Identifying with a Dark Lady

Japanese soap operas differ from their American counterparts in a number of ways. The most obvious distinction is the fact that all of the Japanese ones are miniseries, i.e. they only last one season. If a certain drama is particularly popular, a sequel may appear at a future date, but the single-season run always has a very definite beginning, middle, and climax. That usually means plots that are far more solid and less convoluted then the on-and-on-and-ongoing American soaps. Sure, most Japanese TV dramas are rather cliche love-triangle stories, but a lot of them are very unique and interesting. Some are just plain bizarre.



My wife almost always has one particular drama that is her soup de saison, so to speak. I tend to be rather apathetic toward them. However, every once in a while one of the networks puts on a drama that is either so interesting or so audacious that I wind up getting wrapped up in it. That has happened again recently, and this particular drama is as disturbing as it is entertaining, particularly because of the unique relationship my wife and I have with it.

The name of this drama is "Jo'ou no Kyoushitsu" (女王の教室, lit. "The Queen's Classroom"), and it was apparently taken from a novel. It centers around Ms. Akutsu, a female elementary school teacher who seems to be quite literally a Dark Overlady from Hell^TM. She dresses all in black, keeps her hair tied up so tight you could bounce a 100-yen coin on it, and maintains an icy glare that would freeze the blood of a balrog. When she walks into the classroom, you can almost hear minor chords and Latin chanting in the background. (In fact, come to think of it, sometimes you really do!) To say that she runs a tight ship would be an understatement. She is ruthless and cruel, particularly to the girl who is the drama's #1 protagonist and anyone who befriends her. However, at the same time she strangely dismisses with icy contempt the class screw-off, a boy with attention deficit disorder (among other problems) who is the show's #2 protagonist. Malevolence personified, some of the things she does are unbelievable in their sheer audacity. While her fellow teachers constantly try to get her to lighten up, first with rhetoric (that only gets them frosted in return) and then with underhandedness (which creates more problems than it solves), Ms. Akutsu drives her charges mercilessly. Any attempt to impress her or get a speck of warmth out her ends in cryogenic doom.



The girl who is the primary target of her wrath has a strong personality and is a natural leader type. Not willing to take Ms. Akutsu's cruelty sitting down, she and her friends are constantly trying to come up with ways to defy their Dark Overlady. It never works. The Black Teacher from Gehenna^TM seems to have an almost supernatural knack for figuring them out and turning their plots against them. Most of the time the lead protagonist just winds up giving her famous look of imminent doom:



However, Ms. Akutsu always seems to keep turning out to be right in the end. Even her most unbelievably sinister acts have a tendency to come out for the better, with someone learning a very valuable life lesson in the process. The harried students finally figure that out when the Dark Overlady is finally removed, not because of the various machinations of the students and faculty but because of a mysterious illness that has something to do with her shadowy past. As soon as Ms. Akutsu is replaced by one of her more typical, kinder, gentler (and more indulgent) fellow teachers, the students realize just how much they've all grown thanks to the Dark Overlady and try to get her back. In the end, they realize that Ms. Akutsu showed them far more genuine love than anyone else on the school's faculty.

That was the original series. The sequel has just come on, and this time the main point is Ms. Akutsu's strange past, when she started out as a more typical, kinder, gentler teacher herself but learned her own brutal lessons the hard way. Even so, as with the first series, there are two main themes that keep popping up:

1. Love and indulgence are not the same thing.
2. There is far more to education than just passing tests and graduating from a prestigious school.

You have to understand that both of these themes run completely counter to the culture of education and parenting in modern Japan. Overprotection and certification without content are the primary name of the game. (I should know. I teach at a "high-level", college-aimed school.) In the first series, the teacher that tries the hardest to bend or break Ms. Akutsu and then finally replaces her (to the students' eventual chagrin) keeps going on and on about how the most important thing for a teacher to do is to "love the children" (i.e. just smile sweetly and be nice to them all the time).

When I heard that, it immediately struck a nerve because Mr. O (among others at the academy) always spews the same line. We've even had more than one very heated argument about it. Anyway, I responded to what that teacher had said by echoing what I'd earlier said to Mr. O, "Love them? How the hell is spoiling them the same as loving them?"

An instant later, Ms. Akutsu said almost the exact same thing, albeit more dispassionately.

This sort of thing has happened to both my wife and I on several occasions.

You see, that's what's so disturbing about this drama. Ms. Akutsu is a dark demon of a teacher (by design, as it turns out) who thrives on cruel and unusual punishment. However, my wife and I keep finding ourselves agreeing 100% with her philosophies (though not necessarily with her methods). As with Ms. Akutsu, in our respective schools we are surrounded by fellow teachers that seem to live in some vacuous idealist's essay collection rather than the real world, and we find that a constant source of frustration. However, the popularity of this TV drama would seem to indicate that there are people out there that think the same way we do. I'll take that as a hopeful sign.

I don't intend to impersonate Darth Vader in my classes, however.