YMMV / Kamui Den

• Best Known for the Fanservice: Never mind that the series was a critical darling, which gained a cult following and even influenced political movements in the 70s, anyone you talk to today who took it out of the school library is likely to remember all the sex and nudity.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Anytime the gigantic mountain man Yamajo makes an appearance.
• Complete Monster: The lord of the Hioki Domain in the first series oppresses the townsfolk, starves and brutalizes them, kills any who resist his rule, rapes one of his maids and after she drowns herself spitefully has her corpse chopped into pieces before sending her corpse back bundled in rotting animal meat.
• Continuity Lockout: Another consequence of the series' massive length. Even reading through the entire thing attentively, it's possible to miss or forget important details.
• Gateway Series: The 80s Kamui Gaiden was one of the first ever manga published in English, as "The Legend of Kamui", thanks to the pioneering efforts of Toren Smith (who sold all his possessions and moved to Japan just to get manga published in the US; for a while he was crashing with Studio Gainax and got iimmortalized in Gunbuster with his name flipped), and so it was a seminal part of the burgeoning Western anime/manga fandom.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The animated adaptation was very popular in Mexico during the 80s, especially thanks to the ninja craze of the same era.
• Growing the Beard: Kamui Den was a key milestone in manga, as a medium, growing the beard—so much so, in fact, that the "God of Manga" himself, Tezuka Osamu, would praise it for bringing "Serious drama, characterization, and ideolgy to manga." Tezuka acknowledged a substantial (if grudging) debt to the Gekiga movement, whose influence on his later, more adult-oriented work is clear.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The injustices of Edo Period Japan, often regarded as a period of stability and peace, are treated with unflinching honesty in Kamui-den. Disturbingly, some of the class-based discrimination depicted in the series persists to this day, though no longer in institutionalized form.
• Ho Yay: There are significant gay and lesbian overtones in the early volumes of the second series.
• Sequelitis: The 80s reboot of Kamui Gaiden (itself a sequel/spinoff of Kamui Den). While it's by no means bad, it lacks much of the subversive punch that made the original series a classic. Sadly, this is still the only portion of the Kamui franchise ever to have been published in English.
• Values Dissonance: Western readers will (or rather would) likey experience this, though it's hard to say whether the often brutal treatment of female characters is more due to the author's nihilistic bent or actual historical attitudes toward women in feudal Japan.