Saying Goodbye to Rurouni Kenshin
Saying Goodbye To Rurouni Kensin
Content Warning: The following video essay contains explicit mentions of pedophilia as well as transcripts from an interview where the convicted party explicitly mentions their preferred fetishes. Minor mentions of depression, self-loathing and suicidal feelings are also referenced.

I’ve also gone out of my way to avoid using Kenshin footage after the 1st minute of this video. I think it’s irresponsible to talk about the legacy of a work tainted by its ‘author then spend an entire video promoting said work through the use of clips. If you’re curious about the shows featured, check the description below for information.
“Japan, 1867. The Tokugawa Dynasty stands upon failing legs. An invincible samurai, Kenshin Himura, walks the path of death and destruction ushering in a new regime. Hated and feared by many, he is known as Hitokiri Battousai, the manslayer. In retribution for his deeds, he has taken an oath to protect the innocent and never kill again, but old memories seldom fade and old habits die hard.”
I spent the weekdays of my childhood waiting for these words to introduce my favorite anime, Rurouni Kenshin. Part of the legendary Toonami afterschool block, Rurouni Kenshin stands alongside DragonBall and Gundam Wing in the hearts of 20 something anime fans. The show stood out against its contemporaries by blending a story about pacifistic redemption with blossoming romance. While shows like DragonBall taught the values of bettering yourself through steady growth, the themes and lessons of Kenshin were somber in comparison.
Kenshin Himura is a man deeply haunted by his past and while his outward facing scars represent a man having lived through tumultuous times, his mental scarring defines his entire existence. Years spent as Battosai the Manslayer resulted in Kenshin’s hands being soaked in the blood of the victims of the Meiji revolution. The actions of the Battosai the Manslayer during the Tokugawa Dynasty define the life of Kenshin Himura in the Meiji era. While most of his victims were opposing soldiers and fellow swordsmen, Kenshin’s wife serves as both his final victim alongside the catalyst for his life of pacifism. After accidentally killing his wife in self-defense, Kenshin’s life and his swordsmanship are no longer his to squander as he must live in pacifistic repentance for the lives he took. As he journeys, Kenshin’s ideals are tested as he must contest the murderous anger that defined his previous life and overcome the ideal that his life is worthless because of his sins.
The lessons of Rurouni Kenshin are ones of acceptance and personal growth. While he may grow as a swordsman throughout the second arc of the story, Kenshin’s breakthroughs come from learning self-acceptance and to value his own life. The best example of this is seen during the same arc in which Kenshin is forced to complete his training as a swordsman to stop the overthrow of the Meiji government. Kenshin spends weeks training in the mountain to discover the final technique until challenged by his master. Leading up the clash and facing a certain death at the hands of his master, Kenshin accepts that he’s afraid to die. The revelation that his
life has meaning powers him to overcome his mental limits and master his style. Kenshin’s final technique isn’t powered by anger, nor it is ever presented as a power fantasy. The final technique of his school, an ultrasonic sword draw, is the physical manifestation of Kenshin’s newfound will to live. Rurouni Kenshin is built on the themes of self-acceptance, learning to love yourself and overcoming your anger. These ideals saved my life as I worked to overcome my own issues with my anger, self-worth and depression. For context, I was an overweight, effeminate boy coming up in Tennessee when Kenshin first aired. My dad, worried that my effeminate ways were early signs of being gay, constantly pushed me towards more aggressive, manly hobbies. He was raised in a home of toxic masculinity and still struggles to convey his emotions outside of anger. On the other side of the coin, my mother was overbearing and worried that my hobbies were just escapism from my problems. My mother attempts to be understanding, but still stumbles to an extent and still worries that some things, such as me coming out, are still attempts to escape from my problems. The mix of a toxic father and an overbearing mother culminated into a nasty cocktail of anger issues that were only exacerbated by the bullying problems I dealt with at school. Kenshin hit me right at a time where I needed positive representation of learning to live with my anger and his struggles helped me identify mine. I spent a lot of time trying to track down Kenshin DVDs in the period between middle school and graduation to minor success, but it wasn’t until post-graduation that I really began to understand the more prominent themes of the show.
