We are used to always seeing a Japan with samurai, swords and battles thanks to the various video game representations. But there is also another younger Japan that is mainly included in manga instead. And one of those who did it was Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaibathat ended a few months ago.
During the Demon Slayers, as viewers of the first season of the Ufotable anime could see, we are dealing with the swordsmen, but not the samurai. Together with Tanjiro and Nezuko, we travel to different places, mostly boring, but also someone we know as Tokyo. Let's round up all of these elements in order to understand them when Demon Slayer is set.
Let's start with a point: samurai are barely mentioned in the series. This is because their order, which has become famous in the collective imagination, is abolished with the restructuring of the Meiji in the late 19th century. The time in the fight against the demon of the hands that Tanjiro asks about the time in which they live is then noticed. Tanjiro replies that they are in the Taisho periodor the years between 1912 and 1926. These were inspired by a strong westernization that gradually changed the Japanese way of life and Japanese technologies.
And it is precisely technology that gives us a different hand to understand the historical moment we are in. At the end of the first season of Demon Slayer, we see a train that will also be the main theater in the Demon Slayer story: Infinity Train. This type of train came to Japan in the 1920s 1900, which confirms that we are in the final stage of the Taisho period.
Hence one can say that Demon Slayer is set around 1920after the First World War and at the turn of Japan's transformation into an imperialist country. Who knows if Demon Slayer 2 will give us other clear clues to contextualize the historical period of Koyoharu Gotouge's story.
