One of the best things about Young Black Jack I think is it’s ability to bring you back to the time the series is set in. Among one of the many things I don’t normally think about on a daily basis is the impact that the Vietnam war had on Japan or what happened to the soldiers that abandoned their squads unable to handle the combat.
It also never crossed my mind to think of the impact it would have on the Japanese citizens that helped them. This is basically the set up for the episode, Hazama’s neighbors are harboring deserters and one of them had suffered a major head injury in the process and could die from the pressure on his brain. They can’t call a hospital in fear of getting in trouble and so once again all of the pressure falls on Hazama to do the operation despite it being illegal.
Well let’s back up to the beginning of he episode where the girl from episode 1, Maiko comes over to Hazama’s apartment. She’s so very sure that there is some sort of secret to the miracle surgery that he performed. She begins looking through his place for answers as he sits down for a lovely dinner of Curry Udon and curry over rice.
Well I liked Hazama already but now he’s like, 100 times hotter to me. Any man who loves curry that much is good in my book. She finds that he practices operating on animals, fish, pigs and such. Which is generally fine. Then she hears a sort of groaning from next door and goes to investigate.
Which is how they get caught up with all of this.
These people, I just….I get where everyone in this episode is coming from. I get wanting to keep your promise and not turn over the deserters your protecting. I get wanting to save a life, I get Hazama not wanting to operate because of the moral issues around it.
When it comes down to it though, he’s just a medical student and it was a very complicated procedure. They don’t know that he’s massively skilled, that he had performed a miracle two episodes ago. Like, these guys rather let this guy die at the hands of a medical student then call an actual hospital.
Well in the end, after remembering the doctor that didn’t give up on him when his case looked helpless when he was younger. He takes up the operation and skillfully saves the mans life.
Well the man he saved happened to be an undercover CIA agent who was investigating a group of people harboring deserters in Japan. Hazama gets detained for a bit but is ultimately let go when the entire thing gets covered up.
I honestly, REALLY liked this episode. It made me think of a lot of things that i wouldn’t of thought about in most other situations. Like the situations of doctors, soldiers, civilians and such of other countries during the Vietnam war.
The next episode is looking to throw Hazama and maybe Yabu out onto the battle field of Vietnam. So instead of seeing how it affects the people who are outside of the war, next episode will show how it affects the people inside of the war. It’s almost disturbing to see depictions of how things were at that time. At the same time though, it gives us a rare view.
It also amazing depicted the struggle that Hazama was feeling between saving the mans life himself or doing the right thing. In the end though, what really was the right thing to do? As the end of the episode states, at the the time, Hazama was unaware that there was never really a right or wrong when it came to medicine.
~Midnight
Here here! Curry is love.
This was my favorite episode to date. I really loved the mix of struggles, it was all very greyscale with everyone being a little right and a little wrong (some more than others, of course…but I’m biased towards curry lovers.) As a Canadian I don’t believe my history class covered the Vietnam war (maybe we would have in World History, but there weren’t enough people…), and so the only time I manage to glean information is through admittedly unreliable sources like movies and tv. I do enjoy learning when I can however, so even this brief look into such events from Japan’s side of things is much appreciated. I hope we continue getting peeks like this.
I study highschool in Canada and I believe we did cover briefly about Vietnam War when studying Cold War, not that much but enough to know what happened.
Being a Vietnamese I feel excited for the next ep. I almost choke when I heard the name was mentioned because I didn’t know Vietnam War would effect that much on Japan. Part of me believing this Vietnam War episode is included because of the politic between two country right now.
Hopefully we can get an accurate version of the war (clothes and the names, seriously, I was crying when most of the places’s names were written wrong in Canadian Historical record)
Ah, really? It’s been an awful long time since I was in high school >///<