Ryomaden Episodes 1~9

The Taiga dorama that I am very, very slowly working my way through is Ryomaden. Main reason I am watching is because there is a game coming up soon by Team Ninja called Rise of the Ronin. I am no Team Ninja fan, I thought Nioh was a meh FromSoft clone with a stupid randomly generated loot system but the game is bloody set in the Bakumatsu period with Sakamoto Ryoma in it so fingers and toes crossed it will be a good game!

Sakamoto Ryoma is one of the famous Japanese historical figures that everyone knows by name but no one really can say why he was famous. He was the main character of Ryu ga Gotoku Ishin! but that was more of a Shinsengumi story. Ryomaden was finally enlightened me on why Sakamoto Ryoma is a great man: he has to make a difficult decision between Hirosue Ryoko or Kanjiya Shihori who are throwing themselves at his feet.

I know what you are thinking. With the recent Hirosue Ryoko scandal, surely the answer should be Kanjiya Shihori but Ryomaden came out in 2010, when Hirosue Ryoko was still at the top of her powers.

Joking aside, Ryomaden is about Japan being this isolated country that realised how backwards they were when Commodore Perry and the black ships appeared threatening Japan to open the country to trade. Sakamoto Ryoma realised that the rest of the world had technology that Japan would not even dream of but most of the country wanted to expel the foreigners instead of learning from them because they were scared of being conquered.

Ryomaden shows how feudal society was in that era. In Sakamoto Ryoma's hometown of Tosa, there is even discrimination between different classes of samurai and anyone could get killed at anyone's whim. Samurai lived for the lord and episode 9 you even have a collective responsibility story which reminded me of the case where a school withdrew from Koshien just because on the the students who was not on the team got into a fight.

The thing I am looking forward to in Ryomaden is to see how Kagawa Teruyuki's character goes from super poor samurai selling bird cages to the founder of Mitsubishi. Can't complain, I hope Hirosue Ryoko and Kanjiya Shihori stay in the story until the end! Watchable.