Kunoichi Rumble: The Rivals Get Serious!

Kankuro closes out his bout with Misumi almost effortlessly, baiting his opponent into grappling his puppet Karasu instead of him. The wooden figure wrenches Misumi's neck in return, though the flexible fighter's body warps enough to spare his life. Attention then shifts to the fourth preliminary match, a clash pitting Sakura Haruno against Ino Yamanaka. The two throw themselves at each other at once, yet every strike misses its mark.

Watching from the stands, Neji dismisses their exchange as the ceiling of what a kunoichi can manage, but Tenten corrects him, pointing out that the weak showing comes not from their sex but from each girl holding back against a friend. Stung by the sense that Ino is softening her blows out of pity, Sakura throws an insult to provoke her.

Memories surface between the trading of jabs. In one, Ino teaches a younger Sakura how flowers speak to one another in an arrangement, using the cosmos as her example and noting that thoroughwort exists to set it off. When Sakura asks whether that makes her merely a foil to Ino's beauty, Ino refuses the idea and calls her a bud yet to open. A second recollection has Sakura telling Ino that wearing her forehead protector where it belongs is the moment she becomes a real shinobi.

The barbs finally do their work. Sakura lifts her protector from atop her head and settles it on her brow, and Ino answers by moving hers up from her waist to the same place. Standing as genuine rivals at last, the two charge one another, ready to fight without restraint. A flashback in this episode shows Ino reacting to Sakura's team placement as fresh news, though the anime had earlier placed Ino in the classroom when that assignment was announced.

This is the forty-first episode of the original Naruto series and belongs to the Chunin Exams arc, drawing on chapters 70 and 71 of the manga. It premiered in Japan on 16 July 2003 and aired in English on 8 July 2006. The episode uses Far Away as its opening and Harmonia as its ending. Its trivia notes a continuity slip, since Ino's presence during team formation is unique to the anime and absent from the manga.