Sakamoto Days Explained: The Retired Hitman and the Order

Sakamoto Days has a premise you can explain in one breath and a plot that knots up the moment the assassin bureaucracy arrives. Here is the picture as of September 2026: who Taro Sakamoto is, why he will not kill, what the Order is for, where the 22 episodes stop and what Season 2 adapts. Spoiler-heavy bits are flagged first.

Sakamoto Days at a glance

Detail	What to know
Original manga	Yuto Suzuki, in Weekly Shonen Jump since 21 November 2020
Anime studio	TMS Entertainment
Season 1 Part 1	Episodes 1-11, 11 January to 22 March 2025
Season 1 Part 2	Episodes 12-22, 15 July to 23 September 2025
Episodes so far	22, numbered straight through
Where to watch	Netflix worldwide with an English dub; TV Tokyo in Japan
Season 2	January 2027 on Netflix, confirmed with a teaser and key art
Manga status	Ongoing: 276 chapters by late September 2026, in its climax

The premise: a legend behind a convenience store counter

Taro Sakamoto was the hitman other hitmen told stories about. Then he fell for Aoi, a clerk at a convenience store, and she set one condition: no more killing. He took it, married her, and the two of them now run a shop in suburban Tokyo with their six-year-old daughter Hana. He also put on a great deal of weight, which is both the running joke and the best bit of design here. Push him far enough and the fat burns away, and the show treats the lean version as a real step up in power, not a punchline.

Creator Yuto Suzuki has named The Equalizer and the John Wick films as reference points, plus the 1978 Hong Kong comedy Enter the Fat Dragon, which is where the idea of an exceptionally strong, overweight fighter comes from. Katsuhiro Otomo, Takehiko Inoue, Hiroya Oku and Christopher Nolan are on his influence list too. The spread explains the tone better than any genre label: action staged with the weight and geography of a live-action thriller, and then somebody slips on a wet floor.

The no-kill rule, and why it improves every fight

The promise to Aoi is not a side detail, it is the engine. Because Sakamoto will not take the obvious option, each encounter has to be solved rather than won, with opponents disarmed, knocked out, trapped, redirected into each other or simply outlasted. It also keeps the stakes honest: a man who refuses to kill is permanently handicapped against people under no such limit, so the danger survives the punchlines.

The rule builds the cast as well. A hero who kills everyone has no recurring opponents, while Sakamoto leaves almost everybody breathing, so an assassin he humiliates early can return as a rival, a reluctant ally or a shop regular.

Who the Order actually is

This is where most quick summaries go wrong. The Japanese Association of Assassins, usually shortened to the JAA, is run like a corporation: it licenses assassins, brokers contracts, polices its registered members and trains them at an academy known as the JCC. The association is bureaucracy, not a villain.

The Order is a very small unit inside the JAA made up of its strongest assassins, and its job is to put down anything that threatens the industry as a whole. Season 1 draws its members as colleagues rather than a faceless squad. Shishiba (Taku Yashiro) fights with a hammer and mentors the Order's youngest member, Osaragi (Saori Hayami), a child-sized killer with a circular saw who treats carnage as play. Hyo (Hiroki Yasumoto) is the brass-knuckle brawler who buries any concern for other people under insults. Kanaguri (Satoshi Hino) is a film director obsessed with assassin movies who fights with a bladed clapperboard, and episode 18 is named after him. Takamura (Hochu Otsuka), the katana user, is positioned as the single most dangerous assassin in the association.

Then there is Yoichi Nagumo, a disguise specialist and Sakamoto's old classmate from the JCC, who is an Order member and firmly on Sakamoto's side. If the Order wanted Sakamoto dead, sending Nagumo would be an odd way to go about it.

The bounty, Slur and X

Spoiler warning: this covers a reveal from season 1 episode 3 onwards, plus the shape of a later manga twist without its details.

A one-billion-yen bounty on Sakamoto goes public in episode 3, "Welcome to Sugar Park", the instalment that also introduces Nagumo, and the anime presents it as the JAA's doing. It is not. The real source is Kei Uzuki, the assassin-hunting killer the Viz manga calls Slur and Netflix's subtitles call X, voiced by Daisuke Namikawa. Uzuki wants the JAA dismantled, and he splits into alternate personas to get there. One of them is Rion Akao, who is dead before the series starts and whose JCC account the bounty was posted through.

Rion matters more than that trick suggests. She was the third of the legendary trio Sakamoto and Nagumo formed at the JCC, and Uzuki went through the same school at the same time while being nobody in particular next to those three. So the bounty was never punishment for a retirement. It was bait, meant to drag the one assassin nobody could beat back onto the board. The manga spells the mechanism out at chapter 121 while the anime still holds its cards, which leaves season 1 three-sided: the JAA and its Order, Uzuki's crew, and Sakamoto in the middle avoiding both.

The crew behind the counter

Shin Asakura is the key addition. He is 21, a former JAA hitman nicknamed Shin the Clairvoyant, and an esper who reads minds, which makes him a walking counter to any ambush. It does not work on his old boss: Sakamoto can shut his thoughts off at will and opens the channel only when he wants it, so the two hold conversations mid-fight without speaking. Shin served under Sakamoto and idolised him, then found him fat and content behind a till, and the show mines that disappointment for most of its early comedy. Nobunaga Shimazaki voices him, Dallas Liu in the dub.

Lu Shaotang (Lu Xiaotang in Viz's English manga) is 18, the daughter of a Chinese crime boss, and fights with a mix of Tai Chi and Drunken Fist; she joins the shop after Sakamoto and Shin save her from the gangsters hunting her. Heisuke Mashimo holds the JCC's all-time sniping record, cries about almost everything, and keeps a parrot called Piisuke as his spotter. Ayane Sakura and Ryota Suzuki voice them, with Rosalie Chiang and Xolo Maridueña in English. Natsuki Hanae plays Nagumo, Nao Toyama plays Aoi, and Tomokazu Sugita plays Sakamoto, a lead who barely speaks; Matthew Mercer takes that job in the dub.

