Great Teacher Onizuka Vol. # 25 and Series Review

Archive

Reviewer: Jimmy Lin
Story Title: N/A

By: Tohru Fujisawa
Translated by: Dan Papia
Edited by: Luis Reyes
Publisher: Tokyopop

Would you believe me if I told you that a manga about a first-year sociology teacher could be one of the funniest things you’d ever read?

No? Okay, how about the fact that he’s also a bleached-blonde high school drop-out ex-biker karate champion with the tact and brains of “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan and the sex drive of a bunny on Spanish fly, tiger penis, and crystal meth?

And that the manga involves lots of explosions, tropical beaches, high-school uniforms everywhere, big titties, and yakuza?

Got your attention now? Good. ‘Cause GTO deserves your attention, you little punks, and don’t you forget it.

It’s been about 3 years since Tokyopop released GTO Vol. 1, and the ride has been glorious. GTO enjoyed unparalleled popularity during its run in Japan, which included an animated and live-action series. The series finale of the live-action show was the most-watched television event in Japanese history, and considering how the Japanese love their TV, that’s nothing to sneeze at. Vol. 25 closes out the manga, and although I enjoyed the antics and mayhem, I was a little disappointed at the note with which the story ended.

It’s a simple story; Eikichi Onizuka, 22 years old, a virgin and legendary Shonan Beach biker, decides to become a teacher. Not just any teacher, though – Onizuka is determined to become the greatest teacher in Japan. That he’s a high school drop-out who’s barely managing to graduate from a fifth-rate college doesn’t deter him for a second; his tenacity is his second most important asset (his first is his unusual ability to withstand physical punishment). What initially draws him into the field of education is the prospect of sleeping with high school girls, but soon after his student-teaching period, he realizes that he’s just one of the kids at heart, and that maybe the lack of that empathy is how the school system fails so many students.

Early in the series, Fujisawa establishes a pattern: a student lashes out at Onizuka, and Onizuka – through a combination of muscles, fast driving, ultra-violence, and a simple foreward looking, positive philosophy – solves the student’s problems and then wins them over. Some of the issues are pretty mundane (parents who are drifting apart, ennui) and some are not so ordinary (suicide attempts, having your test tube origins exposed to all your peers in a seedy way) but whatever the situation, the result is always spectacular. A rather understated solution is knocking down a bedroom wall with a sledgehammer. A more violent one entails beating up a group of yakuza as they prepare to videotape the rape of a kidnapped student. Still another involves crawling through the Okinawan jungles with a supergenius on his back and a buttplug up his… well, where else would a buttplug go?

Throughout the hijinks there’s a moral lesson to be imparted, and Onizuka is somehow usually the one with the lesson. Despite the moronic things that spew from his mouth, Onizuka manages to convey meaning and vibrance into his students’ lives. Somehow, it all ties together, from the late-night car chases to rubbing f-cup bras on his crotch to hitting on Kunio’s (really hot) mom.

In the last story arc things take a different turn. Fed up with the mayhem, a certain faction of the Holy Forest Academy’s board hires a beautiful young headmistress to reform the school (and get rid of Onizuka, in the first place). Ms. Daimon hands out PDA’s to the entire student and faculty bodies on her first day, a seemingly generous gesture, but there’s an insidious plan being implemented. A team of special plants known as “Angels” infiltrate the school. They’re sort of angsty teen ninjas – all of them had experienced severe emotional trauma, were rescued and provided for by Ms. Daimon, trained in Tae Kwon Do, and dedicated to learning every student’s dirty little secrets. The PDAs’ wireless e-mail capability is key to executing Daimon’s plan – expose some dirty secrets of the students and faculty to drive them out of Holy Forest, leaving a docile, cowed, and compliant group behind. Unfortunately, nothing seems to work in Onizuka’s case; expelling him from his on-campus digs only leads him to live in a tricked-out delivery truck, and the faculty point system only brings out the best in his students, as they succeed in bringing a yakuza heir back to the school, earning Onizuka more than enough points to make up for his delinquencies.

It’s after single-handedly beating up a gang of street punks and saving a group of Angels (and taking down the gossip network in the process) that Onizuka is diagnosed with several cerebral aneurysms. It’s kinda like Rocky V; if he sustains more head trauma, the effects could be catastrophic. The problem is that most crises that arise seem to involve head trauma (his). Up through this point in the series, the man’s foiled at least three suicide attempts by grabbing the kids and shielding them from impact. Onizuka has been shot several times, been hit by a couple of cars, and crashed through a window after swinging across downtown Tokyo on a rope.

This little bit of information makes its way to the Angels, and one particularly psychotic little twerp decides that he’s going to kill Onizuka to regain Ms. Daimon’s favor. When Vol. 25 opens, the school is in flames, Onizuka’s in a coma, and Ms. Daimon’s pyro past is repeating itself. It’s at this point that the series could have really given itself a dynamic feel by ending with one of the series’ central themes – that it’s the students that need to save themselves and Onizuka is merely the one who has given them the motivation to do so. Unfortunately (from an aesthetic perspective), Fujisawa has Onizuka awake from his coma to save the day in a literal blaze of glory. The story ends with everything effectively returning to status quo – a bright shining future ahead of our block-headed hero and his students with nay-sayers being converted along the way. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fine ending to a great story, but it’s not the strongest narrative approach that Fujisawa could have taken. In addition, there are too many loose ends left untied. The romance angle between Onizuka and Fuyutsuki is never resolved -Asuza’s confession of love in Volume 24 is left dangling in the epilogue, and that just feels very wrong. There’s comedy gold in that romance, and Fujisawa could have given us a taste of sweet, sweet candy.

GTO actually ends about halfway through the book of Volume 25. The rest of the book is a randomly shifting story about putting together a 43-page filler story for a manga anthology in a week. Fujisawa himself is the main character, and he’s lured into this impossible task by the promise of a company-paid trip to Okinawa to feast on coconut crab. He and his editor friends try to create a passable story, but the effort becomes more and more ridiculous with each passing iteration. Fujisawa, with coconut crab on the brain, starts with the touching story of a poor island girl who eats nothing but coconut crabs. Unfortunately, each time a story review is conducted, someone else takes the tale in another absurd direction. By the time the story is accepted, the island girl has sucked venom out of a very naughty place, fought a magic sword battle with demons, and conducted biker warfare against her best friend (who’s really her sister). Each stupid story is told through the very clichéd eyes of another manga genre. It’s a parody of Excel Saga, but it’s a hundred times funnier.