Maui-born FX’s Shogun co-creator Rachel Kondo wins award for critical hit series

FX’s drama “Shogun,” which finished its premiere season at April’s end, has a 99% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is a creation of two Maui residents, Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks. Kondo was born and raised in Pukalani and attended Maui High School.

The show’s success led to an announcement late May that FX, Hulu and the Estate of James Clavell are working to extend the drama to develop the saga with two additional seasons of the series.

To add to Hawaii’s state pride, it was announced on June 11 that Kondo will receive the 2024 New Voice Award at the Austin Film Festival as part of its 31st Festival & Writers Conference on Oct. 23-31, 2024.

Spectrum News Hawaii interviewed Kondo and Marks recently about the experience of making Shogun, living in Maui, and what’s next on the horizon.

Where did you go to high school in Maui, Rachel?

KONDO: I am a Maui High school grad all the way. [People] assume I’m from the mainland. And, I mean, I wish, but, you know, no. Maui High School, all the way! And that’s the best thing about that. My brother and his wife, they still teach there.

MARKS: Yes, this is where we raise our kids. We have two kids, two and four [years old]. We have stray cats. They are now our cats.

KONDO: We also have a dog who has no eyeballs. And he’s very old. He had glaucoma, so they just…took them out. He kind of bonks around.

MARKS: The chickens on our property are pretty funny. They just surround him when he’s out there and they’re just like his aid.

Rachel wrote a short story that was nominated for an award in 2019?

KONDO: Well, it’s actually a long short story. [You’re] talking about the O. Henry Award [““Girl of Few Seasons“].

MARKS: Rachel’s got a great, you know, the language that she’s able to write in, and sort of bringing Pidgin into dialogue.

Tell us a little about FX’s Shogun and how you dealt with the cultural nuances of handling James Clavell’s novel, “Shogun,” published originally in 1975 when writing the current series, since the first television adaptation included some out-of-date racial East-Asian stereotypes.

MARKS; I think that story of a stranger in a strange land and some elements of it … is there really a way to bring this story in a modern way, or should we just, you know, kind of find something new entirely? And you know, we both read the book and found it to be remarkably modern in ways that I wasn’t expecting.

KONDO: I think that what we initially glommed onto were these questions that the book was grappling with, questions about how to encounter. How do we encounter each other when we’re so different? How do we encounter another culture? How do we find ourselves within this culture or outside of it? I mean, it’s just all these questions that to us. Justin calls them very modern, and I think they are modern, but modern in the sense that we’re timeless. These are questions we should kind of always be asking, you know. And James Clavell was asking this in 1975 and here we are, 40 to 50 years later, still asking the same questions. And I think that hopefully in 40 to 50 years, they’ll ask it again, you know.

FX’s “Shogun” “A Stick of Time” Episode 7: Hiroyuki Sanada as Yoshii Toranaga (FX Networks/Katie Yu)

Justin started as the showrunner; he started production with a letter, and he asked, especially, you know, all the Japanese cast, crew, all the advisors, anybody who just who had something to say regarding anything that was being rendered, anything that didn’t sit right with them: he invited commentary and he created a kind of like a virtual comment box where they could email him directly and they could give him reasoning. And that definitely got lots coming his way.

“Shogun” “Ladies of the Willow World” Episode 6: Yuka Kouri as Kiku, Yuko Miyamoto as Gin, Anna Sawai as Toda Mariko (FX Networks/Katie Yu)

What is your next project?

KONDO: Yeah, I am working on a project that is for television, that is set here on Maui in my heyday in the 90s. So we’ll see. It’s just, it’s kind of like a way for me to communicate this place that I love, that it exists in a, in a in a way that people don’t know to anticipate, right? Like this is, this is the Maui of my youth, the Maui of many people’s youths. Many of us are working class, many of us don’t surf.

MARKS: I think after COVID…we can exist working by remote we can…If there’s a way to bring more jobs here, you know, Maui especially, it’s a place where, you know… If the world’s attention moves away from Maui. I think that’s a really bad thing. And so, you know, to bring attention back in whatever the way is. And I think, you know, not just tourism or, you know, donations needed, or things. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about like, telling the stories said here, you know, by people and about people who grew up here, in a way that, you know, shows the world what this place is, and then hopefully, you know, brings people back and makes people, you know, just prouder to have been from here.

Nuy Cho is the executive producer of Spectrum News Hawaii. Read more of her stories here.