I’m not sorry you guys handed me this assignment. Nippon Sangoku is pretty entertaining, and among the most visually inventive (successfully, too) anime of the year. It is interesting to ponder on whether I’d be covering it if the voters hadn’t intervened, though. I find that it operates pretty much on the level of appealing to 14 year-old boys, both in terms of humor and how it defines heroism and virtue. Not to mention subtlety. Them, and die-hards who wax nostalgic for a so-called golden age of Japan where in reality almost everyone lived in poverty and died by 35, whether via war or other causes.

Well, I was a 14 year-old boy once. The military and political machinations are a better face for this show, even if the conflicts are depicted in starkly black and white terms. Mostly, anyway. The Taira are fat and sniffly and evil, and the rough-hewn military guys and Confucian scholars are wise and courageous. I was rather hoping Tonotsugu would provide some diversity to the Taira side but no, he’s just a big little idiot with no clue about what he’s doing. The only thing I haven’t figured out is if Denki knows this is all a trap and is sacrificing his son for the larger cause (which is pretty ludicrous in historic terms, but would fit Nippon Sangoku’s general MO).

The issue comes to a head when it’s time to cross the river and head into Kaga. Ryumon’s man General Sugoh knows that’s a death sentence if this is all a trap, and he pretty much knows it is. Sugoh tries to put a stop to the march but Tonotsugu overrules him and puts him under arrest. The governor has done a good job convincing Tonotsugu’s envoys that this is legit – he took 200 lashes for the cause. If the Sei plan had worked perfectly Ryumon would have followed them into the lion’s den, but he (and Kaku) are too smart to fall for that. Kaku advises they fall back to Fukui, for reasons many and varied which Aoteru has already figured out.

Misumi tells Tsune-chan that Sei will want to avoid fighting a war on their own soil so soon after a coup, even with a numerical advantage in Kaga. Rather, he supposes they’ll invade Yamato – via Okuetsu, a harsh, mountainous region near Fukui – while Yamato’s attention is focused on Kaga. In fact they’ve already besieged Kuzuryu Castle there, with a paltry force of 2,000 defending it. There’s talk of surrendering and offering the castellan’s head to General Kura of Sei, but that sort of talk doesn’t fly round these parts. Instead we get a full-throated celebration of “to our glorious deaths” in the finest Bushido tradition.

In the past, writers of stories (and directors of movies) like this were the type to have themselves beheaded to prove a point. But we live in calmer times now, supposedly at least. It’s all in good fun as long as the line between fiction and reality doesn’t get too fuzzy, but that’s no trivial danger. When the reality you desire is a fantasy to begin with, it can get very hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.