Opening Titles: Shōgun (2024)

Having just completed FX’s Shōgun series more than a week ago, color me mighty impressed. Its critical success had me thinking back on the series and its adaptation of the James Clavell 1975 novel. A book many of us old folk remember reading fondly back in the day. Plus, this more modern adaptation’s emphasis was much different than that of the 1980 miniseries as it puts more weight on the native Japanese characters on the cusp of great changes about to arrive¹.

All of this is telegraphed via Shōgun‘s remarkable opening sequence and its use of the Japanese dry garden (枯山水, karesansui) as a graphical motif to display the upheaval about to be brought upon the land. With its mix of sand and gravel², the rock or zen garden as it’s also referred to, cleverly juxtaposes this traditional art form originally intended for contemplation of nature and its beauty and as an aid for meditation, to one katana sharp contrast with what’s about to land on its shores.

It’s that seeming serenity, which opens the sequence, that Elastic designer Nadia Tzuo used to draw the distinction Japan faced at that time (1600 A.D.) in a recent Mashable article:

“Initially, that direction was called ‘the walled garden,’ which described Japan very well at the time,” Tzuo told Mashable. “It was like its own world in a way, since it closed borders to foreign contact and wasn’t easy to reach.”

The concept of using the traditional dry garden to depict Japan’s surrounding seas as well as the vector of the change to come is quite interesting. In fact, spoilers ahead if you’ve not seen the series, the same traditional grounds are used in a key scene in episode two where Lord Toranaga asks the newly captured John Blackthorne (pilot of the Erasmus) to draw a map of the world as he knows it. Revealing information the Europeans have kept secret that could also threaten Japan.

In Elastic’s composition and use of computer graphics, much like was done with their earlier Daredevil work for that Netflix series, led to some spectacular visual scenes within Shōgun‘s titles sequence. Again, referencing the Mashable article:

“With that concept in mind, Japan — and the entire conflict of Shōgun — becomes a world made miniature in the title sequence. The sun rises over a peaceful dry garden, where the rocks represent land and the gravel between them represents oceans. From there, we see John Blackthorne’s (Cosmo Jarvis) ship sailing into view; battles between the forces of Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Ishido Kazunari (Takehiro Hira) follow soon after. Yet given the garden’s smaller scale and the viewer’s distance from it, there’s still a sense of observational remove. For Tzuo, this remove is intentional, corresponding with how one should experience a dry garden in real life.

“The garden is meant to be watched from a far distance. Not too far, but you’re not supposed to be in it. It’s providing a third-person point of view,” Tzuo explained. “This observational point of view matches the feeling of the whole concept of the show, because Blackthorne is an outsider. He’s observing all the things happening, and he can’t do much about it.””

With all of the upheaval set in motion by the Dutch ship³ that lands onshore, along with the political struggle between two prominent lords at end of the Sengoku Period (1467-1600)⁴, the sequence graphically depicts what’s to come. Even more so, Japan shrugging off its potential colonizers with the segment’s serene end⁵. The stylishly meditative introduction makes some of the real history of Japan and its European traders that much more beautifully and elegantly clear.