Samurai splendour: Sanada playing his role in a scene from ‘Shogun’. — AP
THE government and people cheered the record trophy haul for period drama Shogun at the Emmy Awards as yet another win for their history and culture, which are becoming increasingly popular with tourists and international audiences alike.
The historical epic set in Imperial Japan claimed 18 awards, the most ever for a single drama season, according to the Emmy website, including best drama and acting awards for leads Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai.Another Japanese period piece, Blue Eye Samurai, won an Emmy for the best animated programme.
The government welcomed the achievement, highlighting that 70% of the dialogue in Shogun was in Japanese and that Sanada, who played the lead warlord Yoshii Toranaga, was involved in its production.“We would like to further encourage Japanese creators to take on the challenges of overseas productions,” Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroshi Moriya told reporters.
The Japanese government also set up a committee this month to support the entertainment and content industries, he said.The accolades for Shogun are the latest showcase of Japan’s rising prominence on the global stage.In March, the monster movie epic Godzilla Minus One nabbed a visual effects Oscar after becoming a sleeper hit in United States theatres, while HBO’s critically acclaimed noir crime series Tokyo Vice finished its second and last season in April. In sports, Japanese baseball phenomenon Shohei Ohtani is in second place for home runs in his first season with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Japan finished third in the gold medal tally at the Paris Olympics that concluded last month.
Meanwhile, foreign tourists are flooding into Japan each month, with total visitor numbers and spending poised to smash records this year.Many visitors are drawn to experience things as they were in the Edo period of Shogun, said Naomi Mano, president of Tokyo-based travel agency Luxurique.“We are an island country and in the Edo period, everything was secluded,” Mano said. “Now we’re in a phase where we’re actually trying to get people to understand why we do things or the way we did our traditions.
”Dutch tourist Dominique le Noble said she was partially inspired by Shogun in booking a samurai sword class as part of her first trip to Japan.“The samurai wasn’t all flower arrangement,” Le Noble, 31, said in the underground dojo, or training room, in Tokyo where she had just practised slicing apart woven reed mats with a sword.“It was actual violence and there’s a beautiful side to it but there’s a dark side...
I like how both of them come together,” she said.Shogun is based on a 1975 historical novel by James Clavell, later made into a mini-series in 1980 that focused more on the shipwrecked English captain, played by Richard Chamberlain, than the Japanese characters. — Reuters
