This two-part episode rose Yakitate Japan to my all-time favourite anime series list.

Japan´s representative´s participated to Monaco cup: bread baking world championship tournament. Host is a clown Pierrot. As a reaction to how delicious someone´s bread is, he starts to tell his life story. When he was a baby he was abandoned to the bench of circus. Ringmaster adopted him and he became a clown. His greatest dream is to meet his parents. That´s why he decided to be the best clown ever. Surely his parents would recognize him then. But no matter how famous he became, his parents didn´t show up. Pierrot still continued to believe they will.

That was until he got stabbed by assassin. He went to Heaven´s gates and met the King of Monaco there. Pierrot asked why he was also there, but the King avoided questions. Instead he started to ask about Pierrot´s parents. Pierrot told him how he doesn´t care anymore even if he meets them. But then the King said that he´s Pierrot´s father. Reason why he was also dying was that he was donating blood to Pierrot. They both had rare blood type called Bombay, they can´t receive any other blood types than their own. Every royal of Monaco have bombay blood type, meaning Pierrot was royal too. King also told him how he lost his son 23 years ago because of some stupid tradition. Pierrot was abandoded exactly 23 years ago.

Donating his blood was King´s proof of his fatherly love towards his son. This convinced Pierrot and he wanted to tell the King eveything about his life, but it was too late. He was told that because of the Kings sacrifice, he´s going to die and Pierrot live. When Pierrot realized that he was disappearing and King´s back was farthering, he felt despair. He couldn´t bear those harsh words he said to him about his parents. Before disappearing, he was able to say just one word “Father”. King was surprised and turned to watch his son, feeling same kind of despair as Pierrot. He understood Pierrot didn´t mean those cold words about not caring anymore when he heard his last word. They were reunited after so many years, just to be seperated again.

;_; I cryed so much. This is truly an recipe of great series. First you laugh until your stomach hurts, but soon you´ve cryed your eyes out. I like whole cast of Yakitate Japan, especially Pierrot, so it´s pretty normal to react strongly when something like this happens to him.

I´ve been thinking my all-time top10 anime favourites. After this two-part episode I´m convinced to take Yakitate Japan there. Mixing humor and drama is difficult, and only few series are successful. With many scenes like the one above, Yakitate Japan has proved it can do it.