[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Sounds like it would be a good story to expand a bit on what Clavell wrote about in “Shogun”.

[Verginius Rufus]

I read Shogun a long time ago, but came away with the impression that Clavell was anti-Catholic. I don't know if that was true.

This could be handled a number of different ways: West bad, Japan good...Christians good, persecutors bad...even Jesuits good, their enemies bad. The movie The Mission portrayed Jesuit missionaries in South America sympathetically.