The actor who is playing lord Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) was also a producer for this show. He insisted on making this series as close to reality as possible. There were a lot of Japanese consultants on the set: they taught actors how to fight in samurai style, how to walk (this characteristic "gliding" that you can see in Mariko's walk), and other things. They also speak old Japanese :)

youre in for a treat

If you're interested in a more modern setting, there's a recently-concluded two season Max series, "Tokyo Vice." Probably not for reacting, but worth seeing in general. Strange pacing and some odd characterizations, but fascinating environment. About the yakuza.

When they're speaking Japanese, it's Japanese. When anyone other than Blackthorne or his crew speaks English, it's Portuguese. When Blackthorne speaks English to anyone other than his crew or himself, it's Portuguese. When he mumbles expletives and insults, it's actually English in-world. lol

Great reactions. I read that the people involved with putting this show together did a great deal of research to get every detail they could as accurate to the feudal period of Japan as possible. Even the Japanese language was revised to make it the same as was spoken back then. In effect, the Japanese actors had to learn the language as spoken then.

Did they change the ridiculous romance between the foreigner and the married woman?

The Shōgun and the Emperor are two different things. Shōgun was the title of most of Japan's military rulers, spanning from 1185 to 1868. Shōguns, nominally appointed by the Emperor, were usually the de facto rulers of the country. James Clavell's novel Shōgun is historical fiction, but the characters are based on real historical people. Blackthorne is based on the English navigator William Adams, who in Japan rose to become a samurai under Tokugawa Ieyasu, a powerful daimyō who later became the founder and first shōgun of the Tokugawa shogunate. A little criticism: Overall, your video had poor editing. The story was hard to follow. This first part was 1 hour 9 minutes long and you showed less than 20 minutes. The problem is not the length of the video per se, but what you showed, consisted of very short and transparent clips which felt like you had just dropped them here and there. And there was almost no music to create the atmosphere which is really important. None of the events of the episode were shown properly and calmly from beginning to end and it somehow breaks the series' own tranquility, which appears in several scenes. Well, the video was so short that there seemed to be no time for showing any scenes properly. - Please check out reaction videos to this Shōgun series for example from Spartan & Pudgey KZfaq channel, or from some others. You can see the difference. You two are nice people, but I can already see that the following videos are just as short and probably just as difficult for me to follow. So I'll stop my watching here. Have fun.