Bloody Stumps Samurai

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.