan, children
born of consorts were considered legitimate and often became heirs;
see p. 106.
cotton (pp. 243, 321, 532, etc.). Cotton clothing was still quite
unusual in Japan in 1600, but it was to become more popular in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The loincloth given to Blackthorne (p. 243) would probably have been linen or the cheaper hemp

crucifixion (pp. 191, 229). A form of execution which was firstpracticed in Japan in the twelfth century under the first shogun,
Yoritomo, but which became prevalent only in the sixteenth century.
Japanese crucifixion differed from that in the West in that the limbs
were lashed rather than nailed to the frame, an additional crosspiece
was provided for the legs, and the victim died not of exposure anddebilitation but by being lanced through the vital organs.
daimyo. A feudal lord, in military and administrative control of anautonomous domain yielding an income of at least 10,000 koku. In
1598, there were 204 such daimyo, ranging from 68 with incomes ofthe minimum 10,000 koku to Tokugawa Ieyasu with over 2.5 million

koku.

death poems (pp. 338, 839, 1188). Although Hideyoshi’s deathpoem (p. 338) is historically accurate, it was not the usual Japanesecustom in this period to compose death poems; the ritual of a warrior
such as Yabu composing a poem before seppuku (p. 1188) or
imminent death in battle was devised by the modern Japanese militaryclass.
dictionary (pp. 315, 527, 578, 785). Historically, the dictionary
given to Blackthorne would probably have been the tri-lingual LatinPortuguese-Japanese dictionary published by the Jesuit press in 1595;
a far more complete dictionary of Japanese was completed by a teamof Jesuit linguists in 1603. See p. 84.
divorce (p. 368, etc.). See pp. 40, 101-2.
doctors. As Blackthorne gratefully notes (p. 322), Japanese doctors
did not bleed their patients, but instead relied on the traditional

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Chinese techniques of herbal medicine, acupuncture, and moxa
cautery. Japanese doctors were, however, far behind the West in
surgical procedures; they did not know how to suture, cauterize,
splint, or remove bullets, and normally just applied ointment papers
over open wounds. For Western doctors, see p. 41.
dozo (passim). Japanese for “please,” as in the case of an invitation;
see pp. 81-82.
Edo [Yedo] (pp. 858-60). The capital of the Tokugawa domain,established by Ieyasu in 1590 on the site of a former medieval castle
which had reverted to a fishing village. By 1600, as Blackthorne
noted (p. 568), Edo was on its way to becoming the world’s largest
city and, by the end of the seventeenth century, had grown to a
population of probably over one million. In 1868, Edo was made theimperial capital of Japan and renamed “Tokyo.”
Eight-Fold Fence (pp. 602-3, 835). Mariko’s metaphor for theJapanese use of rituals, customs, and taboos to ensure privacy, theexpression comes from an ancient Japanese poem; see p. 106.
emperor (pp. 967, 1133-4). In Japanese, “tennǀ,” the hereditary lineof rulers of Japan since mythical times, theoretically divine andunbroken. In the era of Shǀgun, the emperor had very little politicalpower but was essential for the legitimation of national rule; see p.
56. The emperor was “restored” to power with the fall of theTokugawa shogunate in 1868.
Erasmus. The name of Blackthorne’s ship and the original name ofits historical counterpart, the De Liefde; see p. 17.
eta (pp. 472, 643, 869, etc.). The Japanese outcaste class; see pp.
125-6.

did samurai come to wear them. The indoor slippers presented toBlackthorne (p. 29) were generally unknown until modern times.
Tabi socks (p. 321, etc.) were less common in 1600 than they are inShǀgun; made of leather, they were used mostly by samurai as
outdoor wear; tabi were considered special, and permission was
required to wear them. Cotton tabi became popular only in the lateseventeenth century, and even then a young courtesan such as Kiku
(p. 1194) would not have worn them, since geisha were very proudof their bare feet.
funerals. Mariko’s funeral (pp. 1101-2) accords closely withdescriptions of Japanese funerals by Western observers of the time.
Although public exposure of the corpse seems unusual for the Japanese (see p. 65), one such case is detailed in an account by the Jesuit
chronicler Luis Frois; see Cooper, They Came to Japan, pp. 363-7.
Garlic Eaters (p. 348, etc.). Used in Shǀgun to refer to Koreans. In
the modern period, Japanese sometimes refer to Koreans as “smelling of garlic,” much as they speak of Westerners as “smelling of
butter.” It is unclear whether garlic was as common in Korean cuisine in 1600 as it is today and whether such an epithet was actuallyused in the period of Shǀgun. We may certainly presume, however,that the Japanese invasions of Korea under Hideyoshi (see p. 45)
caused strong feelings of animosity between Koreans and Japanese,and that such derogatory labels were used by both sides at the time.
geisha (p. 747). Courtesans of the Tokugawa period who provided
singing and dancing entertainment along with their sexual services;
literally, “a person of artistic accomplishment.” Although Gyoko’s“invention” of the geisha is imaginary, it was precisely in her timethat this type of courtesan emerged; see pp. 108-9.

Floating World (pp. 1189, 1195). In Japanese, “ukiyo,” used fromabout the middle of the seventeenth century to describe the hedonistic world of the theater and the pleasure quarters of Japanesecities.

guns (pp. 507, 542, 556, etc.). Guns were introduced to Japan by
Portuguese visitors in 1543 (see p. 46) and were known as “Tanegashima,” after the name of the island where the Portuguese landed.
Guns became a crucial factor in the warfare of the late sixteenth
century in Japan; see p. 58.

footwear. Most Japanese in 1600 went barefoot both indoors andout. When required, the preferred footwear was sandals of rush or
straw (as in Shǀgun, p. 29). Wooden clogs had long been known inJapan (especially for field work), but in 1600 they were still not ingeneral use. The clog-wearing samurai in Shǀgun (p. 32, etc.) would
have been unusual, since clogs were far too noisy and clumsy for abattle-ready warrior; only in the peaceful eighteenth century

hair styles. Mariko is historically a bit ahead of her time in wearing
her hair “in the latest Kyoto fashion, piled high and held in placewith long silver pins” (p. 259): this description fits the “Katsuyama
style” originated in the 1650s by a Yoshiwara courtesan of thatname. Most women of the period of Shǀgun continued to wear their
hair in the aristocratic taregami style, long and straight down theback. A noblewoman like Mariko would have had long straight hair

