Tezuka in English

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ANSWERS:

What is Black Jack's real name and why is he called Black Jack?

See original manga issue #68, "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World," April 14th 1975.

Black Jack’s real name is Kazama Kuroo. As he explains to Pinoko, "kuro" means "black" and "o" can be short for "otoko" meaning "man", ie. Jack, so Black Jack is a loose English translation of his real name. We rarely hear the name Kazama Kuroo – it is generally used by policemen who have been tracking Black Jack, or by people who knew him as a child, classmates or teachers. Black Jack uses the name himself when addressing himself to his mentor Joutaro Honma (see new OAV 4), as well as in the tenth episode of the original OAV series, in an attempt to conceal the fact that he is the infamous Black Jack.

Why is Black Jack scarred all over?

Issue #29, "Sometimes Like Pearls," July 1 1974. New OAV 4.
Issue #54, "The Leg of an Ant," Dec. 23 1974. TV ep. 2.
Issue #68, "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World," April 14th 1975.
Issue #115, "Dud Bomb", March 15 1976 and, New OAV 1, TV ep. 1.

When Black Jack was a child, he and his mother stepped on an unexploded bomb or landmine. In the animated version he was on the beach playing, though in the original manga there is a bicycle in the image, suggesting they were riding it together. The boy was literally blown apart, and his heart stopped, then started again. The hospital staff despaired, but the genius surgeon Dr. Honma saw that the boy’s body was struggling as hard as it could to survive, and insisted on operating. The boy lived, but was hideously scarred and paralyzed in all four limbs. His mother, meanwhile, lost all four limbs and became mute. Her husband, Black Jack's father, abandoned them and ran off with a new wife overseas. Black Jack’s mother wasted away and died in the hospital, and the boy spent many lonely years in a wheelchair, gradually recovering the use of his limbs, cared for by his savior, Dr. Honma. Eventually, inspired by his mentor, Black Jack decided to pursue a career in medicine.

Why is half of Black Jack's face brown or blue?

Original manga issue #99, November 24th 1975.

In the accident which nearly killed him, the young Black Jack suffered severe burns all over his body. He required skin grafts, which for most of his body could be supplied by an adult, but for the face a child's skin was necessary to make sure it would develop properly as he grew up. During the operation, all his classmates and their mothers were waiting in the hospital waiting room to hear news, but when the doctor came out none of the mothers would let their children donate skin, fearing an unsightly scar. The only child without a parent to refuse was a young black boy, so the skin used for the graft was dark brown. Black Jack, who frequently operates on himself, could easily remove this skin and transplant normal-looking skin, but he prefers to keep it as a memento of his lost friend who was the only one to stick by him when he truly needed it. As to why the skin is frequently depicted as blue, rather than brown, I am not sure, but it may be related to the traditions in Indian and Chinese art of depicting figures whose faces should be brown as blue because it was considered less ugly. Another possible explanation is that the colored yellow ink used by printers in the period Tezuka was working did mix very to make complicated hues like brown, orange or green and blue simply came out better – it is for this reason that, in early American superhero comics, one rarely sees costumes in any color besides plain blue, red and yellow.

What happened to Black Jack's parents?

See original manga issue #68, "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World," April 14th 1975.

Black Jack's mother, reduced to a limbless trunk by the accident, eventually pined away and died in the hospital when Black Jack was still a boy. Black Jack's father ran off with another woman and became a successful international entrepreneur. He is still alive, and currently lives overseas with his new wife. They contact Black Jack when in need of his medical services.

Does Black Jack have siblings?

Black Jack has a half-sister, the daughter of his father and his father's new wife, who appeared in one of the online animation episodes, and in issue #233, which also features Black Jack's father and his father’s new wife. She is, as one would expect of the daughter of a wealthy international businessman, very concerned about the patrimony and hostile toward Black Jack as a potential competitor.

