He sold two copies before he was caught by the police and fined ¥300,000 by the Tokyo court in March 2003. Though a trained physician, he refuses to accept a medical license due to his hatred and mistrust of the medical community's hypocrisy and corruption. The man who made the edition copied the chapters from his own personal collection of the original serialized issues, and offered the illegal volume for ¥100,000 per copy (roughly $1,000). Black Jack is a mysterious and charismatic young genius surgeon who travels the world performing amazing and impossible medical feats. Printed with a professional-seeming cover, it was made to match the original 25-volume Shōnen Champion edition.
In one particular case the sealed and semi-sealed chapters, as well as three other excluded chapters, were reprinted illegally by a Japanese Tezuka fan in a pirated volume known as “Black Jack 26”. Obviously, despite Tezuka’s wishes, these sealed and semi-sealed chapters are in high demand for anyone wanting to have a “complete” Black Jack (1973-83) collection. Three of these chapters are considered “sealed”, and the other two considered “semi-sealed”. Although most of the excluded chapters have eventually made it back into print in at least one Japanese edition, there are five chapters that have almost never been reprinted since they originally appeared in Weekly Shonen Champion.