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142(possibly scented with floral oils), shaved eyebrows (with false eyebrows painted higher on the forehead with soot paste), red-painted
lips, and blackened teeth.
harakiri. Ritual suicide by disembowelment; literally, “bellycutting.” A more vulgar term than “seppuku,” commonly mispronounced “harry-carry” in the West. See pp. 73, 95.
harikata (p. 693). A dildo; see p. 110.
hatamoto (pp. 489, 495). A direct retainer of the Tokugawa shogun
with an income of less than the 10,000 koku required for daimyo
status and with a theoretical right of audience with the shogun; thosebelow the hatamoto in rank were called gokenin. During most of theTokugawa period, the hatamoto (sometimes called “banner-men”)
accounted for about one-fourth of the shogun’s approximately
twenty thousand retainers. See p. 7 for William Adams’ status ashatamoto.
hawking (pp. 613-20, 1160, 1207). An ancient noble sport in Japan,
banned in 728 in deference to Buddhist belief but revived in thetwelfth century as a major pastime of the samurai class. Tokugawa
Ieyasu was a skilled and avid falconer; see p. 60.
Hemimura. The village in which William Adams’ estate was
located; see pp. ix, 5, 9, 11.
Hirado. An island off the northwest coast of Kyushu and a major
port for foreign trade with the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. William Adams, the model for Blackthorne, wasemployed by the English East India Company’s trading station in
Hirado and died there in 1620; see pp. ix, 5.
hostages (pp. 69, 121, 216, etc). The taking hostage of family
members (particularly the heir) of one’s vassals in order to ensure
loyalty became a common practice in the sixteenth century and was
eventually institutionalized under the Tokugawa shogunate in the“alternate attendance system,” under which all daimyo wererequired to keep their wives and heir in Edo and to live in Edothemselves every other year.
Izu (p. 53, etc.). A peninsula located on the Pacific Ocean about
seventy-five miles southwest of Tokyo; formerly Izu Province, it istoday part of Shizuoka Prefecture.

judo and karate. Although a samurai like Mura would certainly
have been familiar with the techniques of weaponless fighting which
he displays in Shǀgun (p. 51), he would not have known them bythese names. The term “jǌdǀ” was used by a martial arts school in
the early eighteenth century, but the form known today was synthesized in the late nineteenth century by Kano Jigorǀ (1860-1938) froma variety of existing techniques known as “jǌjutsu” (“the art offlexibility”). Karate (more properly, karate-dǀ, “the way of theempty hand”) was imported to Japan from its native Okinawa in the
1920s by Funakoshi Gichin (1869-1957).
kami (p. 652, etc.). In indigenous Shinto belief, sacred forces, oftentranslated as “gods,” which were most commonly manifested as thespirits of trees, rocks, places, distinguished men, ancestors, andmythological figures.
kamikaze (p. 459). Literally, “divine wind,” historically used torefer to the typhoons which drove off the invading Mongols in thethirteenth century. The term was revived in the twentieth century as
part of the title of certain suicide squadrons in the Pacific War. Often
mispronounced “kamikazi” in the West (cf. p. 81).
karma (passim). In Buddhism, the accumulated consequences of
one’s actions throughout past incarnations. See Chapter 8.
koku (p. 94, etc.), A unit of measure, equivalent to about five U.S.
bushels, used to measure the income of land in terms of its productivity in rice.
Kwanto [Kanto]. Literally, “east of the barrier,” referring to any ofseveral mountain passes on the way from Kyoto to the northeast;
more specifically, the broad coastal plain along the Pacific Ocean incentral Honshu, traditionally comprising eight provinces. Edo (themodern Tokyo) is located on the Kanto Plain.
“Legacy” of Toranaga (p. 847). This corresponds to the Legacy of
Tokugawa Ieyasu, a set of private instructions left to his successors;see pp. 53, 90. For English translations, see Murdoch, A History ofJapan, III, 796-814, and Sadler, The Maker of Modern Japan, pp.
387-98.
massage (pp. 76, 872). A well-developed art in traditional Japan,
often practiced by the blind. The use of “fragrant oil” to massage
Blackthorne is unusual and would more likely be a service ofcontemporary “Turkish baths” in Japan; the traditional method
involves squeezing the muscles or pressing nerve points, techniques

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144

which slippery skin would make difficult. One must also be lightly
clothed, not naked, as in Shǀgun.
meat-eating (pp. 365, 427, etc.). See pp. 40, 116-9.
Mishima (pp. 99, 291, 468). Yabu’s castle town. A real city, Mishima was the ancient capital of the province of Izu and a major stopalong the Tǀkaidǀ; historically, however, it was a post town, not a
castle town.
Murasama [sword] (pp. 77, 621). Corresponds to the historical
Muramasa, a famous maker of sword blades (see the legend quoted
on pp. 92-93). The story of the curse of such a blade on Toranaga’s
family is based on historical accounts; see Sadler, The Maker ofModern Japan, pp. 94-95.
Nagasaki (pp. 240, 664). A port in western Kyushu, ceded to theJesuits by the Omura daimyo in the 1570s and used as a center for
missionary and trading activities until it was confiscated by Hideyoshi in 1587 and placed under central control. After the expulsion of
the Catholics in the 1640s, it became the sole port for foreign tradein Japan, served by Dutch and Chinese merchants. See pp. ix, 48-50.
neh? (passim). A sentence-ending particle implying expectation ofagreement; see p. 81.
nightsoil (pp. 533,836). A euphemism for human excrement, which
was widely used as fertilizer in traditional Japan. In the cities of theTokugawa period, landlords derived an important part of theirincome from the sale of tenants’ wastes to nightsoil collectors. See
also p. 125.
ninja (pp. 1050-62). Practitioners of ninjutsu (“the art of stealth”),
experts in espionage, sabotage, and assassination. The ninja ofShǀgun, whose “only purpose in life was violent death for pay”
(p. 1062), reflect the romanticization of the ninja in modern Japanese popular entertainment: the historical ninja were primarily
experts in political intelligence rather than fanatical assassins.
Although Toranaga was said to have considered ninja to be “filth”(p. 1077), the historical Ieyasu prized the services of ninja and usedthem extensively. In fact, the only lord in Japan in 1600 who could
have ordered a ninja attack of the scale mounted by Ishido in Shǀgun
would have been Ieyasu himself, since he then controlled the Koga
and Iga ninja, the two largest traditional groups. For an account of
the ninja, see Andrew Adams, Ninja: The Invisible Assassins (Ohara
Publications, Los Angeles, 1970).

“Oil Seller” (p. 784). Blackthorne’s sword, which is nicknamed
after its victim; the account in Shǀgun is based on an historical (orat least legendary) incident, in which Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered a
retainer to cut down an oil merchant who had acted in a rude manner and who managed to “walk a few paces before falling divided
into two”; see Sadler, The Maker of Modern Japan, p. 352.
Osaka (pp. 120, 189, 195). Osaka, originally known as Ishiyama,
was a fortified settlement built in the early sixteenth century by followers of the Ikkǀ sects of Buddhism (see Amida Tong). With the
suppression of the Ikkǀ by Nobunaga in the 1570s, Ishiyama cameunder the control of Hideyoshi, who renamed it Osaka and built his
great castle there in 1583-6. After Hideyoshi’s death, Osaka became
the castle town of his heir Hideyori; when the Toyotomi family wasdestroyed in 1615, Osaka was briefly assigned to a Tokugawa-related
daimyo, but in 1619 it came under the direct control of the shogunate. Although a large garrison was stationed in Osaka Castle during the Tokugawa period, the city was basically run by merchants
and served as a national rice brokerage center. Osaka Castle wasdestroyed in World War II, but has been rebuilt in ferro-concrete.
See pp. ix, 38, 56-61, 104-5, 115.
pillow book (p. 898). In ancient Japan, the term “pillow book”
was used to describe a genre of literary miscellanies, informal journals which were probably composed after retiring and hence kept
near the writer’s pillow; the most famous example is Sei
Shonagon’s The Pillow Book (late tenth century; translated by Ivan
Morris). In the seventeenth century, however, the expression came tobe applied to erotic books, some of which were used as visual aids
for the sexual education of young brides, since the “aversion totalking about pillowing” (p. 333) was scarcely a barbarianmonopoly. It is this sort of manual which Mariko seems to haveshown to Blackthorne.
pillowing (p. 329, etc.). In Shǀgun, making love. James Clavell has
said that he chose this word because it is more pleasing than “fornication” and more polite than its four-letter Anglo-Saxon
equivalent. It does not really correspond to any Japanese word,
although the term “pillow” is used in some archaic combinations
that connote sex (such as “pillow book”). The nuance of “pillowing” is considerably more sensuous in the West than in Japan, where
pillows have traditionally been quite small and hard, made of woodor of cloth stuffed with tea or buckwheat chaff.
pissing on a bargain (pp. 299, 485). It is unclear how wellestablished a custom this was among the samurai, but thehistorical story of145

