Demon Slayer’s Entertainment District Arc lifted from real-life destruction

[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for the finale of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba’s Entertainment District Arc.]

Between a Demon Slayer’s sword and an Upper Rank 6 demon, flames were everywhere in “Never Give Up”, the penultimate episode of Demon Slayer’s Entertainment District Arc. As Tanjiro Kamado clung to life in his fight against demon Gyutaro in the beginning moments of the episode, the district fell to the flames of Tanjiro’s Hinokami and Gyutaro’s mighty strength, leaving the demon slayer to wonder if the residents of the area made it out OK. A long, wide shot of Yoshiwara captured the devastation.

But for residents of Yoshiwara during the Taishō era, the period between the years 1912 to 1926, this destruction of the district would be all too familiar. Yoshiwara was destroyed over and over again, just like Edo.

Yoshiwara’s constant destruction

Image by Ufotable

We see the Yoshiwara in Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Entertainment District Arc can be described as a place that was born from the ashes and rebirth of another. Yoshiwara’s original location, founded 1617 in Nipponbashi (one of Tokyo’s most important locations and near the Imperial Palace), was where the Yoshiwara was originally located. To avoid debauchery, the shogunate created the original district as part of their Licensed Prostitution System. It wanted to keep the sex industry centered in a single location, which allowed for taxation and regulation. (A Thank you(Government thing to do.

Edo evolved from being a small rural community where the Emperor spent his vacations to becoming a commercial city. The area around Yoshiwara was more developed as the pleasure district became more important for those who moved to the capital. Around this time, Edo’s first major fire (known later as the Great Fire of Meireki) burned down most of Edo, and took Yoshiwara with it.

Shin Yoshiwara (New Yoshiwara), was born out of the destruction ashes. In 1657, the businessmen moved to the former rice fields to set up shop. For nearly 100 years the region stood as a testimony to Edo’s fleshly desires.

However, the location saw more fires than its predecessor. Every 20 years or so, Shin Yoshiwara residents fled to temporary housing in Asakusa while they watched their houses and businesses crumble — a common sight in Edo where machiya–style buildings were made of wood and were close enough to each other you could borrow cooking materials by reaching into your neighbor’s kitchen.

These fires were often caused by arson. The sex workers in the yukaku, who suffered abuse from their customers and owners or Shinto priests trying rid the area of demons, were pushing their physical limits. The same reason was used to cause the destruction of Susaki Paradise nearby, a smaller pleasure area.

Image: Edo-Tokyo Museum

These recurring smaller blazes (if you could call blocks of buildings being burnt down “small”) culminated in the April 1911 Yoshiwara Great Fire. The fire was so large it followed the Sumida river to neighboring districts — including the famous Asakusa area — destroying the entire Yoshiwara area — including 300 rental parlors (so called because one could “rent” a girl from the window), 123 Hikie teahouses (where a suitor was introduced to a “higher-class” girl who would entertain him for the night), as well as 650 houses and dormitories.

Just as Yoshiwara had many times, the area rose from the ashes to serve its clientele for another decade … until the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, which once again leveled the district as well as most of the bustling city. It was estimated that the 7.9-magnitude event took out 70% of Tokyo’s buildings, with the subsequent fires and aftershocks helping with that statistic. Yoshiwara had just been rebuilt and saw fireballs rise up to 20m above the ground. The district lost over 40,000 residents when the flaming whirlwinds cut out the exits, leaving the survivors to burn in flames.

Yoshiwara was not rebuilt for service after the second bombing raids on Tokyo during World War II. The area was then legislated out in 1958, when the Anti-Prostitution Law was passed. It destroyed more of the neighborhood than the fires. But the area mostly exists today — though it is just another urban Tokyo suburb with some soaplands, rather than the flashy district that is portrayed in Demon Slayer.

Yoshiwara’s influence over Demon Slayer’s story

Image by Ufotable

Unfathomable destruction at Yoshiwara was a great gift to the rest of the world. Demon Slayer, inspiring manga creator Koyoharu Gotouge to make the pleasure district (which translates to “yukaku” in Japanese, the name of the arc in Japan) the setting of the most public (and flashiest) fight between demons and slayers yet.

