Posted in: Comics, Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh | Tagged: Assassination Classroom, entertainment, japan

To Sir with Love, Tentacles and Murder – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Published Mon, 09 Mar 2015 14:30:02 -0500

Last updated Mon, 09 Mar 2015 19:17:59 -0500

Adi Tantimedh writes,

Oh Japan, don't ever change.

At the corner of my mind's eye, Assassination Classroom has been lingering like that weird kid at the back of class who cracks strange jokes to get everyone's attention. He's so weird that he's impossible to ignore.

The entire setting and mood of the series is completely absurd: Koro-sensei is a multi-tentacled, Lovecraftian horror with a smiley face for a head. He has already blown up the moon and proven impervious to attempts to kill him with armies and assassins. He has vowed to destroy the Earth in a year, but until has negotiated a temporary truce with the world's governments where he would teach high school while inviting his students to try their best to kill him and save the world. There's a $100 billion reward to whoever succeeds in killing him, and he happily teaches his students the ways of assassination on top of the usual school topics. He turns out to be the best teacher the students ever had. They like him, but they still want to kill him. Hilarity ensues.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xyrFw8Uo9Y[/youtube]

I was aware of the original manga series since it started back in 2012 and read the first few chapters. At the time, I didn't really think about it other than that it was all rather silly and batshit insane as only Japan tends to be.

More than two years later, the series has proven to be wildly popular and successful, enough to earn an anime adaptation (currently being running in Japan and simulcast streaming on Funimation and Hulu), a video game spinoff and a live action movie. It's so popular in Western anime fandom that Viz Media have started publishing the English translation of the manga. Time to take a closer look, then.

The anime series is more focused on slapstick comedy than the manga, which has a greater emphasis on escalating blockbuster action setpieces, but the story and subtexts remain the same: this is a nutty twist on the Saviour Teacher genre that goes all the way back to To Sir With Love and continued in Hollywood movies like Stand By Me and Dangerous Minds, and still popular in Japan with series like GTO (where a biker gang hoodlum becomes a high school teacher) and Gokusai (where a Yakuza mafia princess becomes a high school teacher), which also spawned anime and live action TV series and movies. Even the alien's nickname "Koro-sensei" is a play on words that means "Unkillable Teacher". You might wonder about the disturbing images of high school students taking up guns and knives to plot to kill their teacher, but that might explain why the series has been so popular. What teenage student hasn't thought about killing their teacher at some point or another? The comedy comes from the students continuing to learn from the teacher while they try to kill him, often at the same time as it becomes utterly normal.

When you want to know what's really on the mind of a society, look at its pop culture. Japan is an orderly, buttoned-down and repressed nation, and Assassination Classroom is a sign of its id and obsessions bursts forth in its pop culture like a flood of sticky fluids from a ruptured dam. No one in America would dare pitch anything like this, since school shootings are a major crisis point, whereas in placid Japan, anything goes in fiction.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6U3zFYRPvM[/youtube]

The series is a catalogue of social issues that plague Japan and schools: bullying, discrimination, class tension, the need for social stability and cohesion, the need to belong, and finding the strength to overcome one's weaknesses… all in the name of training to murder a goofy alien who enjoys messing with his would-be killers every time he thwarts them. Yet he's also like Sidney Poitier in To Sir With Love, willing to go to any lengths to help his students improve their grades and become better people. Series creator Yusei Matsui has said that he identifies most with Koro-Sensei, which makes the character one of the nuttiest Mary-Sues ever. And the character is very much a Mary-Sue: he has superpowers, is smarter than everyone in the room, gets away with making silly jokes all the time and can generally out-think anyone that tries to get one over on him, always five steps ahead. He really is unkillable and is taunting the world by inviting them to kill him, yet has a soft spot for the bad luck high school students he wants to redeem. And little by little, the students do become better – they become a well-oiled team that can work together better than the other classes and even the armies of killers that keep coming to the school to try to claim the $100 million. It's all very heart-warming in a psychotic kind of way.

The most disturbing subtext here is the weaponizing of teenagers. The students here are being militarised so as to become useful members of society as their teacher acts as an oddly tender trainer and drill sergeant. That's in keeping with the current neo-fascistic, right-wing shift in Japan. All of this is sugar-coated in a light-hearted slapstick comedy. You can feel the plot elements appealing to the parts of the audience's brain that craves escapism and thrills and it all goes down a treat. Western anime fans tend to miss the social contexts and undercurrents that inform a lot of anime, and it's very telling that these types of messages are being delivered in series set in high school where teenagers are the target audience. It's effective because it's so entertaining and popular. Propaganda works best when it's fun.

So hey, Japan, maybe you should change. Like maybe be less fascist?

Procrastination Classroom at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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