In addition to this, Honma Joutaro has a daughter named Kumiko, whom Black Jack look out for as a kind of younger sister, though without ever revealing his reasons. In the original manga he saves her from an ailment in issue #87, "Full Moon Disease." The authors of the recent TV series added her to the story told in episode 17, making her one of Wato's classmates at the school, and having her persuade Black Jack to help a classmate in distress.

What is Pinoko and why does she live with Black Jack?

Original manga issue #12, “The Teratogenous Cystoma” 2/18/1974 – included in Viz US edition vol. 1.
Manga issue #116, “Pinoko's Challenge,” 3/29/1976 – included in Viz US edition vol. 2.
Manga issue #67, “Green Pillars” aka. “Another Pinoko,” 3/31/1975 and 4/7/1975.
Manga issue #140, “The Teratogenous Cystoma part 2” 9/27/1976.
Manga issue #222, “Pinoko’s Mystery,” 7/10/1978.

Pinoko’s origins are not explained in any animated version, leaving many wondering why Black Jack puts up with this strange child and why she claims to be eighteen years old. Years ago, a very wealthy eighteen-year-old woman who concealed her identity came to Black Jack to have a Teratogenous Cystoma removed. A Teratogenous Cystoma (aka. Teratoma) is a condition in which one of a pair of identical twins winds up inside the other during development, and becomes a kind of large tumor, which contains all the tissues necessary for a complete body – nerves, bone, muscle – just in a jumble, not alive. The removal of a Teratoma is not terribly difficult as far as major surgeries go, but in this case no one had managed it because the Teratoma seemed to have a will of its own and the power to possess people and make them attack each other; whenever anyone tried to remove it, it made the doctors and nurses attack one another with scalpels. Black Jack was asked to operate, and, requesting to be alone with the Teratoma, reasoned with it, promising not to hurt it. It then let him remove it and put it in a tank. The woman then left, and Black Jack, after a few drinks, used a doll-like plastic exo-skeleton to assemble the Teratoma into the shape of a cute little girl whose photo he had seen in a medical journal. His creation was Pinoko, and he raised her for a few months, then tried to reintroduce her to her eighteen-year-old twin sister, who rejected her utterly. Pinoko has lived with Black Jack ever since, doing the chores and cooking, and serving as Black Jack's sole companion. Pinoko is actually eighteen years old, since she and her twin sister were born eighteen years ago, but she has only been experiencing the world as a real person for a few years, which is why her behavior is so childlike. Due to her unique anatomy she is unable to grow up or live an adult life, and is very sad because of this; she has a bent mirror in her room which distorts her image and makes her look tall, and she spends hours in front of it, fantasizing about a normal life. Pinoko is deeply in love with Black Jack, and insists that she is his wife, and is fiercely jealous of any other woman who tries to get close to him. Black Jack, meanwhile, though he pretends to be cold, has let Pinoko penetrate his heart, though he seems to think of her more as a daughter than anything else – though he yells at her a lot (which she deserves), he is always tender to her when she is asleep or hurt, and he is never so vicious in his vengeance as when Pinoko is threatened.

Has Black Jack ever had a real romance?

Black Jack has twice had the beginnings of serious Romances, once when he was an intern, with a fellow named Kisaragi Kei, and later with a woman named Konomi Kuwata, nicknamed the "Black Queen." Neither of these romances developed into anything long-term, and both were quite bittersweet. The details of these romances are outlined in the secondary character profiles for the two characters.

Why doesn't Black Jack have a medical license?

There are two separate questions here, first why Black Jack persistently refuses to accept a medical license on the numerous occasions that he has been offered one throughout his adventures, (take issue #33 "Pug-nosed Patient" or #72, "Revenge," as examples), and second, why he did not get a medical license in the first place when he finished medical school and did his internship.

In general, Black Jack refuses to belong to any organization of any kind which might put any restrictions on his activities or demands on his time (see the Black Jack movie when he refuses to join even an humanitarian organization for the prevention of medical abuse.) More specifically, in the case of the world of medicine, by accepting a medical license he would be submitting to the rules of the international and Japanese organizations which regulate the activities of doctors. These rules, among other things, establish fixed maximums for what a doctor can charge for any given operation, maximums far lower than the millions of yen Black Jack demands.

