血だるま剣法・おのれらに告ぐ

CHIDARUMA KENPOU: ONORERA NI TSUGU

Drama

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
1
RELEASE
Invalid Date
CHAPTERS
2

DESCRIPTION

With this book, Hirata set out to draw a passionate critique of discrimination against the Japanese outcaste community, known as the burakumin, around the character of Gennosuke, a young buraku whose mission to avenge and uplift his people through the sword goes horribly and gorily wrong. Though clearly intended as an anti-discrimination broadside, Bloody Stumps Samurai rubbed the Buraku Liberation League the wrong way, leading to copies being confiscated and burned and Hirata temporarily blacklisted.

(Source: Retrofit Comics)

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

WallahSous
80/100
1960's Samurai manga about a real outcast minority in Japan. It most definitely inspired Shigurui.
A very short tragedy manga about a Samurai's plea and vengeance.

The manga was released in 1960 and it uses the feudal era at its setting to essentially testify an outcast's life and his resentment towards the classes that discriminate him.

What makes the main character an outcast is his status as the son of Buraku, a real class of people that exist(ed) in Japan.

"Buraku describes a large minority group in Japan, historically descendants of outcast communities of the feudal era, which mainly comprised those with occupations considered "tainted" with death or ritual impurity (such as executioners, undertakers or tanners), and traditionally lived in their own secluded hamlets and ghettos."

The translator also left this note about the controversial publishing of the manga:

"Chidaruma Kenpou: Onorera ni Tsugu is a very controversial manga that was published in the '60s and was soon removed from shelves after being protested against by Buraku groups for its arguably negative portrayal of a Buraku main character. In recent times, it was restored and republished in this new version, but derogatory statements connected to Buraku and their history have still been blanked out. These missing bits have been restored as much as possible in this English translation."

Story-wise (8/10),
The story stars Gennosuke, the son of Buraku parents who died. He makes his way through a Dojo and is portrayed as being very persistant and recklessly relentless. His ultimate goal is to plea for the law of the land to be changed in order to make Buraku a protected class. This plan gets discovered and people realize he's a Buraku himself. This doesn't sit well among Dojo members and causes a cascade of events that end up with him carrying out an ultimate plan of vengeance. The story itself has nice minor twists but it's also fairly predictable and extremely short (even though it spans over more than a decade within the story). There's nothing particularly wrong with the story, it just wasn't exceptional and life during the time-skip should have had more story development. The time-skip almost felt practically useless given how few "changes" were portrayed after it passed. The ending is also a very nice twist that's a bit poetic. He's ended by someone of his caste, eliminating each other in the end, which only benefited the "bad guys" in the story.

Character-wise (10/10),
Gennosuke is very impulsive and intense. You see the emotions he goes through particularly well; you can feel that he's very troubled by what he's living. Fits of violent rage and fits of crying rage constantly on display, with no room given to "normal" scenes. There are basically 2 other important characters which make up his immediate circle, with nice twists to both of them.

Art-wise (7/10),
It's clearly very old but it's not bad by any means. It's simply underwhelming compared to newer art styles, it lacks detail and has this grainy texture. During fights, it can have some nice strokes that give the impression of speed/swinging (2nd pannel) but it can be bland or messy (3rd pannel). Have a look (3 different pages):

Overall, the manga is short and sweet. Enjoyable.

It was most definitely an inspiration for Shigurui
https://anilist.co/manga/33868/Shigurui

Gennosuke...Gonzaemon...crippleness...challenge to inherit Dojo...Irako son of "filth"...a distaste of the caste system...the revegeance plot...slay the tiger...even the sword style at some point...

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Juliko25
44/100
Not only a poor portrayal of a minority group, this manga is just a pointlessly violent angst fest with not much else.
Bloody Stumps Samurai is...a weird manga if I've ever seen one. Published in 1962 by Hiroshi Hirata, it centers on a samurai named Gennosuke Itoko, who was constantly discriminated against due to his family being burakumin. After watching his family be brutally murdered, he tries to work his way into a dojo and plead for the law of the land to be changed in order for the buraku to be a protected class. Two things make this complicated: Gennosuke's tendency to be extremely ferocious and murderous, even during practice fights, and the fact that the second his dojo mates find out he's a buraku, they'll turn on him without hesitation. But his plan gets discovered, and...well, without going into spoilers, everything goes to shit and Gennosuke winds up dedicating his life to getting revenge against all who wronged him.

