Great Teacher Onizuka

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GTO manga, volume 1 (English version)

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 depicted.

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 she is so under this teacher's power that she leaps from a window two stories up and lands in his arms.

Onizuka, seeing this display of a teacher's power over girls, decides to become one himself, and discovers three important things:

1. He has a conscience and a sense of morality. This means taking advantage of impressionable schoolgirls is out...but their unusually attractive parents (see Kunio Murai, below) are a different matter.
2. He enjoys teaching.
3. He hates the systems of traditional instruction, especially when they have grown ignorant and condescending.

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. One example being improving his grade from near-zero to perfect on a standardized test in one week, and taking said test in two hours instead of the normal five, all with a few bullet wounds in him from using the other three to rescue a damsel-in-distress from a yakuza hideout. Hired as a long-shot teacher by a privately operated 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

The original Japanese manga was collected into 25 volumes (tankoubon) by Kodansha's Shounen Magazine Comics imprint. It is currently being translated into English by publisher Tokyopop. Of the original 25 volumes, 22 have been translated to date, with the final few volumes planned for release in the near future. Story and art by Tohru Fujisawa.

Anime

Directed by Noriyuki Abe and Naoyasu Hanyu of Madhouse Studios. The opening theme for the first few episodes is "Driver's High" by L'Arc~en~Ciel and later switches to "Hitori No Yoru (Lonely Night)" by Porno Graffiti.

Live Action

There is also a live action TV series and 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. The final episode of the live action series was the most-watched televised event in Japan's history.

Characters

Eikichi Onizuka

Eikichi Onizuka (鬼塚 英吉 Onizuka Eikichi) 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 (see below). His experience taming the rowdy gangs in his assigned class hardens his convictions that teaching was the way to go, (but meeting Nanako hardened something else...)

Unfortunately, he nearly messes up by forgetting to sit the public teachers' civil service exam. As a result no public high school will take him, though he is still eligible for a number of private schools. He manages to get a job at the upper-crust 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 the stressed-out vice principal even more intent on getting Onizuka fired.

Onizuka is put in charge of class 2-4, 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.

Azusa Fuyutsuki

Azusa Fuyutsuki (冬月あずさ Fuyutsuki Azusa) is a 22 year-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. Her parents have the hole filled, but the rift is healed by the time it is.

Hideki Ozawa

The first 'teacher' Onizuka meets at Musashino Public High School during training. This so-called 'teacher' has a reputation for sleeping with his lovely female students and convinces Onizuka that teaching high school is the way to go. Needless to say, the prospect of having a 16-year-old wife at age 40 is irresistable to the 22-year-old(-and-proud-of-it) Onizuka. But not long after Onizuka silences Nanako's gang, Hideki insists that Onizuka rape Nanako just to keep her shut too. But just as Onizuka's about to go through with it, he learns of Nanako's problems and changes his ways.

We don't exactly learn what happens to Ozawa, all we know is that he was caught but left for another training session somewhere.

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.

Kunio Murai

Kunio Murai is the class 'jock bully.' He's not very bright and loses his temper very easily. When Onizuka arrives at Holy Forest, Kunio and his gang (consisting of Fujiyoshi and Kusano) attempt to kill him several times with seemingly innocent pranks - such as a cockroach planted in his school lunch. The plans backfire - Kunio ends up eating the cockroach! - and he goes insane, nearly ending up with his face impaled on razor-sharp scissors. Onizuka then takes advantage of Kunio's weakpoint - his 27-year-old mother Julia. As it turns out, Julia got pregnant at 13(!) and she ran away from his father and her parents so she could keep the baby.

Kunio and his gang befriend Onizuka later on (especially in Volume 4 when he saves them from a group of ruffians, but not before Onizuka joins the ruffians and have the kids bungee jump off a Tokyo bay bridge.) Kunio still gets very angry when Onizuka tries to make a pass at his mother.

Tomoko Nomura

Tomoko Nomura (野村朋子 Nomura Tomoko) is a pupil in Onizuka's class. She has very large breasts, but is not too bright, leading to people calling her Toro-ko (or Slo-mo-ko in the English version). 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. He even arranges for two porn producers he knows to dress her up for the occasion! Rather than read the given script for the acting category, Onizuka gives her a couple of action figures and she ends up doing a very lovely improv piece (with the vice principal getting an accidental role!) 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.

