The Impact of Gokusen (2002) and Its 17.4% Rating: What Was the 'Casting Reversal' That Produced Jun Matsumoto and Shun Oguri?

In 2002, if you tuned in to the channel at 10:00 PM on a Wednesday, you would find the daughter of a yakuza standing at the teacher's podium.

"Gokusen" was a school drama that aired on Nippon TV's Wednesday 10:00 PM slot from April 17 to July 3, 2002.
Based on the manga by Kozueko Morimoto,
it had a premise that was, if anything, too simple: the heiress of the Oedo yakuza clan hides her true identity to become a high school teacher.
The average viewership rating was 17.4%, with a peak of 23.5% for the final episode.
Originally planned for 11 episodes, the high ratings from the start led to an extension after the fifth episode, resulting in a 12-episode run.
It was one of the rare cases where the production team was overtaken by the viewership ratings.
The lead actress, Yukie Nakama, moved closer to becoming a national star with this drama.
She played a hot-blooded teacher in a tracksuit who yells, a far cry from the aloof air she displayed in "TRICK."
That gap itself became a hot topic.
The catchphrase was,
"More compassionate than that (long-haired) teacher. More reckless than that (Great) teacher."
As a third type of hot-blooded teacher, neither Kinpachi-sensei nor GTO, the character Yankumi became a staple in living rooms.
When discussing this drama, the casting of the students is impossible to ignore.
Jun Matsumoto as Shin Sawada, Shun Oguri as Haruhiko Uchiyama,
Yuma Ishigaki as Yoichi Minami, Hiroki Narimiya as Takeshi Noda,
and Tomohiro Waki as Teruo Kumai.
Furthermore, Kenichi Matsuyama as Kenichi Mori,
and Yusuke Kamiji as Yusuke Oishi.
At the time of filming, Jun Matsumoto was 18.

He did not yet have national popularity as part of Arashi,
and it was before his big break in "Hana Yori Dango."
Shun Oguri was 19.
Four years after playing a bullied child in "GTO,"
he was now standing on set as a blonde delinquent.
What is interesting is how the character names were assigned.
The names of the five main students—Shin, Uchiyama, Kumai, Noda, and Minami—
were derived from the original manga and had nothing to do with the actors themselves.
Jun Matsumoto existed strictly as Shin Sawada, not as "Jun Matsumoto."
However, for the many mob students not in the original manga,
the actors' own real names were used for their first names.
The actor playing Masayuki Ouchi was Masayuki Izumi,
and the actor playing Koji Oda was Koji Kanazawa, and so on.
The only one with a completely unrelated name was
Masato Yuki, played by Eiji Wentz, which was the exception.
In other words, the drama was cast with a reversed logic: keeping the symbolic nature of the original work for the leads, while bringing the supporting cast closer to their "true selves."
The less prominent the student, the more they looked like "themselves,"
and the more prominent the student, the more they stood as a "character."
This manipulation of distance likely gave the classroom ensemble both reality and fiction simultaneously.
And this casting crossed agency boundaries.
Jun Matsumoto from Johnny's, Shun Oguri from Horipro,
and Kenichi Matsuyama and Yusuke Kamiji, who were still unknown at the time.
By throwing young actors from different backgrounds into one classroom, they ended up producing stars from various fields at the same time.
Even the relationships on set became part of the "story" later on.
It is said that Matsumoto and Oguri were not on good terms at the time.
It is a famous story that Oguri said in later years, "I thought he was an unlikable guy."
Since that led to their reunion in "Hana Yori Dango," reality is stranger than fiction.
The filming location, Jissen Women's Junior College,
was the same school used in the 1998 "GTO,"
and Shun Oguri appeared in both works.
In the same classroom, in the same hallway,
he went from a bullied child to a delinquent leader.
There was a similar composition in the theme song as well.
Behind V6's "Feel your breeze" being the theme song was a "give-and-take" where V6's Junichi Okada starred in TBS's "Kisarazu Cat's Eye" at the same time,
and Arashi's "a Day in Our Life" was used as its theme song.
V6 was chosen for the theme song of "Gokusen," starring Jun Matsumoto, as a way of returning the favor.
The program operated within a promotion that crossed agency lines,
rather than the drama competing on its own.
It was an early form of media mix, where multiple pieces of content worked together without the viewers even realizing it.
In my own home, to be honest, I was already quite far removed from the concept of a 'yankee' (delinquent) itself.
So, I watched this drama not as a record of real delinquents, but as a story from a completely different world.
It didn't have the weight that eats into your daily life like the school dramas I had watched until then.
The daughter of a yakuza family becomes a teacher,
and messes around with the students.
It had the carefree nature of pure entertainment. That in itself was honestly enjoyable.
The sense of reality regarding delinquents that 90s works like "Shonan Bakusozoku," "Kiseki no Taku," and "GTO" carried was already fading by 2002.
It was a time when the spread of mobile phones and the internet was shifting the places where young people belonged from the "streets" to "inside the screen."
In that context, I think "Gokusen" was the last school delinquent drama that portrayed delinquents not as "evil," but as "young people who had fallen through the cracks of society."
Because the reality had faded, it conversely became a story you could laugh at with peace of mind.
There was a unique "kindness" to the year 2002.
Beyond the five main students, the presence of the adults supporting the cast is unforgettable.
The comical futility of Katsuhisa Namase, who played Vice Principal Goro Sawatari, was a relief valve that always lightened the mood of a school drama that tended to get serious.
Misaki Ito as school nurse Kikuo Kawashima, Ken Utsui as the third-generation Oedo clan boss Ryuichiro Kuroda, Kenji Anan as the acting underboss, and Ken Kaneko as the henchman.

