GTO Manga Creator Shows His Frustration With Kodansha

The popular manga series GTO, which follows a former bike gang member who becomes an unconventional high school teacher, is getting a new live-action television special in Japan this year, but the series’ original creator Tohru Fujisawa, who writes and draws the series with his studio, is dissatisfied with his publisher Kodansha about it. It appears that the publisher is supposedly placing a higher priority on the TV special while disregarding the ongoing manga series GTO: Paradise Lost.

Takashi Sorimachi, the original star of the 1998 hit live-action series, will play Eikichi Onizuka, a former juvenile offender and member of a biker gang, in the new live-action special GTO Revival, which will have its premiere in the spring of 2024. Onizuka chose to become a high school teacher not for any altruistic motives, but rather so that he could date high school girls. GTO is an acronym for “Great Teacher Onizuka.” And the misogyny in the series was out of this world. Everyone finds that creepy. 

Instead of attempting to sleep with high school students, Onizuka learns that he does, in fact, have morals and a conscience, and he ends up devoting his time to assisting troubled students and repeatedly saving them. Since helping children becomes more important to him than getting laid than getting laid, Onizuka, who is a virgin when he starts teaching, never loses it during the entire series. Whenever Onizuka sought to indulge in his horniness, he was regularly made fun of and had to suffer. Even though Sorimachi is clearly far over his twenties at this point, it might seem a little strange to see him reprise his role as the 20-something Onizuka. But who are we to pass judgment? Fujisawa tweeted his displeasure with how his manga series was currently being handled by Kodansha:

“I’m glad that GTO is coming back after such a long time, but the final chapter of GTO, “Paradise Lost,” which was published in Kodansha’s Young Magazine, was kicked out of the magazine midway through and is currently on hiatus, and when it comes to dramas, it always comes to the fore.・What do you think of a company like this? I wonder if some other publisher will take over the copyright…”

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The original GTO manga had a peak run of twenty-five collected volumes from 1997 to 2002. It was followed by two spinoff manga series, GTO: 14 Days in Shonan in 2009, and the most recent sequel series, GTO: Paradise Lost, which debuted in 2014. In 1999, it gave rise to an anime series (now streaming on Crunchyroll), and in 1998, Takashi Sorimachi became a household name in Japan thanks to a 43-episode live-action series. 

It was revealed that the series would take a break and return in early summer 2023 in the final new chapter of GTO: Paradise Lost, which appeared on February 13 in Weekly Young Magazine 2023 Issue No. 11. Fujisawa is annoyed since it doesn’t appear to be returning. This is somewhat of a tempest in the manga industry because in Japan, it is uncommon for a mangaka to openly express an issue they are having with their publisher.