Jotaro Aragaki has devoted his life to gymnastics. However, he finds himself no longer able to compete to his own expectations physically due to injury and age.
Despite training every day, even his coach recommends that he quit. However, on a trip to an amusement park where he will break the news to his daughter, he meets a self-proclaimed ninja that renews his vigor.
Oof, this series was on the struggle bus at the start, but boy did it finish nice and strong after enough ninja dogezas, turning into the series we all believed it could be. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like The Gymnastics Samurai, head on down below.
Anime Like The Gymnastics Samurai
For Fans of Struggling Athletes
Yuri on Ice
After a crushing defeat at the Grand Prix finale, Yuuri Katsuki returns home no longer as Japan’s most promising figure skater. With his window for skating success closing, he assesses his options.
After a video of Yuuri performing a routine by five-time world champion Victor Nikiforov goes viral, he suddenly finds the champion on his doorstep, offering to be Yuuri’s mentor.
While about different, yet equally more obscure sports, what The Gymnastics Samurai and Yuri on Ice most have in common is that they follow older main characters whose competitive window in the sport, physically, is closing. While Jotaro is distinctly closer to his very last shot, multiple characters in Yuri on Ice are also closing in on that.
The fact that the main characters can see their window closing serves as motivation for them to give it one last shot to satisfy their intense passion for the sport. However, while The Gymnastics Samurai is about single fatherhood outside of its sports focus, Yuri on Ice is more boy’s love-themed as Yuuri and Victor develop their relationship
Tsurune
Kyuudo is a modern martial art with a focus on archery. Minato used to be into the sport in middle school, enchanted by the “tsurune” sound made by a releasing bowstring, but gave it up after a certain incident left him with target panic.
This phenomenon resulted in Minato missing every shot he took and crushing his confidence.
Now, forces conspire in high school to bring him into the newly founded Kyuudo club, but can Minato overcome his anxieties?
While Jotaro is fighting against his own age and physical ability as his struggle in a sport, Tsurune follows a main character whose issue is entirely mental. He is in peak condition, but his target panic causes him to, for awhile, give up on a sport he is passionate about.
Like The Gymnastics Samurai, Tsurune is a sports anime that really excels in communicating the passion that the struggling main characters have for their sport to you, the audience. However, unlike The Gymnastics Samurai and its single father struggles, Tsurune’s non-sports related bits are more about young men bonding and overcoming their differences as a team.
Free!
Haruka Nanase has a passion for swimming that led him to compete and win a tournament in elementary school with his friends.
Years later, they reunite as high schools students, and while Haruka and three friends decide to form a swim club, his fourth friend, Rin, attends another school in order to surpass Haruka in skill. He has also made it clear he has no interest in being friends again.
Both The Gymnastics Samurai and Free are about passionate athletes returning, or at least continuing, in their sport of choice despite certain events. However, while The Gymnastics Samurai is about physical ability, Free is often more focused on the mental struggles of its characters in the sport that they love.
While both sports capture the excitement of these two more obscure sports, Free has distinctly more fan service for its female viewers, or otherwise, anyone that likes men in very little clothes. If lingering shots on glistening flesh are not your thing, then Free may not be for you.
For Fans of Fatherhood Struggles
Kakushigoto
Kakushi Goto is relatively well known for the lewd manga that he creates. However, when his daughter Hime was born, he vowed to keep his profession a secret.
This is the story of the great lengths he goes through to keep his ecchi manga profession a secret from his beloved daughter.
Both The Gymnastics Samurai and Kakushigoto are about single fathers who are balancing parenthood with their unique careers. However, Rei is proud of Jotaro’s gymnastics and his biggest fan no matter what. Kakushigoto goes a much different route in exploring all the many ways her father bends over backwards to hide his career.
While Kakushigoto is, obviously, a comedy, it is actually more heart-warming than you would expect from such a premise.
Deaimon
It has been ten years since Nagomu Irino left home to pursue his dream of music. While his dream is failing, he receives a letter hearing saying father has been hospitalized, so he returns home to help run his family’s traditional Kyoto sweets shop.
Once there, he finds his father is fine, but they have picked up an abandoned 10-year-old girl named Itsuka Yukihira, and his father has chosen her as successor.
It isn’t long before Nagomu bonds with Itsuka, viewing himself as a father-like figure to her.
While The Gymnastics Samurai has Jotaro as his daughter’s actual father, Deaimon is more about a young man feeling compelled to step in as an abandoned girls’ father figure.
Like Rei, Itsuka is pretty mature for her age, though with more emotional baggage from the abandonment. They help to offset their slightly sillier father figure.
What these series have most in common is actually the rather pleasant slice of life moments they have outside of their more dramatic moments. Deaimon can drift into heavier topics while The Gymnastics Samurai can move into more passionate moments when it comes time for competition. The characters in both series are likable, and you just like to watch them.
Sweetness and Lightning
After the death of his wife, high school math teacher Kouhei Inuzuka is left to care for his young daughter, Tsumugi. He does his best, but his busy schedule and poor culinary skills limit them to eating convenience store food separately.
One day, his daughter expresses an interest to eat together after talking to one of his students in the park, Kotori, who deeply enjoys food. He rushes over to the restaurant owned by the student’s mother, but she is not there.
