Happy belated Halloween folks as well as a good start into November. Sorry I'm late with this one. I'm trying to avoid that, but sometimes, real life just makes things difficult. So anyway, this week we're looking at the anime Gokusen. What is it with animators and yakuza anyway? Seems like the last couple of anime I've reviewed have both incorporated criminal syndicates somehow, and here we are with a main character who's actually the heir to a position of yakuza leadership. That's bad enough, but imagine what could happen if such a young woman wanted to become a high school teacher? That's the premise of this anime. So put away your shiv knives and get out the textbooks, school is in session.
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| The main cast. Yankumi, the protagonist, is the girl in the red jumpsuit in the center. |
Gokusen has been a number of things throughout the past few years. It's a story that's been made into several dramas, and a number of TV specials, along with a movie and the anime we're reviewing here. However, it got its start as a mange written for You magazine by Kozueko Morimoto, starting its run in August of 2000. Intended for a josei demographic, that is, a readership largely composed of adult females, it eventually became popular enough for an anime to be produced in 2004 which ran about 13 episodes, along with the other media described above. Those of you wishing to check it out yourselves in the USA can look for it under license by AnimeWorks. With such a vast amount of material behind it, one would expect such a story to really carry some weight. I don't know if the manga was any different, but as for myself, I'm not entirely sure that this series lives up to the hype.
Anyway, the story begins as our protagonist, Kumiko Yamaguchi starts her first day as a teacher at one of the worst schools in the district. However, it turns out that she has a secret. She is also the heir to an influential Yakuza family, and thus, much of the intended comedy and plot draws from her trying to balance her new responsibilities while keeping her past a secret. Even though the kids are basically a bunch of hoodlums, she slowly earns their respect while maintaining her position in the criminal underworld and avoiding being discovered. It's a pretty simple plot and it plays out rather predictably. You have the bullies trying settle scores with Kumiko (nicknamed Yankumi by her students) stepping in at every other opportunity to show them what a real ass kicking looks like. While I will admit some of the jokes are kind of funny, like when she has to cover herself when she accidentally slips into Yakuza jargon at odd moments, or acts scared when the police are nearby, for the most part, it's pretty easy to tell where things are going to go before anything even happens. If a bully shows up, there are only two possibilities, he will either fall to her wits or her brute force. Either way, she wins. It'd be okay if that was milked for comedy, but its not taken advantage of at all. Further, the melodrama is laid on so thick you'd need a carving knife just to cut through it. It's like watching a soap opera. Even the tiniest annoyance feels like its made out to be a huge emergency, which makes the dialog annoying as all get out.
As far as the characters are concerned, almost all of them are pretty stereotypical. You have one guy in the class who is the closest thing the show gets to having a bishounen (physically attractive for the uninitiated), and the rest of his classmates are a bunch of hoodlums who prefer acting out and causing trouble to actually being good, productive people. The other female teacher sounds like she would like to be having affairs with her students even as she tries to set the school up with a choir club (dear god, I never want to hear those guys sing again, I was begging for it to stop by the time that episode was over.) The principle is a dirty old man who wouldn't know how to wipe his own butt if he could find it (most of, if not all of, the students are equally perverted), and the assistant principle is so obviously a rat-faced villain (if he looked any more like a rat, he'd have a tail and round ears) that there is never any mystery about it when someone starts sabotaging the school. It was probably intentional that Yankumi was made out to be one of the only competent people in the show, which makes you really worry about Japan's school system. Then there's the yakuza characters. They act pretty much the way you'd expect yakuza thugs to act. The only one that's really of note is Yankumi's dog, and that's only because he narrates. Otherwise, he's just kind of an annoying distraction. I guess it was kind of interesting to make the Ooedo group somewhat sympathetic, but at the same time, you have to be aware that they are criminals which creates a sort of values dissonance that might weird some out.
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| You know you want your kids to learns THIS in school! |
In all fairness, I've never been a huge fan of those "Mr. Holland's Opus" type stories where someone amazing comes to a school and teaches a class of rowdies and misfits something valuable about life. I'm the type that gets a lot more excited about epic space battles and daring adventures with sword and shield in hand. But even so, I find it even harder to give a show a good report when I don't feel like the characters get any good messages out of it. There is one exception. One of the messages that Yankumi brings the audience is that you don't have to be like your family if you don't want to. But at the same time, she blackens the moral spectrum by keeping one foot in the criminal side of her life even as she steps the other foot out into the world of teaching. What's the lesson here? That it's okay to be in the yakuza as long as you aren't caught? Anyone who knows anything about the yakuza should know that they are bad news to most people, and in some ways, I feel like their lives are almost glorified in a disturbing sort of way here. Further, none of the characters change that much by the end of the show, aside from Yankumi earning enough of their respect that they're willing to go out in a mob and beat up some toughs for her at the end of the series. (You know, there is such a thing as calling the police, guys. I believe the number is 110 in Japan, that's their job, look into it.) Then, as if to totally reverse the whole point of any message about being good productive people, once her secret is out, they keep her on as a teacher, even though she offered to resign, which totally blows off any suspension of disbelief that might have been left after the talking dog that apparently walks on two legs sometimes.
I'm really kind of sad that I was so disappointed, since apparently this story was popular enough in Japan to get so many other film and TV releases aside from this anime, and I find myself hoping that the live-action and manga material is way better than this. Visually, I can't say there's much to make this anime special, although I will say that at least the ending credits theme, Onore Michi by Aki Yashiro, was kind of nice. Making use of traditional instruments such as the koto, it was a nice end theme to an otherwise annoying piece of work. In spite of all the problems I had with it though, I will say that it could have been much much worse. At least it's not Tona-gura!, and that's the tiger's two cents.
Images taken from Gokusen.