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146

Hideyoshi and Ieyasu’s (the Taikǀ and Toranaga in Shǀgun, p.
163) sealing the transfer of the Kanto in this way is recounted in
Sadler, The Maker of Modern Japan, p. 163; according to thisanecdote, the incident came to be known as “the pair of pissers on
the Kanto” (Kantǀ no tsure-shǀben).

Sekigahara, Battle of (p. 1211). The decisive battle in October 1600
at which Tokugawa Ieyasu and his allies defeated a coalition headed
by Ishida Mitsunari and thereby secured hegemony over all Japan.
This battle is considered by many historians to be the beginning of
the Tokugawa period. See pp. ix, 56-58, 60-61.

poisoning enemies (p. 1164). Yabu’s plot to poison Jikkyu inShǀgun is by no means implausible (especially the detail of bribing a
cook, for it is said that Ieyasu bribed a cook to set fire to the kitchenof Osaka Castle in 1615), but on the whole poisoning seems to havebeen an exceptional way of dealing with one’s enemies in medieval
Japan, for reasons that are not clear; see Murdoch, A History ofJapan, I, 631.

seppuku (pp. 568-9, etc.). Ritual suicide by disembowelment; amore proper term than harakiri. See pp. 73, 95-96.

raw fish (pp. 150, 365, 1202). See pp. 121-2. Regents,
Council of (pp. 72, 225, etc.). See pp. 55-56.
rocks growing (pp. 835, 1018). In Shǀgun, Mariko recommends
that Blackthorne try listening to a rock grow, as a way of promoting
wa. This provocative device appears to be a sort of Zen riddle especially formulated for the Western mentality, to which the idea ofrocks growing seems nonsensical. To the Japanese mind, however,this notion would not be such a conundrum, since the Japanesebelieve that rocks do indeed have life within them; the myths evenspeak of a time when rocks could move about and were given tooccasional violence. Japanese have always been great observers andconnoisseurs of rocks, considering them to possess life and individuality, so that watching them grow would have seemed quite natural
to Mariko.
rǀnin (pp. 78, 254, etc.). A masterless samurai (literally, “wave person,” that is, someone floating unattached), who has left his lord’s
service either by choice or compulsion (most commonly because of
the confiscation of the lord’s fief). The stigma againt rǀnin impliedin Shǀgun was a product of the peaceful Tokugawa period, whenprospects of re-employment were slim.
-sama, -san, -chan (passim). Forms of address attached to a person’s name; the latter two are modern corruptions of -sama, -sanindicating respect and -chan familiarity; see p. 83,
samurai (p. 30, etc.). A Japanese warrior, from saburau, “toserve.” The ruling class of Japan from the twelfth to the nineteenth
centuries, the samurai comprised about six or seven percent of thetotal population during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868).

Shinto (pp. 652-3). The indigenous religious beliefs of the Japanese, as distinguished from Buddhism, which was introduced from
China. Literally, “the way of the gods [kami]”), See pp. 117, 123-5.
shogun (pp. 72-74). A national military ruler, an office delegatedby the emperor. Literally, “general,” the title was first assumed byMinamoto Yoritomo in 1190; Tokugawa Ieyasu assumed the position in 1603. See pp. 2, 56.
silk (p. 303, etc.). Silk had long been prized by the Japanese upperclasses as the finest fabric available for clothing, and its importfrom China constituted a major element of foreign trade in the eraof Shǀgun; see p. 49. The Japanese had produced domestic silk for
centuries, but in 1600 the Chinese product was much more valued;
not until the Tokugawa period did Japanese silk come to match andeven surpass Chinese silk in quality, eventually becoming Japan’s
leading export to the West in the pre-World War II period.
soap (pp. 63, 527, 654). A recent import to Japan in 1600 and an
unusual luxury; see p. 124.
sushi (pp. 580, 769). Raw fish with vinegared rice; see pp. 121-2.
swimming (pp. 454-7). Although it is conceivable that a Westernersuch as Blackthorne could have instructed the Japanese in headfirst diving (pp. 455-6), it is certain that his samurai pupils would
have been able to swim rings around him. The “art of swimming”(suiei-jutsu) was an indispensable part of the martial arts, since
samurai often had to fight in the many rivers that divide the Japanese terrain. Samurai were trained not only to swim, but also toengage in mortal combat, in full armor if necessary, both in andunder water. Having mastered techniques of combative swimming,
samurai knew how to grapple with an enemy while falling overboard, how to disentangle armor from seaweed, and even how tojump out of the water into boats. The one thing that samurai would
probably not have done is swim naked, as in Shǀgun; samurai wererarely parted from their weapons and at the very least would have147

