The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Meiji Gekken: 1874

By 1874, seven years have passed since the end of the samurai era. A former samurai, Shizuma Orikasa works as a rickshaw driver in Tokyo while looking for his fiancée, Sumie Kanomata, who went missing during the Boshin War. Shizuma thwarts an assassination attempt and joins the newly established police department, where he'll fight to stop dark forces from overthrowing the government.

Meiji Gekken: 1874 is a Crunchyroll Originals anime series directed by Jin Tamamura and animated at Tsumugi Akita Anime Lab. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

Cards on the table: I am a sucker for historical fiction. While I generally prefer those stories that dramatically change history and explore how events would play out (like in Ooku: The Inner Chambers), I also enjoy the smaller stories from time to time—ones where the creators simply take the events of the real world and use a fictional character to explore them on a more personal level. That is what we have here in Meiji Gekken: 1874.

This anime is set in the early years of the Meiji era when rebellions against the new government were not exactly a rarity. Specifically, it seems to be focused on the lead-up to the 1874 Saga Rebellion. And while we do hop around a bit from famous figure to famous figure, the true viewpoint character of the story is a former loyalist samurai looking for his dead friend's sister.

As far as main characters go, Shizuma is decent enough. His goal is understandable on an emotional level and he hits a solid balance between intelligent, brave, and flawed. In other words, he feels like a real person. The same could be said for the various historical figures.

Where the show goes off the rails a bit is with the introduction of the assassins at the gambling den. Everything seems to be 100% set in reality before this scene and after. The rules of physics are followed and fights are brutally realistic. However, these assassins seem to have superpowers.

One can punch a man 20 feet up a flight of stairs while another can fire four arrows at once that knock a man back 10 feet and pin him to a wall (and that's not even mentioning the monk's hallucinogenic gas attack which somehow doesn't affect him despite him holding the source right by his face). Honestly, it took me out of the story. You can have a story strictly based on reality or you can have one where people's martial arts prowess is exaggerated for the sake of entertainment. You can't do both.

All in all, I enjoyed Meiji Gekken: 1874, the grounded story of Shizuma and the Saga Rebellion. What I didn't enjoy was Meiji Gekken: 1874, the story of cliché anime assassins with superpowers. While the history buff in me wants to continue watching, I'm worried that it will become more and more the latter anime as things go on. Still, I'm willing to give it an episode or two more to be sure.

While one of my favorite genres, historical fiction has a few concrete barriers to overcome. One of them is the temptation to throw too much history in our faces right off the bat, and that's a trap that Meiji Gekken 1874 has fallen into. Along with a plethora of named characters, one or two of whom might have multiple names, the story also tosses in competing political issues and the remnants of a conflict that it doesn't fully explain. Does it need to detail the Boshin War in 1868 (Meiji 1)? Probably not for a Japanese audience or even for a lot of Western viewers who pick this up based solely on the time period. But it still feels like protagonist Shizuma's past is given short shrift, which risks compromising his storyline.

The key thing to take away from the brief sojourn in 1868 is that Shizuma is from Aizu, the losing side of the Boshin War. (I'm simplifying pretty gratuitously here.) Now, in the brave new world that is 1874 (Meiji 7), that makes him inherently suspicious from the new government's perspective, to the point where "I'm from Aizu" is enough reason for a couple of policemen to assume that he's the culprit in a murder attempt. All of this is in service of the offer Shizuma gets at the close of the episode: the (real-life) police chief asks him to join the force. The implications are that Shizuma is being handed a legal way to make himself look trustworthy(ish) and have access to the new government that he may or may not agree with. Since we've already seen a bit of conflict there, it's an interesting proposition that gives the show plenty of space to develop.

Perhaps more importantly, it puts Shizuma in the way of finding his long-lost fiancée, Sumie. Sumie appears to have been kidnapped back in '68, and her brother asked Shizuma to look after her, which is hard to do when you don't know where someone is. I think we, the viewers, may have a clue as to her whereabouts, and unless I miss my guess (and I admit to having trouble keeping track of all of the characters), she's on the side that's rebelling against the Meiji government – or is at least being used by the rebels. There's lots of room for intrigue, and I'm certainly curious about where things will go, although I'm leery of the way the story will be told because, for whatever reason, I spent a lot of this episode confused. But I love the setting and the fact that there's historically accurate European facial hair on two guys (the mid-19th century was very creative with the facial hair), so this is probably worth another episode to see if it irons out its issues.

