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Two dates hold up the samurai in a Japanese history textbook. One is 1185, when the Taira clan went down at the sea battle of Dan-no-ura and the Minamoto began ruling from Kamakura. The other is 1876, when the Meiji government made it illegal to wear a sword in public. Everything in between is a row of era names: Kamakura, Muromachi, Sengoku, Edo, and the last restless years Japanese call the Bakumatsu.
Samurai anime are scattered across those seven centuries, and the era a show picks tells you what kind of story it is. A Sengoku story is usually about war between warlords. An Edo story is about swordsmen in a country that has stopped fighting. A Bakumatsu story tends to be about political killings in the streets of Kyoto. So these eleven run in the order their stories take place, not by score.
I have watched The Heike Story, Dororo, Samurai Champloo, the first season of Hell's Paradise and the 2023 Rurouni Kenshin. The other six I know from the history they are set in, which is what their entries stick to.
The 11 Picks at a Glance
| Title | Format | Length | MBTI | When it is set |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Heike Story | Anime series | 11 episodes | INFJ | 1170s to 1185, the fall of the Taira |
| The Elusive Samurai | Anime series | 24 episodes (2 seasons) | ENTP | 1333, the fall of Kamakura |
| Dororo | Anime series | 24 episodes | ISTP | Sengoku, with no famous names |
| Sword of the Stranger | Anime film | About 100 min | ISTJ | Sengoku, with Ming warriors in Japan |
| Yasuke | Anime series | 6 episodes | ISFP | 1582, then twenty years on |
| Shigurui: Death Frenzy | Anime series | 12 episodes | INTJ | 1629, a tournament with live blades |
| Onimusha | Anime series | 8 episodes | ISTJ | Early Edo, an aging Musashi |
| Samurai Champloo | Anime series | 26 episodes | ISTP | Edo, after the Shimabara Rebellion |
| Hell's Paradise | Anime series | 25 episodes (2 seasons) | ISTP | Edo, with the shogun's executioners |
| Peacemaker Kurogane | Anime series | 24 episodes | ESFP | 1864, the Shinsengumi in Kyoto |
| Rurouni Kenshin (2023) | Anime series | 47 episodes (2 seasons) | ISFJ | 1878, after the sword ban |
Where a show names no year, I placed it by its period.
1. The Heike Story
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Historical, Drama | 11 episodes | Elegiac, Quiet |
Biwa is a young girl who travels as a biwa player, and one of her eyes sees what is going to happen. After agents of the Taira clan kill her father, she is taken into the household of Taira no Shigemori, eldest son of the clan's all-powerful leader Kiyomori, and grows up with the family whose fall she can already see coming.
Science SARU made it, with Naoko Yamada directing, from the novelist Hideo Furukawa's 2016 translation of The Tale of the Heike into modern Japanese. Its 11 episodes streamed in Japan from September 2021 and aired on TV in early 2022.
History, Plus One Invented Girl
The Tale of the Heike is the 13th-century epic of how the Taira rose under Kiyomori and were destroyed by the Minamoto in the Genpei War of 1180 to 1185. Its opening lines, about the bell of the Gion Shoja temple and how the proud do not last, are lines Japanese students study in junior high school, and many are asked to recite them. So every Japanese viewer starts this series knowing how it ends.
Biwa is the one major character the epic does not have. The anime added her as a witness who can see the end coming and cannot stop it, which is the position the audience is in too.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
2. The Elusive Samurai
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Historical, Action, Comedy | 24 episodes (2 seasons) | Breathless, Playful |
In 1333, Ashikaga Takauji turns against the Kamakura shogunate, and the Hojo clan that ran it is wiped out. Hojo Tokiyuki, the young heir, survives because the one thing he is truly good at is running away. A Shinto priest named Suwa Yorishige, who claims he can see the future, hides him and sets him on the long road to taking back what he lost.
