So after watching the first 2 episodes and seeing the previews for the later episode's, it does look like we're getting backdoored into a white savior plot.
My suspicion was first peeked with the storm scene. There's simply no reason the Japanese would allow a European pilot to navigate a Japanese ship in Japanese waters. The chill viewer isn't going to care, but I fully understand how that scene feeds into the belief that only Europeans knew how to navigate the seas. It's why you're not taught that European explorers had native, African, and Islamic navigators on their ships.
Why wouldn't the Japanese know how to predict that a storm was coming? Why would the Japanese need to be told how to handle steering in a storm? Why wouldn't the Japanese have their own pilot?
Small details like that are overlooked as plot devices but this is how you smuggle ideas of European superiority.
