Character · Great Teacher Onizuka
Eikichi Onizuka
A twenty-two-year-old ex-gang leader takes a teaching job for the worst possible reasons and turns out to be the best teacher in the building.
In Otakana the clue reads: Ex-biker who becomes a high school teacher
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Great Teacher Onizuka
- Letters
- 7 · Hard
Onizuka's stated ambition is to become a great teacher, and his actual motivation is that schools contain girls. He arrives at a private academy with a criminal record, a scooter, no qualifications worth mentioning and a class that has already destroyed several adults. The students of 3-4 do not play pranks. They ruin careers deliberately, having worked out that a teacher can be removed with the right rumour and a little patience.
What breaks the pattern is that Onizuka does not care about his career. He cannot be blackmailed, embarrassed or driven out, because he has no dignity to protect and nothing to lose. So the war becomes personal, and one at a time he works out what each child is actually frightened of. The methods are indefensible: he cheats, lies, breaks into houses and hits people. The results are hard to argue with.
Tohru Fujisawa serialised GTO in Weekly Shonen Magazine from 1997 to 2002, twenty-five volumes, following the same character from an earlier biker series. The anime and a live action drama both landed in 1998, and the drama was one of the highest rated of its year.
Spelling ONIZUKA
ONIZUKA is seven letters and the game wants the family name, not Eikichi. 鬼塚 is oni, demon, plus tsuka, mound, and the T softens to a Z when the two halves join, which is why the middle looks wrong to anyone reasoning from the parts. Three A-and-U vowels after the opening ONI. Demon mound is a fair description of the man.