From Yusei Matsui, the creator of Assassination Classroom, whose manga ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2021 to 2026. CloverWorks animated Season 1 in 2024 and Season 2 in the summer of 2026.
A Footnote Made Into a Hero
Tokiyuki appears in the chronicles of the period, and so does the Suwa clan's decision to hide him in Shinano. Outside this manga, most Japanese know Takauji's name and not Tokiyuki's, because Takauji went on to found the Muromachi shogunate, and he is the man this series makes its villain.
The Japanese title, Nige Jozu no Wakagimi, means "the young lord who is good at running away." Matsui built a historical series around a boy whose talent is retreat.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
3. Dororo
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Action, Dark Fantasy | 24 episodes | Somber, Fierce |
To bring prosperity to his land, the warlord Daigo Kagemitsu makes a pact with twelve demons and pays with his newborn son's body. The boy lives anyway, born without his limbs, his eyes and much else, and grows up as Hyakkimaru, who wins back a part of himself each time he kills one of the demons. On the road he picks up Dororo, a young thief who will not leave him alone.
Osamu Tezuka's manga from 1967, remade in 2019 by MAPPA and Tezuka Productions and directed by Kazuhiro Furuhashi. The first anime version came out in 1969.
The Warring States From the Ground
The Sengoku period, the age of warring states, runs roughly from the late 1400s to the late 1500s, and most stories set in it are about warlords Japanese children know by name. Dororo has none of them. Daigo is invented.
The war in Dororo is seen from below: the people Hyakkimaru meets are farmers, orphans, bandits and foot soldiers, and the one lord the story follows closely is the father who sold him.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Streaming |
| Amazon Prime Video | Streaming |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
HIDIVE carries it too, and The Roku Channel has it free with ads.
4. Sword of the Stranger
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime film | Action, Historical | About 100 min | Tense, Kinetic |
A boy named Kotaro and his dog are on the run from a band of warriors from Ming China, who want him for reasons he does not understand. He hires a nameless ronin to protect him, a swordsman who has sealed his own sword so that he cannot draw it.
Produced by Bones and directed by Masahiro Ando. It opened in Japan in September 2007.
Invented From Top to Bottom
No real person and no named battle: the film picks an unnamed corner of the Sengoku period and fills it with its own lord, its own temple and its own foreign soldiers. The Ming warriors' reason for crossing the sea is a secret the film keeps for most of its length, and the same secret, by coincidence, is the one that sends the convicts of Hell's Paradise to their island.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
5. Yasuke
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Action, Fantasy, Historical | 6 episodes | Brooding, Explosive |
Twenty years after the death of the warlord Oda Nobunaga, the man who once fought at his side lives quietly as a boatman. Yasuke is pulled back into fighting when he agrees to escort a girl named Saki, whose powers are wanted by a dark lord, across a Japan full of mechs, magic and mercenaries.
Created by LeSean Thomas, who also directed, and animated by MAPPA, with music by Flying Lotus and character designs by Takeshi Koike. LaKeith Stanfield voices Yasuke in English. Six episodes, released on Netflix in April 2021.
The Man Behind It
Yasuke reached Japan in 1579 in the service of the Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano and met Nobunaga in 1581. Nobunaga kept him on and gave him a stipend, a sword and a house. He was with Nobunaga in Kyoto when Akechi Mitsuhide attacked at the Honno-ji temple in 1582, was captured, and was handed back to the Jesuits. The records lose him after that.
So the anime begins where the history stops. Everything after 1582 is invention.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Streaming |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
6. Shigurui: Death Frenzy
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Drama, Action | 12 episodes | Brutal, Cold |
In 1629, Tokugawa Tadanaga, the lord of Suruga, orders a sword tournament fought with live steel instead of wooden swords. The first match pits a one-armed swordsman, Fujiki Gennosuke, against a blind one, Irako Seigen, and the series goes back to show how both men came to that day through the same dojo.