What the 22 episodes cover, and where they stop

Those 22 episodes are a single season split into two cours, not two seasons. Trackers list Part 2 as its own entry and some outlets call it season 2, which is why people argue about whether season 2 already aired. It has not: that means the January 2027 run.

Part 1, episodes 1 to 11, ran from 11 January to 22 March 2025 and is mostly assembly work: Shin arrives, Lu and Heisuke follow, and the bounty lands in episode 3. Episode 10, "Bathhouse Roughhouse", changes that by opening the Death Row Prisoners arc, in which X frees condemned killers and points them at the Order and at Sakamoto's circle. Lu's backstory fills those last two episodes, the second of which, "Casino Battle", closes the cour. Vaundy's "Hashire Sakamoto" opens Part 1, Conton Candy's "Futsu" ends it.

Part 2, episodes 12 to 22, ran from 15 July to 23 September 2025 with Kroi's "Method" and "Dandelion" by Go!Go!Vanillas. The death row arc is finished off first, including the stretch where Nagumo turns up at the shop disguised as Aoi to handle an escapee himself. Then episode 17 starts the JCC Transfer Exams arc: Sakamoto decides the fastest route to intelligence on X runs through his old school, which means sitting its entrance exam as a middle-aged shopkeeper. "Exam, Stage Three" is episode 19. The finale, "Each One's Mission", gets the exam out of the way and leaves the infiltration itself still to come, which is exactly where season 2 picks up.

Season 2: what is confirmed as of September 2026

Season 2 was announced at Jump Festa '26 on 20 December 2025, and Netflix later pinned it to January 2027 with a teaser and new key art. Daisuke Nakajima directs this time, with season 1's Masaki Watanabe moving up to supervising director; Taku Kishimoto returns on series composition, Yo Moriyama on character designs and Yuki Hayashi on music.

Netflix's own synopsis is unusually specific. Sakamoto and Shin press on with the JCC infiltration to dig up intelligence on X, Order members are put in danger in Kyoto, and the shared history of a young Sakamoto, Nagumo, Rion and Slur is finally laid out. That last item is the backstory that makes Uzuki's campaign personal rather than ideological. Three new characters arrive with it, a top JCC student hostile to the assassins' association, the school's longest-serving teacher, who once trained Sakamoto, and one of the Order's founding members.

Where to pick up the manga

If January 2027 is too long to wait, the manga is a long way ahead of the anime. The Japanese edition reached 28 collected volumes in August 2026, with volume 29 due on 4 November 2026, and more than 18 million copies are in circulation; Viz Media handles the English release. Jump billed the start of the story's final battle in August 2025, then announced in July 2026 that the series had entered its climax. As of late September 2026 it is 276 chapters in and still running, with Sakamoto and Uzuki still in the middle of that fight. Suzuki has said since the 100th chapter that he already knew how it ends. Volume 1 is the cleanest starting point, because the early arcs carry detail the adaptation had no room for.

Why it took off

Netflix's engagement report for the first half of 2025 made Sakamoto Days the most-watched anime season on the service worldwide across that period, with 24.4 million views, ahead of Mashle and The Apothecary Diaries, and the series picked up a Best New Series nomination at the 10th Crunchyroll Anime Awards. The manga had already won the U-Next Prize at the 2021 Next Manga Awards and taken a Shogakukan Manga Award nomination in 2022.

It sits beside Spy x Family, another hit about a lethal professional protecting a domestic life he was not supposed to want, and beside Dandadan among recent Jump titles that refuse to pick one genre. For more in that register, try our best comedy anime and best action anime rankings, and our 2025 year in review puts its debut in context.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Sakamoto Days about?

It follows Taro Sakamoto, formerly the most feared hitman in Japan, who retired after falling for a convenience store clerk named Aoi. He runs a suburban shop with her and their daughter Hana and defends them from assassins without killing anybody, helped by reformed professionals including the mind-reading esper Shin Asakura.

Why doesn't Sakamoto kill anyone?

Aoi's condition for marrying him was that he give up killing, and he has kept it. He disarms, knocks out or outmanoeuvres opponents instead, which is why the series keeps so many antagonists around as recurring characters.

How many episodes of Sakamoto Days are there?

Twenty-two, as of September 2026. Season 1 aired in two cours on Netflix and TV Tokyo: episodes 1-11 from 11 January to 22 March 2025, and episodes 12-22 from 15 July to 23 September 2025. Trackers listing the second cour as "Part 2" are still describing season 1.

Is Sakamoto Days Season 2 confirmed?

Yes. It was announced at Jump Festa '26 in December 2025, and Netflix has confirmed a January 2027 premiere with a teaser and key art. Daisuke Nakajima directs, with season 1's Masaki Watanabe as supervising director, and the story continues the JCC infiltration while revealing the shared past of Sakamoto, Nagumo, Rion and Slur.

What is the Order in Sakamoto Days?

The Order is a small elite unit made up of the strongest assassins in the Japanese Association of Assassins, and its job is to suppress anything that threatens the assassin industry. It is not a squad hunting Sakamoto for retiring: its member Nagumo is his old classmate and ally, and the bounty was placed by the series villain Kei Uzuki, who goes by Slur or X.

Is the Sakamoto Days manga finished?

Not as of September 2026. Yuto Suzuki's manga has run in Weekly Shonen Jump since November 2020, reached 28 collected volumes in August 2026, and was announced as entering its climax in July 2026. It is 276 chapters in and still publishing, so the anime has plenty left to adapt.