Ajiro possibly hasn’t changed a lot in four centuries – it remains a quaint fishing port where visitors can enjoy the hot springs, the beach, and today’s catch straight from the ocean. Clavell’s detailed placement of Anjiro on Izu’s eastern Pacific coast leaves us in no doubt of its true identity.

So Edo founder Tokugawa becomes Toranaga in Clavell’s classic, Osaka Lord Ishida becomes Ishido, and the tiny fishing port of Ajiro becomes Anjiro. Clavell cleverly changes the spelling of names slightly in his piece of historical fiction, just enough so we can still recognise the originals, but also enough to emphasise that whilst the geographic and historical settings are real, the detail of the story is fiction. The first couple of hundred pages of Clavell’s epic are set in Ajiro, the southernmost part of the modern town of Atami, and just 10 minutes on the Ito local train line from the Tokaido Shinkansen. Perhaps Clavell felt Kyushu was too far away from the main centres of Osaka and Edo (Tokyo) for the smooth flow of his story, so he substituted Kyushu with Izu Peninsula’s Pacific coast, where Adams did in fact conclude his life at Ito (see below). This is not lost on Clavell, who strategically places his story on the Izu Peninsula, in between and easilly accessed from all the capitals by Tokaido, but just far enough away from all to be influenced by all.Ĭlavell’s protagonist in Shogun, Blackthorne (later renamed Anjin), is based on the true story of English pilot William Adams who was shipwrecked on Japan’s southernmost main island of Kyushu. You can imagine that the territory between the old capitals of Kyoto and Osaka, and the new capital in Edo, played a pivotal role in this part of Japanese history. This battle ended the Warring States Period and was the beginning of the legendary Edo Period, during which the capital was relocated from Osaka to Edo (now called Tokyo). Clavell provided the perfect tool to do that – a fast moving historical romp that also explains Japanese Culture 101 to those that didn’t have the time or inclination to take the University paper.Ĭlavell cleverly sets his novel in the year 1600, for Japanese instantly rememerable as the year of the battle of Sekigahara (which you can glimpse through the windows of the Tokaido Shinkansen shortly before it zooms into Kyoto). Japan was asserting itself as the engine room of global economic growth, and Western readers were eager to better understand this mysterious nation.

In the 1970s and 1980s James Clavell’s Shogun captured the Western World’s imagination.

Shōgun by james clavell