This Week in Anime

Journey to the Past

Lucas
Sylvia, we spend a lot of time talking about genre in anime circles. While the more demographically targeted vocabulary of shonen, shojo, seinen, josei, etc. tends to dominate the conversation, there are A LOT of less discussed canons of work that are nothing short of pillars in today's anime and manga landscape. Case in point, while historical anime has always been popular, there are a considerable number of high-profile period pieces hitting this and next season, including Sparks of Tomorrow, Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia, The Apothecary Diaries, Firefly Wedding, and plenty more!

How'd you like to roll back the clock with me and chat about some choice titles in this genre while we try to figure out just what makes historical fiction so timeless?

Jaadugar would obviously be sensational in a vacuum, but it's especially interesting to me as a zillennial, as every adult around me suddenly had major opinions about the Middle East when I was six, but none of them could even answer basic questions about the region or the culture of the people who live there.

I was immediately charmed by Jaadugar's presentation, but also by how firmly it's rooted in the culture and history of 13th-century Persia. Of specific note, I love how the original writers include both the specific term "iddah" for a widow's mourning period after her husband's passing as well as enough context clues to discern what that culturally-tied term means. Also, props to the localizer on this anime for recognizing the intent of this phrasing and keeping the term in the subtitles!

Jaadugar is easily one of the most culturally informed and appreciative works of fiction focusing on an Islamic region and people of Islamic culture that I've ever experienced, but it also doesn't sugarcoat the history of the region! To put modern events in further perspective, people have been fighting over what we know as Iran for pretty much all of recorded history, and the inciting event for much of this anime's story is Sitara's life being upended by the invasion of the Mongol Empire.

Though not an anime, but still a delightful work of animation, I really recommend that anyone who appreciated Jaadugar watch the film Persepolis, which covers the recently deceased author and director Marjane Satrapi's experiences growing up during the Iranian Revolution.

Love the use of barbarians as a descriptor there, as Jaadugar helped me realize just how often modern fiction uses the Mongol Empire as inspiration for characters that fall under that stereotype in a deeply reductive way. The most recognizable instance of this today is the Dothraki in A Song of Fire and Ice/Game of Thrones and, while George R. R. Martin at least has the sense to give principal characters from this group some pathos, it really is a shame that the real-world logistics needed for a migratory and militaristic culture rarely make it into the media inspired by them.

While we're talking about stories that take place in the 13th century, we should probably talk about the equally creatively rendered anime adaptation of 13th-century historical epic The Tale of the Heike, or The Heike Story.

Which, before we say anything else about this anime, I'd like to stress just how much it absolutely whips! If you like crunchy tales of empires and how interpersonal friction or cohesion can play just as big a role in warfare as tactics or resources, this is the anime for you!

There is definitely an underlying element of "the more things change, the more they stay the same" in both works, which also makes them feel like explorations of the human condition and the societies we've built. While I only picked up on a surface-level reading of the gender politics of the leads in both, I did pick up on the tribalism and the Taira clan's timeless family drama immediately.

But yes, Sitara and Biwa are both terrific frames of reference and audience POV characters, and both being young women is a clearly intentional choice that helps these works feel just as much about the culture of the times and places they depict, instead of just the events that took place in those periods.

Lol, my genuine first reaction to learning that the Taira clan had roving packs of teenagers who were tasked with weeding out dissidents was "Oh, just like on L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology boats!" Truly, humanity has known how to indoctrinate young people into a system that does not care about them for a long, LONG time.

And if we're beginning to bridge into the more fictitious side of historical fiction, we've gotta talk about one of my absolute favorite entries in the genre, Golden Kamuy! Equal parts classical western and an exploration of Japan's tumultuous Meiji Era in the early 20th century, it's about a war veteran and a young woman from the Ainu people indigenous to Hokkaido and other islands north of Japan searching for a fabled hoard of gold.

God, the lengths this work goes to in expressing practices, belief systems, and textiles and craftsmanship of the Ainu people are nothing short of robust and should be the standard for all works that prominently feature marginalized cultural groups.

I especially appreciate how Asirpa isn't just an avatar of the community that she's from and instead has her own feelings about and connections to her culture, as well as opinions on how they should integrate into a rapidly industrializing world.

Of course, Golden Kamuy's depiction of the Ainu people in the Meiji era is just a small part of the history it takes inspiration from! It also features critical figures from the Bakumatsu period (basically the conflicts at the end of the Edo period that resulted in Japan no longer being an isolationist nation), like the Shinsengumi (basically secret police from the time that acquired enough power to have political influence), vice-captain Toshizou Hijikata, as well as Japan's ongoing land disputes with Russia at the turn of the 20th century.

It is shockingly informative and educational for a work that also frequently has its cast of mostly male and beautiful men posed as sexily as possible.

Orb was actually a tougher watch for me, as I was pretty familiar with the subject matter thanks to a "History of Science" class I took in college that extensively covered the actual history and politics of heliocentrism, though this is still a very good work about the ceaseless persistence of progress and discovery even in the face of suppressive organizations and ideologies.

Though, for anyone who did click with Orb better than I did, I STRONGLY recommend playing the game Pentiment, which similarly explores and humanizes the life of those living through the incredibly regressive Middle Ages.

Cuuuuuuuute~

And if people like romance in their historical anime, they should get ready for Firefly Wedding next season! Another story taking place in the Meiji Era, outside of its central situationship, this work is very much about the different (though all similarly limited) ways women fit into this society and is a painfully honest portrait of the era.

Hey, don't forget goofy! A big part of Shinpei's appeal is his goofiness!!

And yes, charismatic, sociopathic assassins aside, Firefly Wedding really puts into place how far women's rights and their personhood in broader society have come in the past 100+ years. That isn't to say that things are great for women today, but they used to be a lot worse a lot more recently than we care to remember.

It's striking how immediately Firefly Wedding comes off as pro-sex work just by the acknowledgment that, during this time period, it was one of the few means of monetary survival available to women, let alone any class mobility.

Even in the face of a lot of high-profile sequels hitting next season, I think this is going to be an anime to keep an eye on, as it's hitting that sweet spot of a historical story overtly informed by modern social politics.

Ugh, I really wanted to like Red River and have another explicitly shojo series to recommend to people...but between the lead constantly being put in peril, apologizing to her family for her impending death, and then being saved at the last minute by a nearby man, it just does not have the juice in 2026 like manga may have in 1995 when damsel in distress tropes were less grating.

Oooooh~ great recommendation! And, if we're winding down this column with mentions of historical series that are rooted in their creator's political beliefs and activism, I'd be remiss if I didn't name-drop Vinland Saga!

Explicitly informed by mangaka Makoto Yukimura's experiences growing up during the Cold War and motivated by the September 11th attacks that would act as the catalyst for the next decades spanning global conflict, this adaptation of Nordic historical myth is as much a critique of tribalism and jingoism today as The Crucible was of McCarthyism when that play premiered in the 1950s.

You're entirely correct, and nothing gives me more hope about our collective future than us having overcome so, SO MUCH in our collective past. All of the works we've talked about today are a terrific reminder of that, and I hope we can all take the learnings these works are based on and apply them to today's problems.