Madhouse made it in 2007, directed by Hiroshi Hamasaki, from Takayuki Yamaguchi's manga, which adapts Norio Nanjo's novel Suruga-jo Gozen Jiai.
A Real Lord, a Fictional Tournament
Tadanaga was real: a younger brother of the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, and the lord of Suruga, in what is now Shizuoka Prefecture. He did not keep his domain for long. In the early 1630s he was stripped of it and ordered to commit seppuku. The tournament itself comes from Nanjo's novel.
A warning before you press play: the manga and the anime are both known for extremely graphic violence and nudity, so this one is strictly for adults.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
7. Onimusha
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Action, Horror, Fantasy | 8 episodes | Grim, Heavy |
Early in the Edo period, with the wars over and Japan settling into peace, an aging Miyamoto Musashi takes on a secret mission. He carries the Oni Gauntlet, a weapon that consumes demons' souls, and the demons are coming back.
Based on Capcom's video game series. Takashi Miike, the live-action director of Audition and 13 Assassins, was chief director, Shinya Sugai directed, and Sublimation animated it. All eight episodes arrived on Netflix in November 2023.
Musashi, With Mifune's Face
Miyamoto Musashi, who died in 1645, is the most famous swordsman in Japanese history: the author of The Book of Five Rings, who wrote that he fought more than sixty duels and never lost one. Many Japanese readers know him through Eiji Yoshikawa's novel Musashi, or through Vagabond, the manga drawn from it.
He has been played on screen many times, and the anime picked one of those actors as its model. Musashi here is drawn on Toshiro Mifune, who played him in Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai trilogy in the 1950s.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Streaming |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
8. Samurai Champloo
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Action, Comedy, Adventure | 26 episodes | Cool, Restless |
Fuu, a waitress at a teahouse, ends up saving two swordsmen from execution: Mugen, a wild drifter who fights like a breakdancer, and Jin, a quiet ronin with flawless classical technique. She makes them her bodyguards on a journey to find "the samurai who smells of sunflowers."
Shinichiro Watanabe directed it for Manglobe after Cowboy Bebop, with a hip-hop score by Nujabes, Fat Jon, Force of Nature and Tsutchie. Twenty-six episodes, 2004 to 2005.
Hip-Hop, Pinned to a Real Decade
The show never puts a year on screen. What it does give you, without spoiling the ending, is the shadow of the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637 and 1638, an uprising of mostly Christian peasants in Kyushu that the shogunate crushed before tightening its ban on Christianity. So the trip happens some years after 1638, in the first decades of the Edo period, although the show scrambles the calendar on purpose.
The anachronisms are the joke: record scratches between scenes and a baseball game. The ukiyo-e painter Hishikawa Moronobu turns up as a character, and so does a Dutchman modeled on Isaac Titsingh, who did not reach Japan until 1779.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Read the full review: Samurai Champloo (full review)
9. Hell's Paradise
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Action, Dark Fantasy | 25 episodes (2 seasons) | Tense, Gory |
Gabimaru, the most feared ninja of Iwagakure, is on death row, and every attempt to execute him fails. Yamada Asaemon Sagiri, an executioner, offers him a way out: sail with other condemned criminals to a mysterious island, bring back the elixir of immortality for the shogun, and walk free.
From Yuji Kaku's manga, animated by MAPPA. Season 1 aired in 2023 and Season 2 from January to March 2026.
The Executioners' Surname
Yamada Asaemon was a real name, passed from one head of the Yamada family to the next. From around 1700 the family tested the shogunate's swords on the bodies of executed criminals and carried out beheadings in Edo, and the line held the job into the Meiji era, until beheading was abolished in the early 1880s.
The manga turns that one family into a whole school of executioners, each ranked by number.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Streaming |
| Hulu | Streaming |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Crunchyroll has both seasons. Netflix and Hulu list Season 1.
