A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Shōgun is kind of a Dad Show. It has some Dad Show elements (historical drama, bloody violence, a highly competent Cool/Bad Guy), but they’re only a few of the ingredients in its rich, sailor-flavored stew.
I don’t feel the need to write more specifically on the Dad Show topic, but I do want to write about Shōgun again after its finale – specifically, how glad I am to be alive now and not Japan in the year 1600.
A large part of the appeal of watching historical dramas like Shōgun is imagining what it would be like to live in the depicted time period. And I don’t imagine I would have done well in feudal Japan.
The show makes the era seem abjectly shitty. Everybody kept trying to kill themselves to get away from how bad their lives were. They were constantly like “I want to disembowel myself while someone cuts my head off, because I can’t stand being alive anymore.” But they had to ask their boss for permission first, and if he said no, they had to keep living. And whatever their fate, they accepted it without complaint. They were committed to their duty.
I once quit a job because I got called in on my day off.
Contemporary America, where I live, is not an honor culture. If I found myself in the Japans, my baseline level of selfishness and dishonesty as a regular American dude would require me to commit seppuku several times per week. And I wouldn’t even do it. I’m not honorable like that.
If my boss commanded me to abandon my life and risk grave personal danger to pose as a janitor in a fishing village in order to spy on his enemies, I would be very unhappy. And then if he had the AUDACITY to criticize where I kept my pigeons… I would go Buntaro on his ass.
But even Yabushige-sama, the most self-interested man in all of Izu province, followed through when Toranaga-sama told him to off himself. The big man said “I want you to be dead in 18 hours, okay?” And Yabushige was like “Yeah, sure, whatever. Just make sure to leave my body in a field so dogs can eat it.”
I’m not saying the way they did it in Shōgun times was better. That one guy had to end his whole family line because he spoke out of turn. That’s very extreme. It’s good that we don’t do that anymore. I appreciate that we are more forgiving now. But I could stand to be a little more honorable than I am. The next time I say something I shouldn’t, I will symbolically punch myself in the stomach.
I wonder if I would have been like John Blackthorne, who eventually overcame his galootish ways to become an honorable Japanese man. But I don’t think I would have, because I don’t have the skills as a mariner to have been useful to Toranaga-sama. What am I gonna do, write a review of a kabuki play? No, I would have been the Dutch guy who got boiled alive in the first episode.
If I had to pick a recent period drama set in Japan to live in, it would be Tokyo Vice, which is set at a newspaper in the late ‘90s, because it would mean I get to experience the commercial peak of print journalism.
In conclusion, here’s an Anjin meme I made about something that annoys me.
Over at TV Guide, I reviewed The Veil, FX/Hulu’s new Elisabeth Moss spy thriller. It’s just good enough to not be bad. Next week’s Dad Shows will be about the show’s creator Steven Knight, TV’s wildest dude you might not have heard of. He gets to write whatever he wants, but he probably shouldn’t. It’ll be fun. See you then.