Yaiba Appears

This article is about the first chapter of the Yaiba manga. For the Yaiba: Samurai Legend episode with the same name, see Yaiba Appears (Yaiba: Samurai Legend episode)

Chronology
N/A	List of Chapters	You'll Be Taking Care of Me ›

Yaiba Chapter 1
Information
Title:	Yaiba Appears
Japanese title:	YAIBA見参 (YAIBA Kenzan)
Original release:	August 24th, 1988
Shōnen Sunday issue:	#39/1988
Volume:	1
Pages:	22
Anime adaptation:	Episode 1: Heisei's Samurai Yaiba Appears

Yaiba Appears (YAIBA見参 ,YAIBA Kenzan) is the very first chapter of the manga of Yaiba. It was written by Gosho Aoyama and drawn by him and his assistants and first released in Shōnen Sunday #39/1988 on August 24th, 1988 and later on reprinted as the first chapter of volume 1 on April 18th, 1989. It depicts the rather involuntary arrival of Yaiba Kurogane, a feral child raised in the jungle, in the Tokyo Metropolis and his initial difficulties in finding his place in a modern society.

Characters

Introduced

Yaiba Kurogane
	14 years old Samurai/Kendoka

Kenjuro Kurogane
	Samurai/Kendoka Yaiba's father Raizo's old rival

Currently unnamed tiger
	Yaiba's pet

Sayaka Mine
	14 years old Middle school student

Raizo Mine
	Professional kendoka Sayaka's father

Settings

Introduced

• Jungle (Yaiba)
• Tokyo
  • Narita Airport
  • Bali (Mentioned on a flag)
  • Mine residence (Mentioned)

Yaiba, Kenjuro and the tiger hide from the gorillas in a wooden crate.

Plot

The 14-year-old feral child Yaiba Kurogane, who was raised by his father Kenjuro Kurogane in a jungle and trained in the art of survival and swordsmanship, hungrily waits for his old man to finish cooking their next meal. The father throws off his son's wish by stating that patience is also a part of training. Shortly after this lesson, both of them are attacked by a gorilla. Yaiba felt the approaching animal by meditation and focus, enabling him to defeat it with just one blow of his kendō sword made of bamboo. Yaiba and his father roast the dead gorilla over a bonfire and eat it, which Kenjuro declares is the "law of nature".

Sayaka meets her father Raizo at the airport.

But the next uninvited guests are already approaching: a tiger notices the tasty prey of the duo and wants to snatch it for himself. But after it dives in and unluckily misses its target, the father and son to decide to eat the tiger too. But before they can, the relatives of the eaten gorilla have located the killers of their family member and now want to take revenge. Kenjuro and Yaiba flee on the back of the tiger and hide in a wooden box. Just as Yaiba dreams about being awash with food one day, the box is filled with a bunch of pineapples, and the lid gets closed with all three of them still inside the crate. The package gets loaded onto an airplane, which has been scheduled to fly to Narita Airport in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, Japan.

The group flees from the patrol cars in a taxi.

Parallel to their arrival, the middle school student Sayaka Mine comes to meet her father, Raizo Mine, who has just returned from a kendo tournament on the Asian mainland. Sayaka congratulates him for his victory, but Raizo refuses the compliment, saying that he can never feel like a true winner until he has beaten his old rival—who happens to be Kenjuro Kurogane. As chance would have it, he is just tumbling out of the wooden box at the same airport together with his son and the tiger. An airport police unit sets out to arrest the trio, but Yaiba sets the tiger to attack the officers to buy some time and uses the flag of a tourist group as an improvised kendo sword against them. Just as he is about to hit Raizo from behind, Sayaka stands in his way, who asks him his name. He realizes that Sayaka is something he has never seen before: a girl. To her visible shock, he checks out her entire body and takes a look under her skirt, which she counters by clobbering him with her umbrella.

Meanwhile, Raizo recognizes his old rival in Yaiba's father, but before he can challenge him, he is grabbed by Kenjuro and dragged into a taxi with Yaiba, Sayaka, and the tiger followign them. Kenjuro tells the taxi driver to drive all the passengers to the Mine residence, while a squadron of patrol cars follows them. Yaiba notices this, climbs up onto the roof of the car and prompts the cops to battle him. Sayaka is left confused at who this strange trio may be...

Continuity

• Sayaka Mine wears a Summer school uniform (June 1st-September 30th)
• Start of the series' plot and of what the fandom calls the "Yaiba Arc" (Manga: Chapters 1-5, Anime: Episode 1)

Referenced in

• You'll Be Taking Care of Me (Yaiba Manga: 2): The next chapter is a direct continuation of this one and is still set on the same day.
• What's "School"? (Yaiba Manga: 3) : Yaiba Kurogane tries to sense Mr. Sudo the same way he learned to sense animals in the jungle and like he did with the gorilla at the beginning of this chapter.

Real Life Models

Narita Airport

The airport Yaiba, his father Kenjuro Kurogane and their pet tiger Kategora arrive at is the real Narita International Airport on the border between the towns of Narita and Shibayama in the Chiba Prefecture, which is part of the Greater Tokyo Area. It was the biggest and most important airport serving Tokyo back then, before it was replaced in this function by Haneda Airport. They would also have to arrive in what is Terminal 1 nowadays, since Terminal 2 and 3 opened in 1992 and 2015 respectively, long after the release of this chapter.

• 

  Narita Airport in real life.

• 

  Narita Airport in chapter 1.

Yaiba's jungle

The unnamed jungle Yaiba Kurogane and his father live in seems to be (intentionally) highly ambigious about what jungle or even on which continent it could remotely be. Besides the rather generous surroundings, animals like Gorillas (from Sub-Saharan Africa), Tigers (having their habitat in continental Asia) and Jaguars (who usually live in Central and South America) seem to have their dwell there.

Trivia

• This chapter was made/released directly after the three chapters of Detective George's Mini-Mini Big Strategy, which were in turn directly made after chapter 12 of Magic Kaito (Volume 2, Chapter 6). Gosho Aoyama described this experience as pretty daunting and that he really had to rush the latter chapter to get it all done on time.
• Narita Airport, where Yaiba and his father Kenjuro Kurogane unintentionally get transported to, is a setting featured frequently in the works of Gosho Aoyama. It's also where Princess Anne of Sabrina lands in Magic Kaito, as well as the place of Conan Edogawa's confrontation with Yutaka Abe and the airport Vermouth returns to Tokyo to in Detective Conan.
• The plane Yaiba and his father arrive with is "flight #704" with a machine of Japan Airlines (JAL), a real airway company. JAL's crescent-shaped logo also was the template for the brand of the (fictional) LUNA airline company in Detective Conan.
• The taxi cab sports the company name "OX".

Adaptations

• Episode 1: Heisei's Samurai Yaiba Appears

See also

• Manga
• Yaiba Manga Volume 1-10
• Yaiba