The second half of Volume 11 and the first half of Volume 12 have a small side adventure featuring Tomoko and her manager, called GTO - this time standing for Great Tomoko Oppai (Oppai meaning breasts.) In it Tomoko's manager embarks on one very madcap adventure to save her from her dubious producers.

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. In the Anime version, Tomoko is given a cell-phone for her performance and her improv is her calling Miyabi asking for forgiveness and friendship.

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 Kanzaki (神崎うるみ 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

Hiroshi Uchiyamada (内山田ひろし Uchiyamada Hiroshi) 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.

Biography according to Volume 5: Born and educated in a small rural town, Uchiyamada is discovered as a prodigy and eventually recommended to learn to be a teacher at the Tokyo College of Education where he first met his wife-to-be. 29 years of hard work eventually earned him his house in Imura, with a small garden.

Uchiyamada rubs Onizuka up the wrong way in the interview because of his background - as revenge when he got slugged for grabbing Fuyutsuki's butt on the train he took on the way to work. 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. Onizuka infuriates Uchiyamada even more when he uses the principal's shiny new and VERY beloved Toyota Cresta as a disposable cushion when he saves Noboru from suicide...both times!

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 disdain him even though everything they do is funded by his work.

Mayu Wakui

Mayu Wakui (和久井繭 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.

Yoshito Kikuchi

Yoshito is one of Onizuka's students. This computer prodigy serves as the class president. He is also notorious for making pornographic composite photos for use as blackmail. Upon Onizuka's arrival at Holy Forest Academy, Yoshito tries to blackmail the new teacher into resignation with several pictures posted all across the school for everyone to see. Onizuka catches Yoshito and ironically asks him to make composite porn pictures of Azusa and other teachers.

Yoshito eventually befriends Onizuka and later helps Noboru fabricate evidence to prevent Anko Uehara's mother - the president of the school PTA - from getting Onizuka fired. Later volumes hint at a relationship between him and fellow genius Urumi Kanzaki.

Toshiyuki Saejima

Toshiyuki Saejima (冴島 Saejima Toshiyuki) is one of Onizuka's buddies. A corrupt police officer, he spends most of his time selling seized police evidence, trying to convince Onizuka to buy into his scams, and "testing" out weapons from crime scenes.

Suguru Teshigawara

Suguru Teshigawara is a ruthlessly perfectionist teacher and a graduate cum laude of Tokyo University. He dresses very neatly and even wears a white velvet glove - a symbol of perfection. He's obsessed with Azusa Fuyutsuki to the point of stalking; the walls of his apartment overlooking Azusa's is completely plastered with photos of her. He keeps tabs on her every move in her apartment with a wider variety of surveillance equipment than an FBI mob watch. Suguru even had to drape white cloth all over them to keep up a spotless appearance when he tried to invite Azusa over to his apartment in Volume 5. Instead, Onizuka came over and nearly pulled the special rope that would remove the cloth. Suguru ends up crashing head-first into his computer screen just to chase him out. On the flipside he absolutely loathes Onizuka, not only because he's a fifth-string college dropout, but because his students love him...and Azusa even more.

In Volume 5 he also pulls in a favor with the head of a concerned parents' group whose daughter he tutors (and is the personal manservant of.) This eventually leads to Onizuka taking the aptitude test - and passing with flying colors and several bullet wounds (long story). Later on in Volumes 18 and 19 his obsession reaches a boiling point when he kidnaps Azusa. When Onizuka figures out the plot with the help of Azusa's sister, Suguru finally snaps and threatens to blow up the school with homemade molotovs (sake bottles and rags).

Ryuji Danma

Onizuka's best buddy and his 'sidekick' from his gangland days. In the years since he went straight, Ryuji has set up his own used motorcycle shop and profits greatly from it. He refers Onizuka to Holy Forest Academy when his buddy is down on his luck.

Later events show the bond between gangbangers isn't solid, when he refuses to lend Onizuka any money to cover the 8-million-yen cost of a school trip to Okinawa - at least not until he clears up his own million-large debts with Ryuji.

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