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The 10-episode Disney+ series Shogun has reached its conclusion, and fans are calling for female lead Anna Sawai to be rewarded in the upcoming awards season for a stellar performance.
As the main character, Lady Toda Mariko, Sawai, 31, plays “a woman with invaluable skills but dishonorable family ties, who must prove her worth and loyalty.”
Shogun is an adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 novel of the same name, which is a fiction of real people and events in 17th century Japan.
As it turns out, Lady Makiro is actually based on a real person from about 350 years ago.
So who is Anna Sawai and what is the real story of her character?
The 10-episode Disney+ series Shogun has reached its conclusion and fans are calling for female lead Anna Sawai (seen as Lady Toda Mariko) to be rewarded for a stellar performance.
Sawai took a break from acting when she was 21 to join a Japanese girl group, but has made a very successful return to the screen.
Who is Anna Sawai?
Anna Sawai was born on June 11, 1992 in Wellington, New Zealand, but launched her acting career at age 11 after moving to Japan the previous year.
In 2004 he starred in a stage production in Tokyo and five years later made his film debut in the martial arts film Ninja Assassin.
However, Sawai took a break from acting roles when she was 21 as the lead vocalist of the girl group FAKY, which propelled her to stardom in Japan.
But she left the band after five years to return to pursue her acting career and landed a role in the BBC crime series Giri/Hagi.
Her next big role saw her on the Hollywood big screen in 2021’s Fast & Furious 9 as Elle Lue.
From then to being the female lead in the Disney+ hit Shogun, Sawai has also appeared in the Apple TV series Pachinko and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
Returning from her music hiatus, the actress (centre) landed a role in the 2019 BBC crime series Giri/Hagi.
Sawai made her Hollywood debut in Fast & Furious 9. She is seen in the film with Sung Kang.
He also starred in the Apple TV series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (pictured).
Is Lady Mariko in Shogun a real person?
The real woman behind Lady Toda Mariko is Akechi Tama, also known as Hosokawa Gracia, a 16th century Japanese aristocrat and daughter of General Akechi Mitsuhide (Akechi Jinsai in Shogun), who served under Japan’s first unifier, Lord Oda Nobunaga ( Shogun’s Kuroda).
At age 15, Tama married Fujitaka Hosokawa’s (Toda Hiromatsu in Shogun) eldest son, Tadaoki (Toda Buntaro in the series), another powerful warlord of the time.
Tadaoki was a highly educated military commander and he and Tama had five children.
However, Tama became caught at the center of a power struggle in 1582, when she was 19, when her father betrayed and murdered Lord Nobunaga before dying in battle himself a month later.
Tama’s reputation suffered and he spent two years in exile, after which he lived in Osaka. We see the tension her reputation brings in episode six between Mariko and Ochiba No Kata (Fumi Nikaido).
In Osaka, Tama converted to Catholicism and assumed her given name, Gracia, causing conflict with her husband, according to documented family history. Christianity arrived in Japan at the end of the 16th century thanks to Spanish and Portuguese missionaries.
Legends tell of how “once it was time to put on armor and mount his horse to face the enemy, Tama was no less brave than a man.”
When the Hosokawas joined forces with Tokugawa Ieyasu (Yoshii Toranaga in Shogun) in 1600, Tama remained in Osaka, but went on to play a pivotal role in the coming war.
A lie in Shogun is Mariko’s relationship with John Blackthorne, who is based on William Adams, the first English sailor to arrive in Japan in the 1600s.
While Adams maintained a friendship with Tokugawa, he apparently never met Tama, who at the time was known as Lady Gracia, as she was never Tokugawa’s translator.
While episode nine of Shogun exaggerates Lady Gracia’s actual fight at her Osaka mansion, Ishida Mitsunari (Shogun’s Ishido) ordered that she and her children be taken hostage.
Lady Gracia refused capture and preferred suicide. However, as her faith determined that suicide was a sin, she ordered a servant to kill her, which he did.
Although Ishida reportedly insisted that he was not responsible for her death, the event shocked Osaka and mainly her husband, who was fighting in the East.
In the following months, Hosokawa and Tokugawa emerged victorious at the Battle of Sekigahara, the largest in the history of feudal Japan, paving the way for two and a half centuries of Tokugawa military rule of the country.
Lady Mariko is based on the real daughter of a 16th century Japanese warlord, Akechi Tama, better known now as Lady Hosokawa Gracia.
A falsehood in Shogun is that Tama never met English sailor William Adams, who is introduced in the series by Cosmo Jarvis as John Blackthorne (pictured).
Despite the success of Shogun, its co-creator has hinted that he will not return for a second season, since the 10 episodes come at the end of the book on which it is inspired.
Will there be a Shogun season 2?
The Tokugawa shogunate (military dictatorship) marked the end of the volatile feudal period in Japanese history and the epilogue of James Clavell’s novel.
FX Hasn’t Renewed Shogun Yet Despite Its Breakthrough Success, Co-Creator Justin Marks Said direct in February 2024: ‘I think we told the full story of the book. And we reached the end.’
Marks also mentioned how much time (around five years) has been spent creating the 10-part series as a reason for leaving it at that.
The series has received a staggering 99 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes amid global acclaim.