When the series introduced Yoshiwara in the second episode of the Entertainment District Arc, the yukaku’s seemed to be the perfect home to demons, thanks to the night-life aspect of the area and the then-intermittent destruction. Daki, one demon of the arc, was abusing her rank of oiran (highest Yoshiwara girl’s rank) to kidnap people. To avoid being suspect over 100 years of her youth, she had to change her identity every day. That’s easier to do when the district has all-but turned to ash every few decades.

While the manga did its job of conveying Gotouge’s story, the anime produced at Ufotable only increased the similarities and realism of just how hazardous life in Taisho-era Yoshiwara might’ve felt, either in the face of an Upper Rank Six demon or real-life disasters.

It was a powerful combination of photorealistic backgrounds and a vivid use for realistic flames that resulted in some stunning shots. There is Machiya in the background with firewood everywhere and a sewer running through the middle of the former gravel pathway between the houses. If someone from Taisho-era Yoshiwara saw the footage, they likely wouldn’t be amiss if they thought they were looking at footage recorded from the 1911 fire — though the giant walking skeleton of a demon might tip them off that isn’t real.

Image by Ufotable

Image by Ufotable

The flames danced whenever Gyutaro was captured on an attack. Shots with Tanjiro at the attack featured more controlled flames. This symbolized that demons could bring natural disasters just as well as supernatural ones. The same applies to Tengen and Gyutaro’s fight, when each weapon clang brought a new threat. Man of SteelYoshiwara will be devastated in ways not witnessed since the Great Kanto earthquake.

The staff at Ufotable didn’t need to go this hard on the animation of this episode, but the one-two punch of Toshiyuki Shirai storyboarding and directing the episode with a caravan of amazing animators that included legendary animator Nozomu Abe, who both worked together to create shots from season 1’s “Hinokami” that blew the minds of viewers around the world, leveled the animation beyond anything we’ve really seen in TV anime before. The CG staff were flexing harder than Tengen’s muscle mice.

Tanjiro was like Yoshiwara, rising from the ashes of metaphorical, literal and personal flames. He was able defeat Gyutaro the demon and save the remaining district. However, the last shot of Yoshiwara that is used as the ending credits is an incredibly poignant scene. It looked almost like there was a bomb or earthquake. If I hadn’t seen the episode before it, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had told me it was a painting from the era.

Japanese cinema uses imagery that is taken directly from life to infuse emotions. One of the best examples of this is Hideaki Anno’s Shin GodzillaThis video, which referenced the tsunami and earthquake in 2011 Tohoku, was shot with similar angles to news footage that day. I felt the same sense of terror watching it live broadcast around the world.

Image by Ufotable

Japan, particularly through natural disasters, is considered a land of revival. Although Demon SlayerAlthough they don’t have 4K footage of a 1911 fire, Ufotable staff have thousands and thousands of images as well footage from other disasters over the past decade. People still remember the Tohoku tsunami of 2011. The home that was flattened by water looks similar to Yoshiwara, 1911. Demon Slayer.

These allegories to real-life events, whether it be from 1911, 1923, or 2011, gives us a sense that these Upper Rank demons — who we’ve barely touched on to this extent in the series thus far — are basically unstoppable natural disasters (unless their head gets cut off).

It’s clear that the staff at Ufotable did their homework when looking up reference footage of fires and destruction from the era and probably used photos, as seen in the real photos above of the Yoshiwara Great Fire and below from the ending of the 10th episode of the Entertainment District Arc.

The utter feeling of hopelessness that this single wide angle shot has was gut-wrenching, especially since we’d just seen the four Demon Slayers defeat both demons after half the arc had been spent on just chopping at the neck. The series ended on a cliffhanger in episodes 9-10, but the show still had the heart of a good story. Demon Slayer to leave viewers hanging with such vivid imagery — ripped directly from the pages of the real-life horrors of history — deserves a round of applause.