Who Is John Blackthorne of 'SHOGUN'? The Contemporary Revival of Adams

September 2024, Los Angeles Emmy Awards ceremony. Disney+'s drama series 'SHOGUN' took 18 major awards and updated the record for most drama-category wins.

Star Sanada Hiroyuki and Anna Sawai took Best Actor and Best Actress in a Drama Series, respectively.

The original is James Clavell's 1975 novel 'Shōgun' — a story of the English navigator John Blackthorne who drifted to Tokugawa Ieyasu-era Japan.

The model of this Blackthorne was Miura Anjin of four hundred years ago.

Clavell's novel 'Shōgun,' published in 1975, became a worldwide bestseller, and was made into a miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain on NBC in 1980.

From then on, Blackthorne came to be recognized in the English-speaking world as a representative character of 'the Westerner who came to Japan.

' The story's Blackthorne is a fictional character, but the skeleton — landing of de Liefde (1600), meeting with Ieyasu, hatamoto appointment, marriage to a Japanese woman — nearly matches Adams's life.

What is notable about the 2024 version of 'SHOGUN' is Japanese-actor top-billing and the full adoption of the Japanese language.

Sanada Hiroyuki also served as executive producer and comprehensively supervised the Japanese depiction of the Hollywood version; the precision of period research, costume, and manner reached an unprecedented level.

Japan of the late Sengoku depicted not from the Western view of Japan but from the perspective of Japanese themselves reached viewers around the world.

The record 18 Emmy Award wins is the fruit of this production policy.

Through the global success of 'SHOGUN,' overseas interest in the real Adams exploded.

Overseas tourists visiting the Anjinzuka in Nishi-Hemi-chō, Yokosuka City, surged, and the production of Adams-related English-language books and documentaries followed one after another.

A single four-hundred-years-ago English navigator revived within twenty-first-century global entertainment and generated tourism demand for real historic sites — this cultural circulation is a rare case of interaction between history and the present.

The contemporary cultural situation in which the historical Adams and the fictional Blackthorne coexist will continue to be an important element of future Japan-England cultural exchange.