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148

worn a loincloth, which was almost a part of the body for the traditional Japanese male.
tai-fun (pp. 464, 971, etc.). A typhoon. “Tai-fun” appears to be adialectical Chinese pronunciation, the source of the English“typhoon”; in Japanese, the characters (meaning “great wind”) areread taifǌ.
taikǀ. Hideyoshi’s highest title, used as a proper noun to refer to
Hideyoshi himself. His first court title was kampaku, or “regent” forthe emperor, which he took in 1585; in 1591, after ceding his title tohis heir Hideyori (hence the reference to Yaemon as “Kwampaku,”
p. 278), he himself became taikǀ, a special title for a retired regent.
See p. 55.
tokonoma (pp. 549, 624). A slightly raised alcove in a Japaneseroom, typically decorated with a flower arrangement or hanging
scroll. The tokonoma was a feature of teahouse architecture and in
the modern period of most Japanese houses. Misspelled “takonoma”(“octopus room”) in Shǀgun.
Tǀkaidǀ (p. 290). Literally, “eastern sea road,” the great coast
highway from Edo to Kyoto.
tooth-blackening. In Shǀgun, the only blackened teeth are those of
the courtier Ogaki (p. 965) and the (apparently) transvestite Regent
Ito (p. 1077). By the seventeenth century, however, the practice had
spread beyond the courtier class to all upper-class married women, sothat Mariko in real life would certainly have blackened her teeth. For
the traditional Japanese, gleaming black teeth were considered very
sexy in a woman and elegant in a man; for a sensuous modern
appreciation of this aesthetic, see Jun’ichirǀ Tanizaki, In Praise of
Shadows (Leete’s Island Books, 1977), especially pp. 33-35. Teeth
were blackened by the periodic application of a solution of iron filings pickled in vinegar and sake.
uniforms. The Brown and Gray uniforms in Shǀgun are a fictional
device; see p. 57.
wa (pp. 472, 602, 609, 642, etc.). The frequent use of “wa” inShǀgun to indicate a transcendent state of spiritual “tranquillity”
would strike most Japanese as peculiar. In Japanese, wa implies thereconciliation of conflicting elements (and hence is perhaps besttranslated “harmonization”) and is used primarily to refer to social
harmony, as in the famous sixth-century injunction of Prince Shǀtoku: “Concord [wa] is to be esteemed above all else; make it yourfirst duty to avoid discord.” Many Japanese corporations today
similarly use “wa” as a motto to encourage cooperation among
employees; see Thomas Rohlen, For Harmony and Strength (Univ.
of California Press, 1974). “Wa” can also suggest harmonious balance in an artistic sense, and as such constitutes an important aesthetic of the tea ceremony. The conception of wa in Shǀgun is far
more privatized and anti-social than in conventional Japanese usage.
wakǀ (p. 666). Japanese pirates, active in the trade with China; see
pp. 44-45.
wheeled vehicles. As explained by Mariko (p. 801), wheeled vehicles were surprisingly rare in traditional Japan, although oxcarts
were commonly used for heavy loads. Vehicles with wheels were not
only of limited practical use in Japan’s rainy climate and hilly
terrain, but were also severely restricted by the Tokugawa government as a means of status regulation and military control.
Willow World (pp. 100, 678, etc.). The licensed pleasure quarters;
see pp. 108-110.
Yedo. See Edo.
Yoshiwara (p. 1180). The licensed pleasure district of Edo; see p.
109.
Zen (p. 48). A Chinese sect of Buddhism introduced into Japan in
the thirteenth century; patronized generously by the samurai class,Zen Buddhism came to have a profound influence on samurai
morality and on Japanese aesthetics; see pp. 77, 92-93.

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For Further Reading

Basic Background
First choice for an introduction to Japanese political history isPeter Duus, Feudalism in Japan (Knopf, 1969, paper), a brief andwell-written survey of Japanese history until the nineteenth century,emphasizing samurai rule. For general histories with an emphasis
on culture, see George Sansom’s classic Japan: A Short Cultural
History (1931; rev. ed., Appleton-Century, 1943; Stanford, 1979,
paper) and R. H. P, Mason and J. G. Caiger, A History of Japan(Free Press, 1972). A more detailed political narrative is provided in
George Sansom, A History of Japan (3 vols.; Stanford, 1958-73;
1978, paper).
For the background of Shǀgun in particular, four books are of
special importance and were of obvious use to James Clavell in his
preparatory research for the novel. Heading the list is Michael
Cooper, ed., They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European
Reports on Japan, 1543-1640 (Univ. of Calif.. 1965), a well-edited
collection of fascinating primary materials. Second is Arthur Sadler, The Maker of Modern Japan: The Life of Shǀgun Tokugawa
Ieyasu (Allen & Unwin, 1937; Tuttle reprint, 1978, paper), the only
English-language biography of the model for Toranaga; often tedious, it is nevertheless filled with fascinating detail, much of which
reappears in Shǀgun. Next is Charles Boxer, The Christian Century
in Japan, 1549-1650 (Univ. of Calif., 1951), the standard accountof early European contact with Japan. Finally, James Murdoch, A
History of Japan, Vol. II: During the Century of Early Foreign
Intercourse (1542-1651) (2nd of 3 vols.; Kobe: Japan Chronicle,
1903; long out of print), remains the single most detailed political
history of the period; although outmoded by current standards,

Murdoch has still not been replaced and, despite (or even becauseof) its old-fashioned tone, his book provides provocative insightand pleasant reading.
Shǀgunalia
James Clavell’s Shǀgun (Atheneum, 1975) is now most readily
available in the Dell paperback edition (first printing, June 1976;
thirty-eighth printing, March 1980), but those interested can still
acquire the one-volume Atheneum hardback edition (now in its
fourteenth printing), the two-volume edition produced for The
Literary Guild, and editions in most major foreign languages—
including Japanese (3 vols.; TBS-Britannica, Autumn 1980). For asampling of reviews of the novel, see Contemporary Literary Criticism, v. 6, p. 114; the most thorough of the various journalistic
reviews were the ones by Webster Schott in the New York Times
Book Review (June 22, 1975, p. 5) and D. J. Enright in the New
York Review of Books (Sept. 18, 1975, pp. 44-45). For a more academic review, see Sheila Johnson in the Journal of Japanese Studies,v. 2, no. 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 445-8.
The making of the twelve-hour television miniseries of Shǀgun
(broadcast by NBC Sept. 15-19, 1980) proved to be a rerun of manyof the crises in cross-cultural communication which fill the novel
itself. For a short account, see Neil Martin, “Shǀgun: Culture
Clash in the Orient,” American Film, April 1980, pp. 18-23; moredetails and hundreds of photographs are provided in The Makingof James Clavell’s Shǀgun (Delta Books, 1980, paper).
A board game entitled “Samurai,” by Dan Campagna (© 1979,
Heritage Models), may amuse readers of Shǀgun, since it uses
many of James Clavell’s fictional characters (but with no attribution
whatsoever); a mapboard game of the military simulation variety,“Samurai” is of marginal educational value and is marred by frequent misspellings and errors of fact. There also exists a board gameactually entitled “Shogun,” by Epoch Playthings; it is an excellent
game—a sort of checkers with an element of chance introduced bya magnetic board—but its only tie with Japan is that it was invented
there: it is lacking in any cultural or historical content. Anotherentry in the category of Shǀgunalia unrelated to the novel (except for
the name) is Suntory’s wine-sake beverage “Shǀgun” (see p. 121).
1. The Will Adams Legend
The best of the various biographical writings on William Adams
is Philip G. Rogers, The First Englishman in Japan: The Story ofWill Adams (London: Harvill Press, 1956). Less detailed but alsoof interest are: Arthur Diosy, “In Memory of Will Adams, The
First Englishman in Japan,” Trans. and Proc. of the Japan Society,151