10. Peacemaker Kurogane
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Action, Drama, Historical | 24 episodes | Earnest, Bloody |
Kyoto, 1864. Tetsunosuke Ichimura, 15, watched his parents die at the hands of a rebel from Choshu and wants to get strong enough for revenge. He joins the Shinsengumi, the shogunate's police force in the city, as page to its vice commander, Toshizo Hijikata, and gets a close look at what the job asks of the men who do it.
Gonzo animated it from Nanae Chrono's manga. Twenty-four episodes, 2003 to 2004.
The Page Who Carried the Photograph
Ichimura Tetsunosuke served in the Shinsengumi as Hijikata's page, and the one story about him that Japanese fans repeat is from 1869. During the fighting at Hakodate, Hijikata sent him away with a photograph and a lock of hair to deliver to his family in Hino, in what is now western Tokyo.
That photograph, Hijikata with cropped hair and Western clothes, is the portrait of him Japanese fans know best, and it is still held in Hino by the family museum of his brother-in-law, Sato Hikogoro.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
11. Rurouni Kenshin (2023)
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Action, Historical | 47 episodes (2 seasons) | Warm, Thrilling |
Meiji 11, or 1878, ten years after the wars that ended the shogunate. Himura Kenshin, once a legendary assassin for the revolution, now wanders the country carrying a reverse-blade sword that makes killing hard, and in Tokyo he meets Kaoru Kamiya, who runs her late father's swordsmanship school.
LIDENFILMS' remake of Nobuhiro Watsuki's manga. Season 1 (2023) covers the Tokyo arc, and Season 2, Kyoto Disturbance (2024 to 2025), moves the story to Kyoto. A third season has been announced.
Where the Samurai Era Ends
In 1876 the Meiji government banned the wearing of swords in public, except for soldiers, police and others in uniform, or people in formal court dress. That law, the Haitorei, is where this list's timeline stops, and Kenshin is walking around with a sword two years after it.
Watsuki based him on Kawakami Gensai, an assassin of the Bakumatsu years whom the new government executed in the early 1870s. The gap between that history and Kenshin's gentle manner is what the whole story turns on.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Streaming |
| Hulu | Streaming |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Crunchyroll and Netflix have both seasons. Hulu lists Season 1.
US Streaming Comparison at a Glance
| Title | Crunchyroll | Netflix | Hulu | Amazon Prime Video | HBO Max | Disney+ | Apple TV+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Heike Story | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| The Elusive Samurai | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Dororo | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Sword of the Stranger | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Yasuke | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Shigurui: Death Frenzy | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Onimusha | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Samurai Champloo | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Hell's Paradise | ◎ | ◎ | ◎ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Peacemaker Kurogane | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Rurouni Kenshin (2023) | ◎ | ◎ | ◎ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
Checked in the US region on October 7, 2026. ◎ means included with the base subscription, △ means a paid add-on (here, the Crunchyroll channel sold inside Prime Video), and ✕ means that service does not carry it. Crunchyroll covers everything here except Dororo, Yasuke and Onimusha, and Dororo is the only one you can watch on a plain Prime membership.
Two That Missed the Timeline
Gintama is set in an Edo period that never existed, one where aliens have landed and the samurai have lost their swords, so it had no place on a timeline. It still has the best-known Shinsengumi parody in anime: its police squad is led by Kondo Isao, Hijikata Toshiro and Okita Sogo, named after Kondo Isami, Hijikata Toshizo and Okita Soji. Crunchyroll, Hulu and Netflix all list it.
Blade of the Immortal, the 2019 series, is the other near miss: a swordsman cursed so that he cannot die until he has killed a thousand evil men. It is on Prime Video.
Seven Samurai, Harakiri and 13 Assassins are live action, so they are on the Japanese samurai movies page. Golden Kamuy, set in Hokkaido after this timeline ends, and Rashomon, set earlier in the Heian period, are with the historical anime and Japanese period films.
Streaming information was checked in the US region on October 7, 2026 and can change without notice.
