Cowboy Bebop often steals the spotlight in conversations about the best anime of all time, but its spiritual sibling, Samurai Champloo, deserves equal recognition. The influence of this historical epic still echoes today, most recently in Sony’s flagship Ghost franchise.
This month’s Ghost of Yotei, the sequel to the 2020 PlayStation 5 exclusive Ghost of Tsushima, deepens its homage to samurai cinema with the return of Kurosawa Mode — complete with black-and-white visuals, film grain, and vintage audio. New options include Takashi Miike Mode, which sharpens the camera and intensifies blood and mud; and Shinichirō Watanabe Mode, featuring a lo-fi hip-hop score shaped by the anime director’s vision. If you’re curious about that second one, Watanabe is the visionary responsible for creating the jazz-soaked Cowboy Bebop and the hip-hop-fueled Samurai Champloo, among other notable anime.
Watanabe’s 2004 series Samurai Champloo blends Edo-period Japan with hip-hop culture and modern sensibilities. It follows the unlikely trio of Mugen, a wild and unpredictable swordsman; Jin, a calm and disciplined ronin; and Fuu, a brave waitress who recruits them on her quest to find “the samurai who smells of sunflowers.” While the soundscape is ultimately his creation, much of Champloo’s music was inspired by Japanese hip-hop producer Nujabes, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 36. Nujabes deserves his flowers alongside Watanabe when it comes to the sound the anime is known for and pays homage to in Ghost of Yotei.
Much of what made Samurai Champloo stand out on the Adult Swim lineup was its seamless blending of hip-hop and Asian culture. That combination has been a mainstay in hip-hop culture since Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) in 1993, which itself stems from an entire generation growing up on Kung Fu movies featuring Bruce Lee and Sonny Chiba. My first encounter with Champloo was its opening sequence, set to the hypnotic hip-hop track Battlecry by Nujabes and Fat Jon. For many, Adult Swim and Samurai Champloo served as an introduction to lo-fi/experimental hip-hop, with artists like Nujabes, Shing02, and Flying Lotus, the latter of whom went on to score the Netflix anime Yasuke.
Stylized and symbolic, Champloo’s opening introduces the main characters through kindred animals in the background — Mugen struts like a rooster, while Jin moves with the calm, graceful demeanor of a koi. Although Champloo’s protagonists are the highlight of the series, its secondary characters are where the true heart of the anime lies. There’s pickpocket Shinsuke, who has a lonely story of survival in episode 7, and another character named Yamane, whose interactions with Mugen affect him so deeply that Yamane ends up in his memoirs years later. In the eleventh episode, “Gamblers and Gallantry,” Jin falls in love with a married woman sold into prostitution named Shino and helps her escape a brothel.
At first glance, the 26-episode series appears to tell a non-linear tale of the trio’s journey to meeting the Sunflower Samurai, but as Samurai Champloo progresses, events from previous episodes begin to weave together to form a single, cohesive narrative. Every interaction our heroes experience along the way has an impact on both them and the broader story.
The series also draws from Edo-period history (the same setting as Yotei), filtered through Watanabe’s creative revisions. Events like the 1637 Shimabara Rebellion and locations such as the Hakone Checkpoint (which Yamane guards) are woven into the story. Early on, ukiyo-e artist Hishikawa Moronobu appears and briefly fixates on Fuu as his muse. After she rejects him, his work eventually falls into the hands of Vincent van Gogh, who, in Champloo’s alternate timeline, is inspired to create his famous sunflower paintings.
All of these elements tie directly into Champloo’s score, giving this samurai story the kind of distinct identity that other projects have long sought. Titles like Afro Samurai (featuring Wu-Tang’s RZA), Tokyo Tribe, and Yasuke all attempted to capture its blend of style and sound, but with diminishing returns. Ghost of Yotei has the chance to pick up where Samurai Champloo left off, sparking a new wave of influence much like the anime once did. If you’re diving into Yotei, it’s worth revisiting Champloo, because without it, there’d be no “Watanabe mode,” no wave of hip-hop-infused anime, and no lasting legacy of Nujabes, from which the influence stems.
Samurai Champloo is streaming on Crunchyroll and available to buy on VOD from all the usual places.