Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan

I primarily watched the first season of this documentary series for the viewing of costumes, interior design, and overall Japanese artistry / craftsmanship. The historical accuracy and narrative quality were secondary or less to me. Many reviewers criticized the historical "inaccuracies" (we don't know this and the reviewers did not provide any credentials) and injection of Western historians, but given the target audience of the series, i.e., Americans, this makes sense. When the series employed an "authentic" Japanese historian, we had to read subtitles, which greatly interrupted with the flow of background re-enactments, etc. If non-citizen historians can be trusted with world history, why not Anglo-American historians with Japan's history? Nevertheless, I give this series an 8/10 in light of all of the reviewers who screamed, "Inaccurate!"

Well made re-enactments and relevant interviews. The episodes had good flow and kept an even pace. The subject matter was interesting and easy to digest. Interesting to learn about an era of samurai.

So i went through the reviews and people are offended by the white historians and the dramatic acting/scenes in this series. (Lol)

None of it bothered me, but i know nothing of Japanese history and i enjoy content over presentation. I don't mind a bit of dramatic flair in a scene at all despite it being a historical inaccuracy, i think it broadens the audience to keep more people interested. Plus the series is not going in the details, it's just giving an overview of complex events and politics. At this point acting inaccuracy is not on my mind.

I loved the way this was edited and split into episodes, i watched the series in one sitting it kept me interested! I was delighted to learn more about Japan history, especially since i went to japan not too long ago.

I found it super informative although i couldn't say if it was accurate because i have no prior knowledge. I thought the historians presented it well and since im guessing this is made for a non-Japanese audience it doesn't bother me at all that the historians were Occidental. But to be fair, having more diversity would've been great! I would've loved a Korean or Chinese historian.

The acting was fine in my opinion and so were the sets considering this is made on a documentary budget. The blood added in post looks like they used the little budget they had left but so what, this isnt the point of this documentary.

Honestly watching this made me want to learn more about Japanese history and that's a win in my book!

I don't know anything about this subject so I can't speak to the veracity of the information. However, it is overall quite engaging and the mix of dramatized scenes, information from their experts, and narration is good. However, I feel like there could have been better diversity in their "experts". I find it odd that they're essentially all British or American. I can't believe that they weren't able to find more Japanese subject-matter-experts to interview. That strikes me as a real issue with their production decisions.

Personally, my knowledge of Japanese history in the XVI century equals to not much, therefore I was interest in this documentary. I vaguely remembered the names of Hideyoshi and Ieyasu as the men who reunited Japan, but I missed a large part of the history.

The structure of the documentary is the usual: historians narrating the events, interspersed with acted battles and daily life scenes. The interior design and costumes look OK, but the narration (and battle scenes) go very much in the direction of "this strong samurai fought bloody battles" followed by even bloodier ones, won by the next fierce samurai.

I get that the point is narrating the reunion of Japan under a single ruler and that part of history is mostly the succession of samurais that it took to complete the task, but all the battle scenes look pretty much the same. Still worth to watch.

PS as to the criticism that the historians are mostly not Japanese... since when one should study only the history of one's own country? Which level of crazy is that even if I am interested in Japanese history, I should not talk about it because I'm not Japanese?