In addition, the medical association forbids some procedures outright, either because they are considered to be ethically questionable, or because they are considered too risky, with too high a likelihood of the subject’s death – fixed rules like can't take into account the fact that Black Jack’s individual surgical genius makes impossible procedures possible, but must regulate the entire medical community. Thus, if Black Jack were to accept a medical license, he would not be allowed to perform extremely risky operations such as cutting open a perfectly healthy woman in order to graft her ailing son onto her circulatory system like a Siamese twin, or extremely bizarre operations like making a little girl out of a taratoma. Members of the medical association are also forbidden to use cadavers to supply tissue and organs for transplants without legal permission, something which Black Jack does regularly, valuing life above law.

As to why Black Jack did not have a medical license originally, there are two separate reasons given in the manga. One, mentioned in several different issues, is that, while as an intern, a case appeared in which a patient was dying and the hospital refused to attempt the necessary operation because it was forbidden by the medical board on the grounds that it had a very high likelihood of the patient dying on the operating table. Black Jack, refusing to watch a patient die if there was the remotest chance of saving a life, took sole responsibility and performed the operation anyway, even though he was only an intern. As a result the doctor supervising him had his license taken away.

The second explanation, from issue #71, "Pneumothorax Operation", is that Black Jack’s hands cramp up whenever he tries to perform a pneumothorax operation, an alarming symptom, which the medical examiners had no reason to think could not spread to affect him more generally, which made the medical board unwilling to license him. Dr. Yamadano later determined that it was caused by psychological trauma suffered in Black Jack's childhood, when one of the injuries he suffered from the bomb explosion was an agonizing pneumothorax condition.

Why does Black Jack charge such outrageous fees? - STILL TO DO

What does Black Jack do with all the money?

That's what the gangster Skunk and his thugs went to great lengths to find out in issue #81, Treasure Island. After all, Pinoko and Black Jack live modestly, in a small house, and Black Jack's only big spending is on airfare and medical equipment, and if you raid Black Jack's files there are no large piles of sums hidden in bank accounts. A lot of the money he spends on expensive equipment and testing. A lot of it he spends on bribes necessary to accomplish what he does, as in issue #116 "Pinoko's Challenge" where he spends several millions bribing faculty to allow Pinoko into various schools. A lot of the money he spends in saving people, as in issue #201, "Black Jack Saves his Savior" where Black Jack literally spends tens of millions to save the life of a man who helped him. In a number of cases he will demand outrageous payment from one person and immediately give it to another who needs it more.

As for the remainder, the answer which Skunk eventually discovered in issue #81 is that Black Jack stashes most of his money in an island. There is no treasure vault as the gang assumed; rather the island itself is the treasure, a lush jungle island which Black Jack has bought in order to keep it as a nature preserve. You can see Black Jack and Pinoko taking a boat out to visit this island in the opening credits of the recent TV series. In other manga issues, Black Jack has purchased marsh land in danger of destruction by oil companies, and has bought and paid for the reforestation of mountains damanged after the Olympics were hosted there - in both these cases, however, there were complicated reasons why Black Jack agreed to the purchase.

There is a final, darker purpose behind Black Jack' fortune: revenge. Black Jack holds five men responsible for the suffering of him and his mother in the incident with the unexploded bomb, ranging from petty officials who were bribed into concealing the dangers of the area to the father who abandoned them. The process of tracking these men down is slow and expensive, but Black Jack finds them one by one and exacts his revenge, not by killing, but by putting each one through a kind of suffering comparable to what he and his mother endured. Four of the significant issues addressing this theme are #68 (The Most Beautiful Woman in the World), #115 (Dud Bomb), #195 (Second Person), and #241 (The Power of Laughter).

For info on secondary charactesr, to back to the Black Jack Basics