In 1975 James Clavell published a best selling novel Shōgun, loosely based on the story of William Adams, an English Tudor period pilot major who was shipwrecked off the coast of Japan in the early 1600s and rose to prominence in the court of one of the Japanese warlords of the time.

Clavell had been a British Army officer in Malaya, and was captured by the Japanese in Java during the second world war and was interned in Changi PoW camp in Singapore.

(It’s one of the oddities of history that he might have crossed paths with my uncle Jimmy, who was interned first by the Japanese in Changi before being transferred to Sime Road camp. As both are now dead – my uncle probably dying of mistreatment in Sime Road, we will never know).

Clavell paints the Japan of the period as a strange and very alien place and almost completely unknown to the west. In fact this isn’t quite true, at this period the door was ajar with small numbers of merchants visiting Japan, as well as the occasional missionary.

At the same time a small number of Japanese visitied the west including Cosmas and Christopher (we don’t know their Japanese names), who were captured by the English privateer Thomas Cavendish while travelling on a Spanish Galleon, eventually ended up in Elizabethan England.

Adams, who despite being English, was employed by the Dutch VoC at the time, might well have encountered Japanese mercenaries prior to being shipwrecked, so he may have had more of an acquaintance with Japanese culture than Clavell’s fictional protagonist.

The Dutch, the Spanish and the Portuguese all employed Japanese mercenaries at various times in their wars both among themselves and against indigenous rulers in what is now Indonesia, Timor and the Phillipines.

Clavell’s story, and it’s a good story, chronicles the rise to power by Clavell’s protagonist, John Blackthorne. As a story it has perhaps more drama than Adams’ and makes more of Blackthorne’s value as a westerner with skills that the Japanese did not possess at the time.

As a story, it’s very much out of the ‘first encounter’ trope of science fiction where a group of explorers encounter a strange, sophisticated and utterly confusing and alien culture – and the Japan of the period fits the description perfectly – sophisticated, alien, and most definitely not western.

I read the book in 1977 or 78 and remember being fascinated by its portrayal of an utterly different culture, in which people have the same urges and desires as every other human being, but at the same time behave differently due to cultural differences and different attitudes.

In fact I was so fascinated by the book that I tried to teach myself some Japanese from a BBC correspondance course.

A complete failure – apart from a few useful words and phrases uch as arigato and moshi moshi, I learned nothing, certainly not enough to string together a sentence, perhaps with a Japanese teacher I might have learned more.

Shōgun was such a success as a novel that NBC in America commissioned a TV dramatisation in the early eighties, which was both well made and reasonably true to the book. At a time when TV was still very much a shared event, myself and friends would gather together in each other’s share houses for a pot luck supper and watch it on a Sunday evening.

Until a few days ago I hadn’t thought about the book for years. My paperback edition had long since disappeared to a second hand shop somewhere, probably as a result as one or other of my moves, and then I saw in the New York Times that there was a remake of the original TV series.

The pictures in the NY Times article suggest that the remake is visually stunning. Unfortunately it’s probably going to end up on Disney plus in Australia, which probably means I won’t be able to see it, or at least not until it’s several years old and ends up on one of the public networks.

However, I did download a copy of the book to my Kindle to see if it was still as good as I remembered it, if nothing else I’ve got my next few week’s evening reading sorted…