Many of us grew up see­ing hard­back copies of Shō­gun on var­i­ous domes­tic book­shelves. Whether their own­ers ever actu­al­ly got through James Clavel­l’s famous­ly hefty nov­el of sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Japan is open to ques­tion, but they may well have seen the first tele­vi­sion adap­ta­tion, which aired on NBC in 1980. Star­ring Richard Cham­ber­lain and Toshi­ro Mifu­ne (and nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles), that ten-hour minis­eries offered an unprece­dent­ed­ly cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence to the home view­ers of Amer­i­ca, pre­sent­ing them with things they’d nev­er before seen on tele­vi­sion — and things they’d nev­er heard on tele­vi­sion, not least numer­ous lines deliv­ered in untrans­lat­ed Japan­ese. The idea, accord­ing to screen­writer Eric Bercovi­ci, was to put the view­ers in the shoes of Cham­ber­lain’s pro­tag­o­nist John Black­thorne, an Eng­lish ship pilot marooned in Japan with no knowl­edge of the local lan­guage. Dur­ing the show’s run, news­pa­pers print­ed glos­saries of the Japan­ese words most impor­tant to the sto­ry. The sec­ond adap­ta­tion of Shō­gun, which aired ear­li­er this year on FX, does things dif­fer­ent­ly. For one thing, it makes use of those help­ful devices known …