Bleach Officially Has Only 1 Bankai That Can Bring Back the Dead, and It’s Kubo’s Answer to Edo Tensei

Naruto has Edo Tensei, and Bleach quietly has its own answer buried inside a single Bankai. Genryusai Yamamoto’s Zanka no Tachi hides a technique that literally drags corpses out of the ground and makes them fight again, and it’s the only ability in the entire series that pulls this off.

However, we feel like it doesn’t get talked about nearly as much as it should, so here’s the full breakdown of how it works and how it stacks up against Naruto‘s version. It’s also worth mentioning that this is just one ability of the Bankai – it has many other offensive ones as well, four to be exact. They are labelled East, West, South, and North, and the ability in discussion here is from South.

How Yamamoto’s Bankai Zanka no Tachi Raises an Army of the Dead in Bleach

Genryusai Yamamoto‘s Bankai, Zanka no Tachi, already has a reputation as one of the scariest tools in Bleach, mostly because of the variety of abilities it has. One of the four abilities of Yamamoto’s Bankai is Zanka no Tachi Minami: Kaka Juman’okushi Daisojin.

Instead of swinging his sword, Yamamoto jams it point-first into the ground, and ash starts pouring out of the earth. It isn’t random ash; it’s the remains of everyone Yamamoto has ever burned to death with Ryujin Jakka over the centuries. Those remains climb back up as charred skeletons, and they don’t just look scary standing there; they actually attack on command. To add to it, Yhwach actually saw an illusion of his past comrades in those skeletons, which further weaponized his grief against him mid-battle.

This move only shows up once across the whole series, against who he believed was Yhwach in the early stages of the Soul Society invasion. The skeletons rose in numbers big enough to tear straight through Kirchenlied: Sankt Zwinger, a defensive spell built specifically to be nearly impossible to break, before piling onto their target completely. It later turned out the man on the receiving end wasn’t Yhwach at all, but Royd Lloyd, an impersonator, and he took the full brunt of the attack while Yamamoto had no idea he wasn’t fighting the real thing.

How Does This Bankai Actually Stack Up Against Naruto‘s Edo Tensei?

Orochimaru performs Edo Tensei in Naruto: Shippuden | Credits: Studio Pierrot

Both techniques haul specific dead people out of the ground and force them into combat one more time, and both users treat the dead less like people and more like tools they’ve earned the right to reuse. That’s basically where the resemblance ends, though, because the mechanics behind them are almost opposites.

Edo Tensei needs DNA and a living sacrifice to even get started, and it hands the reanimated ninja their full personality, memories, and jutsu back, to the point where they can rebel against whoever summoned them. Yamamoto’s technique needs none of that. It only works on people he personally killed with his own flames; it runs purely on ash rather than anything resembling a body, and the skeletons it raises don’t think, argue, or remember anything; they just swing until they’re ordered to stop.

There’s also a difference in what each technique is trying to say about its user. Kabuto and Orochimaru treat Edo Tensei as a strategic trump card, a way to stack the odds by cheating death itself. While Yamamoto is already one of the strongest characters in Bleach, his version feels more like a punishment he’s inflicting on himself as much as his enemy, forcing him to watch the people he’s already killed get dragged back into violence because of him one final time. It’s a smaller, uglier kind of resurrection, and that’s probably why Kubo only let it happen once.

What are your thoughts on our comparison and theory? We’d love to know your opinions in the comments below.

All Episodes of Bleach, including the Thousand-Year Blood War Arc, are available to watch on Hulu and Disney+.