Yasumoto Noboru completed three years of medical studies in Nagasaki where he learned the latest advances in Western medicine. He expects to be appointed to the position of a doctor for the shogunate. To his dismay, the ambitious young doctor will spend the next year as an apprentice doctor at a public charity clinic run by a crusty, old doctor nicknamed Red Beard. What lessons will Red Beard teach Noboru during this tumultuous year? The great film maker Akira Kurosawa translated these Red Beard stories to film in Akahige [Red Beard] (1965), starring Toshiro Mifune.