International media distributor Remow teamed up with Nihon Eiga Broadcasting to bring historical dramas to overseas audiences with its Samurai vs Ninja website and YouTube channel. Remow has also gotten into anime licensing and continues to refrain from exclusives, sharing content on Tubi and YouTube.

Tonbo! (2024) is the best title in their anime portfolio so far. The manga by Ken Kawasaki and Yu Furusawa has been serialized in Weekly Golf Digest since 2014 and currently totals 52 volumes. So the viewer would do well to keep in mind that this isn't your usual shonen sports drama. It is written for golfers.
In other words, if you don't find Tonbo's inventive use of a 3 iron inherently fascinating, then the series probably isn't for you.

The plot merges the premises of Barakamon (2014), in which a professional calligrapher with a troubled past exiles himself to a tiny island and meets a bunch of quirky kids, and Rising Impact (2024), in which an eight-year-old golfing prodigy from the sticks is recruited to the elite Camelot Academy.

For idiosyncratic reasons I never divined, the names of several characters in Rising Impact are derived from the aforementioned Camelot, like Gawain and Lancelot. And speaking of Gawain (Misaki Kuno), a good part of the fun is listening to him (her) speak in a Tohoku accent you could cut with a knife.

In Tonbo! a professional golfer with a troubled past exiles himself to a tiny island in the Tokara archipelago and there encounters a quirky island girl named Tonbo, who turns out to be a golfing prodigy. He sees in her great potential, potential that will remain dormant and untested if she remains an island girl.

Along with smoothing out her more eccentric golfing habits (while not interfering with her unique approach to the game), he nudges her to leave the island when she graduates from junior high. The island has no high school. Students continuing their education live with relatives or attend boarding schools.

The Tokara archipelago is collectively governed as a village of Kagoshima Prefecture, so the favored destination for transfer students is the port city of Kagoshima and the surrounding areas.

While thoroughly entertaining, Birdie Wing (2022) and Rising Impact are so over the top that they more resemble superhero franchises that have to constantly invent new comically overpowered villains (and golf courses designed by M.C. Escher) to challenge the skills of the comically overpowered protagonists.

Tonbo! is far more realistic and treats the subject with the most technical accuracy. The main characters have actual character arcs, so there's no need for vaudevillian villains to create dramatic conflict. Instead, we focus our attention on how Tonbo evolves as an already gifted golfer and grows as a human being.

It's been an entertaining journey so far and I hope we can follow her all the way to a professional career.

The second cour is a continuation of season 1 starting with episode 14.

Related videos

Tonbo! (Tubi YouTube Prime)
Barakamon
Birdie Wing
Rising Impact

Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, geography, japanese culture, manga, remow, samurai vs ninja, sports, tubi

The two major pure-play anime streamers in the North America market are Crunchyroll and Hidive. Netflix is active enough in anime to place third, but a distant third to Hidive, while Hidive places a distant second to Crunchyroll.

That's how dominate Crunchyroll has become in the anime world.

Some of my all-time favorite titles, such as Insomniacs After School, Made in Abyss, Girls und Panzer, Patlabor, Beyond the Boundary, Beautiful Bones, Tsurune, Clannad, and The Demon Girl Next Door debuted on Hidive. More recently, though, Hidive has been abandoning licenses as fast as it is acquiring new content.

Patlabor, for example. One of the best mecha series of all time. A true Mamoru Oshii classic. Gone without a trace.

As a result, the second seasons of Call of the Night and The Dangers in My Heart are the only recent titles on Hidive that have caught my interest. Separately, Netflix and Hidive don't have big enough anime catalogs to justify staying subscribed for more than a few months at a time.

With Crunchyroll, by contrast, the ongoing challenge is combing through the next season's lineup every quarter and deciding what not to watch (because I simply don't have the time).

Since entering the anime licensing arena, international distributor Remow has embraced a go wide philosophy that includes sharing content on Tubi. Remow partnering with Hidive is the stuff MBA theses are made of, but I'm not sure how plausible it would be from a bottom-line business perspective.

My solution to this problem is for Netflix to buy Hidive and combine their anime catalogs under the Hidive brand (using Netflix's streaming architecture). Netflix would preserve Hidive as a standalone pure play for subscribers like me who aren't that interested in anything else on Netflix besides anime.

Netflix could feature popular Hidive titles on its own service and Hidive would benefit from access to Netflix's licensing and production teams.

Too many players in a niche streaming market works as much to the detriment of the consumer as too few. But I doubt the FTC would condone Sony buying yet another anime distributor on top of what has become the Crunchyroll colossus.

Netflix acquiring Hidive would bring some competition back into the anime market without forcing anime fans to sign up for yet another streaming service. Netflix's platforms are much better and Netflix could inject some fresh blood into Hidive's dwindling catalog with content from its own backlist.

Related posts

Japan's phantom content boom
Netflix in Japanese (1)
Netflix in Japanese (2)
Netflix in Japanese (3)
Samurai vs Ninja
Japanese language links

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, hidive, japanese tv, netflix, remow, sony, streaming, tubi

Many of the Japanese historical dramas on Tubi are distributed by Samurai vs Ninja. As the name makes clear, it focuses on action-oriented Edo period movies and series. I got to wondering who came up with such a great name and dug up the following.

The service launched in 2023 as a joint venture between international distributor Remow and Nihon Eiga Broadcasting, which also runs its own pay TV channel for historical dramas. Samurai vs Ninja is active in forty countries around the world.

The corporate vision statement on the Remow website sums up the underlying problems with Japanese content distribution that have been brought into stark relief by the soaring popularity of Kdrama. Well, somebody finally decided to do something about it.

We hear more and more about Japanese productions being viewed around the world. However, the number of platforms on which Japanese titles can be viewed is limited. The truth is that many users all around the world are viewing pirated copies rather than using legitimate platforms. Japanese entertainment is an expression of our culture and our identity, and we want to deliver this entertainment culture to the people of the world along with the identity of our thoughts and feelings.

Remow has identified a chronically underserved market (while NHK Cosmomedia invests in a vanishing niche with Jme TV). Samurai vs Ninja is a work in progress though I have to wonder if its appeal might prove too narrow. Maybe add "Cops vs Yakuza" to the mix next. And lean harder into licensing.

I expect that Sony will end up being taught as a case study in business schools for wisely resisting the siren song to launch its own branded streaming channel. It already owned Aniplex, an anime production and distribution company, and then purchased two established anime streaming services.

Sony subsequently merged Funimation and Crunchyroll into a worldwide operation under the Crunchyroll brand. It didn't have to spend the time and resources building the whole thing from scratch with untested original content.

Owning a bunch of content doesn't matter much if nobody knows about it and can't access it. To its credit, the Samurai vs Ninja YouTube channel is jam-packed with sample episodes and promotional material. Although for now, aside from the website, the only streaming apps are for Android and Apple.

Related links

Samurai vs Ninja (official website)
Samurai vs Ninja (YouTube channel)

Labels: business, crunchyroll, history, japanese culture, japanese tv, jme, nhk cosmomedia, remow, samurai vs ninja, sony, streaming, technology, tubi