Great Teacher Onizuka (グレート・ティーチャー・オニズカ Gurēto Tīchā Onizuka?), officially abbreviated as
GTO, is a Japanese
shōnen manga written and illustrated by
Tohru Fujisawa. It was originally serialized in
Weekly Shōnen Magazine from May 1997 to April 2002. The story focuses on 22 year-old ex-
bōsōzoku member Eikichi Onizuka, who becomes a teacher at the private high school, Holy Forest Academy, in
Tokyo,
Japan. It won the 1998
Kodansha Manga Award for
shōnen,
[1] and is a continuation of Tohru Fujisawa's other manga series
Shonan Junai Gumi (lit. "Shōnan True Love Group") and
Bad Company, both of which focus on the life of Onizuka before he becomes a teacher in
Great Teacher Onizuka. As of 9 June 2009, a sequel to the
GTO manga was released in Kodansha's
Weekly Shōnen Magazine under the title
GTO - Shonan 14 Days.
Due to the popularity of the manga, several adaptations of
GTO were made. These adaptations include a twelve episode Japanese
television drama running from July to September 1998; a
live action film directed by
Masayuki Suzuki and released in 1999; and a 43 episode
anime television series, aired in Japan by
Fuji Television and
Animax from June 1999 to September 2000. Both the anime and manga have been licensed in North America by
Tokyopop. The Tokyopop version of the manga is out of print as of August 31, 2009
Plot
Eikichi Onizuka is a 22-year-old ex-gang member and a virgin. While peeping up girls' skirts at a local shopping mall, Onizuka meets a girl who agrees to go out on a
date with him. Onizuka's attempt to sleep with her fails when her current "boyfriend", her
teacher, shows up at the
love hotel they are in and asks her to return to him. The teacher is old and unattractive, but has sufficient influence over her that she leaps from a second story window and lands in his arms.
Onizuka, upon seeing this display of a teacher's power over girls, decides to become a teacher himself. In his quest, he discovers two important things: He has a conscience and a sense of morality. This means taking advantage of impressionable schoolgirls is out, but their unusually attractive mothers are a different matter. He enjoys teaching and, most of the time, he teaches life lessons rather than the routine schoolwork. He hates the systems of traditional education, especially when they have grown ignorant and condescending to students and their needs.
With these realizations, he sets out to become the greatest teacher ever, using his own brand of
philosophy and the ability to do nearly anything even when under enough pressure. He is hired as a long-shot teacher by a privately operated school to tame a class that has driven one teacher to a mysterious death, another to
nervous breakdown, and one other to joining a
cult. He embarks on a mission of self-discovery by breaking through to each
student one-by-one, and helping each student to overcome their problems and learn to genuinely enjoy life.
Shonan 14 Days
During summer vacation Onizuka tells a particularly bad story on live TV and decides to lie low until the outrage blows over. He goes back to his old stomping grounds in Shonan and runs into a friend of Azusa, a colleague of his from school, named Shiratori. She is a caregiver at the White Swan Youth Home which houses kids from broken homes. Shiratori invites him to stay with them and help out, and Onizuka obliges her in order to help the kids in the same manner he does at school.