Great Teacher Onizuka

Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers!

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:

1) He has a conscience and a sense of morality. This means taking advantage of impressionable schoolgirls is out.

2) He enjoys teaching.

3) 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 philosphy 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.

Manga (Books)

Anime Directed by Noriyuki Abe[?] and Naoyasu Hanyu[?] of Madhouse Studios[?].

Characters

The main characters are as follows:

Eikichi Onizuka

Onizuka 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 Nobura 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 group four of the second year, a class so bad it has already made three teachers psychotic.

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.

Noburo 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.

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 Uehara

Anko is one of the students in Onizuka's class. She is a typical female bully and Noburo is often on the short end of this.

However, after a particular degrading attack on Noburo, Onizuka ambushes Anko and two of her friends at a local Karaoke bar, taking some rather embarrasing 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 Noburo and others.

At some point after this, however, Anko switches sides (the reason for this is not clear) and even helps Onizuka when Miyabi sets up the embezzlement of the school trip fund.

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-moko.

After initially messing up her role in one of Anko's plans to get Onizuka fired, she is cut off from Anko'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 Aizawa

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 behing the school trip embezzlement, in which she blackmails a teacher 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 two friends up with a Sadomasochistic group, where she is narrowly saved from being raped by Onizuka.

Urumi Kanzaki

Urumi is a child genius, with an IQ over 200. However, she is also psychologically disturbed, with a hatred of teachers inparticular.

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.

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.

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 Noburo from killing himself, Uchiyamada wants Onizuka fired.