Entertainment & Arts
The Complete Guide to The Man in the High Castle Season 3 – Premiering 10/5
WW2 historian Paul K. DiCostanzo breaks down Amazon’s upcoming The Man in the High Castle season 3, and the hidden WW2 history driving it.
Nobusuke Tagomi: On a Quest for Truth
Amazon Studios Trade Minister Tagomi
Perhaps more than any other single character in The Man in the High Castle, Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) stands as the character many hold most dear in this incredibly complex story. He is the model of the best of Japanese culture, irrespective of the given timeline.
Tagomi is a man desperately seeking a personal peace, having lost his wife and son. Moreover, he only seeks the purest form of truth, even if such a truth is so fundamentally opposed to a world he knows, and contradicts what he has always known to be true himself.
If there is one person in this myriad web of narrative one would want to discover the secrets of traveling between universes, Tagomi is your guy.
His experience traveling to the October 1962 that we know has innumerable consequences. Foremost, it is logical to deduce that one can only travel to a universe in which their identical counterpart is either dead, or never existed in the first place. Secondly, his experience with his living family and repairing the domestic damage done by his drunkard duplicate has given Tagomi new purpose.
In Tagomi’s return, he brings back a film showing the US testing a hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, better known as Operation Castle Bravo. With the cooperation of Inspector Kido and Oberst-Gruppenführer Smith, nuclear devastation was averted.
The audience last sees Tagomi receiving an unexpected delivery of films from Lemuel Washington. Tagomi is visibly pleased by this revelation. There is every reason to conclude that Tagomi is looking at his world very differently than before he made the jump to the alternate universe he arrived.
What Tagomi’s actions may be going forward, or what they might entail remain to be seen. However it is fair to conclude he is no longer a simple functionary in the Japanese government.
The venerable Trade Minister has undergone a profound experience changing him forever. Coupled with his already clearly established priority for truth, Tagomi seems but one small step away from subverting the current world order. Needless to say, he is a new ally in the quest to try and create a better and more peaceful world.
What must never be forgotten however, is Tagomi will have to overcome a strongly conditioned sense of loyalty to his own people. Before the Japanese were defeated in the Second World War, his people held a deep belief that their Emperor was a living god – a direct descendant of Amaterasu. Unfortunately for Tagomi, his universe altering revelations may likely require a deeply problematic change in personal values to fully break from his divine mandate, and actively undermine the Chrysanthemum Throne. After all, Trade Minister Tagomi is only human.