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London, v. 6, pt. 3 (1904), pp. 325-53; Lord Redesdale, “Three
Hundred Years Ago,” ibid., v. 8 (1907), pp. 3-21; and Ilza Veith,“Englishman or Samurai: The Story of Will Adams,” Far Eastern
Quarterly, v. 5, no. 1 (Dec. 1945), pp. 5-27.
Numerous published primary sources on William Adams and his
English compatriots in early seventeenth-century Japan are available and provide fascinating details for those willing to tolerate
wildly inconsistent spelling and tedious trade reports: Thomas Rundall, ed., Memorials of the Empire of Japan in the XVI and XVIICenturies (Hakluyt Society, 1850; Burt Franklin reprint, 1963),
which contains the most important letters of Adams; C. J. Purnell,ed., “The Log-Book of William Adams, 1614-19,” Trans, andProc. of the Japan Society, London, v. 13, pt. 2 (1915), pp. 156-302,
a record of Adams’ two voyages to the Ryukyu Islands which also
includes more of his letters; Ernest Satow, ed., The Voyage ofCaptain John Saris to Japan, 1613 (Hakluyt Society, 1900; Kraus
reprint, Liechtenstein, 1967), the journal of the man who opened
the English trading station in Japan (see p. 6); E. M. Thompson, ed.,The Diary of Richard Cocks, Cape-Merchant in the English
Factory in Japan, 1615-1622 (2 vols.; Hakluyt Society, 1883; Burt
Franklin reprint, 1965), which contains a number of references toAdams; and M. Paske-Smith, ed., Peter Pratt, History of Japan,
Compiled from the Records of the English East India Company(Kobe: Thompson, 1931; Barnes and Noble reprint, 1972). For asecondary study of the English trading station, see Ludwig Riess,“History of the English Factory at Hirado (1613-1622),” Trans, ofthe Asiatic Society of Japan, v. 26 (1898).
2. The Attractions of an Opposite
Little has been written on the attractions of a topsy-turvy culture;
on a closely related topic, see David Plath, ed., Aware of Utopia(Univ. of Ill., 1971), a set of essays on the “perennial place of impossible dreams.” The model for Shangri-la is traced in Edward Bernbaum, The Way to Shambala (Anchor Books, 1980, paper).
Considerably more has been written on Western images of Japan,
although much remains to be explored. For an Asian overview, seeJohn Steadman, The Myth of Asia (Simon and Schuster, 1969,
paper) and Harold Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American
Images of China and India (J. Day, 1958; M.E. Sharpe reprint,
1980, paper). For Japan, Jean-Pierre Lehmann, The Image ofJapan: From Feudal Isolation to World Power, 1850-1905 (Allen &Unwin, 1978), examines Western ideas of Japan in the Meiji period,and is nicely supplemented by Robert Rosenstone, “Learning fromThose ‘Imitative’ Japanese: Another Side of the American Experience in the Mikado’s Empire,” American Historical Review, June

1980, pp. 572-95. For the post-World War II period, an excellent
short history is Sheila Johnson, American Attitudes Toward Japan,
1941-1975 (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for
Public Policy Research, 1975, paper). Some interesting specialized
essays may be found in Akira Iriye, ed., Mutual Images: Essays in
American-Japanese Relations (Harvard, 1975).
3. Cross-Cultural Learning
Teachers at the secondary level who are interested in ways ofusing Shǀgun in the social studies classroom will find useful information and exercises in “Shǀgun: A Guide for Classroom Use,” apamphlet prepared by Teaching Japan in the Schools (TJS) andavailable for $2 from TJS, 200 Lou Henry Hoover Building, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305; those interested may wish to
ask for information on other teaching-related materials produced
by TJS. Also of special interest to teachers at the secondary level
will be Opening Doors: Contemporary Japan (The Asia Society,
New York, 1979), a resource manual for teaching about Japan
today. For continuing information on educational resources about
Asia, teachers of all levels should profit from FOCUS on AsianStudies (published three times annually, subscription $3 from
Service Center for Teachers of Asian Studies, Ohio State Univ.,
29 W. Woodruff Ave., Columbus, Ohio 43210).
Historical novels have received little attention either as a genre ofliterature or as potential tools for teaching history, perhaps because
their relationship to both history and literature is so complex and so
ambiguous. For those interested in other historical novels about
Japan, two by Oliver Statler are highly recommended: the classic
Japanese Inn (Random House, 1961; Arena Books, 1972, paper), an
excellent introduction to Tokugawa Japan by way of the history of
an inn along the Tǀkaidǀ, and Shimoda Story (Random House,1969), a novel about Townsend Harris, the American diplomat who
negotiated the commercial treaty with Japan in 1858 (see p. 8).
William Butler’s The Ring in Meiji (Putnam, 1965) also deals with
Americans in mid-nineteenth-century Japan, while Shelley Mydans,
The Vermilion Bridge (Doubleday, 1980), is set in eighth-century
Nara Japan. For an example of historical novels by Japanese writers,
see Eiji Yoshikawa, The Heike Story (trans. Fuki Uramatsu; Tuttle,
1956, paper), a modern retelling of the classic The Tale of the
Heike.
More manageable than retrospective historical novels in the teachingof history and culture are the literary classics of the culture itself;
for a discussion of approaches, see “Teaching Social Studies
Through Literature,” Social Education, v. 42, no. 5 (May 1978),which includes a discussion by Elgin Heinz of The Tale of Genji.

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4. Blackthorne’s England
Tudor England (Penguin Books, 1950) by S. T. Bindoff is a clear
and well-written introduction to the political history of the Tudor
period and includes basic information on English social, legal, andreligious institutions. Carl Bridenbaugh in Vexed and Troubled
Englishmen, 1590-1642 (Oxford, 1967; paper) explores in detail the
restless society of late Elizabethan and early Stuart England. John
E. Neale’s biography, Queen Elizabeth I (London: J. Cape, 1934;
Anchor Books, 1957, paper), is the classic account of the life andreign of Elizabeth I; Neale’s admiration for the queen is evident,
but the book is balanced and beautifully written.
Garrett Mattingly’s The Armada (Houghton-Mifflin, 1959;
paper) provides a detailed description of the diplomatic maneuvering and military preparations leading up to the great sea battle of
1588 as well as a stirring account of the battle itself. In The Expansion of Elizabethan England (St. Martin’s, 1955), A. L. Rowse tells
the tale of exploration and warfare in lively style. James Williamson, The Age of Drake (London: A. and C. Black, 1938), traces
Elizabethan voyages of exploration, trade, and colonization against
the background of English domestic and foreign policy.
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England Before theIndustrial Age (Scribner, 1965; paper), is a pioneering investigationof the day-to-day lives of ordinary people in preindustrial England.
The English People on the Eve of Colonization, 1603-1630 (Harper,
1954; paper) by Wallace Notestein is a clear and well-written introduction to English society in Blackthorne’s time, while KeithThomas’ fascinating Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1971) takes a look at the world view of the English in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Penry Williams surveys
changes in English society and culture in Life in Tudor England(Batsford, 1965).
5. Trade, Diplomacy, and Christianity
The best general surveys of early contact between Japan and theWest are Charles Boxer. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650(Univ. of Calif., 1951); Michael Cooper, ed., The Southern Barbarians: The First Europeans in Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha. 1971); andGeorge Sansom, The Western World and Japan (Knopf, 1949; Vintage, 1973, paper), which continues the story through the nineteenth
century.
For a general overview of Japanese expansionism in the time ofShǀgun, see Yoshi Kuno, Japanese Expansion on the Asiatic Continent (2 vols.; Univ. of Calif., 1937). Japan’s diplomatic difficulties with China are recounted in Wang Yi-t’ung, Official Relations

