Great Teacher Onizuka
Great Teacher Onizuka (more commonly abbreviated to GTO) is a manga and anime series created by Tohru Fujisawa. This is a sequel of lesser known series Shonan Junaigumi lit. Shonan True Love Group where Onizuka's rogue highschool days are depcited.
Story
This story is about the life of Eikichi Onizuka, a 22-year old biker who initially has no idea whatsoever about what to do with his life.
While peeping up girl's skirts at a local shopping mall, Onizuka meets a girl who agrees to go out on a date with him. However, Onizuka's attempts to bed her fail when her current 'boyfriend' - her teacher - shows up at Onizuka's apartment and asks her to come back. This teacher is old and unattractive, but so under this teacher's power is she that she leaps from a first-floor window into his arms.
Onizuka, seeing this display of a teacher's power over girls, decides to become one himself, and discovers three important things:
- He has a conscience and a sense of morality. This means taking advantage of impressionable schoolgirls is out.
- He enjoys teaching.
- He hates the systems of traditional instruction.
With these realizations, he sets out to become the greatest teacher ever, using his own wacky brand of philosophy and the ability to do nearly anything when under sufficient pressure, an example being improving his grade from 8/100 to 100/100 on an SAT-equivalent in six days, after taking said test in two hours instead of the normal five, all with a few bullet wounds in him. Hired as a long-shot teacher by a private school to tame a class that has driven one teacher to suicide, one to nervous breakdown, and one to joining a cult, he embarks on a mission of self-discovery by one by one breaking through to each student, and helping each student, ranging from the busty bimbo to the Oedipal Rebel, to learn to genuinely enjoy life.
Media Information
Manga (Books)
| Name | Publisher | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| English GTO Volume 1 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1931514933 |
| English GTO Volume 2 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1931514968 |
| English GTO Volume 3 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1931514496 |
| English GTO Volume 4 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1591820286 |
| English GTO Volume 5 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1591820294 |
| English GTO Volume 6 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1591820308 |
| English GTO Volume 7 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1591820316 |
| English GTO Volume 8 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1591820324 |
| English GTO Volume 9 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1591820707 |
| English GTO Volume 10 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1591821061 |
| English GTO Volume 11 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1591821355 |
| English GTO Volume 12 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1591821363 |
| English GTO Volume 13 | Tokyopop | ISBN 1591821371 |
Story and art by Tohru Fujisawa-san
Anime
Directed by Noriyuki Abe and Naoyasu Hanyu of Madhouse Studios.
Live Action
There is also a live action movie. Takashi Sorimachi stars as Onizuka, and Nanako Matsushima is Azusa. It is directed by Masayuki Suzuki, and the opening song, "Poison", is sung by Takashi Sorimachi. There are some drastic changes from the anime, but the live-action is quite good in its own right.
Characters
The main characters are as follows:
Eikichi Onizuka
Onizuka (鬼塚 英吉) is a 22-year old biker and virgin. He graduated from a 5th-rate university and as such cannot get a decent job, and so his main way of spending time was to peer up girls skirts in a local mall.
Through the events explained in the story section Onizuka decides to become a teacher. His initial teacher training is in the Musashino Public High School, where he meets Nanako Mizuki.
After this training period he messes up by forgetting to sit the teachers exam. As a result no public high school will take him, but he manages to get a job at Holy Forest Academy, despite the objections of vice-principal Uchiyamada.
One of the conditions of having the job at Holy Forest is to sleep at the school (on the roof) and it is here that Onizuka meets Noboru by stopping him from committing suicide. Unfortunately, in doing this he trashes Uchiyamada's car, making him even more intent on getting Onizuka fired.
Onizuka is put in charge of class 3-4, a class so bad it has already made three teachers psychotic. However, he not only survives the class, but begins to bring them round onto his side and sort out their problems, and this is what the main part of the books is about.
Fuyutsuki Azusa
A 22 years old beautiful female teacher who is the heroine of the series. Unlike Onizuka, she had a very normal life and graduated from a 1st rate school. Her quiet manner and moderate ideas are misleading as she proves to be very tough on her own sometimes scaring even tough Onizuka. To prepare him for the test of his teaching life, she prepares a mountain of jelly with eyes of Maguro tuna fish as fruits and imposes impossibly tough schedule that would have killed anyone or drove them mad. Her field of teaching is Kokugo or Japanese language. She would, not that surprisingly, falls in love with Onizuka but as both are quite reluctant to admit their feeling and show them in the open, they claim that they are just "friends".
Nanako Mizuki
Nanako is a student at the Musashino Public High School who is in the class that Onizuka is given to teach while training. Initially she agrees to set Onizuka up, seducing him into taking her back to his apartment, where she undresses and some of the boys from the class take a picture of Onizuka and Nanako together.
However, Onizuka is able to persuade the boys to keep quiet about this (using a few of his biker friends to help - about 100 of them). Despite being set up once, Onizuka agrees to take Nanako to her house after she insinuates he might be able to have sex with her.
Eventually though she ends up at his house and sleeps there (though no sex happens) after explaining that her parents have no time for her anymore because of their businesses.
Onizuka solves this by bashing a hole in one if the walls in Nanako's house, thus ensuring that the wall does not act as a barrier between Nanako and her parents. The hole is fixed, but the rift is healed by the time it is.
Noboru Yoshikawa
Noboru is a pupil at Holy Forest academy, and has not had a good time there so far, being the victim of serious bullying, most of it by Anko and her group. He is extremely good with TV games and is something of an Otaku but proves to be quite handy with making things in a later episode.
This bullying is so bad it makes Noboru try to kill himself twice, by leaping off the roof of the school both times, but each time he is saved by Onizuka and strikes up a sort of friendship with him, as Noboru has a lot of stuff that Onizuka wants to borrow.
