Great Teacher Onizuka (more commonly abbreviated to GTO) is a manga and anime series created by Tohru Fujisawa.
Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers!
Table of contents |
2 Media Information 3 Characters |
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
The main characters are as follows:
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Miyabi is another pupil in Onizuka's class, and seems to hate teachers quite severely.
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.
Urumi is a child genius, with an IQ over 200. However, she is also psychologically disturbed, specifically having an intense hatred of teachers.
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). 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.Anime
Directed by Noriyuki Abe and Naoyasu Hanyu of Madhouse Studios.Characters
Eikichi Onizuka
Nanako Mizuki
Noboru Yoshikawa
Anko Uehara
Tomoko Nomura
Miyabi Aizawa
Urumi Kanzaki