Hidamari no Ki

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"Why are we here? Just to suffer?"
-80% of characters in Hidamari no Ki

I’m not sure if its Tezuka’s style or typical of that era, but Hidamari no Ki (HnK) is certainly a historical fiction that subverts ... expectations. When Tezuka’s characters are foreshadowed to head down one path, God’s (Tezuka’s) hand invariably has other plans for them. At the very start of the manga, Ryoan the doctor and Manjiro the samurai are set up to be prodigies of sort. Manjiro immediately kills 3 swordsmen without formal sword training, while Ryoan is an early adopter of western medicine and skillfully sutures up a wounded Manjiro without any surgical experience. However, we’re quickly reminded of the historical part of the story, and those expectations are derailed by bigger incidents. This repeats throughout the entirety of HnK. As expected of Edo Japan, many suffer tragic, brutal twists, with dreadful amounts of sexual violence against women in the first half. It may have been necessary to blackpill readers about the futility of struggling against a whimsical fate, but it felt suspiciously gratuitous at times.

The further I got into HnK, the more impressed I was by its consistency with the historic timeline. While I can’t say I’m familiar with Japanese history, the protagonists’ interactions with many important historical figures appeared seamless and logical, after reading Wikipedia page intros on said figures. If you’re interested but not intimately acquainted with modern Japanese history, wanting to find out what happens next makes it a real page turner, and I was able to grasp, and even sympathize with, the factionalism and contradictions leading up to the Boshin War and following the Meiji Restoration.

I enjoyed how the realism also applied to the way the protagonists were developed, or were not developed! Real life challenges are messy; they rarely if ever perfectly match what a character needs for growth to create an elegant, packaged, character arc. As cliché as messages of “it can’t be helped” are in Japanese media, I empathized with the numerous characters who were competent and ahead-of-the-curve, yet ended up stalling out due to macro-environmental changes.

Lastly, HnK includes noticeable commentary on humankind. It reminds us of how far humanity has come, when up to a century prior, surviving cholera outbreaks was still more or less luck of the draw. Yet, with much drama between the smallpox vaccination proponents and their fierce opponents, it also prophetically asserts how the more things change, the more they stay the same. In the same vein, it presents a disillusioned take on “great man” theory, showing the individual ronin, samurai, doctors, and conscripted farmers, all dying for somebody else's cause, only to have their achievements rendered inconsequential by time. Instead, the few with flexibility, and more importantly, luck on their side, shall inherit the country. Overall, Hidamari no Ki provides valuable perspective that manages to mirror the hustle and bustle of today, even 40 years after it was written. Although the story is exasperating and the plot is almost random, the character development via trauma is apropos, and the subtle advice on living the good life is appreciated.

It amazes me that to this point no one has ever written a review of this story on the MAL site. Well, I think it's better late than never.

Hidamari no Ki is the story of the friendship between samurai Manjiro Ibuya (a fictitious character) and doctor Ryoan Tezuka (later Ryosen Tezuka, and this is a historical figure, Osamu Tezuka's great-grandfather). Even though they have diametrically opposite occupations (samurai are occupied with killing, and doctors with saving lives) a great mutual respect and trust is slowly built between these two characters. They both learn from each other and themselves, changing their beliefs and learning things about ... the world. In the end, they are practically irrecognizable from the two men that started the story hating each other.

More than all, this manga is a lesson on how to craft a good historical manga. That is the main thing I have to say about it.

The first topic is on the practice of medicine, specially the intellectual feud between "Chinese medicine" and "Dutch medicine". The practicants of Dutch medicine, or "dutchies" as they were called by the members of the Bakufu, were seen badly and regarded as practicants of black magic. The japanese had a very retrograde view on science. Even though the Chinese Medicine was proven through science to be many times inefficient (and even sometimes harmful to the patient), people still held those practices because they were doing so for hundreds of years. When the dutchies tried to promote campaigns to vaccinate people, there was a rumour which said that it would turn people into cows. When you read it and remeber how some people nowadays react towards vaccines, you realize that times haven't changed much in the last 150 years.

The other historical topic has to do with the Meiji Restoration. The story starts in 1855 and go all the way to 1868, the year of the Restoration. At first it is not a main topic of the story, but then, with the appearance of historical figures Townsend Harris and Henry Heusken, the current state of the Shogunate and the necessity of change in Japan's intern and foreign politics starts to be discussed. It is all crafted very subtly in the beginning, but it soons takes shape in the manga.

The story mainly focuses on Manjiro and Ryoan, but there's a myriad of really interesting supporting characters, like Okon (a former prostitute who is quite fond of Ryoan), Koan Ogata (a historical figure, teacher of Dutch medicine), Tobei (he is quite hateful to be honest, but a very interesting character with a unique background story) and Taki Seisai (another hateful character, but a perfect example of the Shogunate's outdated worldview). If not for Hidamari no Ki's historical learnings, one can read it for the fictitious events as well.