Biwamaru is a wandering blind acupuncturist who travels across Japan healing people with uncanny speed. He's scruffy and worn—dressed in tatters, using a gnarled stick as a cane, and carrying a shabby bundle on his back. Like Black Jack, he operates outside the law since mainstream medicine dismisses him as a charlatan, though he'd argue that cutting patients open is the real barbarism. He also shows up in Tezuka's famous samurai series Dororo, where he takes on a different role entirely.
Black Jack and Biwamaru clash because they're too alike to ever see eye to eye. When Biwamaru rolled into town in issue #126 ("The Blind Doctor of Acupuncture," June 1976), it was instant hostility—each convinced the other was a fraud. Problem was, neither could actually prove it; both got results. What really got under Black Jack's skin was that Biwamaru worked for free, making the town question why they were paying Black Jack's astronomical fees. Their whole dynamic became competitive pointscoring, each trying to expose the other's limitations and mostly just learning hard lessons instead.
They crossed paths again not long after in issue #141 ("Death of Hyojisai"), meeting at a hot spring where they discovered they both made pilgrimages to the same legendary master forger—who crafted scalpels for one and needles for the other. When the forger fell ill, they raced to cure him, but Hyojisai used his own sickness to teach them both that skill means nothing against fate. It's a brutal moment for them both. The upcoming Two Dark Doctors film is supposedly including material from this story.
In Dororo, Biwamaru appears as a blind musician and master swordsman. Hyakkumaru, the crippled samurai who basically inspired Black Jack's character, actually becomes Biwamaru's student here—a neat reversal of their Black Jack dynamic.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
