‘Shōgun’s Biggest Shocker? None of the Japanese Actors Had to Shave their Heads for the Show

A tremendous amount of love and care and effort went into FX‘s Shōgun. The fact alone that each script was painstakingly translated from English into Japanese, then enhanced by a Japanese playwright, filmed, and then translated back to English shows just how badly the production team wanted to get the James Clavell novel adaptation right. One of the Shōgun production’s most shocking surprises, however, might have to with what’s going on with the ensemble cast’s hairlines.

Sure, many of the male characters — from Buntaro (Shinnosuke Abe) to Omi (Hiroto Kanai) — sport a historically accurate hairstyle wherein part of the head is shaved (for a combination of aesthetic purposes and keeping cool) while the rest is tied back. But what might surprise Westerners is the reveal that Shōgun‘s actors didn’t have to shave their heads to achieve this 1600s look. Rather, FX’s Shōgun flew in a team of expert Japanese wig makers whose whole deal is creating special wigs with built in bald caps to keep the actors’ real hair in place.

In a fairly recent installment of FX’s official Shōgun companion series, The Making of Shōgun — Chapter Four: Creating the Look, series Hair Designer Sanna Seppanen and Makeup Designer Rebecca Lee lift the curtain on what goes on behind-the-scenes to bring those incredible hair pieces to life.

While the featurette delves into how, say, Lady Ochiba no Kata’s (Fumi Nikaido) hair comes with lavish draping as befitting her station, I was most bowled over to discover that many of the male actors were sporting Japanese-crafted wigs, complete with custom bald caps.

“You know this bald part?” Ishido Kazunari actor Takehiro Hira says, pointing at his character’s bald area. “We all used, what we called habutai, which is like oiled paper cloth.”

“That’s a Japanese bald cap,” Rebecca Lee explains in voice over. “These are very fine pieces of silk treated with a special type of Japanese wax. And they’re applied on the head, like a bald cap, wrapped with these straps.”

Lee goes on to share how the production team was initially daunted by the sheer scale of the show as there were days when there would be “hundreds of samurais” who would all need to be fitted with the habutai. Lee explained they were fortunate to have Japanese wig technicians, including Wig Supervisor Mitsuyo “Michi” Takasaki.

“The technicians came to teach our crew how to manage these beautiful masterpieces,” Sanna Seppanen said. “The way they honor their craft, it just becomes a piece of artwork.”

Hair and makeup wasn’t the only instance where Shōgun‘s North American production team found help from Japanese experts. During a December 2023 preview event Decider attended, showrunner Justin Marks explained how star and EP Hiroyuki Sanada’s early calls to incorporate Japanese crew with the Vancouver production swiftly came to fruition.

“I remembered as a conversation about obi-tying, you know, the belts, the kosodes — and just kind of — there are YouTube videos for that. We can all look at that, and we can all understand these things,” Marks said. “Three days into production, we have tyers coming out from Japan in armies because we just couldn’t get people up fast enough.”

“Hiro-san, it was you who was like, no, we really need them from Japan,” Marks added.

So if you find yourself entranced by how FX brought feudal Japan to life, remember it’s thanks to a collaboration between East and West; specifically between Japanese technicians the Shōgun production team.