That's What Love Is: Kou Kou Kyoushi

In 2021, the anime series Wonder Egg Priority attracted a cult audience thanks to its beautiful animation and complex characters. Then the show’s production collapsed, the script took one wrong turn too many, and a disastrous delayed finale killed any lingering affection for the show. Several of its staff escaped the smouldering wreckage to do great work elsewhere. Meanwhile, its audience moved on to the next big thing.

I wasn’t ready to move on yet, though. You see, Wonder Egg Priority hurt me. I resented it, but also (deep down) felt a kind of grudging admiration. Who thought they could get away with this? One name rose above the rest: Shinji Nojima, an acclaimed scriptwriter for Japanese dramas. His cache was likely what allowed Wonder Egg Priority to be made in the first place.

So I did some research. I looked up every show Shinji Nojima had ever made. Then I went looking for other series that Japanese drama fans called the best of the best: The Great White Tower, Dakara Watashi wa Oshimashita, Soredemo Ikite Yuku. I also read up on the most popular scriptwriters, like Yuji Sakamoto, Kankuro Kudo and Akiko Nogi.

Eventually I decided it was time to confront Nojima on his home turf. So I chose his 1993 drama High School Teacher, or Kou Kou Kyoushi. It is not necessarily the best or most popular series written by Nojima. But it was the first of his “social dramas,” which tackle taboo topics, to find success. Since the darker aspects of Wonder Egg Priority spoke to me, I figured it was as good a place to start as any.

High School Teacher follows a scientist named Takao Hamura. After being let go from the medical facility where he works, he becomes a biology teacher at a high school for girls. In time he hopes to earn his spot back at the facility, marry his former boss’s daughter and become a renowned medical researcher. Instead his life is derailed when a student of his, named Mayu, spots his fiance cheating on him. Hamura and Mayu become close and eventually fall in love despite the fact that Mayu is a teenager and Hamura is over thirty years old.

It’s easy to see how the series made such a splash at the time. First of all, it has a fantastic cast, including a young Hiroyuki Sanada playing the role of Takao. The music is composed by Akira Senju, who anime fans may recognize from his work on Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood among others. High School Teacher is also a consistently good looking show, particularly when it comes to lighting and shot composition.

The characters have that Wonder Egg complexity to them while still being easy to root for. Sanada plays Hamura as an everyman hiding deep hurt and frustration underneath his placid exterior. Mayu comes off as a manic pixie dream girl at times, but actress Sachiko Sakurai plays her so that you’re constantly watching her face to see what she’s really thinking. My personal favorite is the P.E. teacher Toru Shinjyo; while he’s strict and sometimes cruel to his students, outside of work he’s a divorced single dad with a heart of gold.

Nojima’s script portrays school as a warzone and students as a danger to their adult supervisors. These kids commit petty crimes, talk back to adults and solicit sex for money. There’s a great sequence in the second episode that cuts between Hamura at school and Mayu at the mall. While Mayu confronts Takao’s fiance about the fact she is cheating on him, Hamura is forced to do push-ups by the high school basketball team he is expected to coach. The tension builds and builds until Mayu pushes the fiance down an escalator. As a viewer, you have to wonder: what won’t these high school students do when provoked?

Then again, Nojima doesn’t let adults off the hook either. The school’s administrators care less about their students than they do about maintaining an aura of prestige. Tomoki Fujimura, a popular English teacher beloved by his students, is a serial rapist who blackmails his victims with video footage of his crimes. Then there’s Mayu’s father, a famous artist who in his very first scene gouges plaster from a naked female statue with a scraper. You know immediately that he’s bad news; the only question is just how monstrous he is.

Running underneath all of this is a theme of incompetent teachers. Sure, Fujimura is the worst of all. But Hamura, who dumps all his trauma on the first student willing to listen to his problems, doesn't set a great example either. Shinjyo is the only teacher who takes his responsibilities seriously. He’s also the most unpleasant to be around while on duty at school. That’s Nomura’s sense of humor for you.

High School Teacher aired a year after the premiere of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in Japan. While I can’t say for sure, I suspect that this series was influenced by Lynch. Partly because Mayu’s story is (to be reductive) a spin on Laura Palmer. But also because High School Teacher’s signature move is the sudden pivot from soap opera to suspense thriller and horror story. No matter how much of a “serious drama” it might appear to be on the surface, the series is at its heart a schlocky Grand Guignol in which seemingly ordinary people are revealed to be monsters.

At the beginning of the series, we see Hamura reading Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Hamura will lecture to anybody who will listen that Dawkins believes animals are driven not by logic or responsibility but impulse. We learn that Hamura’s peers are driven by these illicit desires. Yet Hamura, too, is subject to this same principle. His refusal to acknowledge this over the course of the series inflicts as much damage as it prevents. When he finally accepts it, it ruins his life, but finally grants him happiness.

