Golden Kamuy

I've been watching the anime, Golden Kamuy, on Crunchyroll lately. 

It is a period piece set shortly after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, in Hokkaido, the northernmost main island of Japan, featuring a veteran of the war and an orphaned Ainu girl who has just reached marriageable age but is too much of a tom boy to be attractive to Ainu men, who team up to find a stash of gold stolen from the Ainu people in a robbery that killed her father and to avenge her father's death. The location of the gold was tattooed in a treasure map distributed amongst multiple escaped prisoners and the remnants of a disgraced Army division or groups of prisoners are also hot on the trail.

I've researched the factual points touched upon by the story and while it takes liberty with our reality, the alternative history isn't too far off.

The disgraced Army division's efforts closely mirrors that of the people who briefly formed the Ezo Republic, although the timing is about forty years after the real events that it echos. The scenes from the Russo-Japanese war (in flashbacks) likewise convey well the core and defining realities of that conflict such as the fact, that would be reduplicated ad nauseam in World War I, a decade later, that a well positioned small force with machine guns is a very tough match for a large force of infantry armed only with bolt action rifles and bayonets, and the acid bath of class tension that resulted from repeated orders to continue futile or extremely costly infantry charges despite this fact.

A relict population of Ezo wolves, that probably went extinct in the 1880s or 1890s, is prominent in the story, but given that the subspecies of Hokkaido wolves which was much more closely related to the gray wolves of North America than to Asian wolves was believed to be extinct already in the story itself, this isn't such a great departure.

The notion of Hokkaido as a center of gold mining, mostly panning rivers for gold, is authentic and its remains the center of gold mining in Japan. 

Everything depicted about Ainu culture and religion in the anime likewise closely matches official sources about the real world, including the encouragement that the young Ainu woman's grandmother gives to her to marry her ethnically Japanese partner.

And, of course, the landscapes and urban backgrounds are clearly based upon contemporaneous images of the real thing.

On the whole, the choices made to balance the needs of an exciting story and the goal of conveying the gist and context of a specific historical period in a particular place that it brings to life, are very well done. I would recommend it.