The Land Where a Hero Once Lived

While Naruto and Sasuke compete at their tree-climbing training, one of Tazuna's laborers named Giichi walks off the job and urges his employer to abandon the bridge. On the way back from the market, Sakura is shaken by the desperation around her as people try to snatch her bag, which she first mistakes for something less innocent. Tazuna insists the country would thrive once the bridge is done and Gatō is stripped of his grip on it.

After dinner, Naruto and Sasuke keep gorging themselves and vomiting in a stubborn push to grow stronger. Sakura asks why Inari keeps staring at the family portrait, which has been torn to erase one figure. The boy storms off, and Tsunami follows. Tazuna then explains that the missing man, Kaiza, had been a celebrated hero and Inari's stepfather. A wandering fisherman, Kaiza first met Inari after pulling him from the water, and the boy grew to lean on him completely. Kaiza earned the village's reverence by single-handedly holding back a flood, but when Gatō arrived he had the man executed to crush the people's hope, a cruel plan that worked and left Inari scarred. Touched by the account, Naruto resolves to prove that heroes still exist.

Giichi abandons the bridge project and pleads with Tazuna to give up. Team 7 witnesses the poverty gripping the Land of Waves. The torn photograph reveals the history of Kaiza, Inari's heroic stepfather, whom Gatō had killed to break the region's spirit. Naruto commits himself to showing Inari that heroism has not died.

The eleventh episode of the original Naruto series adapts chapters nineteen and twenty during the Prologue arc in the Land of Waves. It first aired in Japan on December 12, 2002, and in English on November 12, 2005. The opening is R★O★C★K★S and the ending is Wind. It became the first episode rated TV-14-V on a 2012 broadcast, and the Cartoon Network airing altered Kaiza's crucifixion-like pose.