‘Shōgun’ Episode 2 Recap: “Servants of Two Masters” 

In episode two of Shōgun, we learn a great deal more about the dangerous game Lord Toranaga has been forced to play, a game that really began with specific instructions the Taikō left with one of the supreme ruler’s few remaining breaths. In a flashback to one year before pilot-major John Blackthorne and his Dutch warship Erasmus washed up bedraggled on a Japanese shore, Toranaga speaks in confidence with his dying leader (Yukijiro Hotaru). The vultures are circling, the old man says. His death will surely stir up calls for civil war. Worse, it will leave his young heir Yaechiyo (Sen Mars) vulnerable to the snuff out. And while the Taikō trusts only Toranaga, declaring him sole regent would immediately align every other power-seeking party against him. Which is exactly why a different decree is issued, one where Toranaga shares power with the four other regents. There is the scheming, powerful Ishido, who’ve we’ve met; Sugiyama (Toshi Toda), a descendent of samurai wealth; Ohno (Takeshi Kurokawa), the former warrior who converted to Catholicism when he contracted leprosy; and Kiyama (Hiromoto Ida), also a man of faith, so long as it satisfies his greed and ambition. 

All of these guys want Toranaga gone. The blood in his veins is Minowara, a name once associated with the ultimate earthly title and rank. You know it: Shōgun. And while Toranaga claims to not want the shogunate, he still has to manage against the moves of his regent adversaries. It’s a volatile political climate exacerbated by the arrival of Blackthorne, aka “the barbarian,” aka “Anjin,” the Japanese word for a ship’s pilot, aka “heretic” among the converted. 

The man who stands at the greatest height is the loneliest man in the realm. But now, as Blackthorne bows before him in a formal garden, Toranaga learns crucial information that will give him and this mysterious foreigner common cause. The meeting is also another example of how exquisitely Shōgun uses language. With Jesuit priest Martin Alvito (Tommy Bastow) called to translate, Toranaga also employs Lady Mariko – fluent in Japanese, Portuguese, and Latin – as a trusted failsafe against shenanigans. With Alvito translating and Mariko supervising, Shōgun focuses on Toranaga and Blackthorne in close-up. The translation falls away, a kind of direct communication is enabled, and through the sift of two spoken languages, each man learns the cerebral measure of the other. They can use each other, is what it comes down to. Blackthorne has knowledge of secret Portuguese bases, in places like Macao, that are coordinated by the Jesuits and stocked with guns and mercenary ronin samurai converted to Catholicism. And as an intelligent and astute political observer, Marko notes how Toranaga will use the Protestant, English pilot visitor to sow division between the Jesuit priests, the two Christian regents, and Ishido, thereby strengthening his political position.

But first, Blackthorne must endure the dank and dreadful prison where Toranaga tosses him in order to appease Ishido. And who’s in there but a wild-haired Joaquim de Almedia as disgraced priest Father Domingo. “You can’t play their games,” Domingo tells the pilot. “Their rules are too opaque, their hearts too guarded.” To which Blackthorne draws on the pluck that helped bring him all the way around the world, to a land where he does not plan to die on a cross. What if he can play their games? Even better, what if he wins? Busted out of the jail by the samurai Yabushige – he’s the tough Toranaga-sworn vassal who is nevertheless angling to align with Ishido after Toranaga is removed – the pilot sees how his knowledge can enable Toranaga’s political gameplay. 

“Your country falls into the Portuguese half. So it belongs to them.” At another meeting in the formal garden, Blackthorne has described how treaties between Portugal and Spain have carved up the non-Christian world. He draws a globe in the sand, a visual aid that illustrates the location of England and Europe in relation to Japan, and describes the route of the Erasmus through the Strait of Magellan in South America. A route kept secret by Spain and Portugal. A route they’ve stocked with bases. And a route through which they continue to hoard the riches of trade with Japan for themselves. Toranaga is startled. He asks Mariko: did the barbarian really say Japan “belongs” to Portugal? And as the regency’s president of foreign relations, he issues a hold against the Black Ship, Portugal’s principal trading vessel. “Perhaps we should learn more about these bases before negotiating further,” Toranaga tells Alvito, and the young priest turns green like he just swallowed a bug.

The Portuguese priests need the Black Ship to run the trade routes in order to protect their income and bargaining position, and this heretic feeding Toranaga intel is really cramping their style. So Dell’Acqua (Paulino Nunes), the glowering chief priest, conspires with the Catholic regent Kiyama. Late at night, in the West Palace quarters of Toranaga, an assassin slips in while everyone is asleep. Her tantō blade sings, and samurai guards fall. As the alarm is raised through paper shoji panels, Toranaga conceals himself where Blackthorne sleeps. A master of the games being played, he sensed this attack would come. More importantly, he sensed that he would not be the target. And when the assassin appears, he cuts her down with an assist from Blackthorne himself. “This wasn’t Ishido,” he tells Mariko and his son Nagakado. “The assassin didn’t come for me. She came for him.” And Shōgun cuts to the dead attacker, her bloody body disturbing the pristine contours of the formal garden.    

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.