Between China and Japan, 1368-1549 (Harvard, 1953), and So
Kwan-wai, Japanese Piracy in Ming China During the 16th Century(Michigan State Univ.. 1975). A revisionist interpretation of early
Tokugawa foreign policy is provided by Ronald Toby, “Reopening
the Question of Sakoku: Diplomacy in the Legitimation of theTokugawa Bakufu,” Journal of Japanese Studies, v. 3, no. 2 (Summer 1977), pp. 323-63.
The activities of Western traders in East Asia in the era of Shǀgun
are detailed in several works by Charles Boxer, including: Fidalgos
in the Far East, 1550-1770 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1948), a
history of the Portuguese trade based in Macao; The Great Shipfrom Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade, 15551640 (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Historicos Ultramarinos, 1959);
and The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 (Knopf, 1965). For the
early English traders in Japan, see references in “The Will Adams
Legend” above. The activities and influence of the Dutch in Nagasaki after the exclusion of the Catholics are treated in Charles Boxer,
Jan Compagnie in Japan, 1600-1850 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,1950); Grant Goodman, The Dutch Impact on Japan, 1640-1853(Leiden: Brill, 1967); and Donald Keene’s delightful The Japanese
Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830 (London: Kegan Paul, 1952; rev.
ed., Stanford, 1969, paper).
Two excellent recent books on early Christianity in Japan are
Michael Cooper, Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japanand China (Weatherhill, 1974), a detailed biography of the modelfor “Tsukku” in Shǀgun, and George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The
Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Harvard, 1973), a
scholarly and penetrating study of the acceptance and then rejectionof Christianity in seventeenth-century Japan. For a different sort ofunderstanding of the dilemmas of Christians in Japan in this period,
see Endǀ Shǌsaku, Silence (trans. William Johnston; Tokyo: Sophia
Univ., 1969), a provocative novel by a modern Japanese Catholic
author.
6. The Struggle for the Shogunate
For the evolution of Japan’s premodern political institutions, thebest book is John Hall, Government and Local Power in Japan, 500
to 1700 (Princeton, 1966). Useful essays on the evolution of thedaimyo and their castle towns in the era of Shǀgun may be found inJohn Hall and Marius Jansen, eds., Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan (Princeton, 1968; paper). For specialized scholarly essays on the period, see John Hall, Nagahara Keiji,
and Kozo Yamamura, eds., Japan Before Tokugawa: Political
Consolidation and Economic Growth, 1500-1650 (Princeton, 1980).

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The military history of the sixteenth-century unification of Japanis detailed in such general histories as Murdoch and Sansom (see“Basic Background” above) and in a readable and well-illustrated
survey by S. R. Turnbull, The Samurai: A Military History (Macmillan, 1977). For the rise and fall of the military importance of firearms in Japan, see Noel Perrin, Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879 (David Godine, 1979), an interestingbook which is best read in conjunction with a perceptive review by
Conrad Totman in the Journal of Asian Studies, v. 39, no. 3 (May1980), pp. 599-601.
For biographical background on the three unifiers of Japan,
useful summaries and revealing documents may be found in Ch.
xv, “Heroes and Hero Worship,” in W. T. de Bary, ed., Sourcesof Japanese Tradition (Columbia, 1958; paper). Virtually nothing
about Nobunaga is yet available in English; Hideyoshi is only
slightly better served by Walter Dening’s badly outdated The Lifeof Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Kobe, 1888; rev. ed., 1904; 3rd ed., 1930),
but should at last receive some of the attention due him in a politicalbiography by Mary Elizabeth Berry, Hideyoshi (Harvard, forthcoming). For Tokugawa Ieyasu, the indispensable English-language
source is Sadler’s The Maker of Modern Japan (see “Basic Background” above). For a good introduction to the political structureof the Tokugawa shogunate, see Conrad Totman, Politics in the
Tokugawa Bakufu, 1600-1843 (Harvard, 1967). Totman is also
currently preparing a biography of Tokugawa Ieyasu aimed at a
general audience.
7. A Model for Mariko
The only English-language materials which provide any details
about Hosokawa Gracia and her family are Charles Boxer, “Hosokawa Tadaoki and the Jesuits, 1587-1645,” Trans, and Proc. of theJapan Society, London, v. 32 (1934-5), pp. 79-119, which quotes
interesting Jesuit descriptions of Gracia, and Johannes Laures, Two
Japanese Christian Heroes: Justo Takayama Ukon and Gracia
Hosokawa Tamako (Tuttle, 1959), a rather eulogistic account by aJesuit scholar. The connection between Hosokawa Gracia and theJapanese “Cinderella cycle” (see p. 70) has been proposed by
Chieko Mulhern in “Cinderella and the Jesuits: An Otogizoshi
Cycle as Christian Literature,” Monumenta Nipponica, v. 34, no. 4(Winter 1979), pp. 409-47.
8. Death and Karma
There is as yet no systematic study of Japanese approaches todeath; for an introductory survey, see William LaFleur, “Death andJapanese Thought: The Truth and Beauty of lmpermanence,”

in Frederick Hoick, ed., Death and Eastern Thought: Understanding Death in Eastern Religions and Philosophies (Abingdon, 1974,
paper), pp. 226-56. A samurai view of death is presented by Winston
King in “Practicing Dying: The Samurai-Zen Death Techniques of
Suzuki Shǀsan,” in Frank Reynolds and Earle Waugh, eds.,
Religious Encounters with Death (Penn. State Univ., 1977), pp.
143-58. For suggestive studies of attitudes toward dying in modern
Japan, see Robert Lifton et al., Six Lives, Six Deaths: Portraits from
Modern Japan (Yale, 1979).
On the theme of karma in Japanese thought, only fragmentary
insights are available in English. Kyǀkai’s Nihon ryoiki, a basic
source, has been translated by Kyoko Nakamura as Miraculous
Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition (Harvard, 1973). For a
Zen perspective, see Ch. 4, “The Problem of Karma,” in Francis
Dojun Cook, How to Raise an Ox: Zen Practice as Taught in the
Zen Master Dǀgen’s Shǀbǀgenzǀ (Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1978). An anthropologist’s insights about the basic problemof “fatalism” in Japan, trying to explain how a culture long preoccupied with fate can so successfully deal with sudden change, areprovided by David Plath in “Japan and the Ethics of Fatalism,”
Anthropological Quarterly, v. 39 (July 1966), reprinted in Irwin
Scheiner, ed., Modern Japan: An Interpretive Anthology (Macmillan,
1974, paper).
For general background information on the history of Japanesereligion, see W. T. de Bary, ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition(Columbia, 1958; paper), and Joseph Kitagawa, Religion in Japanese History (Columbia, 1966).
9. Learning Japanese
A good short introduction to the Japanese language is Joseph
Yamagiwa, “Language as an Expression of Japanese Culture,” inJohn Hall and Richard Beardsley, eds., Twelve Doors to Japan(McGraw-Hill, 1965), pp. 186-221. For more detailed linguistic
surveys, see Haruhiko Kindaichi, The Japanese Language (trans.
Umeyo Hirano; Tuttle, 1978), and, for a more academic and historical emphasis, Roy Miller, The Japanese Language (Univ. of Chicago, 1967). Two different approaches to the fascinating issues
raised by the Japanese language in its cultural context are Roy Miller,
The Japanese Language in Contemporary Japan: Some Sociolinguistic Observations (Washington, D.C.: American EnterpriseInstitute for Public Policy Research, 1977, paper), and Takao
Suzuki, Japanese and the Japanese: Words in Culture (Kodansha
Intl., 1978).

