16 Educational Anime That Can Teach Real Knowledge

I’ve always been an advocate on educational anime can be. While anime may be fantasy, there is usually a solid message to be found and useful life lessons.

Be it a brief glimpse into a different culture, exposure to a new language, or something less easily grasped and more inspirational, there is quite a bit that anime can teach you. However, you can learn more from some anime more than others.

There are anime series that teach life lessons and morals, but there are actually quite a few educational anime out there that teach legitimate academic knowledge.

When educational topics are all wrapped up in an otherwise entertaining anime series, it is really the best way to learn. However, as with learning anything from a series that is also entertainment, be sure to fact-check your knowledge so you can separate the fact from the farce fiction.

Best Educational Anime

Cooking: Food Wars

For all of its fan service, and there is a fair bit within here, Food Wars does present an educational take on cooking and being a chef.

Certainly if you go to cooking school, you won’t be having many shokugeki battles with classmates, but Food Wars does touch on what it takes to be a good chef and the philosophy of food service.

Furthermore, Food Wars gets much of its acclaim because it presents the science behind recipes and the recipes themselves legitimately. However, due to time constraints, they usually just give the basics of the recipes so you will have to find the finer details to accurately re-create it. Yet, you really can replicate most of the recipes in Food Wars.

Japanese Snacks: Dagashi Kashi

Do you want to learn the history of a bunch of popular Japanese snacks and candies? No? Well, too bad! Because that’s what Dagashi Kashi is centered around.

It follows a daughter of a large confection company that came to recruit a man from his small snack shop in the country. The boy’s father wants his son, who wants to be a manga artist, to take over the shop. He won’t accept her offer of recruitment until he agrees. So, passionate young snack lass that she is, tries to ignite the son’s fire by talking about popular Japanese snacks and their history.

It is a hard show to sell, but a fun show to watch. It is even more fun if you do like your Japanese snack foods.

However, the educational element of it is only applicable to the first season. Apparently people didn’t like the knowledge-bombs and they were lessened in the second season.

Agriculture and Food Science: Silver Spoon

You’d be surprised how many people don’t know where their food comes from or how much work goes into getting it to you. However, as an anime series surrounding an agricultural school, you can get a taste from Silver Spoon.

Similar to Food Wars, Silver Spoon also presents a few recipes as well. Though, their recipes are a little more basic, and feature a lot less fan service

However, Silver Spoon has more of a focus on the finer details that go into farming and animal husbandry. It usually uses food to drive home how hard it is to eat something you raised, but how grateful you are for it.

Human Biology: Cells at Work

Like the well-aged children’s movie Osmosis Jones, Cells at Work presents a similar tale of cells fighting against germs. Unlike Osmosis Jones, Cells at Work is specifically trying to present the information in an educational but also entertaining way. As such, it goes into infinitely more detail about the different cells and the types of jobs they do inside your body.

When a new cell or organism is introduced, you are given a very scientific (and factual) introduction to the cell and its purpose rather than the character and its personality.

While watching something like having the cells battle a flu in the body or handle getting a cut is entertaining, it is an accurate visual representation of what the cells are doing in your body even if it is re-imagined to make for a good anime episode.

Economics: Spice and Wolf

While not the first anime series to have a main character as a merchant, Spice and Wolf is the first anime to fully go into the details of economics.

While Spice and Wolf is set in a medieval world and thus focuses on medieval-level economics, you’ll find that they are still very applicable today in many ways.

Watching Holo and Lawrence’s escapades is certainly more interesting that Macro 101, let me tell you.

Mixology: Bartender

Bartender can win awards for being one of the most mellow anime series, but there is much to learn from it as well.

While you might expect Bartender’s plot following a bartender who gets his ear bent by a number of troubled patrons only to help them with the perfect cocktail, you might not expect the shot of mixology knowledge that is served with it.

Bartender not only goes into how to make the cocktails in the show, but it also delves into the history behind each cocktail. This added dose of education works well with the show, since it often goes to explain why the cocktail is the exact right panacea for the patron’s pain.

Creating Anime: Shirobako

Remember when you were young? You saw a few anime series and, young and naive, you may have thought, “I want to make one!” How hard could it be, right?

While Shirobako isn’t meant to be a dream crusher, it is meant to show the hardship and many people that goes into creating anime.. You can’t quite appreciate the hard work until you see it unfold.

Creating Manga: Bakuman

Similar to creating anime with Shirobako above, there are a lot of different considerations that go into creating a manga.

Bakuman goes into a surprising amount of detail when it comes to drawing as well as approaching the manga industry as a creator. It can’t teach you to draw, but it can show you the differences between the different tools and how the industry works over in Japan.

Sports: Most Sports Anime

Not always, but in general, sports anime is often the most educational anime genre.

Sure, the charm of sports anime is the character stories, but there are a lot of technical aspects and techniques that go into playing a sport.

Not every sports anime goes to great lengths in explain the sport or the training for it, some sports anime are just shounen action battlers in a sports wrapper, and some sports anime focus on sports that are just plain fiction. However, there are a good deal of sports anime that explore real sports knowledge.

Solid realistic sports anime include:

• Tsurune
• Ping Pong the Animation
• Yuri on Ice
• Free
• Re-Main
• Haikyuu
• Hajime no Ippo

Microbial Science: Moyashimon

Germs and bacteria are bad, icky, and gross, right? Well, Moyashimon wants you to know the truth of it.