While Kotori tries her best to cook for them, her skills are lacking. However, together, Inuzuka-sensei, Tsumugi, and Kotori learn to expand their cooking skills.
Both The Gymnastics Samurai and Sweetness and Lightning are about single fathers, but the main subject of the anime is actually something else. In The Gymnastics Samurai, Jotaro balances single fatherhood with his gymnastics career. In Sweetness and Lightning, Inuzuka is instead focused on learning to cook good meals for and with his daughter.
Whereas The Gymnastics Samurai has some drama moments in the family unit, Sweetness and Lightning is, overall, a much more wholesome anime.
Finding Motivation Through Others
Tsuritama
Yuki Sanada is a socially awkward young man that, due to his grandmother’s job, has to move around a lot. He has all but given up on making normal friends until he moved to the town of Enoshima.
There, he meets a man named Haru who claims to be an alien. It turns out Yuki was right on one account, he would never make “normal” friends.
While The Gymnastics Samurai and Tsuritama are about very different subjects, they both follow main characters that are a bit adrift who suddenly have their life turned upside down by the appearance of an energetic mysterious stranger.
Essentially, when you see Haru in Tsuritama, it is very hard to not think of the silly Leonardo. Both characters are supportive and quirky, but serve as a big motivator to the main character despite being rather mysterious in their own motives.
Barakamon
After losing his temper on a critic, renowned calligraphy artist Sieshuu Handa is exiled to the Goto Islands by his father for a period of self-reflection.
There, he seeks to find new inspiration for his art, but finds that his neighbors and some neighborhood kids keep getting in his way.
Like Jotaro finds his own compelling motivation to continue pursuing gymnastics despite his age and abilities, so too does Handa find his renewed passion for calligraphy through the help of others.
While The Gymnastics Samurai is more laser-focused on Jotaro improving himself through practice and other techniques, Barakamon takes a slice of life approach. However, the abstract silliness invading his life comes with a series of life lessons for him that ends up inspiring him.
While Barakamon is more laid-back, they are both inspiring in their own way and feature unique characters that are just a joy to watch.
For Fans of Cross-Sport Inspiration
SK8 the Infinity
High school student Reki Kyan is passionate about skateboarding and board-making. While he works part-time in a board shop after school, his real interest is the underground race that happens at night.
S is a competitive skateboard race where participants are encouraged to win at all costs. Unfortunately for Reki, his most recent race came in at a loss.
The next day at school he meets new transfer student Langa Hasegawa who was a snowboarder when he lived in Canada. After a series of events that led both of them to an S race, Reki discovers that, despite having no experience on a skateboard, Langa’s experience snowboarding is unexpectedly useful in an S race.
While Leonardo in The Gymnastics Samurai is harvesting inspiration from gymnastics, Sk8 the Infinity takes the more common route of having a snowboarder find that his skill at snowboarding is pretty transferable to the fictional skateboarding race present in this series.
Both series really excel in creating characters that you just like to watch. Leonardo and Jotaro become friends, just as Reki and Langa do. However, Sk8 the Infinity tends to focus more on their building bro-ship whereas The Gymnastics Samurai is more focused on Jotaro’s struggles.
Dance Dance Danseur
After watching a gripping performance by a male ballet dancer as a kid, Junpei Murao fell in love with dance. However, after being pressured into finding it effeminate, he took up more manly sports like Jeet Kune Do and soccer, particularly after his father’s death made him the man of his house.
One day after a female classmate witnesses him do a kick with the earmarks of ballet to it, she asks him to join her mother’s ballet studio. Although he resists at first, Junpei finds himself willing to make endless sacrifices for the euphoria that ballet elicits.
While dance only plays a very small role in The Gymnastics Samurai as the sport that Leonardo does, Dance Dance Danseur, despite being about ballet, captures the same feeling about dance that Jotaro has about gymnastics.
Both series follow main characters that feel that same exciting spark when they watch their sport being done well, and are motivated to pursue that themselves.
Furthermore, both series feature characters that take inspiration from other sports and bring it back into dance. For Leonardo, he is inspired by gymnastics while Junpei brings elements of other sports he did into dance as well.
However, while The Gymnastics Samurai follows the main character’s diminishing physical abilities and the struggles of being a single father, Dance Dance Danseur instead explores social expectations, particularly the complicated relationship between masculinity and ballet.
Bakuten
Shoutarou Futaba loves sports, but he has languished as a bench warmer on his middle school baseball team. One day after watching a group perform gymnastics in the park, he develops an interest in the sport.
While watching a tournament, he finds himself captivated by Shoushukan High School’s team performance, but watches them place second to last for not fielding a full team. This motivates him to enroll in the school and join their gymnastics team.
Outside of The Gymnastics Samurai and the well-aged Ganbarist Shun, Bakuten is really the only other anime option for those that want more sports anime about gymnastics. So, in the fact they are both about gymnastics, these two anime series are innately similar.
However, while Leonardo is the one harvesting inspiration from gymnastics for his sport, Bakuten features a main character who was a baseball player that was inspired to become a gymnast instead.
The biggest differences are in the age of the characters and the dynamics of the sport. The Gymnastics Samurai is about a professional adult who is a solo competitor while Bakuten is about high school boys that compete as teammates.
Do you have more anime recommendations like The Gymnastics Samurai? Let fans know in the comments section below.
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