In the School trip to Okinawa, he finally gets over the bullying by pretending to be the ghost with help of Onizuka and scaring Anko's group to death. He would later get lost with Anko on an island but Anko discovers that he can be someone to trust and bullying stops.
Anko Uehara
Anko is one of the students in Onizuka's class. She is a typical female bully and Noboru is often on the short end of this.
However, after a particular degrading attack on Noboru, Onizuka ambushes Anko and two of her friends at a local Karaoke bar, taking some rather embarrassing pictures of them in return.
This makes Anko get her mother, who is part of the PTA, to file a complaint against Onizuka. However, this complaint is dropped when the mother is blackmailed by some evidence that has been fabricated by Noboru and others.
At some point after this, however, Anko switches sides because she doesn't like the way Miyabi is making others to her dirty work, and even helps Onizuka when Miyabi sets up the embezzlement of the school trip fund. On the trip in Okinawa, Noboru ends up helping Anko, and she falls in love with him.
Tomoko Nomura
Tomoko is a pupil in Onizuka's class. She has very large breasts, but is not too bright, leading to people calling her slo-mo-ko. She and Yoshikawa makes a good duo beating the tag of Onizuka in a watergun battle by blasting the room with multiple water rockets prepared by Yoshikawa himself (There had been no limit placed on what type of weapons to use).
After initially messing up her role in one of Miyabi's plans to get Onizuka fired, she is cut off from Miyabi's group. However, Onizuka sorts this out by getting her into a local beauty contest. She doesn't win, but she gets noticed by several TV producers and starts starring in various commercials and the like. Her young male manager, impressed with her naturalness and falling in love at the first sight, makes it a lifetime quest to make her succeed.
In the live action TV episode, instead of her succeeding dramatically in following episodes, she would part for an Okinawa actor school to learn dancing and singing.
Miyabi Aizawa
Miyabi is another pupil in Onizuka's class, and seems to hate teachers quite severely. She is easily the most popular girl in school though her queen-like manner can easily irritate anyone.
Originally just out to be rid of Onizuka on principle, she quickly makes it personal when he arranges for Tomoko to get noticed at the beauty contest, whereas she did get anything out of it.
Miyabi is behind the school trip embezzlement, in which she blackmails Mr.Sakurai (not Mrs. Sakurai husband) into asking parent to submit the money by cash. This allows her to steal the money and plant it on Onizuka, who manages to lose it all in a sting step up by Miyabi.
However, Urumi, who is Onizuka's side by this time, gets revenge for him by setting her and her three friends up with a Sadomasochistic group, where she is narrowly saved from being raped by Onizuka who dives into a room of a skyscraper through the window from another skyscraper.
Urumi Kanzaki
Urumi is a child genius, with an IQ over 200. However, she is also psychologically disturbed, specifically having an intense hatred of teachers.
Her genius is displayed repeatedly by such abstract actions as blasting every single disposable boxes with firecrackers right on the 0:00 PM, making a fake sillicone head so a snake look like a viper, or more genius like actions like shouting curses in French and being able to speak Cantonese.
This hatred stems from her elementary school days. Her teacher wasn't able to handle Urumi properly, and Urumi's constant requests for the teachers time both inside and outside of school eventually made the teacher snap. The teacher then told Urumi's secret to her class (something about her father, but it isn't stated explicitly then. It is later told that her mother had selected a genetical father based on his intelligence and nothing more). Naturally this caused a great deal of psychological trauma to Urumi, and a quite understandable hatred of teachers.
However, after a couple of run-ins with Onizuka he is able to get through to her by almost killing both himself and her by jumping over the gap in a suspension bridge, and by making her see that her past trauma, however bad, just isn't worth messing up her present with.
Hiroshi Uchiyamada
Uchiyamada is the vice-principal at Holy Forest academy. He has some very set ideas on how peoples backgrounds relates to how well they can do. Despite his many failings, he is not an evil man but is just very serious about the job of teaching.
Uchiyamada rubs Onizuka up the wrong way in the interview because of his background. However, Onizuka is not the first to experience this, and a couple of expelled students come to the academy looking to pay Uchiyamada back for their own treatment. He offers Onizuka a job if he can get rid of these students, but after hearing what Uchiyamada has to say about them, he incapacitates Uchiyamada instead.
Because of this, because of Onizuka's background and because Onizuka trashes his car twice while saving Noboru from killing himself, Uchiyamada wants Onizuka fired.
He is a not quite extreme example of punishing an ordinary older middle-aged Japanese man takes from his home and workplace. He is forced to work with a young man like Onizuka who easily breaks his rule and things he do doesn't make sense to him. The boss he serves under seems to think it is fun. At home, his daughter and wife openly disdaines him even though everything they do is funded by him working everyday in a stressful workplace.
Mayu Wakui
Mayu is the grandson of Chairwoman Sakurai. He attended Holy Forest for a while, then left for an unknown reason.
As part of Miyabi's continuing (as of book 14) quest to get rid of Onizuka, she asks Mayu to come back to try and get him removed.
Mayu comes back and almost immediately rubs Onizuka up the wrong way. This results in him bursting a water main and almost doing Mayu in with an entire set of lockers. At this point Onizuka finds out that Mayu is Chairwoman Sakurai's grandson, and she lashes out at him. Uchiyamada then takes that opportunity to suspend Onizuka.
However Mrs. Sukurai then calms down, realises that it was all Mayu's fault (it always is according to her) and asks Onizuka to come back and try and bring him back onto the straight and narrow.
Mayu has a terminal illness because of a medical mistreatment and later makes a debut in the mainstream media by confessing his illness. This is the reason to his chaotic manner as no matter what he does, he can be dead next day.