This episode synopsis may contain errors and mistranslations. Plot spoilers are also present. Please consider yourself warned.

Kids from the local elementary school are being rushed to the hospital for food poisoning in record numbers, and there is chaos both at the school gate and the hospital hallways. As Vito and Hana search for one of the students that he had befriended, Itou-sensei and Shiori are at a television station for a special guesting.

There they are both afflicted by the same food-related ailment, but they were not as adversely affected as the children. Shiori bravely takes over Itou-sensei’s spot in the show, and while she was there she puts two and two together that her family’s food business could be implicated in the investigation of the school food poisoning.

The prosecutors and investigators from Vito’s drug case discover this same fact, and use it as an opportunity to get back at Vito and the everyone else at Matsumura foods. They fingered the sekihan food packs (red beans and white rice) that Vito had delivered earlier that morning as the source of the food contamination.

While all of this is unfolding, Itou-sensei is intent on drinking himself into oblivion because of his botched television appearance, which unfortunately also led to Shiori Matsumura becoming a popular television personality. Vito runs into him in one of Shibuya’s numerous specialty restaurants, and he tries to get the lawyer to calm down and stop kicking up a fuss. They also inadvertently foil a robbery attempt at a convenience store, and this seals their friendship which extends way into the future.

As the episode ends, the folks at Matsumura Foods are gearing up for another legal battle over the supposedly tainted sekihan, Vito and Hana decide to formally start dating, and we get a brief glimpse of the circumstances behind Hana’s trauma and subsequent inability to speak.

This episode didn’t have much in the way of plot development, but it did provide a lot of back story on Vito and Itou-sensei’s relationship. The episode also focused a lot on Itou-sensei’s own insecurities, and the reasons why he is so determined to become “that famous lawyer on tv” as opposed to a proper lawyer dealing with as many cases as he can handle.

We also witness another depiction of the small prejudices the Japanese people are guilty off when dealing with foreigners, as was the case with the mother of one of the hospitalized school children. Although unfailingly polite, she undoubtedly made implications that she considered Vito personally responsible for her daughter’s condition, and that foreigners as a whole were unfit to touch food meant for human consumption. I find this ironic since it is a fact that many of the major sectors of the Japanese food industry run on the backs of the hardworking Korean, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants

SMILE airs weekly Friday nights on the Japanese network TBS, at 10PM starting 17th April, 2009. For more information, please visit official website (Japanese only).