Nippon Sangoku The Three Nations of the Crimson Sun

Episode 12

Leave it to Nippon Sangoku to finish its inaugural season with a veritable avalanche of bloodbaths, backstabbings, and bastard cliffhangers. Given the pace of just this first batch of episodes, it was obvious that Aoteru and Yoshitsune's dream of a peacefully united Japan still has a very long way to go. I knew that Taira probably had one last devious ploy in store to bust out before the credits rolled this week, but I still didn't expect things to go quite so topsy-turvey for our heroes.

Of course, the fall of Aoteru and his allies comes on the heels of unprecedented success and glory. Just as Aoteru predicted last week, the feint of retreat successfully lured Wajima and the Seii army into a gruesome deathtrap. I have to admit that crushing Wajima's troops under a mountain of abandoned, rusted-out cars from the pre-apocalypse was a cool way to exploit the show's futuristic setting, and it's something I hope to see a lot more of as the series continues. While this finale is more a spectacle of grand tactics rather than excessive action, it is all too fitting for Wajima's ambitious campaign to end in a literal slow-motion pileup of hundreds of dead relics from a world gone by.

Despite the triumphant victory that comes from Kaku's last act as Yamato's great strategist, things go downhill quickly from here, as Taira uses the preceding peace talks between the two nations as an excuse to burn everything to the ground and finally secure his spot at the head of the table. Wajima is executed by her own people under false pretenses, and Yamato's Emperor is declared a powerless symbol. Taira swoops in to consolidate his power. As a result, Aoteru and Ryumon are amongst the many rivals who are locked up in prison, while Seii is crushed under the might of Taira's ruthless and bloody crusade.

It's a hell of a lot to take in over the course of just a dozen minutes, and this is where the show's stylings as a historical chronicle both help and hurt its success as a television series. On the one hand, these sweeping political maneuvers and their massive consequences are just the sort of beats that a pseudo-documentary approach can really excel in, since it captures the big picture of how these events are shaping the whole of this post-apocalyptic version of Japan. That said, it does mean that the personal impact on our individual characters' lives can feel a bit muted. So far as we know, Wajima really has been brutally executed and used as another bloody stepping stone for Taira to plant his stubby little feet on, but her death is reported with the same casual indifference that the narrator affords every other death we've seen so far. The same goes for Aoteru being locked up in prison for years, which we barely get to see unfold before the episode comes to a close.

This isn't necessarily a flaw in Nippon Sangoku's execution, since this pacing and narrative distance are all obviously intentional and meticulously laid out. It's just a shame that the season finale of the series marks the first time the show's methods have taken me out of enjoying the story to its fullest, if only ever so slightly. To be clear, none of this takes away from what an exemplary work of art that Nippon Sangoku has been all season. This remains one of the best anime to come out all year, easily, and a second season cannot possibly come soon enough.

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Nippon Sangoku The Three Nations of the Crimson Sun is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.