The Shinsengumi Return in Blue Miburo, Plus the Joys of New Licenses

A late addition to the fall anime season is Blue Miburo, a new interpretation of the famed Shinsengumi.

From Kodansha USA:

It's 1863, the twilight of the shogunate, and Japan is on the cusp of monumental change. The streets of the nation's capital are soaked in blood as political upheaval and rising tensions between masterless, wandering ronin and government samurai set the stage for one of the most turbulent times in Japan's history. Young orphan Nio is no stranger to the harsh realities of the world, and yet he can't help but cling to his burning passion for justice and desire to change the world for the better.

One day, he crosses paths with two men who will become central figures of the coming revolution: Hijikata Toshizo and Okita Souji, two of the founding members of a group of hated ronin known as the Miburo—who would later become known as the Shinsengumi. Inspired by the efforts of the so-called "Blues Wolves of Mibu," Nio decides to join the ranks to help carve a path to the world he wishes to see. But with new betrayals and reversals every day, will Nio be able to stay true to his conscience?

The Shinsengumi have been featured in numerous manga and anime series, most notably in...

Kaze Hikaru...

Hakuouki...

... and of course Gintama.

It should be remembered that the Shinsengumi were a reactionary force and wouldn’t be looked on with favor these days. I myself tend to forget this when I drool over Hakouki’s Hijikata or laugh at Gintama’s Kondo and Okita. Yes, they were genuine heroes to a certain side in Japanese history - but that was long ago.

Nonetheless, I’m giving Blue Miburo a try. I can’t resist the Shinsengumi in any of their iterations.

Some unexpected good things have come out of paying for streaming subscriptions. By which I mean that I didn’t expect to find anime treasures at Disney Plus or Hulu, but they’re there.

Years ago, fairly early on in my anime fandom, I fell in love with a series called Nurarihyon no Mago (English name: Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan).

I don’t even recall where I watched it. It was probably Crunchyroll but maybe it was Funimation? Or the Anime Network? Regardless, there was only one season and I figured that was all.

... Until the other day, when I was tooling around the Hulu site and decided to check out their anime catalog. For some reason, even though I knew that Hulu and Disney Plus held a number of anime licenses, I never thought to look to see if they had anything that would fill in the gaps in my personal anime wish list.

I found to my delight that not only do they have Nurarihyon no Mago but that there is a second season of it. Remember, I date back to the days of anime fandom when it was catch as catch can. Before Crunchyroll turned legit, you had to hunt and search for episodes. If you were lucky, and remembered enough of your high school Spanish, you might get by with Naruto and Bleach episodes with Spanish subs on YouTube. It was like that back then.

In other words, I didn’t think to consider that times have changed. With the growing popularity of anime in the U.S. even older series are being picked up, including the later seasons of those series that never got localized before.

So I’ve started a “Rewatching” list to add onto my “Currently Watching” page. Because not only did I find Nurarihyon no Mago but I found two other old favorites with additional seasons.

Oh, I loved Bakuman when it came out. I just fell in love with the story. I bought a gigantic box set of the complete manga. I watched the anime, the first season, all 25 episodes of it.

Then... the second season got caught up in a legal mess. The season was dubbed into English but some situation came up that prevented it from being released/distributed. At that point (this was years ago), I gave up on ever being able to watch the second season.

Until...

I was gobsmacked and extremely happy to find out that Disney Plus is streaming all three seasons of Bakuman. I didn’t even know there was a third season. I never thought I would be able to watch S2 considering its past legal situation, let alone get to watch a third season.

Bakuman is about two high schoolers who create their own manga. The Bakuman manga itself was created by Takeshi Obata and Tsugumi Ohba, the team that did Death Note, a story that is about as far from the light tone of Bakuman as it’s possible to get.

Bakuman is a gem. It shows the creative process as experienced by two young people and the challenges they face when they unexpectedly turn professional. I am just really happy that I’ll get to see the story brought to life in anime form, all three seasons of it.

Finally, from the same camp of unexpected good news, Disney Plus currently holds the Durarara!! license and I found out that Durarara!! has a second season! Really, I don’t know why they don’t publicize these new licenses enough. It makes me want to go through Hulu and Disney Plus and Crunchyroll and just look for new seasons of old anime series that I still love.

Best of all, they’re available in sub and dub. Sub (Japanese voice cast with English subtitles) is far and away my preferred way to watch anime. I wouldn’t have put it past U.S. anime streamers like Disney Plus and Hulu to just have the dub versions, but they have the Japanese versions too.

This brings me back to the earlier years of my anime fandom, before there was so much isekai and before the long-running shounen anime series I loved like Naruto and Fullmetal Alchemist concluded their stories and entered the annals of anime legend.

Not to mention that the fall 2024 anime season is a good one and I’m still watching those series too. It’s a good time to be an anime lover. :-)

Ten Years Later

Once upon a time, there was a young American girl.

Her grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Japan, making the girl a third-generation Japanese-American.

She grew up in a white neighborhood in Southern California, a child in the 1960s and a teenager in the 1970s. Not that long after WWII, with Pearl Harbor within living memory of most people.

She felt American inside, even if some people she met saw her face and considered her a foreigner. Her parents, who spoke both English and Japanese, only spoke English at home, perhaps to ensure that she would be seen as American as possible by other Americans.

They never taught her anything about the culture of her grandparents and ancestors.

She didn’t mind. After all, she was American.

Many years passed.

One evening, she was watching the Starz Network and saw something she’d never seen before.

It was something called anime — animation from Japan.

It blew her mind.

Not only was the story adult in tone, but it was what she knew as slash — a romance between two men. She had no idea that entertainment like this existed outside of fandom, and from a foreign country too.

Japan. A country she was connected to by blood made shows like this. She was staggered to find this out.

But that wasn’t all. The Starz Network also had other anime series.

Slowly, as if being drawn in against her will, she began to search out more anime to watch.

It was her first exposure to Japanese manga and anime art styles, and what she saw changed her whole view on art.

She particularly loved how some anime series created entire universes one could lose oneself in — the setting, characters and stories forming whole worlds in themselves.

She fell in love with so many characters... and the seiyuu who played them.

She attended many anime conventions, discovering the love her fellow fans had for anime.

... And that sometimes, one could meet a Shonen Jump editor in real life that you’d seen in an anime.

She started a blog so she could write about her love for anime and manga.

And she began taking Japanese lessons, finally starting to learn the language of her grandparents — and discovered what her name was in Japanese (ジャン 鈴川).

Since she’d worked as an editor before, she began freelancing as a translation rewriter/editor for the U.S. companies that published manga and anime-related books.

She edited many books in the field:

Even the yaoi light novels she loved to read... she became the editor of some of those books as well.

The world she entered when she became an anime fan expanded her sense of storytelling and setting, and inspired her first published novel.

That novel set her on the road to other fictional worlds, and other series that she is still writing today.

Her love for anime and manga gave her a second career in editing, as well as the fulfillment of a lifelong dream — to be a published fiction writer.

It brought her full-circle in terms of acceptance and appreciation for her heritage as a Japanese-American.

So be open, and stay curious as to the world around you. Because one day, you may be watching television or surfing the Internet and not expecting your life to change, but — it can.

A gift that takes your life in a new direction can come to you, unexpected, sent to you by the universe with hidden hands.

Thank you for reading this blog for the past ten years.