Maui’s Shogun creators bask in Emmy glow
The tremendous success of the FX TV series “Shogun” was a bit of a surprise to all those involved, including Haiku based showrunners Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks. Here was an epic historical drama set in feudal Japan, starring primarily Japanese actors with subtitled dialogue.
Based on the best-selling novel by James Clavell, “Shogun” earned more than 9 million viewers in its first week, was hailed as mesmerizing and masterfully crafted, and won the most awards ever for a series in a single season at the 76th Emmy Awards in September. Nominated for 25, it won 18, including best drama series for executive producers Kondo and Marks, best actor in a drama series for Hiroyuki Sanada and best actress for Anna Sawai.
“We were beyond surprised,” says Rachel Kondo, who was born and raised on Maui. “The whole show was a huge risk. My husband, Justin, likes to say that he has no idea how the executives at FX slept at night, because they had their jobs on the line. Our studio FX had never done anything on this scale. I don’t know very many productions beyond maybe ‘Game of Thrones’ that had that kind of sweep of international collaboration. We had cast and crew from Japan, cast and crew from Canada, and cast and crew from the States, and we were all coming together trying to figure out how to do this. The toughest thing was probably sustaining that level of chaos for that long.”
Set in 1600, “Shogun” covered the power struggle that embroiled feudal Japan following the death of its leader, and the cultural impact of the first English navigator arriving on Japan’s shores.
A Maui High School graduate, Kondo and her husband spent five years immersed in the project adapting Clavell’s novel as script writers and executive producers. “We started out the process not knowing what we didn’t know,” she says. “That was an advantage. We went into it naively, thinking it’s going to be so exciting. Then years into it, it starts settling in that this is incredibly difficult. It’s an incredibly daunting thing. We were living with pure chaos. It was exhausting. I had my second child throughout this process.”
Within the chaos there were moments of exhilaration, “when we were probably halfway through almost a year long shooting. We all understood that because each of us was giving our every ounce of passion, our energies, our vision to it, it was becoming something way bigger than what any of us could do alone. I’d never experienced that degree of satisfaction when it comes to doing something super special, because it’s collaborative.”
Justin Marks had initially balked at adopting the project. “His response was, I don’t know if I can do this as a white male,” Kondo recalls. Raised on Maui with a Japanese father, she felt more attuned. “Initially, I had thought I’m the perfect person to write on this, because I’m Japanese. Then I quickly realized being Japanese American from Hawaii is a completely different thing than being a Japanese national, and someone who speaks the language. I was very much brought to my knees by that realization.
“Then I quickly understood that I and many people from here had been on a kind of Mariko (Lady Toda Mariko in “Shogun” played masterfully by Anna Sawai) journey. I’m bicultural, biracial, and I’m not one thing. Living here, growing up here, it’s kind of required that you be many things, so that you can belong here and you can belong to many cultures. I would say that’s probably the part of Maui that made it in (the show).”
Crafting the show’s scripts was a complex, intricate process. Writing in English, the couple sent scripts to Japan for initial translation before they were adapted into 17th century Japanese, and finally re-translated back to English for their approval.
Hiroyuki Sanada (left) and Rachel Kondo (right) hold their Emmy awards won for Shogun on Sept. 15, 2024, at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy Disney
“I don’t think my husband Justin understood quite what the translation process was going to require of us,” she says. “Oh, we’ll write it in English, and they’ll translate it. There are certain lines in the show that went through this huge, long process, because after it was translated by the playwright, who specializes in old Japanese, it then went to the Japanese producers, Hiroyuki Sanada and Eriko Miyagawa. They put their touch on it, and then they gave it to the actors who performed it, and they put their flair into it. And then it comes back to us as a performed thing. Then we spent months with Eriko and our post production team, translating what was spoken back to English, so we could compare it with the scripts and choose how to meld the two.”
While it may look like it was set in Japan, “Shogun” was actually filmed in British Columbia. “We shot on the largest stage in all of North America, and hundreds of thousands of square feet and 3,000 people working on it,” Kondo explains. “It was just a huge undertaking.”
All the hard work with the phenomenal actors involved paid off at awards time. “It was just very overwhelming,” she says about the show’s massive record-setting win. “It was beyond our wildest dreams. We went to the first weekend of the Emmys called the Creative Arts Emmys, and that’s when our production team won 14. At some point, Justin said, ‘I think we just broke a record.’ I’m like, what record? You don’t know the framework for this kind of stuff. It was wild. Justin and I had kind of to hold our mouths closed, because it was just hanging open the whole time.”
So now, “we’ve got two Emmys here in Haiku.”
And now they have dived into season two of “Shogun,” after FX has commissioned a follow-up to the saga, which will take the leading characters beyond Clavell’s book.
“We are deep into writing for season two,” she notes. “We’re a little bit more comfortable with the chaotic process of creating something new, because we no longer have the book as our excellent guide. We have history, of course. We’re trying to study how Clavell curated and selected what he did. He conflated characters, and he just had such a skill set for this kind of storytelling. So we’re very quickly becoming pretty well versed in all things Sengoku Japan going into Edo Japan.”
As well as working on “Shogun,” Kondo has a Maui based TV project in development. “I wrote a pilot for a show set on Maui during my heyday of the ’90s,” she explains. “It’s a half hour comedy about the relationship between two brothers. It’s meant to be very heartwarming and endearing, and kind of like a love letter to the time and place I grew up in.”
As part of the 44th annual Hawai’i International Film Festival presented by Halekulani, Kondo and Marks will be in Honolulu on Oct. 11 at Consolidated Theatres in Kahala for “Shogun: An Evening with Showrunners Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo.”
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