**All for Show: Shōgun and Architectural Settings in Warring-States Era Japan**

Free Talk Event
August 8, 2025

Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a creative explosion in architecture and large-scale interior painting. The achievements of this era revolutionised the image of authority on the archipelago and continue to resonate in television series such as Shōgun (2024) or videogames like Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. This talk will discuss the settings—that is, castles, courtyards, audience halls, and teahouses—used in these fictional retellings of history and their unique origins. While separated by centuries and manifested in divergent mediums, their appeal for shoguns or art directors is no different. In these historical and modern recreations of these settings is a common, shared and underlying interest in storytelling and clarifying relationships.

Topics to be covered

Sengoku (Warring States) Japan
Japanese castles
Shoin-mode architecture
Ōhiroma
Oda Nobunaga
Toyotomi Hideyoshi

DR MARK ERDMANN

Dr Mark Erdmann is a Lecturer in Art History in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. He has published on Nanban art and Kanō Eitoku’s Azuchi Screens, a work that remains lost in the Vatican. He is currently working on a monograph on Azuchi Castle, the progenitor of the Japanese castle form, an introductory volume to reading rakuchu rakugai-zu, as well as an annotated translation of the early seventeenth-century secret carpenter manual Shōmei (Elucidation of the Craft).

This is the second day of Shōgun Talk Event Series.