The Emmy Awards nominations caused a stir last month, July 2024, when Shōgun (将軍) topped the list with 25 nominations including best drama series. Set in 1600 Japan, the show is mostly in Japanese, making it only the second majority non-English drama to be nominated for the top award after South Korea's Squid Games in 2022. What's more fascinating is that it features scheming Portuguese priests and other Portuguese-speaking characters, namely a Japanese aristocratic lady and an English sailor who reached Japan onboard a Dutch ship. Hollywood naturally rendered all the Portuguese dialog in English, but this helps puts a spotlight on Portugal's historical ties to Asia for a worldwide audience.
Available on Disney+, the show is based on James Clavell's 1975 novel of the same name, which was based on the historical figure William Adams, an English navigator who became a high-ranking samurai in Japan. Both the novel and the drama series manage to intersect the tail-end of the Japanese warring states period (戦国時代) with the European wars of religion, with the Catholic Portuguese cast as the self-serving enemies of the Protestant Englishman and the Dutch crew he sailed with.
The Portuguese first reached Japan by accident in 1543. In fact, last year, 2023, marked 480 years of Luso-Japanese relations, the subject of an earlier blog post. This being the first interaction that the Japanese had with a European culture, there was a significant cultural impact in terms of vocabulary, food and of course religion. Francis Xavier started a Jesuit mission in 1549 to introduce Catholic Christianity and a growing number of converts included powerful Japanese aristocrats. These lords were richly rewarded through their involvement with Portuguese control of trade. Goods, and profits, flowed from as far as Goa in India, but of particular importance was trade with China, given that Ming dynasty China had cut off direct commercial relations with Japan. Portuguese trade was even responsible for the founding of the port of Nagasaki (長崎) in 1571 (the city would have the misfortune in 1945 of being the second city in the world to be devastated by an atomic bomb).
The Portuguese even intervened militarily in the long Japanese civil war going on, bombarding the castle of Moji (門司) from the sea in 1561 at the request of a Christian lord. In 1565, a flotilla of 8-10 large Japanese junks, dozens of smaller vessels and hundreds of samurai attached two Portuguese ships in Fukuda Bay (福田浦) in Kyūshū. While eight Portuguese were killed in the battle, the Japanese had to retreat after losing three of their junks and over 70 samurai. This cemented the fearsome reputation of the Portuguese and their ships. As these carracks had their hull painted black with pitch, they became known as "Black Ships", or 黒船 (kurofune) in Japanese.
This was the broad historical context for the Shōgun drama series, with the historical turning point of the arrival of Protestant Europeans intent on competing with the Portuguese, whether in trade or religion. Despite the best efforts of the Portuguese to monopolize trade with Asia by keeping navigational and other essential information secret, the Dutch spy Jan Huygen van Linschoten exposed all of this in great detail in 1595 by publishing Reys-gheschrift vande navigatien der Portugaloysers in Orienten (Travel Accounts of Portuguese Navigation in the Orient). More details on this in this post.
The English navigator William Adams made it to Japan in 1600 onboard a Dutch ship, but interestingly this was the lone surviving ship of an expedition that took the much more perilous route of crossing from the South Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, going around Iberian-controlled South America (Spain and Portugal shared the same king under the Iberian Union from 1580-1640). Adams became embroiled in Japanese politics as well as European relations, and became a high-ranking samurai. He serves as the inspiration for the character John Blackthorne, played by Cosmo Jarvis, in the Shōgun drama series. Here's the trailer for those interested:
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