Ep. 01: Tougen Anki

Ahhh! Here we are, finally checking out the last new release I was interested in for the summer 2025 anime season. It’s been a bit annoying counting down the days, with Tougen Anki competing hard with Gachiakuta for my most anticipated new release. But it looks like we’ve got another potentially great show on our hands. Tougen Anki’s first episode gave lots of action, raised lots of questions, and gave me some real food for thought. I don’t necessarily think this will be the deepest anime of the season, but I think we’re in for a lot of fun.

The only way any conflict can ever know peace is when someone, on one side or another, finally decides to stop fighting. And the first step toward that result is someone questioning whether there is worth to killing or dying. This seems to be the crossroads that Shiki’s adoptive father, who was once part of the agency trying to exterminate all oni, reached when he spared baby Shiki’s life.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s think about humans and oni as though they are two different cultures, coming into contact. Are either of them saints here? Doubtful. Did each likely have their reason for fighting the other? Highly likely. Did those reasons potentially shift or get warped over time? I’d bet money on that. Should any of that have logically lead to what we saw happen in episode one? Hell no.

Even with all the background we got about the oni–which we’ve only gotten from an agency point of view–Shiki has not had any part in the atrocities that the agency hold oni, as a collective, responsible for. The idea of sins of the father, or generational guilt by association, are ugly philosophies that just provide sadistic creeps with an excuse to make more people bleed. And we see this here, especially with what we see at the end of the episode. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

There are few things more damaging to the human spirit than prolonged periods of rumination. Nursing a grudge and allowing it to to blossom into full blown hate. Which leads to brash actions and, sometimes, unfathomable evil. That’s really the only thing I can think of that would make someone want to murder a baby. And then have the persistence to spend well over a decade tracking that kid down.

This guy is the polar opposite of Shiki’s dad. And while he likely didn’t feel he was strong enough to do anything when he watched Shiki’s dad walk away, carrying baby Shiki in his arms, now that time has passed he feels that he can go to to to with his former “Senpai”, and the respect he once seemed to have for this man has been eclipsed by his generalized hate of all oni, and his burning desire to wipe them out.

I really like the two major fight scenes we get in this episode. The one between Shiki’s dad and the agency warrior who has come to take him and Skiki out kinda gives me Obi Wan Kenobi vs. Darth Vader vibes. We get both the master vs. apprentice angle, given that this guy has referred to him as Senpai. Another thing that occurred to me is, what if Obi Wan had reacted to Luke the way this guy did to Shiki, rather than the way Shiki’s dad did? Both Star Wars, and this show, would lose their hero if either story had taken that route.

That’s largely because who or what is perceived as the hero in a piece of fiction depends on who is writing, and then eventually reading, watching, or playing the finished result. Our perceptions of heroes and villains stem from our general morality, and that stems from which social norms we have grown with and actually internalized. Shiki is, or is at least part, oni. Yet he has spent his whole life living as a human, with no idea of who or what he really was on a biological level. Until this creep showed up and tried to murder him.

And then this guy tries to tell us that oni are savages? That this is why they need to be exterminated? That is gaslighting and this guy’s a scumbag. If the words didn’t point it out, trapping Shiki in a bind that looks like a spider’s web is a clear tip-off. In many storytelling traditions, spiders represent trickery or deception. Japanese stories are no exception. Think of the thief Onigumo (which is the name of a species of spiders in Japanese), who allows demons to consume him and then becomes Naraku. He tells InuYasha and Kikyo lies about each other that tear them apart. Just like our scumbag here has trapped Shiki because he wanted him to witness his father’s death.

The jury is out on how much oni were responsible for the way they are being attacked now. But what we can see clearly in this episode is that while Shiki is a hot head, he also has heart. His rage on behalf of his severely wounded father was impressive, and gave us a taste of the kinds of powers an oni can potentially have. But his heartfelt grief as he holds his dying father as he passes away is the clearest distinction between him and the man that attacked him and his dad.

Now, at this point the story does take a shift. Shiki is found by, and taken by, oni looking for people to fight against the agency. With any luck we’ll get their perspective on how things have played down in the next episode. I’ll say this: the guy did not make a great first impression. He seems pessimistic about Shiki and potentially eager to get rid of him. Then again, characters either start at the bottom and climb, or start on a pedestal and fall. So this sour opening could very much be an intended thing.

Getting back to something I touched on earlier, lets wrap this up by talking about the mummified manipulators that we see near the end of the episodes. These guys give me the creeps way more than any of the oni do. There are several reasons for this. They’ve clearly lived a long time and are manipulating things from the shadows. As far as I can tell, the unfinished business that’s kept them going is wanting to wipe out the oni. Which means they are fueled by hatred.

Which means if they succeed, there’s every possibility they pick a new target. Beings ruled by hatred must always have something to hate. Then there’s the question of who or what is actually sustaining them, and what does that say about magic or the laws of nature in this world? And last, there is the obvious rejection of death itself. Which often stems from hubris and leads people to think that they are above the living, because to be of the living is to acknowledge that you will one day die.

Tougen Anki is off to a fantastic start and I’m eager to see what will happen once Shiki realizes he’s been taken somewhere without anyone asking him if he had any desire to go. How will he adapt to his new situation? Will he take his dad’s dying wish to heart, or blaze his own path? Will we learn more about the history of the oni and the agency? I think there’s a lot to look forward to here.

But those are just my thoughts. Did you watch the first episode? What did you think? I’d love to know, so feel free to leave a comment below.