Bamboo Blade focuses on a Japanese high school kendo team whose teacher, a former kendo competitor himself, is forced to form it as part of a bet. Finding interest generally lacking from male students (bar two), he’s able to cultivate a five-person girls’ team instead. The star of the team is the diminutive and quiet Tamaki, a first year prodigy who is the daughter of a widowed kendo instructor. Matters become complicated when the teacher, Toraji Ishida, unwittingly angers the principal’s female neighbour, linking the kendo club’s success or failure to his own employment.
I’m not generally a fan of sports anime, which all tend to feature the same elements: the down on its luck team, the coach who could have been a legend if not for one bad play, the prodigious player who comes out of nowhere, etc.
Bamboo Blade apparently feels the same, and delivers a padded blow to this formula.
Whilst nominally a sports/tournament anime, Bamboo Blade manages to buck clichés quite readily. For a start, it’s good fun. The show’s humour manages to stay fresh, not overusing the same gags as many shows do. It also easily crosses the language/culture barrier. Understandably, Japanese entertainment will use a lot of jokes that make no sense if you don’t live there and/or speak the language. That’s completely fine in context, but it generally floats like a lead balloon with foreign audiences. The humour in Bamboo Blade instead translates much more easily, relying more on character interactions and sight gags. Comedy works so much better when you genuinely get and enjoy it, instead of having to do homework or pretend to find it amusing because you want to seem cultured.
Tamaki is another place where the show shattered my expectations. When she first appeared, meekly mumbling, I expected yet another weak-willed anime archetype female whose actions are aimed at pleasing the ‘moe’ demographic. In actuality, she’s a strong-willed and humanized character with some actual depth. An amusing aspect is her love for live-action superhero shows such as the fictional Blade Bravers, a rough spoof of Kamen Rider. Moreover, it’s an angle that is handled carefully: rather then use it to serve up an absurdly over the top parody or make the character appear to be an otaku, she has a generally healthy but dedicated fan response to the show which in turn inspires her attitude for kendo combat. A particular treat is a set of episodes that introduces a similar female kendo student who prefers Blade Braver’s anti-hero rival. It’s to the show’s credit that it doesn’t turn this conflict into the hammy melodrama other shows would.
The other characters in the club are perhaps a bit more clichéd but still enjoyable. Seniors Kirino and Sayaka are infectious as the heart of the team, working to encourage the others who are all a year below them. They usually serve as effective comic relief, especially when attention turns to Sayaka’s mistaken belief that she has musical talent. There are some arguable hints of romance between the two, but the show never commits to the flirtation.
Miyako Miyazaki is the stereotypical tall pretty girl who is curiously devoted to Dan, one of the two sole male members, and perpetually drawn in a deformed style. Miyako’s polite nature hides a hair trigger sinister side which is usually saved for final female member Satori, who is the well-meaning klutz who Miyako conned into joining the club by claiming it will increase her mental ability. The sequence in question is one of the show’s comedy highlights. The final member is Yuji, the token straight man and potential love interest for Tamaki. Luckily, despite not getting too much to do, Yuji doesn’t feel like a cheerleader character, and the lack of matches for both him and Dan is given a reasonable explanation in a subplot about the lack of male members.
In fact, I was struck by how very much the kendo team feels like … well, a team. Tamaki might be the clear stand out, but everyone pulls their weight. It probably helps that the show doesn’t waste time on the more pointless tournament matches and instead focuses on those of consequence, ensuring they’re paced well enough to be exciting but not melodramatic or stretched thin. Other shows could stand to learn from this. Kendo is portrayed fairly realistically as a sport, not given super human participants with special moves (which, as Excel Saga brilliantly highlighted, must surely break the rules anyway) or claims that the fate of the world hangs on winning the regional finals.
After a generally positive start, the concluding story arc sees the club face pressure when the actions of two delinquent students cause it to be scapegoated by parents worried about violence. This is the bleakest part of the set, as slowly the club begins to fall apart. My only real complaint is the likely solution seemed obvious, made worse when it played out exactly as I predicted.
A marginal oddity of the show is Carrie, an American living in Japan who serves to play rival to Miyako. The character’s non-Japanese origin is given a bizarre focus when she first appears, which seems even more odd because beyond that her status as a foreigner receives no real call out beyond moments of badly accented Engrish and she’s treated as she might as well be just another Japanese person. Hopefully this is just a case of an awkwardly done gag, since I’m not really a fan of it when Japanese shows introduce foreign characters just to play ‘You’re wrong because you aren’t Japanese’ gag characters.
I have one minor nitpick regarding translation. As part of the alliance between anime licensors, tapes of series are passed between local studios. For most titles, these seem to result in a company like FUNimation doing the work for America, which then passes them on to Madman in Australia and thence to Manga UK. This means that generally the translation and subtitles will be American derived. The first episode of this set involves a brief conversation about classic games consoles. The Famicom is translated as NES and the Mega Drive is translated as Genesis. It’s the latter which raises my nitpick, given the console was called Mega Drive just about everywhere but America. Add in that these are characters living in Japan and thus Mega Drive applies to them too. I appreciate that shared translations like these are part of the reality of seeing a release of such a niche, but for cultural and nostalgic reasons it’s a minor annoyance.
The set is presented across two discs, with the standard industry choice of an English dub (produced by FUNimation voice talent) or subtitled Japanese. Two extras are also presented on the second disc: a clean OP and ED animation. Sound and visual quality is crisp and clear.
Bamboo Blade really did surprise me. I’d heard of the show before watching it but had no idea quite what to expect, so it’s a great pleasure to find that it was so enjoyable. I’m the kind of guy who usually prefers shows that ask big (arguably pretentious) questions, but when done right it’s quite easy to enjoy something lighter. Bamboo Blade is just such a show, telling a story but not falling into the common trap of trying to act deeper then it needs to. It’s an enjoyable pick me up, and after watching this I’m certainly keen to see first half that I missed.