After graduation, I was gifted a laptop and quickly learned how to torrent anime. Naturally, Kenshin was the first thing I came back to and for the longest time, Kenshin was a show that I watched every year around my birthday. The show helped me through my first Christmas alone when I didn’t want to be around the toxicity of my family in the wake of my parent’s divorce. Hell, one of my fondest memories is the New Year’s Week spend building Gundam model kits with my best friends while Kenshin played in the background. The opening track was localized and poorly sung in English for the American release, so the start of each episode was a race to skip past it. This show stuck with me in a way I can’t contain and my best friend openly admitted that, ”Seth lived and breathed Rurouni Kenshin for all of his adult life”. Sadly, this would come to an end when I woke up to the news that Kenshin’s creator had been charged with possession of child pornography. Most of the information below comes from a series of Kotaku articles that initially reported that,” Nobuhiro Watsuki, creator of the hit manga Rurouni Kenshin, has been charged with possession of child pornography”. Yomiuri Shinbun, a Japanese newspaper, reported that investigators discovered DVDs that showed nude girls under the age of fifteen at Watsuki’s home and office. When interviewed by the authorities, Watsuki is on record as saying that,” I liked girls from the upper grades of elementary school to around the second year of junior high school”. Due to the backlash of the allegations, the newly airing Hokkaido arc of Kenshin was put on indefinite hiatus.
In February, Nikkan Sports reports that Watsuki was fined what amounts to 2,000 dollars for violating Japan’s child pornography laws. In April, Jump Square announces that Kenshin will resume publication in June alongside a statement from the editorial staff. The statement reads,” The author spends his days reflecting and with remorse, and think as though it’s our obligation as
a publisher as well as his as an author to make a way for us to reply through the work of various opions we’ve been getting, and so, from the July issue, serialization will resume”. In June, Kenshin returns from haitus and is featured in Jump celebrations later that year alongside an appearance in the upcoming Jump Force video game. With that, the show goes on.
I spent a lot of time in reflection after the initial news came out. I did my best to air my frustrations out amongst trusted company and hearing my peers express their frustrations created a catharsis and solidarity that I wasn’t alone. There’s was a tweet from Minovsky Article, a twitter user I look up too, that helped me better contextualize the severity of Watsuki’s actions. The realization that my money had indirectly funded the sexual exploitation of children washed over me as I read Minovsky’s tweet. Those words sunk every mental attempt to reconcile the series as something independent of the author’s crimes. Just talking about Watsuki’s work after that felt wrong and uncomfortable. I spent a long time wondering if I could even finish this because I was shining a light on Watsuki’s work regardless of how negative I was towards it. After a certain point, I just needed to get my thoughts collected somewhere and hopefully by putting myself out there, I can help someone deal with this the way Minovsky helped me.
I’ve talked with some friends who were able to go back to the show and the reasoning just never sat right with me. The two ideas that keep getting floated are to either go anime only or to separate art and artist, but I think both are deeply flawed. The anime, while having minimal input from the creator, is still a representation of the characters and plot that Watsuki created. While I’ve never been particular fond of the idea that you can separate an artist from their art, manga is one of the unique mediums that is the sole vision of a single creator. I cannot divorce Kenshin from Watsuki because is a direct expression of him as a creator. I don’t begrudge anyone who can take the series as a compromised work, especially since I’m on record about doing the same with the Persona, but the sexual exploitation of children is a line in the sand that I’m not willing to cross.
I’ve come back to this topic numerous times and I realized that lessons Rurouni Kenshin taught me would never let me divorce Watsuki’s crimes from it. Watsuki is not repentant for his actions nor was he truly held accountable for his crimes. His fine was a slap on the wrist and he went back to work almost immediately. I really believe that if Watsuki was repentant, Kenshin would have died there with him as he exiled himself. In 2018, Rurouni Kenshin reads as a lecture on morality and redemption from a hypocrite who isn’t interested in either. Watsuki is an unrepentant monster and while the burden of his actions is relatively minor for his fans, the children he has harmed through his habits will be surrounded by imagery of his work for the rest of their lives.
I spent a lot of time in the aftermath looking for things to fill the hole Kenshin left in my heart. There was a rush of recommendations on twitter for shows that were thematically similar to Kenshin in the aftermath, but each one of them rang hollow to me. While I enjoyed those shows, I did them both a disservice by trying to use them as replacements instead of works of their own. In the year since Watsuki was outed, I came to terms with the gap in my heart and the disillusionment I had with his work. Normally, I’d be spending this time preparing for my yearly rewatch. Instead, I came here to say goodbye to Ruroni Kenshin.