Bacteria is essential to everything from digesting food to brewing beer. While Moyashimon has an agricultural bent similar to Silver Spoon, it explores how bacteria plays a role in so many things and can be just as good as it can be bad.

Oh, it also makes bacteria look cute.

Japanese History: Hyouge Mono

There are lots of anime series that touch on historical topics, particularly Japanese history. However, many are not always historically accurate, and many more are embellished for…Fun? National pride? Ecchi fan service?

Hyouge Mono takes a more realistic approach to the Sengoku period legendary for the samurai warrior class.

Samurais were warriors, yes, but they were also men of nobility and culture who pursued various hobbies befitting of such. Many samurai enjoyed arts like calligraphy, poetry, flower arrangement, and, like in this anime, tea ceremony. Hyouge Mono explores a samurai less passionate about glory on the battlefield and more passionate about tea ceremony.

As it lacks calculating and flashy sword battles, Hyouge Mono got slept on more than a desk in school. However, its passion for showing off samurai outside of battle or intrigue is admirable.

Animal Biology: Heaven’s Design Team

Full disclosure, Heaven’s Design Team is often fiction in the creatures it is creating, but it is using real fact to do so.

Heaven’s Design Team is about what it says on the label. People charged by God to populate the Earth with animals they designed.

In a typical episode, they will try to create an animal to fulfill a certain purpose or meet a certain criteria. What a first draft will look like is a sort of animal out of fiction – like a griffin or a dragon. The anime will then highlight factual reasons steeped in animal biology why that creature could not survive.

By the end of the episode, you will see them create a creature based in reality because it does indeed have the necessary biology to survive on Earth.

Heaven’s Design Team is unique as an educational anime in that it really doesn’t seem like it would be educational.

Scientific Method: Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It

Who doesn’t love education wrapped up in a beloved rom-com anime wrapper? It has all the charm of a legitimately good romance anime while also being, essentially, a science class.

In Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It, a graduate student confessed her love to her peer. Being people of science and inexperienced in love, they demand to know if scientifically they love each other. So instead of dating and depending on unreliable feelings, they propose a series of hypotheses and conduct experiments based on that.

While that all sounds like fun, albeit really nerdy rom-com shenanigans, the anime actually does detail the factual scientific formula and theories that they are exploring. Many times the experiments are silly, but using real scientific techniques.

Survival Skills: Are You Lost?

Anime Waifu God help you if you are lost in the wilderness and all your knowledge of survival comes from watching this anime alone.

While Are You Lost does document real survival skills and techniques, it doesn’t always highlight the most practical ones. That said, you would be surprised at the amount of people who do not even know basic survival knowledge, and this anime does highlight the basics pretty well. It is really a “something is better than nothing” sort of education.

Unlike most educational anime that is mostly jokes rather than plot, Are You Lost is surprisingly oriented towards exploring its characters and getting them off the island they are stranded on, even if that is just a set-piece to drop their survival knowledge.

Fitness and Anatomy: How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift?

There has been a few anime that approached the subject of exercise, usually trying to compel you to exercise along with some cute, encouraging anime girl and no actual plot to speak of. However, they usually lacked any real information on the topic of fitness and the characters are banal at best.

How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift is a different beast. It doesn’t encourage you to do some fitness regime with the characters, instead it offers you up the information about fitness, muscle gain, weight loss, and exercise techniques all while being an actually entertaining show.

While fitness is actually a more in-depth topic than you might expect, How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift offers you up a solid foundation that can help you get into exercise to meet your desired goals.

Fishing: Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater

While you could say that Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater is a sports anime, and should be counted in that section, this series is really more of a school club anime. It is also one of those school club anime series that is dangerously close to being Cute Girls Doing Cute Things.

While the series is as plotless as most Cute Girls Doing Cute Things anime, and the girls are indeed cute, what sets this apart is how educational and sometimes “uncute” it is when it comes to fishing.

The series details the basics of seaside fishing from how to fish for certain types of fish compared to others, how to tie fishing lures on, how to go clamming, ect. It even shows the girls gutting fish which, let me assure you, is not a typical moe activity in anime.

Invention and Science: Dr. Stone

Dr. Stone is probably one of the best educational anime at both injecting real knowledge while also still being a very entertaining anime with the power to appeal the shounen action fan base.

In Dr. Stone, it follows a super genius who was petrified with the rest of the world for 1,000 years until some random act of nature lined up just right to remove the petrification. After “defrosting” some others, he sets to work reviving human civilization through invention.

Yes, that certainly doesn’t sound very “educational,” but as I said before, Dr. Stone balances education with entertainment.

The education in Dr. Stone comes from his inventions. He isn’t using anime magic to make them. He goes through the basic, fundamental, and factual process of creating each invention and often produces a rudimentary version of that object that – while not perfect – serves its purpose.

Dr. Stone starts off simple with things like creating rope, clay pots, and soap. It then progressively moves up through the innovations of human history to things like boats, cars, and electronics.

This series does have a lot of fact in it, but it is also an educational anime where you still want to take everything with a grain of salt. For example, some of the objects, if you were to try and re-create them, would probably not work out so well.

Did we miss another good educational anime opportunity? Let us know in the comments section below.