Séamas O'Reilly: I was so engrossed in 'Shōgun' that I forgot I don’t speak Japanese

Hiroyuki Sanada as Yoshii Toranaga in Shogun.

I was about 20 minutes into Shōgun, the new historical epic from Disney+, when I realised something that struck me to my core. Engrossed in the show’s thrilling feudal intrigue and bracing samurai action, I’d become fully subsumed into its richly populated world. So fully, in fact, that I thought nothing of turning to my laptop to see if it was based on real historical events.

Prior to this show, I didn’t know much about Samurai. The one thing I did know was that they were abolished in 1867. I know this because the fax machine was patented in 1843, while Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, and that there exists a 22-year window in which a Samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln, might well be my all-time favourite fact.

My bit of light research taught me two main things: Firstly, the series, and the 1975 novel by James Clavell from which it springs, are very broadly rooted in real history, namely the arrival of the first Englishman in Japan. John Blackthorn, played with real Richard Burton-esque chewiness by Cosmo Jarvis, is loosely based on the historical William Adams, an English navigator who led a Dutch East India Company expedition to Japan, arriving there in April of 1600. Prior to this point, Japan had been exclusively the preserve of the Portuguese, who had been busy conducting trade, converting large swathes of the local ruling class to Catholicism, and keeping the nation’s location a closely guarded secret from their Northern European Protestant rivals.

This hermetically sealed world becomes primarily apparent in dialogue, as every local character speaks Japanese throughout, and cannot understand what the Blackthorn is saying, before representatives from the Jesuits, and later Mariko, a noble-born Christian Japanese woman, enter the story to translate on his behalf. This only becomes marginally confusing when one discovers that all the ‘English’ we hear from Blackthorn, Mariko, the scheming priests and every other non-Japanese character is, in fact, ‘Portuguese’, albeit rendered in English for our comprehension. This is revealed when an English-speaking prisoner turns to the English-speaking Blackthorn to commend him in English for the quality of the Portuguese he’s just been speaking. 

In terms of balancing readability and authenticity, both seem unequivocally the right decisions, expertly deployed with minimal exposition, but it does leave one wondering what Portuguese-speaking viewers might make of it all.

The world of political turmoil that greets Blackthorn is precarious, to say the least. He finds himself in hoc to Lord Toronaga, played by the ever-excellent Hiroyuki Sanada, who seeks to use him as a bargaining chip in his ongoing feud with his political opponents, the heads of the other four clans currently vying for supremacy following the death of their esteemed imperial regent. 

This situation, I read, also follows the broadest outlines of real history, albeit with names changed, dates rearranged, and many other narrative conveniences deployed.

It was just as I was congratulating myself on all this learning, in fact, strongly considering applying for a job teaching Japanese history at a local university, that my second epiphany arrived: I had not taken in any of what had been happening on screen for the previous five minutes and would have to rewind. It is the highest compliment I can give to any show that I was so engrossed in its story that I momentarily forgot I don’t speak Japanese.

Was this mental confusion because I use subtitles almost all the time now, even for English-language shows? Recent reporting suggests half of us use closed captions for all television viewing and the cause most typically cited is that of poor sound quality, connected to the way that audio is mixed on streaming services so it can be optimised across phone, TV and tablet viewing. TVs have also become bigger, great for picture quality, but also thinner, terrible for audio quality, meaning dialogue is often inaudible, while explosions and gunshots sound like they’re happening inside your ribcage.

There are also external factors. As parents, my wife and I keep TV volume as low as we can possibly stand it, in order to prevent the pitter patter of disturbed little feet marching downstairs from their beds. Single people, meanwhile, increasingly live either in the same house as their parents, or in crowded flat shares, both situations that might necessitate watching movies and TV on low volume, so the preponderance of subtitling is likely to continue.

None of which quite explains how I managed to convince myself I spoke Japanese, but it does point at a few possible explanations. One is that, even five years ago, my brain automatically associated subtitles with foreign language viewing, and primed my brain to understand this. Perhaps now that I’m so used to seeing text at the bottom of my screen, that discipline has disintegrated.

Another is that whenever I watch foreign language films, I avoid distractions or phone use, whereas I observe a much more laissez-faire attitude to TV. This theory of internalised snobbery is borne out when I test my memory and note that no such problems arose watching recent films like Anatomy Of A Fall or Zone Of Interest whereas similar things did happen when I watched both breezy French comedy-drama Call My Agent and Korean death-game blockbuster Squid Game.

The fact this has happened before, and that I’d completely forgotten about it until now, lends additional credence to a third, and equally valid answer: I am simply a bit thick, and the steel trap of my mind is rusting slowly shut from a combination of age, sleep deprivation, and a youth spent atomising my brain cells in every one of the ways I was urged not to.

Luckily, I can make myself smarter each day by watching fancy historical epics about feudal Japan and reading Wikipedia to fill in whatever blanks are left. Even better, I reckon subtitles count as reading, so I can class most shows I watch as books. If you know of any university posts going, keep me in mind.