Creative Staff
Story: Tohru Fujisawa
Art: Tohru Fujisawa
What They Say
After cracking down on troubled teens in his own school, Eikichi (aka GTO) goes home to the peaceful shores of Shonan to relax and escape the stresses of modern-day Tokyo. However, much like communities across the globe, even his hometown has not escaped the declining state of child services. In typical form, GTO decides to personally provide hard-knocks education to his old neighborhood with hopes of putting a group of troubled teens back on the track towards happiness.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The storyline involving Sakurako is one that is certainly difficult to watch, especially since the book does provide the usual disturbing real world data on just how poorly prosecuted abuse is all around. For Sakurako, her life has been hard from the start because of her father with how he abused her mother, openly in front of her, and caused it so that she and her mother were often on the run, trying to find a new safe place to hide out for awhile. And even when they managed to escape for awhile, Sakurako was often alone since her mother worked nights and she spent her days in daycare, making it hard to really have a bond. It went even worse when the abuse began to be heaped upon Sakurako herself from her father, starting a young age and just inflicting deep wounds that aren’t all that visible to others who don’t know how to look.
In the present, matters become far more complicated when Sakurako’s father has decided that now’s the time to put his plan into motion, which involves a lot of money and getting others to do the dirty work, especially in getting Sakurako’s mother committed to a hospital so he can become sole custodian and retrieve her from the White Swan. That naturally doesn’t go over well with anyone there, but they do it pretty efficiently and confidently, which pushes back against their own belief in what’s right. While we do get to see that Sakurako is drawn back into her old, terrible life, we also get to see how the White Swan kids fix it by getting a little help from Urumi, who always has great ways of making things difficult for adults. It’s all a bit forced and quick to occur, but you have to love when a bad man gets taken down, and taken down for more than he was involved with in order to make it stick for a long, long time.
As this volume is getting close to bringing things to an end, we also get a lot of time with Uchiyamada, who has his own terrible summer break go even worse when he hooks up with the group home manager in Shonan and the two realize they both have the same nemesis. And like middle aged men, they decide that a pre-celebration is in order and that means lots of drinking and strip clubs with young girls are in order. It’s very, very sexual and fun to watch, especially as the pair end up in a couple of clip joints which just goes from bad to worse quicker than you can imagine. Seeing Uchiyamada in this situation is definitely fun and in character and provides him with some very necessary material to show what he’s been up to and how he views life in a few ways too.
The series also starts to segue into its final run to some degree as we see more of the Mayor’s policy going into effect as he’s desperate to make a return of someone in order to show that it’s going right. That has Ikuko being up next, which the Mayor manipulates by bringing her mother directly and massaging the situation well enough to hammer it into everyone that it’s the right thing, particularly since the media is there and it gets Ikuko to realize that maybe things have changed. And in a lot of ways, you really do want to believe that – especially when you see the damage that Ikuko has suffered from her mother – but you know that the series won’t give you that kind of uplifting moment. It has to go darker and deeper into things so that we see that these kids are really at the end of their ropes and with no other options.
In Summary
GTO: 14 Days In Shonan has a very strong volume here as it works several different storylines to try and work through some of the remaining issues. As creepy as Sakurako’s story is, there’s a lot of fun to it as well since Urumi gets involved and it goes as big as it does. The Uchiyamada material was definitely a big highlight as well since he’s such a fun character to watch and he gets involved in a lot of perverted material here in a way. But the book stays true to what it wants to do in the end in having Onizuka make it clear that he can help these kids and that he will go the distance, and bringing Ikuko’s story into the spotlight once more definitely is the right thing to do, especially with how she tries to match up her friends in the home by looking for a way to live her life going forward. And that’s hugely inspirational.
Content Grade: B+
Art Grade: B
Packaging Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Vertical
Release Date: March 26th, 2013
MSRP: $10.95