Meiji Gekken is competent. It knows what it wants to be, and has exactly the right artistic vision and production resources to achieve that goal. It just so happens that what Meiji Gekken aspires to be is the platonic ideal of a 6/10 historical drama, caught up in replicating the distinct political tensions of its time period and mixing that history with every crime thriller cliché it can think of.

If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, it's only because this is the exact kind of show that slides off my brain the moment I stop watching it. It ticks along at the right pace to tell its story without any dramatic flourish or interesting characters. It pieces its plot together through familiar ideas and lays them out in the exact order you'd expect. In this first episode,e our hero is falsely accused of a crime, hunts down the man who did it, and gets conveniently saved from a gunshot wound by an emotionally significant memento, before being offered a job as a cop. Were Shizuma about a foot taller and built like the broad side of a barn on steroids, he'd be Meiji Era Jack Reacher. His story is surrounded by a bunch of place settings to establish the political and criminal stakes at play, and that Shizuma will presumably get caught up in while he searches for his missing fiance, but very little of it matters for this episode.

The one wrinkle is the cast of eccentric vigilantes (or something; it's not made clear who they are) that show up in the middle of the episode to bust a corrupt gambling den. Those guys feel a little more distinct, if only because they feel like a goofier version of the cast of Revenger, last winter's 6/10 historical crime drama. There's even a bit where one of them seemingly fires seven arrows at once and pins a guy against the wall like a goddamn Looney Tunes gag. It's ridiculous and tonally inconsistent with everything that happens before and after, but it's also the most entertaining part of what could otherwise be a rerun of NCIS.

The problem is, I have no idea how or when those characters will factor into the plot again, and I'm not curious enough to stick around and find out. Even in a weak season, there's nothing much here to pull me along or hold my interest. If you're a history nerd who specifically likes the early Meiji era, this might scratch your itch. Outside of that, the characters are too simple and modular to be anything but plot devices, the visuals are too dreary to leave any impact, and the whole thing glides over your attention without ever sticking. It succeeds by never failing, but also never excels, and I'd rather watch a show fall on its face than walk at a leisurely gate down a perfectly straight road.

I'm always down for a good Japanese period piece, and the Meiji era has provided a practically endless bounty of inspiration for any number of epic wartime dramas and fascinating studies of how the swiftly changing times affected every aspect of the culture and its people. Plus, there's no denying that the aesthetic of stories set in the Meiji period, defined by a clash of ancient Eastern traditions and modernized Western values, is just generally very cool if I do say so myself. It's why, for instance, a show like Meiji Gekken: 1874 can get away with using a soundtrack that combines classical elements and some bitchin' rock and roll to set the tone for the story of Shizuma the Rickshaw Guy, who carries on the classic literary tradition of being a former samurai that is just trying to find his place in an unfamiliar and ever-changing world.

This quest, naturally, is complicated by the fact that the "new" Japan is just as much in need of people who are good at killing other people as in any of its past eras; it's only the means and methods of the bloodshed that have evolved. So, sure, a guy named Shizuma might not have been expecting to get tangled up in an underground political crime war involving gangs of assassins, Catholic ninjas, and hallucinogenic-incense-spewing monks, but that's just the nature of the times in Meiji Gekken: 1874. If Shizuma wants to find his missing fiancé and clear his name, then he's probably going to have to get his hands dirty, and that's fine by me, because the weirder and more complicated his life gets, the more entertaining it is for us to watch.

At the end of the day, that's exactly what Meiji Gekken: 1874 promises and that's what it delivers: A well-produced and entertaining tale of intrigue, political unrest, lost love, and good old-fashioned katana stabbings. It's still early goings in this story, so only time will tell if it will coalesce into a fully coherent and satisfying vision with characters worth remembering, but for now, it's off to a great start.