When the “Shogun” team gathered in a Washington, D.C., hotel room last February, champagne in hand, to countdown to the series’ worldwide release, producer Miyagawa Eriko struggled with the TV settings and watched the clock tick by until the launch. “That moment when something you’ve poured years of your life into finally reveals itself to the world, I thought maybe that’s what it feels like to send a kid to college, that mix of pride and terror and love,” she recalled during her keynote speech at the MPA seminar at the Tokyo International Film Festival.
The emotional moment came as the culmination of a full journey for Miyagawa, who had returned to DC to screen episodes at MPA headquarters just before the series debuted. For the Yokohama native, who graduated from Georgetown University in 2002, the nation’s capital represented the starting point of her “international adventure.” Twenty-two years later, she returned to present “a Japanese jidaigeki, a period drama born from true cross-cultural collaboration.”
The event took on added significance when a deputy chief of mission at the Japanese embassy explained how the original 1980 miniseries “Shogun” became an unexpected diplomatic tool when he was a teenager living in the United States. “Americans were captivated by stories of a distant land with unfamiliar customs and codes,” Miyagawa recounted. “Many of his classmates had a crush on Shimada Yoko.”
The anecdote echoes Miyagawa’s childhood experience of cross-cultural connections. When her family moved to Dubai for her father’s job, she befriended a Dutch neighbor even though they shared no common language. “One day my dad put on the VHS of Alice in Wonderland. I remember sitting side by side with this girl laughing at the Mad Hatter’s birthday party. We didn’t need words, we just needed a story,” she said. “That little moment of connection stayed with me and became, I think, the seed of everything. »
Miyagawa’s career journey reads like a masterclass in how to bridge Hollywood and Japanese cinema. His first job after college was translating on the set of “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” where she was stunned by the scale and international collaboration. “The team came from all over the world: the United States, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada. It was beautiful chaos and I felt completely at home,” she said.
Working on Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” a passion project decades in the making, proved educational. Traveling with the legendary director to Nagasaki, Miyagawa was struck not by his fame but by his humility. “Although he was an author, he approached the subject like a student. He surrounded himself with historians, priests and cultural advisors, not to verify the facts, but to seek to understand. He listened, he asked and kept asking. And this openness, this curiosity, stayed with me.”
When Miyagawa joined FX’s “Shogun” after the release of “Silence,” the timing proved prescient. The series, based on James Clavell’s 1975 novel previously adapted into the 1980 miniseries, found passionate champions in FX executives John Landgraf and Gina Balian, who brought on co-creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo to reimagine the story for contemporary audiences.
“In an acceptance speech, Justin joked that he still can’t believe FX greenlit a very expensive subtitled Japanese period drama whose climax revolves around a poetry competition,” Miyagawa said.
While many applauded FX for taking such a gamble, Miyagawa prefers a different framing. “I like to think of John and Gina as reading the direction of the wind, waiting for the right moment and striking. The timing was remarkable. COVID accelerated the rise of global streaming. Audiences became more and more adventurous, willing to read subtitles, hungry for good stories, wherever they came from.”
This shift has brought a greater responsibility to authenticity, which Miyagawa described as “a process that requires patience, curiosity, and respect. Every hairstyle, every sleeve pattern, every historical gesture has been discussed in English, discussed in Japanese, and often returned to English. Every line of dialogue has been translated, polished, retranslated, repolished by writers, translators, historians, playwrights, producers, and actors.”
The production has become its own cultural conversation. “If you had visited our set, you would have seen teams from five continents, sharing bento boxes and donuts, carefully carrying food lids so as not to damage county land. We weren’t just making a story about cultural exchange. We were living it.”
Reflecting on his career, Miyagawa revealed: “I realized something: I have never worked on a series that did not require translation. My entire career has been a long experience in translation, not just of language, but also of worldview. From ‘Kill Bill’ to ‘Silence’ to ‘Shogun,’ I have lived at the crossroads where Hollywood ambition meets Japanese precision and incomprehension, dealt with with benevolence, can be transformed into magic.
When asked about creating an epic narrative, Miyagawa dismissed expected answers about budgets and scale. “The truth is, I think an epic story isn’t about how big we can create something. I think it’s about how many hearts it can belong to. Every truly epic story I’ve been a part of has started the same way, with people from different worlds meeting in the same creative space, finding what the common language is, finding the story they’re trying to tell: curiosity, empathy, and courage.”
Although “Shogun” could not be filmed in Japan for logistical reasons, Miyagawa did not rule out the series returning to the country where it is set for future seasons.
She concluded with a rallying cry: “Let’s continue to create the kinds of stories that no culture could imagine alone. »
