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Here's a book about Japan written 40 years ago by a white guy, and that means we get to play our favorite game: Is! It! Racist!

And unfortunately you get everyone's least favorite answer: Sortof. The only really bad part is that all the Japanese ladies are like obsessed with how huge white guys' dicks are, sigh. The rest of it is pretty much your run-of-the-mill Asian glorification, look how wise and noble they are, do you know they have this thing where they drink tea from an empty cup, so deep, watch me write a haiku. You'll live. The penis thing is annoying.

The book itself is, honestly, it's a fantasy book. It's like the Robert Jordan books. It's probably like the Game of Thrones books but I've only seen the show. It's one of those sprawling epics with lots of characters and pages and politics and armies and a pawn slowly becomes a queen and it's all a great deal of fun even though it somehow manages to not wrap up any of its storylines. I'm going to go ahead and call it Game of Thrones with ninjas because let's face it, we've got to call something that, and did you hear me say ninjas?

Oh yes, there are ninjas. And samurai and geishas and seppuku and just all kinds of Japan crap. It sounds like someone’s playing Asian Stereotype Bingo but the weird part is, all of this actually happened. Around 1600, a superfamous dude named Tokugawa (Toranaga in the book) tried to unify Japan (view spoiler)[(it worked!) (hide spoiler)] and one of his buddies was a white guy named Will Adams (Blackthorne) who'd been stranded there in a typhoon. Real that James Clavell gets the basic history of this crucial turning point in Japanese history correct.

Look, it's a little exaggerated. If people committed seppuku with this regularity in real life there'd be no one left. But it turns out that this was the one period in all of history when, yes, ninjas were really a thing. It's all real! Except for white guy dicks. Those were never a thing.