Last February, as the “Shogun” team gathered in a Washington, D.C., hotel room with champagne in hand and counted down to the show’s global release, producer Etsuko Miyagawa struggled with the TV settings and watched the clock tick toward the start of the broadcast. “The moment something you’ve poured your life into for so many years finally comes out into the world, I thought, maybe it’s like sending your child off to college, a mixture of pride, fear, and love,” she recalled in her keynote address at the Tokyo International Film Festival’s MPA Seminar.
The emotional moment came as the culmination of a full-circle journey for Miyagawa, who had returned to DC to screen an episode at MPA headquarters just before the series began. For the Yokohama native, who graduated from Georgetown University in 2002, the nation’s capital represented the place where her “international adventure began.” Twenty-two years later, she once again performed “a Japanese historical drama born of true cross-cultural cooperation.”
The event took on added significance when the Japanese embassy’s deputy chief of mission spoke about how the original 1980 Shogun miniseries became an unexpected diplomatic tool when he was a teenager living in the United States. “Americans were fascinated by stories of distant countries with unfamiliar customs and norms,” Miyagawa said. “Many of his classmates admired Yoko Shimada.”
This anecdote resonated with Miyagawa’s own childhood experiences of intercultural connections. When her family moved to Dubai due to her father’s job, she befriended a Dutch girl next door, even though they didn’t have a common language. “One day my dad put on the VHS of Alice in Wonderland. I remember sitting next to that girl at the Mad Hatter’s birthday party and giggling. We didn’t need words, we just needed a story,” she said. “I think that little moment of connection stayed with me and was the seed of everything.”
Miyagawa’s career trajectory is a masterclass in bridging Hollywood and Japanese cinema. Her first job out of college was translating on the set of Kill Bill: Vol. 1, where she was struck by the scale and international collaboration. “The crew came from all over the world, including the United States, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Australia and Canada. It was a beautiful mess and made us feel completely at home,” she said.
Martin Scorsese’s Silence was a decades-long passion project that proved to have formative results. When Miyagawa visited Nagasaki with the legendary coach, he was struck not by his fame, but by his humility. “Despite being a writer, he approached his material like a student. Surrounded by historians, clergy, and cultural advisers, he sought understanding, not confirmation of facts. He listened, asked questions, and kept asking questions. And that generosity, that curiosity, stayed with me.”
Miyagawa’s joining FX’s Shogun after the release of “Silence” was visionary timing. The series, adapted from James Clavell’s 1975 novel and previously made into a 1980 miniseries, found enthusiastic champions in FX heads John Landgraf and Gina Balian, and brought on co-creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo to reinvent the story for modern audiences.
“In one acceptance speech, Justin jokingly said that he still can’t believe that FX greenlit a very expensive subtitled Japanese historical drama, the central climax of which revolves around a poetry contest,” Miyagawa said.
While many praised FX for taking such a gamble, Miyagawa prefers a different framework. “I’d like to think that John and Gina were reading the wind and waiting for the right moment to strike. The timing was remarkable. COVID-19 accelerated the rise of global streaming. Audiences, no matter where they come from, have become increasingly adventurous, willing to read subtitles and hungry for good stories.”
That shift brought with it a deeper commitment to authenticity, which Miyagawa described as “a process that requires patience, curiosity, and respect. Every hairstyle, every sleeve pattern, every historical gesture was discussed in English, debated in Japanese, and often back into English. Every line was translated, refined, retranslated, and repolished by writers, translators, historians, playwrights, producers, and actors.”
This work has become its own cultural conversation. “If you visited our filming location, you would see crews from five continents sharing bento lunches and donuts, carefully covering the food to avoid damaging county land. We weren’t just creating a story about cultural exchange. We were living cultural exchange.”
Reflecting on his career, Miyagawa says, “I’ve realized something: I’ve never worked on a show that didn’t require translation. My entire career has been a long experiment in translating not only language but worldviews. From Kill Bill to Silence to Shogun, I’ve lived at the crossroads where Hollywood ambition meets Japanese precision, where misunderstandings can turn into magic if handled gently.”
Asked about the epic storytelling production, Miyagawa declined to give an expected answer on budget or scale. “Actually, I think a great story isn’t about how big you can make it, it’s about how many people it can touch. Every truly great story I’ve ever been a part of started out the same way: people from different worlds coming together in the same creative space, figuring out what their common language was, and finding the story they were trying to tell: curiosity, empathy, courage.”
Although “Shogun” could not be filmed in Japan for logistical reasons, director Miyagawa has not ruled out returning to the country for future seasons.
She concluded by rallying everyone, “Let’s continue to create stories that cannot be imagined by a single culture alone.”