The world of the yakuza and the world of school, two worlds that should never intersect, coexisted without any sense of discomfort.
As symbolized by the setting of Teruo Kumai, a.k.a. Kuma, whose family runs a ramen shop, even though they were delinquents, they were students who carried the lingering scent of Showa-era humanistic comedy rather than being people who hurt others.
Although Shin Sawada had a background of turning to delinquency due to conflict with his politician father,
he was also a character who was a prototype for later hero roles: brilliant, athletic, and loyal to his friends.
Even though they were delinquents, no one was truly afraid of them.
I think that exquisite balance was the biggest factor that made this drama work as a "school comedy" rather than a "delinquent drama."
Society itself was by no means calm.
The Koizumi administration's theatrical politics dominated the news every day, the Korea-Japan World Cup had the archipelago in a frenzy, and meanwhile, the North Korean abduction issue came to light, shaking society significantly.
Mobile phones were entering the center of life with picture mail and ringtones, and 2channel and WinMX were beginning to shape internet culture.
Amidst that disparity, the brightness of "Gokusen" stood out even more.
An unstable society and the trivial fights inside a classroom.
That contrast might have been what made this drama a "shelter from life."
In my home, my child, who was still in kindergarten at the time, was obsessed with Sentai and Rider shows.
It was an era when the habit of watching 9:00 or 10:00 PM dramas as a family still existed.
Whether at school or work, the drama was a shared topic the next day.
V6's "Feel your breeze" became a song that someone would always sing at karaoke, and if you stopped by a convenience store, TV magazines were stacked high.

That "scent of television," which seems carefree now, certainly still existed in 2002.
Even if you didn't have an emotional attachment to delinquents, you could laugh at the classroom slapstick. That level of distance felt just right.
The legacy left by "Gokusen" is significant.
Yukie Nakama became a national actress, Jun Matsumoto established his status as an actor, and it led to "Hana Yori Dango" thereafter.
The second series, which aired in 2005, recorded phenomenal numbers with an average rating of 28.0% and 32.5% for the final episode, becoming a legendary series for Nippon TV.
The third series in 2008 also took the number one spot for average annual commercial drama ratings, and in 2009, it was adapted into a theatrical film, with box office revenue exceeding 3.4 billion yen.
One cannot overlook its achievement in reviving the school drama genre itself and keeping the "hot-blooded teacher" image alive into the Reiwa era.
The fact that Yankumi won first place in the "Ideal Teacher Ranking" is proof that the fictional teacher image had penetrated into real-life desires.
In 2020, 18 years after it aired,
when it was rebroadcast as the "Gokusen 2002 Special Edition," the first episode recorded a 12.7% rating.
In an era where recent prime-time dramas struggle to exceed 10% ratings, hitting this number with an 18-year-old rebroadcast became a topic of conversation within the industry.
There were not only voices of nostalgia, but also many reactions from generations who didn't know the time, enjoying it freshly as "the young days of today's stars."
Topics are passed from parent to child, or child to parent.
The fact that the work survives in that way might be the greatest legacy left by the year 2002.
Compared to the "weight of the era" carried by B'z and "Battle Royale" in 2000, or "Spirited Away" and 9/11 in 2001,
the nature of "Gokusen" is clearly different.
It was not a drama that spoke to the era, but a drama for laughing in the gaps of the era.
The fact that such a "lightness-in-charge" work could exist at the top of the ratings in 2002 itself well represents the atmosphere of that year.

The daughter of a yakuza becomes a teacher,
and messes around with the delinquents.
That simple story continues to be talked about even now, more than 20 years later.
The unknown student actors became stars in their respective fields, and the program itself became a "future actor directory."
It was the drama that most unreservedly embodied the brightness and lightness of the year 2002.

#Gokusen #Gokusen2002 #YukieNakama #JunMatsumoto #ShunOguri #HirokiNarimiya #Yankumi #2002Drama #SchoolDrama #HeiseiRetro #V6 #FeelYourBreeze #KisarazuCatsEye