If you're wondering what a burakumin, or buraku is, it's the name given to a minority group of people that were shunned and discriminated against due to having jobs involving death, like undertakers, executioners, butchers, slaughterhouse workers, and so on, professions which were considered tainted, ritually impure, or defiled during the feudal era. Basically, burakumin were seen as less than human, and while the burakumin status was technically abolished in 1868 after the Meiji Restoration, descendants still wind up dealing with stigmatization and discrimination to this day. The history behind Bloody Stumps Samurai's publication is actually fairly interesting, because at the time of its publication, it wound up causing a hotbed of controversy. Hirata had originally created the manga with the intention of writing a story about a buraku main character in an attempt to give the burakumin positive representation for once, as a way to combat and critique the stigmatization they were still experiencing. But apparently, according to burakumin movements in that era and the notes in the first English publication, he didn't do a very good job of it. In fact, the controversy the manga started up was so bad that it was not only pulled from shelves, but people were actually burning copies of it in public, the burakumin were that offended by it, and justifiably so. Hirata did try to explain himself and elaborate more on his intentions behind the manga, but it wasn't enough. And...honestly, after reading the manga myself, I'm inclined to agree that Hirata really messed up in his depiction of a minority class.

Mainly because the manga has a crap ton of other problems besides depicting a minority class in an unfavorable way. Bloody Stumps Samurai is just a really, really edgy, schlocky, super dark manga that's caked in gore and violence, with very little in the way of levity or anything to break up the non-stop misery. The manga itself is pretty short, clocking in at one single volume, so thankfully it doesn't overstay its welcome, so you can read it in a day. But man, similarly to Vampire In The Garden, Bloody Stumps Samurai is a tragedy through and through, so intent on being as morose, miserable, and unnecessarily angsty as humanly possible. Characters are always either screaming, crying, angry, or trying to kill each other, and Gennosuke both goes through back-to-back tragedies and horrible traumas with no hope or help whatsoever, but hits rock bottom and commits murders on the regular, so it's hard to sympathize with Gennosuke or root for him because he literally has nothing to his character other than "suffered trauma, wants revenge, kills all who wronged him." Yeah, I can absolutely see where the burakumin movement people are coming from with this: If you're trying to write a main character who's part of a minority group and trying to go for a positive portrayal, DON'T make them into crazed psychos who only want to kill people and literally nothing else, because that just reduces them to a prop for tragedy porn or paints them as crazy people in general.

It doesn't help that all the characters are pretty bland too. I already mentioned the problems with Gennosuke, but all the other characters don't have much to them either. They're all one-note stereotypes that either hate Gennosuke for being a buraku, or try to sympathize with him but wind up having to betray or kill him for some reason. Since the manga is so short, it doesn't have the time to flesh them out beyond their main singular traits. I don't know if the short length was intentional on Hirata's part or not, but it really didn't help the manga's case. Plus, the latter half of the manga has Gennosuke be capable of feats that really, really should not be possible for a human being to do, especially in the time period in which Bloody Stumps Samurai takes place. Without spoiling anything, there is an in-story reason for why the title is Bloody Stumps Samurai, but honestly, it just really broke my suspension of disbelief. Apparently Hirata-sensei came to realize just how stupid the last half of the story was, because he would go on to remake the manga years later, cutting out the latter half of the story entirely. But having read said remake, other than improved artwork, some extra scenes showing Gennosuke being kind, and cutting out the latter half of the story, the remake still suffers from the same problems as its parent story does. And in both versions, Gennosuke...let's just say he doesn't get a happily ever after and leave it at that.

Speaking of the artwork, for its time, it was fine, though nowadays it can be considered a little cartoony and rough, with very thick linework and equally thick brush strokes that are put to almost extraneous use during the fight scenes. There aren't always a lot of details and it lacks texture on occasion. Granted, this manga was made in the 1960s, so anime/manga in general was still fairly in its infancy, and at the time, I bet this manga's art probably looked more realistic than anything else that had come out before then. I do appreciate that the more important characters like Gennosuke and his teacher actually look like big, bulky men with toned muscles and large physiques, with more realistic looking faces and angular facial contouring, which you don't see in a lot of modern anime anymore unless you know where to look. Plus, a lot of the art's initial problems were fixed in the remake, so I'll give Hirata-sensei credit for refining his craft over the years. I also feel like the story relied way too much on narration than actually letting the story and characters speak for themselves.

In the end, Bloody Stumps Samurai is a morose angst-fest of a manga that had good intentions but ultimately botched its message in its attempt to tell a story about a person in a minority class. This article here elaborates a little more on why it failed in its initial mission to highlight the struggles the burakumin people had to endure. I myself did something similar in some fan fics I wrote years ago, though that's a touchy subject I'm not comfortable elaborating on. Basically, Bloody Stumps Samurai isn't for me, but I'm sure there's plenty of people that like it, and good on them. It did inspire later works that would refine its themes and tackle them more sensitively down the line, so while the manga really messed up in its mission, it's not entirely without merit, especially from a learning perspective. But if you can't stand super violent, edgy manga with no levity, steer clear of Bloody Stumps Samurai. Honestly, I find the manga's publication history more interesting than the actual manga itself...and I'm sure that says a lot.
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