I thought this would be appropriate for Back of Beyond players wanting to try something new or inspiration for their own shenanigans in the far northeast.
Golden Kamuy is about the hunt for a missing horde of gold on Hokkaido a few years after the Russo-Japanese War. The map to the treasure is tattooed on hardened criminals and psychopaths escaped from the dreaded Abashiri Prison in the far north. The goal is to catch the criminals, copy their maps and decipher the gold’s location.
The main groups hunting for the gold are “Immortal” Sugimoto and the Ainu girl Asirpa. The Ainu are Japan’s indigenous northern peoples and like Native Americans, have been pushed off their land and told to assimilate into a society that doesn’t want them. Asirpa is in the hunt to discover what happened to her missing father, one of the Ainu who was moving the gold. Sugimoto is a scarred Russo-Japanese War veteran.
Sugimoto and Asirpa
Tattooed prisoners
Lt. Tsurumi, another war veteran, leads a rogue element of the 7th Division to find the gold. He will use the gold to fund arms factories and create a nation where veterans will never be discarded and their survivors will always have a home. He lost the front of his skull and some brain matter to a Russian artillery shell; it has not done wonders for his mental state or temperament.
Tsurumi and the 7th Division
The last major faction is led by legendary samurai and demon vice commander of the Shinsengumi, Hijikata Toshizo. In the real world, he died fighting in the 1869 Battle of Hakodate but here the old man lives and has a hidden agenda of his own.
Hijikata Toshizo
I recommend this to anyone who wants a fun, wild adventure and doesn’t mind oddball humor. The film can be watched on Netflix with subtitles or dubbed. Golden Kamuy 2 is an eight episode follow up TV series that lives up to the quality of the movie and gets into the… weirder stuff that comes as it gets more unhinged and colorful. The attempt at recreating the manga look of characters is something that either bothers you or you just go with it.
The opening Battle of 203-Meter Hill by itself has a nice epic quality and feels like it could be the set up for a prequel series just using the character’s wartime back stories.
Battle of 203-Meter Hill
The weapons used in the series are reflective of the era; Sugimoto and the other soldiers all fight with the Type 30 rifle and its bayonet. Fighting with fixed bayonets occurs throughout the story and it feels like we rarely see that on screen in most period films. Tsurumi carries a Borchardt C93semi-automatic pistol, a less famous contemporary of the Mauser C96 and fitting the flamboyance of his character. As an officer, it’s reasonable he has a private purchase side arm, though we see soldiers with the standard issue Type 26 revolver. Hijikata, reflective of his place as a “man out of time,” fights with his katana, the Izumi no Kami Kanesada, and a Winchester repeater which he spin cocks like John Wayne. The katana is real and I can confirm, its beautiful.
Though fiction, the story lives in the real Hokkaido of roughly 1910. It’s the old west but up north complete with natives, pioneers, and roughnecks staying a step ahead of the government. Nearly every building is a real place that you can visit, not a set. Visiting those places inspired a love of Hokkaido in me and my wife.
It was originally a manga and then an anime, if you want to get into the real world history surrounding the story I recommend the manga which gives a lot of context to this disappeared world. It’s also where I think a lot of storytelling inspiration can be found for small scale skirmish games like Pulp Alley or Dead Man’s Hand as rarely does any event involve more than a handful of people on either side.
November 13, 2009, 09:26:17 PM
