The Real History from the ‘Shogun’ Finale

Editor’s note: This post contains spoilers for the ending of “Shōgun.”

And so, with one final view of Lord Toranaga standing alone at the edge of the world, FX’s “Shōgun” comes to a poignant, if abrupt end. Viewers who expected the old-school Japanese epic to end with a massive battle or other large-scale set piece may have been disappointed, but after spending ten episodes watching Toranaga mastermind his way through a 17th century game of thrones, the charged determination in his gaze is dynamic enough on its own.

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The ending of “Shōgun” focuses on the certainty of Japan’s future, revealing the show’s true narrative as a heavily orchestrated reality wherein Toranaga has already won. But what exactly does his victory mean?

In the most literal sense of the word, it means nothing. Toranaga is a fictional character created by James Clavell to represent the historical shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and therefore never really existed. Same goes for Mariko, Blackthorne, and the rest of the characters from Clavell’s bestselling novel. But being literal is boring. Here is what happens after the events of “Shōgun,” based on the equivalent events in Japanese history.

No, wait, go back. “Shōgun” really just ends there?

Yep. The book ending is equally as abrupt, if it makes you feel any better. Instead of showing the decisive battle that secured Toranaga’s victory and ascension to the shogunate (based on this historical Battle of Sekigahara), the future shogun simply describes the future as he has designed it and states that to be shogun was simply his fate, or karma.

James Clavell did write more books in his so-called “Asian Saga,” but none of them continue the story of John Blackthorne in Japan — the only other book set in Japan takes place during the 1800s and while it does feature a descendent of Toranaga as a character, there’s no real continuity between the individual stories.

What happened to the real John Blackthorne?

One of the funnier reveals in Toranaga’s ending speech is the truth behind his interest in John Blackthorne. Despite being a co-protagonist in the series, pretty much nothing Blackthorne did mattered. Toranaga used him as a two-legged distraction, a red cape he waved around at the charging bull of Lord Ishida’s ambitions, and everything Blackthorne wanted over the course of the show — to reunite with his crew and sail against the Portuguese — couldn’t matter less to Toranaga. He does, however, predict that Blackthorne will never return to England and will help him build a legendary fleet, which is almost exactly what happened to Blackthorne’s historical counterpart William Adams.

William Adams lived the rest of his life in Japan, advising Lord Tokugawa and facilitating trade between the Protestant nations and Japan. He ended up building two ships for the shogun, but they didn’t amount to the powerful naval force Toranaga describes. Adams married a Japanese woman and had two more children in addition to those he left behind in England. He was given a small fiefdom and eventually a house in Tokugawa’s budding city of Edo — to this day, the street where he lived bears the name Anjin-dori, or Pilot Street.

How did Mariko really die?

Of all the things James Clavell didn’t have to make up, a prominent, Christian, and multilingual Japanese noblewoman who died by suicide in a fiery explosion to protest the keeping of hostages in Osaka Castle is possibly the most specific. The “real” Mariko was Lady Hosokawa, who famously disobeyed the orders of Lord Ishida (Ishido’s historical counterpart) to leave her estate and come to Osaka to join the hostages he was keeping in the castle as insurance against Lord Tokugawa’s vassals getting any ideas about overthrowing him.

Instead of going with Ishida, Lady Hosokawa laced her chambers with gunpowder, ordered a servant to stab her in the chest, and blew up her entire house. The reaction to her sacrifice was similar to that shown in “Shogun.” Thoroughly shamed and facing mutiny, Ishida let the Osaka hostages go, leaving him vulnerable to the next phase of Tokugawa’s plans.

The biggest and most impressive difference between Lady Hosokawa’s death and Mariko’s is that Lady Hosokawa was not working with or for Lord Tokugawa at the time. Her actions were entirely her own, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the ripple effects of her defiance changed the course of Japanese and world history forever.

What is the significance of the Tokugawa shogunate? 

It would take at least one of not many college level courses in Japanese history to fully explain how the Tokugawa shogunate changed Japan, but in the spirit of brevity and keeping things relevant to “Shōgun,” here are some cliffnotes:

The Tokugawa shogunate unified most of Japan under the military rule of the Tokugawa clan. It restructured Japanese society to have all noble houses as part of a hierarchy under the shogun, eliminating the possibility of war between clans. Their most lasting impact was the foundation of Edo, the capital city that would one day become Tokyo, and a hallmark of Tokugawa power was the practice of sankin-kotai — a system that kept the upper class financially humble by requiring them to move between their own estates and a mandatory residence in Edo every other year. Sankin-kotai was remarkably effective because moving absolutely sucked even back then.

The story of “Shōgun” contains a lot of foreshadowing about the construction and importance of Edo. When Toranaga negotiates his escape from Osaka with the Portuguese Jesuits blocking the harbor, he promises them a cathedral in Edo as part of his bargain. Tokugawa did allow the Franciscan order to build a church in Edo, but the shogunate later banned Christianity in Japan and violently expelled all priests and missionaries from the country.

There’s also the matter of the protection for sex workers Toranaga promises to create in Edo at the request of Gin, the proprietor of Ajiro’s teahouse. This historically became Yoshiwara, the world-famous pleasure district of Edo, where the “willow world” Gin describes in Episode 7 bloomed as a recognized commercial district of the city.

“Learning from Shōgun” is available in PDF form here. Other sources used in this article include “A Brief History of Japanese Civilization”  

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