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Crunchyroll Streams Love Rice, More Ninja Girl & Samurai Master

Media distribution service Crunchyroll announced on Friday that it will stream the Love Rice (Love Kome -We Love Rice-) anime and the second season of Ninja Girl & Samurai Master (Nobunaga no Shinobi). Both are available worldwide outside of Asia.

The first episode of Love Rice will stream at 5:00 p.m. on Friday. Future episodes will stream at 11:00 a.m. on Wednesdays. The series Premiered in Japan on April 5 on Tokyo MX and it is also airing on Sun TV, Tochigi TV, and RNC.

The anime project anthropomorphizes rice (kome in Japanese) into schoolboys. At the Kokuritsu Inaho Academy ("Rice Ear Academy," a wordplay on national schools), five new rice-inspired students attempt to supplant bread as the popular grain at the school. The new students form the "Love Rice" unit and challenge themselves to perform at the "Harvest Show" to show the delicious appeal of rice grains. The "heartwarming 'kome'dy with laughs and passion" promises to let audiences rediscover the virtues of rice ("Japan's soul food").

Yūki Takabayashi is credited with the original concept and series script supervision. Yaoyorozu is in charge of planning and the original work. Graphinica's Takashi Horiuchi (Boku wa Ō-sama) is directing at Encourage Films, and Levin Aoi designed the characters. NOB-C is the art director and sub-character designer, and Yaoyorozu's Yoshitada Fukuhara is serving as general producer. Takashi Ifukube is writing the scripts, Tomoyo Sawada is the animation character designer, and Yuta Yamazaki is the series director. Plus Tsubasa is composing the music, Kogane Fusa is the sound director, and Tōru Nakano is the sound producer. Kei Sadayama is handling the animation prop design.

New episodes of Ninja Girl & Samurai Master's second season will stream on Fridays at 2:05 p.m. EDT, starting this Friday.

The anime's first season premiered in October and Crunchyroll streamed the anime as it aired in Japan. The final episode of the first season premiered on March 28. '

For the second season, the anime's air time on Tokyo MX is switching from Tuesday evening to Friday night, so Crunchyroll's stream times will also change. Episodes are still premiering a few days earlier on the KBS Kyoto channel on Wednesdays.

Akitarō Daichi (Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, Sexy Commando Gaiden: Sugoi yo!! Masaru-san, Kamisama Kiss) is directing the anime at TMS Entertainment, and Junko Yamanaka (Detective Conan, Kamisama Kiss, ReLIFE) is designing the characters for animation.

The gag manga centers on a young female ninja named Chidori, whose dream is to help the Warring States-era warlord Oda Nobunaga to achieve his goals. Shigeno launched the manga in Young Animal in 2008, and Hakusensha published the manga's tenth compiled volume in September. Hakusensha published the second volume of Shigeno's Nobunaga no Shinobi - Owari no Tōitsu-ki (Nobunaga's Shinobi - Chronicle of Owari's Unification) manga in February 2016.