Toshokan Sensou

In the year 1989, the Japanese government passed the Media Betterment Act, allowing a group of soldiers known as the Media Betterment Committee (MBC) to destroy and censor any "problematic" media under the guise of protecting public morals. As a response, regional governments established the Library Defense Force (LDF), whose members take up arms and put their lives on the line to protect freedom of expression. At the top of the Kanto branch of the LDF stands the Library Task Force (LTF): an elite squad consisting of only the most exceptional fighters.

As a high schooler, Iku Kasahara experienced the terror of censorship first-hand when she refused to surrender the newest volume of her favorite series to MBC agents. She only came out unscathed thanks to a lone member of the LDF, who protected her and her beloved book. Now in her 20s and still unable to forget the man who saved her, Kasahara joins the LDF in the hope of becoming just like her prince.

But LDF training turns out to be far more rigorous than she could have imagined, and her instructor, LTF member Atsushi Doujou, seems fixated on making her life a living hell. Given her struggles, Kasahara is shocked when she is selected as one of the two new LTF recruits as a result of Doujou's recommendation. As Kasahara does all she can to become worthy of the LTF and unravel her enigmatic superior's motivations, she wages war—both on the battlefield and in her personal life.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Doujou, Atsushi Main

Maeno, Tomoaki Japanese

Kasahara, Iku Main

Inoue, Marina Japanese

Shibasaki, Asako Supporting

Sawashiro, Miyuki Japanese

Komaki, Mikihisa Supporting

Ishida, Akira Japanese

Tezuka, Hikaru Supporting

Suzuki, Tatsuhisa Japanese

Asahina, Hikaru Supporting

Ono, Daisuke Japanese

Tezuka, Satoshi Supporting

Yoshino, Hiroyuki Japanese

Inamine, Kazuichi Supporting

Satou, Haruo Japanese

Nonomiya, Shizuka Supporting

Nazuka, Kaori Japanese

Orikuchi, Maki Supporting

Tanaka, Rie Japanese

Hosokai, Kousuke Producer

Nishimura, Tomoyasu Producer

Takeuchi, Fumie Producer

Hamana, Takayuki Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

Feb 5, 2025

LuxuriousHeart

Recommended

This anime is very relaxing to current events. If you know, you know. While tackling a serious subject, like censorship, they manage to have light hearted and funny moments, and they squeeze in a well written romance. The cast was actually likable, while being believably flawed. This was a great anime!

Except, the censorship. It's ironic, isn't it? The premise of this anime is that censorship is bad, and that we must fight against it, yet this anime was censored. The censorship of this anime was not only disgusting morally, but it also made parts of the anime confusing. ... I actually had to read in order threads to understand certain plot points. That's a failure of the anime. It's such a shame because the cast is great, the premise is great, and the writing (that wasn't censored) was good. It was literally just the censorship that made the anime a mess at times, which is very ironic.

Still, I do recommend this anime.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Oct 18, 2023

Maskedhero_420

Mixed Feelings

everything else about the show is palpable. the context of the library wars, the conflicting ideologies producing this type of war to begin with and the consequences of a society full of literary censorship. the BIGGEST problem I see in this show is the persona of the MC and how it devalues the nature of the story going on around here. while library wars is meant to encapsulate the circumstances surrounding a society fighting over censorship of texts, all this gets completely lost upon us when the motivating factor for the MC's decision to join the defense force is a romantic one and a self ... centered one rather than a noble one. she wants the officer who saved her and her book to notice her. more so than protecting the value of books, this MC is only interested in garnering the attention of her supervising officer. how am i supposed to take the plot seriously when the author forcefully injects a teen romance into all of this? the MC has nothing endearing about her. she is incredibly cocky about her physical ability all because she used to run track and field. she refuses to acknowledge why the instructor is going hard on her. she lacks the objective ego to realize her own shortcomings and turns into a watered down asuka type character when trying to confront these shortcomings. this story would have been a million times better if the MC was a mature woman and not a literal middle schooling fawning over an adult man. this reads like a sick romantic fantasy devised by an author who has no understanding of conflict and narrative tension.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Nov 28, 2022

DaxtotheMax

Not Recommended

If Ray Bradbury had an anime.

The concept is fun, pitting two sides against each other on the side of censorship or preservation, hence a "Library War". To think that books would cause a war, right? With shooting and bullets and guns and boot camp. Even with "war", it keeps a semi-light hearted tone, it's kind of hard to describe but to me "stringy" sounds good. It doesn't get gritty or bloody and it's not a rom-com, but it has slapstick moments, an in-betweener, I suppose.

It's been said before with a handful of anime (I know Kuroko's Basketball had this problem) but it applies ... here as well. Every episode starts with a recap of the synopsis (basically what I already told you) and then the OP and then a recap of the episode before it, which in this day and age we can just skip it but it's still annoying for it to take up the first 2-3 minutes.

In just that first episode, you're introduced to the motivation, the key players, the goal and the opportunity to achieve that goal but also opportunity for learning. This series is based around Kasaharu, who falls victim to the Media Cleansing Act while going to the book store to retrieve the new issue of her favorite book series. Come to find out, that book is being banned so she protects it. It'd be interesting to see her sneak out with it but no, someone comes by as a part of the Library Defense Force and claims the book/shop in the name of the great library.

The story kind of continues from there and episodes do build off of each other by including plot threads but it's not a deep storyline or anything, it's light. The idea is that there are all these events that sort of give Kasahara reason to grow and change so that she may approach a certain situation in the last episode differently than what she would have at the beginning of the series, which is cool and all for that pay off but I feel like it could've been a bit smoother and engaged in its narrative.

Because other than Kasahara, the characters don't get a whole lot. As I said, the filler type episodes can have Kasahara team up with someone such as Shibasaki or Tezuka and they might get their own little thing here or there but that's about it. They introduce who seems to be a promising major villain that isn't even associated with the Cleansing Force but he doesn't show up until (I'm pretty sure it was Episode 8) out of 12 and shows up very sparingly after that one ep. Now this could've been taken farther with a S2, except there isn't one, this is just part of the story, both the manga and light novels go farther but honestly, I wasn't interested in it enough for an S2 anyway.

In the end, it doesn't innovate the concept a whole lot, leaving it to feel pretty bland and shallow with its content, same with its visual style. It could've had a message like "love blooms on a battlefield" or "find beauty in a battlefield" anything that could've been built but it takes as broad strokes as it can. I like the challenging rules standpoint but it needs more. From what I see, people who read the manga and novels don't like it anyway so maybe it's better there. What I can imagine happened is that there are two different mangas (Love is War and Spitfire) which take two different tones and they figured why not combine the two for an anime since ran along side them but I honestly don't know since I haven't read them, that's just a theory.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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	Poll: Toshokan Sensou Episode 12 Discussion ( 1 2 ) dtshyk - Jun 26, 2008	62 replies	by LuxuriousHeart »» Feb 5, 4:29 AM
	Poll: Toshokan Sensou Episode 11 Discussion dtshyk - Jun 19, 2008	42 replies	by LuxuriousHeart »» Feb 5, 4:02 AM
	Poll: Toshokan Sensou Episode 10 Discussion dtshyk - Jun 12, 2008	32 replies	by LuxuriousHeart »» Feb 5, 3:03 AM
	Poll: Toshokan Sensou Episode 9 Discussion dtshyk - Jun 5, 2008	36 replies	by LuxuriousHeart »» Feb 5, 2:05 AM
	Poll: Toshokan Sensou Episode 8 Discussion dtshyk - May 29, 2008	35 replies	by LuxuriousHeart »» Feb 4, 2:15 AM