I liked the ending of High School Teacher much better than Wonder Egg Priority’s finale. The last few minutes leave Hamura and Mayu’s fates ambiguous but imply just enough through blocking and motif to break your heart. There’s even a magic trick at the very end that I’m shocked they managed to pull off. It’s like if the series finale of The Sopranos aired 14 years earlier in 1993.

So, does this series prove once and for all that Shinji Nojima have the juice? Well, yes and no. Everything I wrote above is true: this is a series that is thoughtful, well-crafted and often astonishing for the time at which it was made. Unfortunately, the worm that killed Wonder Egg Priority is here too, even at this early stage in Nojima’s career.

Nojima is excellent at writing male fuck-ups. We see how Hamura’s unwillingness to acknowledge what he wants hurts the people closest to him; how Fujimura’s abuse comes from a fear of adult women and a sincere desire to be loved; how even a bro like Shinjyo can have a temper he isn’t proud of. Even Mayu’s father, who might as well be a monster out of fairy tales, feels real pain at being separated from his daughter. 

Where Nojima fell short in Wonder Egg Priority, and where he also stumbles here, is writing women, particularly adult women. He does not give them the same affordances that he grants his male characters. Instead they are one-note. Hamura’s fiance is shallow and materialistic. Hamura’s teaching assistant is jealous of Mayu. Mayu’s classmate Asami hates Hamura because she is gay and wants Mayu for herself. (Yes, this character is why folks say High School Teacher has “LGBTQ rep.”) 

The two female characters who are written to be sympathetic are Mayu and her best friend Naoko. Nao is easy to like because she does her best to help out her friends despite being abused weekly by Fujimura the English teacher. Mayu on the other hand is tough to figure out. Sometimes she does funny, whimsical things like drawing cats on Hamura’s foot with marker. At other times she clearly knows more than she lets on. She’s an out-of-her-depth child, conniving manipulator and tortured victim depending on what Nojima needs from her.

Sachiko Sakurai does her best to knit these contradictions together. You look at her face and see a psychology there, even if she’s selective about what she chooses to share. Yet as the series continued I couldn’t help but wonder: how much of this is Sakurai’s doing and how much is Nojima’s? Remove Sakurai and Mayu becomes a symbolic rock at sea for Hamura to wreck himself on. Sakurai is the key ingredient that makes the character a person.

What makes critiquing Nojima complicated is that he loves leaving empty spaces. You’re supposed to wonder if Hamura is admirable or a hypocrite, because that’s what makes him interesting. So when I see characters like Mayu, or even somebody like Hamura’s teaching assistant, I worry if what I think of as failures of imagination are in fact purposeful. Why should you be able to grasp the nature of somebody like Mayu? What’s wrong with ambiguity? Isn’t that why Nojima left the world of live action for the anime industry?

When Nojima does choose to clarify through his script, though, his answers are always revealing. Later in the series, when Hamura speaks with Shinjyo about how to keep Mayu safe from her father, Shinjyo suggests that he just let Mayu return home. “She’ll find another man her age,” he says, “and he’ll keep her safe.” Shinjyo is the closest thing that High School Teacher has to a moral compass, and here he suggests that if Mayu just returns to her abusive family, everything will work out. Is that really the right choice?

One of my favorite characters in the 2011 drama Soredemo Ikite Yuku is Kyoko Nomoto, played by Shinobu Otake. At the beginning of the story her young daughter is murdered by a friend of her son. She swears vengeance against the murderer’s family and writes them threatening letters in secret. Eventually, though, she faces her trauma and grief. The scriptwriter Yuji Sakamoto gives her a long monologue where she describes a dream she had, where she met her dead daughter and found peace. The show is confident enough to center her for the whole sequence and Otake sells it. You believe in that moment that a real person, not a fictional character, is talking to you.

I don’t think Nojima has it in him to write a character like Kyoko, and that’s where High School Teacher falls short. Despite its interest in how institutional corruption ruins the lives of the marginalized, the script consistently shows more interest in the psychology of their abusers than the marginalized themselves. When characters like Nao do speak their truth, it’s always a truism, like “you must never trust men” or “you need an adult woman to love you, because they take love more seriously than men.” I’d believe that Nojima has adapted with the times since except that a surprising amount of this made its way untouched into Wonder Egg Priority. That’s one reason it bombed.

I came to High School Teacher because I wanted to understand Shinji Nojima. Did he fall off as a writer after his golden years in the 90s, or was he never any good to begin with? What I’ve learned is that even during his golden period, Nojima had the same strengths and weaknesses that dog his work today, just in different proportions. He’s a fuck-up just like Hamura. That’s okay, though. Nojima’s just one guy among others who made his mark in a sea of stories. I might never have known had I not chased this thread. That’s what love is.

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