NIPPON SANGOKU – Episode 1

Content Warning: Bloody military executions, corporal punishment, tobacco use, post-apocalyptic imagery, fatphobia, jingoistic dog whistling

What’s it about? In the mid-21st century, the world fell into chaos with nuclear war. While Japan is spared from the direct fighting, they are swamped with refugees who bring about a new pandemic. This plight is compounded by its ongoing shrinking birth rates and declining education levels,  along with vast economic inequalities that boil over into a violent uprising that Balkanizes the nation into three feuding states. Yamato, Buo and Seii now fight using Meiji-era technology due to societal collapse. In the Yamato domain, Aoteru Misumi lives a difficult but modestly happy life as an agricultural affairs officer in his home town in Ehime Prefecture. While he has voraciously studied the works of military masters from yesteryear, he has no interest in military service, even if his wife says he could be the one to reunite the nation. However, one day, an official visit from the capital upends Misumi’s life forever, and he embarks on a years-long quest for revenge.

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Nippon Sangoku possesses a powerful aesthetic that harkens back to an era that some in Japan would herald as the good-old days. It’s the period of Japan’s history where, after hundreds of years of relative peace and isolationism, the nation rapidly modernized into a romantic mix of new and old. While most celebrate this era for its revolutions in education, medicine and political thought, it also came with rapid changes to the military as it modernized uniforms and weapons and combat strategies to more Western conventions. The era culminated with its victory against Russia in 1905 to cement the nation’s place as an imperialist power.

While the Meiji-era military aesthetic-alone does not necessarily present a dog whistles for nationalist sentiments, Sangoku overflows with them. It puts me on edge because it’s a show that feels like it’s going to be more than jingoistic saber-rattling, but is inescapably steeped in it from the start.

Piling on every Japanese social issue today, Nippon Sangoku blames its societal collapse on the rapid decline of birth rates, a huge influx of refugees, and lowered education rates, compounded by late-stage capitalist inequality. It’s a perspective that violently rejects the current world, envisioning an apocalyptic future trying to right itself and finding stability by embracing tradition. And it is this world view that sets off an alarm bell or two in my head.

This rejection is so thorough, it even seeps through to the language Aoteru and others use. Foreign loaner words have all but disappeared while Aoteru speaks with a Japanese vocabulary so robust, even I had to stop the video and pull out a dictionary to look the word up. (It was “畏怖,” btw, to fear or dread. Also, is it normal for Amazon videos to not have subtitles? Because I had to watch this thing raw. I’m literally using a 30-day Free Trial just to do this review, so I’m not following up). 

And this is where this show breaks past “worrying” to “good,” for me, as I am astounded by not only the artistic direction, but the spotless writing in its dialogue. Aoteru’s keigo (formal Japanese) was impeccable. I don’t know when was the last time I heard someone vocalized “僭越ながら” (By your grace) so naturally and so perfectly into a conversation. I literally guffawed hearing him lace that in during his frantic entreatment to the lord of home affairs.

Admittedly, this show looks gorgeous and the writing is engaging. It’s got everything it needs to be a star player this cour as the story laid out a clear trajectory for Aoteru going forward.

Yet, there is also a spiritual tug of war in how to find a safe and relatable character in Aoteru. Aoteru is a 15-year-old farmer with a passion for map making and reading military history and philosophy. If he simply wanted to join the military and employ his strategic genius, Sangoku would be a very different show. It’s his softer side that gives him an approachable character, but that Aoteru would never leave for Osaka to become a military strategist—unless we give him a healthy dose of man-pain.

And that presents yet another conduit for concern, as Aoteru’s journey only begins because a corrupt tyrant brutalized his childhood friend-turned recently wedded wife Saki. It clearly establishes our hero as more than just a cog in the militarist state, but the personal drive is now just his tempered but undying flames of rage against his wife’s murderer.

Saki, meanwhile, engages in a healthy spate of fat shaming as she calls Denki a “fatso” repeatedly throughout the episode. Denki, the corrupt lord of home affairs is the only visibly fat character so far, and the show makes it a point, through sound effects and visual framing, to remind you that, “yes, he is indeed fat,” as if that is the defining reason why he is evil, and not because of his blood thirsty sociopathic nature.

It’s these little flaws that intrude on an otherwise engaging story that make you pause and sometimes wonder, couldn’t this all have been packaged a tiny bit better? I think about that while contemplating Yang Wen-Li, a history buff who just got promoted despite himself.

And as if all of this wasn’t enough, Aoteru, among others from the opening credits, are shown to be quite adept at chain smoking and looking incredibly badass while doing it. I definitely felt a small itch after seeing half the cast take a nice long drag to blow some smoke.

Despite it all, though, Sangoku seems like a fun story to follow, and I hope that it is, because this could so easily become something anything but that with the wrong heart.