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10. The Samurai
An excellent general history of the samurai, authoritatively written and beautifully illustrated, is Richard Storry, The Way of theSamurai (Putnam, 1978); it includes a far more detailed bibliography than is possible here. For a briefer survey, see H. Paul Varley,
Samurai (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970). Ivan Morris’ The Nobilityof Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (Holt-Rinehart,1975) examines the important concept of “sincerity” in the samurai
tradition.
The medieval epics are a marvelous repository of lore about thesamurai class in its classic phase. The Tale of the Heike is available
in a readable if uninspired translation by Hiroshi Kitagawa andBruce Tsuchida (2 vols.; Univ. of Tokyo, 1975; paper). The influence of this great epic on samurai values (see pp, 89-90) is discussed
in Kenneth Butler, “The Heike Monogatari and the Japanese Warrior Ethic,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, v. 29 (1969), pp.
93-108. Two other important military epics have been translated by
Helen McCullough; The Taiheiki: A Chronicle of Medieval Japan(Columbia, 1959) and Yoshitsune: A Fifteenth-Century Japanese
Chronicle (Stanford, 1966).
For the samurai martial arts, see, in addition to the titles mentioned on p. 92, the excellent three-volume survey by Don Draeger,
The Martial Arts and Ways of Japan (Weatherhill, 1973-4): Classical Bujutsu, Classical Budo, and Modern Bujutsu and Budo. Alsoof use is Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook, Secrets of the Samurai:
A Survey of the Martial Arts of Feudal Japan (Tuttle, 1973).
For primary sources on Bushido, see Miyamoto Musashi, A Book
of Five Rings (trans. Victor Harris; The Overlook Press, 1974), a
treatise by one of Japan’s greatest swordsmen; “Yamaga Sokǀ andthe Origins of Bushido,” in W. T. de Bary, ed., Sources of JapaneseTradition (Columbia, 1958; paper); and Yamamoto Tsunetomo[Jǀchǀ], Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (trans. William Scott
Wilson; Kodansha Intl.. 1979). The classic version of the story of
the Forty-Seven Rǀnin is Donald Keene, trans., Chǌshingura: The
Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Columbia, 1971; paper). For a description of the practice of seppuku, Jack Seward’s Harakiri: Japanese
Ritual Suicide (Tuttle, 1968) is good on the details of the ritual but
weak on any psychological analysis.
Modern Japanese interpretations of Bushido must be used withcare; for example, Nitobe Inazo’s well-known Bushido: The Soulof Japan (1899; rev. ed., Putnam, 1905), although suggestive, waswritten by a Japanese Christian for an Anglo-Saxon audience andhas strong polemical overtones. Equally deserving of caution is
Mishima Yukio’s The Way of the Samurai: Yukio Mishima on

Hagakure in Modern Life (trans. Kathryn Sparling: Basic Books,
1977).
The tea ceremony, the most all-encompassing of the many cultural
pursuits of the samurai in the age of Shǀgun, is described in goodhistorical detail in Arthur Sadler, Cha-no-yu: the Japanese Tea
Ceremony (Kobe: Thompson, 1934; Tuttle reprint, 1962, paper).
For a description of the Japanese tea ceremony as it is practiced
today, see Tanaka Sen’o, The Tea Ceremony (Tokyo: Kodan-sha,1973). Okakura Kakuzo’s famous The Book of Tea (1906; Tuttle,1956) is an inspired account of the tea ceremony infused withnineteenth-century romanticism. A basic source of information onother aspects of the cultural activities and patronage of the samurai
class is the Heibonsha Survey of Japanese Art (31 vols.;
Weatherhill, 1972-80), which includes volumes on The Feudal
Architecture of Japan, Momoyama Decorative Painting, Momoyama Genre Painting, The Namban Art of Japan, and The Garden
Art of Japan.
11. Consorts and Courtesans
Very little is available in English on the history of women in traditional Japan. For a concise survey of the changing status of womenin medieval Japan, see Joyce Ackroyd, “Women in Feudal Japan,”
Trans, of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 3rd ser., v. 7 (1959), pp. 3168. The position of women in the Heian period is discussed in Ivan
Morris, The World of the Shining Prince (Oxford, 1964; Penguin,
1979, paper). Useful comparative material on marriage andinheritance may be found in F. Joüon des Longrais, L’Est et l’Ouest:
Institutions du Japon et de l’Occident Comparées (Tokyo: Maison
Franco-Japonaise, 1958).
For the women of Shǀgun, some sense of Hideyoshi’s relationships with Nene and Yodo may be obtained from Adriana Boscaro,trans, and ed., 101 Letters of Hideyoshi (Tokyo: Sophia Univ.,
1975), while information on Ieyasu’s wives and consorts is provided
in Sadler, The Maker of Modern Japan (see “Basic Background”
above).
For the world of the seventeenth-century Tokugawa courtesan,particularly as it appears in literature, see Howard Hibbett, The
Floating World in Japanese Literature (Oxford, 1959; Tuttle reprint,
1974, paper). A marvelously detailed description of the traditional
Yoshiwara is J. E. de Becker, The Nightless City, or the History of
the Yoshiwara Yukwaku (1899; Tuttle reprint, 1971, paper). The
authoritative history of Chinese ideas about sex is R. H. van Gulik,
Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1961); no comparable
work has yet been done for Japan, although some useful information
may be found in Howard Levy, Sex, Love, and the Japanese(Washington, D.C.: Warm-Soft Village Press, 1971). For a partial

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160translation of Saikaku’s Nanshoku ǀkagami, see E. Powys Mathers,trans., Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1928; Tuttle reprint, 1972).
12. Daily Life in Traditional Japan
Two general surveys of daily life in traditional Japan are available
in English: Louis-Frédéric, Daily Life in Japan at the Time of theSamurai, 1185-1603 (trans, from the French; Praeger, 1972),
emphasizes the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, while C. J. Dunn,
Everyday Life in Traditional Japan (London: Batsford, 1969;
Tuttle reprint, 1977, paper), focuses on the Tokugawa period. In theabsence of any specialized scholarly studies, the most useful andprovocative information on customs and daily life is to be found in
the accounts of Western observers, such as Michael Cooper’s They
Came to Japan (see “Basic Background” above). Of the many other
Western accounts, particularly revealing are Engelbert Kaempfer,
The History of Japan (3 vols., Glasgow: MacLehose, 1906; AMS
reprint, 1971), a late seventeenth-century chronicle of Japan which
includes an excellent description of the Japanese steam bath (II, 3235), and Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese (1890; many later
editions; Tuttle reprint, 1971, paper).
The standard study of Japanese population trends is Irene Taeuber’s The Population of Japan (Princeton, 1958); for a more recent
and detailed analysis of the Tokugawa period in particular, see Susan
Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change
in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1868 (Princeton, 1977; paper). The
growth of castle towns is traced in John Hall, “The Castle Town
and Japan’s Modern Urbanization,” Far Eastern Quarterly(1955), reprinted in John Hall and Marius Jansen, Studies in theInstitutional History of Early Modern Japan (Princeton, 1968;
paper). For a cross-cultural comparison of Edo and London, seeHenry D. Smith II, “Tokyo and London: Comparative
Conceptions of the City,” in Albert Craig, ed., Japan: A
Comparative View (Princeton, 1979), pp. 49-99.

