Manga by Toru Fujisawa, published in 1997, and more commonly known as GTO. Story revolves around a 22-year old, former bosozoku named Eikichi Onizuka. He is a chain-smoking virgin whose hobby is looking up the skirts of Tokyo schoolgirls but who boasts great skills in karate (2nd dan).

Onizuka decides to become a teacher when a liaison at a love hotel with a high school girl turns sour. The girl has told him she is on the outs with her boyfriend, who turns out to be her teacher, and shows up outside the love hotel. She jumps from the window to be with the short, bald, ugly man, leaving Onizuka speechless.

After a series of misadventures, Onizuka becomes a teacher, after which he embarks upon a whole new series of misadventures. Each segment of the manga is called a "lesson". The manga was rather popular, and led to both a live-action and animated TV series.

For those not gifted with Japanese gab, Kodansha Bilingual Comics has published three compilations of GTO. Characters' words appear in English inside the speech bubbles, with the original Japanese (kanji and kana) in small print outside the frame. Sound effects appear within the frame in either one language or the other; the translation appears outside the frame. Recommended for those seeking to improve their reading skills, as well as those interested in picking up Japanese slang.

Volume One contains Lessons 1-5. Volume Two contains Lessons 6-14. Volume Three contains Lessons 15-23. Sadly, Kodansha has not published Volume 4 yet, and it has been nearly nine months since Volume Three appeared. Since volumes 1-3 appeared within four months of each other, it is possible that Kodansha will not publish future bilingual volumes.

There is also a TV movie and an OAV special. Nice tidbit of information: Takashi Sorimachi, the actor of Onizuka, and the actress of his love interest Fuyutsuki-sensei became a couple and eventually married in real life.

Basically, the main point of the stories is that Onizuka is outwardly rude, lecherous and agressive - exactly the kind of guy no father would want their daughter to date - yet it turns out that in truly critical situations, he shows far more integrity, ethics and selflessness than any of the higher-than-though people who look down on him and bad-mouth him. For example, while he loves looking under girls' skirts, he fends off several attempts of schoolgirls to seduce him; in contrast it turns out one of his worst enemies among the teachers is habitually groping women on crowded trains and another put cameras in the girls' toilet. In a way, it's a statement against judging people by appearances.

It's also quite interesting to look at the differences between the manga and the dorama: because the TV drama has only 12 episodes, the writer had to select which of the manga stories to use, and in order to keep it coherent, many details had to be changed and some roles were merged. However, they did a good job, and both versions of the story are equally funny, exciting and sometimes touching.

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