Big in Japan

The first adaptation of samurai epic Shogun made television history. The new remake goes deeper.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

James Clavell's bestselling 1975 novel Shogun and the 1980 miniseries that followed did wonders for bringing Japan to the West. True, movie buffs and Hollywood directors had already tapped the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa and others. But Shōgun was a blockbuster book followed by a blockbuster TV show. It's credited with helping start a 1980s tsunami of Japanophilia in the West and did wonders for sushi sales.

The series starred Richard Chamberlain before he starred in The Thorn Birds. In Shōgun he played an Englishman washed up in 17th-century Japan. After a bath, he looked like a Bee Gee in a kimono.

Clavell had based his story on William Adams, the first Englishman to arrive in the country where Portuguese traders and Catholic Jesuit missions already had a foothold. The writer had been a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II.