Postscript: The TV Transformation

From the start, the production of Learning from Shǀgun has beena delicate balancing act, an attempt to maintain a tone which would
attract the sympathy of both enthusiastic amateurs and skepticalacademics. I must confess, however, that my sense of balance (let’scall it “we”) has been somewhat disturbed by the TV film versionof Shǀgun. At best, it was passable soap opera with beautiful costumes and sets. At worst, and too often, it was a jumble of some of
the more simplistic generalizations and grotesque situations foundin the novel. It was, in short, a far less subtle, less integrated, and in
the end less satisfying work than the novel on which it was based.
This unfortunate distillation of the most dubious aspects ofShǀgun was achieved by the conscious elimination of precisely those
aspects of the novel which made it, in our minds, most worthy of
consideration. To begin with, virtually all of the political intrigue
among the Japanese daimyo was either eliminated or left incomprehensible; even those familiar with the novel found the TV plot difficult to follow. Hence most of the political background which has
been emphasized in Learning from Shǀgun will be impossible toappreciate on the basis of the film alone. The most regrettable sacrifice was Toranaga, who in the novel is a rich and complex characterbut who in the film is reduced to an inscrutable cipher, notwithstanding the majestic presence of Toshiro Mifune.
Even more unfortunate from our point of view was the elimination and even reversal of the theme of “learning from Japan,” which
we considered so fundamental to the novel. Clavell’s original Blackthorne was a confused and complex man, his prototypical qualities
as a WASP hero constantly challenged by the mores and beliefs of
the Japanese. As conceived by director Jerry London and played by
Richard Chamberlain, however, Blackthorne becomes instead analoof victim of Japanese aggression who manages to “become” asamurai only by stubborn adherence to his own Western code ofvalues; about all he really “learns” is the art of bathing and a few
words of Japanese. Consider, for example, his lines to Yabu in protest against the threatened crucifixion of the Anjiro villagers: “It isagainst my Christian conscience. I will have to commit suicide atonce.’’ In the novel, one senses the fundamental moral contradiction
between Christian conscience and suicide, but in the film the twostatements are edited into a perfectly smooth, unflinching sequence.
The transformation of Blackthorne from cross-cultural learnerto stubborn ethnocentrist finds a fascinating real-life parallel in the

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creation of the film itself, as detailed in The Making of James Clavell’s Shǀgun (Delta Books, 1980), the official account of the project.
Here we find a candid and often amusing chronicle of the persistent
American refusal to accommodate to Japanese ways, a refusal which
seems to have left the project persistently lacking in any of the wa (inthe Japanese sense; see Glossary) which is so idealized in the novel.
The Making of Shǀgun also provides a revealing explanation of thelogic which lay behind the television transformation:
There is no question that [scriptwriter Eric] Bercovici’s approach subtly
changed Shǀgun’s basic perspective. Clavell himself notes that, in the novel,
Blackthorne is the alien. “It’s a Japanese story, a very pro-Japanese story.” In
the beginning, we are not at all sure that Blackthorne is a hero .... Only as hefinds the beauty of Japan do we find the beauty of his character.
By switching the perspective from the Japanese to Blackthorne, all isreversed. Blackthorne becomes a hero and it is Japan that is alien. When we
first see him on the deck of the Erasmus in the film version, he is quite arecognizable Western hero. Says Clavell simply, “Different media. You
don’t relate film form to book form.” (pp. 36-37)

The context of this startling admission makes it clear that the difference in perspective is not simply a matter of form: it reveals
instead a tacit conviction that the American television public in 1980
is so xenophobic that it cannot tolerate an image of the Japanese (orpresumably other such non-white, non-Christian cultures) as anything
more than incomprehensible “aliens.” What has been effected is areversion to the basically ethnocentric structure of the Will Adams
myth (see Chapter 1), deprived of the strongly pro-Japanese tone
which distinguished Clavell’s novel.
The controversial decision by Bercovici to have all the major Japanese characters except Mariko speak only in Japanese, with no subtitles and no dubbing, stemmed as much from the “alien” approach toJapan as from any concern for authenticity. As explained in The
Making of Shǀgun, “The plan was simple: The entire story would be
told through Blackthorne’s eyes .... What he did not understand, we
did not understand” (p, 33). The unfortunate effect was to make theJapanese principals appear far more “inscrutable” than in the novel.
In particular, the central male actors were foreclosed from
communicating any but the most primitive (and typically hostile)
emotions to the American television audience.
The one great strength of the TV series was the reliance on Japanese expertise to create “authenticity.” But what was achieved wasrather the look of authenticity, a largely cosmetic effect which presented the uncomfortable contradiction of skilled Japanese actors,
finely costumed, who often behaved in the most un-Japanese ways.
Mariko’s hairdo may be more historically correct than in the novel,

but she still insists that “Japanese is a very simple language,”
instructing Blackthorne in distinctions of inflection which do notmake sense in her own tongue. More disturbing than such minor
errors was the film’s emphasis on those scenes from the novel which
tended most to caricature Japanese behavior. What on earth did all
the Japanese actors make, for example, of the scene in which the oldgardener is executed for taking down a rotten pheasant in defianceof Blackthorne’s orders, contrasting the humane and life-affirming
Western hero with the blindly obedient and life-negating Japanese?
Presumably, most of the native Japanese involved in the production of “Shǀgun” passed off such scenes with good humor, toleratingthem as the sort of exaggeration typical in the Kabuki theater. Butamong the American television viewers, a good many were moreinsulted than amused, particularly in the Japanese-American community. One of the strongest reactions came from Clifford Uyeda,
former national president of the Japanese-American Citizens League,
who wrote that the “captivating” costumes and photography “weremere settings in which subtle racism was beamed into thesubconscious mind .... Japanese characters were not individuals.
They were stereotypes, often gross, sometimes odious. Samurai weredepicted as a class of people cruel to the point of being inhuman.
Japanese people were cast as a race to whom life has little meaning
except death” (Pacific Citizen, Sept. 19, 1980, p. 6).
So the TV transformation involved a certain loss of innocence forShǀgun, a submission of a very private and self-contained fantasy to
the compromising demands of the American entertainment industry.
The unfortunate part is that so much good will went into the makingof the film series, particularly on the part of James Clavell, whostresses at the end of The Making of Shǀgun that “Shǀgun was
written to be a bridge between East and West and to dramatize andtry to explain the Land of the Gods to the West. It is passionately
pro-Japanese” (p. 224). Perhaps I am being impatient and idealistic in
my disappointment with the TV version of Shǀgun. It was certainly apresentation of great visual appeal, with some fine acting by anumber of the principals. And for all the latent stereotyping,“Shǀgun” does seem to have left a generally positive feeling toward
the Japanese among the majority of viewers. If only as “‘the world’s
costliest language lesson” (N.Y. Times, Sept. 15, 1980), the TV“Shǀgun” left millions of Americans knowing far more about Japan
than before. Deep-rooted cultural biases cannot be broken down
overnight, and “Shǀgun,” like its parent novel, offers a hopeful
foundation on which to build the deeper cross-cultural understanding
which is so clearly the ideal of James Clavell. (H.S.)

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