OCOKA

Misato Sasakawa is a run-of-the-mill high school girl whose only aspiration in life is to win a national modeling contest called the "Princess Model Auditions" next month and become a nationally recognized teen graveure model.

Her gal pal and classmate, Shinko Sumida, on the other hand, is being pressured by her ambitious parents to get into a good university so she can be more like her older sister who got a job with a big company, married well, and now is expectant.

Meanwhile, in English class, another classmate, Michiru, enjoys showing up her peers with her precocious English skills, thus making all her peers seem like dim-witted and tongue-tied morons.

Just in time to break up the small-town ennui and pointlessness of their lives comes a young and idealistic replacement teacher, Kazuki Yashiro, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Rob Schneider of SNL fame. Mr. Kazuki is replacing their regular Modern Japanese Culture teacher, Ms. Yashiro, who's taking time off for maternity leave. The girls however, had a preview of Kazuki-san's methods when they ran into him on the train platform on their way to school as he singlehandedly put a gang of schoolboys in their place. The girls conclude that he must be a local Yakuza. Much to their surprise, and chagrin, Yakuza he is not as he is summarily introduced as their new Modern Japanese Culture teacher by superintendent and principal Hamada of the Hamatsu Daichi High School. Other classmates and friends of Misato include pig-tailed wallflower, Ijima Mimiko, and Tenryu Tohko.

In a convoluted series of events, Misato's older sister moves back in with her parents even though she's married and six-months pregnant, as she is angry about her husband being suddenly laid off from his corporate job. Misato takes this as a lesson that the road to middle-class respectability vis-a-vis a top-notch university education and respectable marriage is as fraught with risk and uncertainties as anything. Unwilling to take that risk herself and follow in her older sister's footsteps, she decides to throw herself into her teen graveure modeling contest aspirations. However, a quickly dispatched form letter she receives from the contest organizer shortly after submitting her application informs her that she is too old to compete. Truly despondent and dejected now, she decides to follow up on Teacher Kazuki's invitation to join the "Shodo" or caligraphy club. After-school club activities, aka "Bukatsu" or "Kurabu" (clubs) -- just like interscholastic sports & after-school clubs in the U.S. -- for many Japanese high school students are an important part of the high school experience, as well as a welcomed distraction from their otherwise monotony filled existences. Kazuki-sensei, whose mother was a famous Shodo artist and calligrapher, imparted the artistry to him as a child before her untimely death. Now a teacher himself, he sought to imbue the artistry of Shodo to his students through after-school clubs, however, he soon found himself at odds with the school administration, who responding to the complaints of ambitious parents, found the amount of time their kids were investing in Shodo to be a distraction from more important activities: preparing for college entrance exams. As a result, Kazuki-sensei's Shodo clubs and activities are shuttered and soon he finds himself placed on administrative leave by the school. That is, until his recent callback to fill in for a teacher on maternity leave. School superintendent Hamada reluctantly calls Kazuki-sensei back as a replacement, but remains firm in his position that the role of the school and the teachers is to increase the students' acceptance rates to the most prestigious and desirable universities in the nation.

Without exactly getting permission, Kazuki-sensei also restarts the Shodo club, and disillusioned Misato and Shinko, along with Mimiko decide to give the fledgling club a try. Their first event is a Saturday jaunt to a local park where Kazuki-sensei lays out a giant piece of paper and shows them what Shodo can be -- an all-out demonstration of physical and mental agility culminating in performance that is part sport and part art. As the kids get their feet wet, quite literally, handling large caligraphy brushes and gallons of ink, in a moment of pure release, they start having an ink and brush fight, thu destroying the entire canvas. Somehow pictures of the impromptu paint fight wind up in the email inbox of Superintendent Hamada the next Monday morning, and with that, Kazuki-sensei is warned to keep out of trouble. What follows next is straight out of "Dead Poets Society" where idealistic students literally stand up for and stand with their teacher against all odds against old-school establishment teachers and conservative and ambitious parents. A movie that is definitely worth its while and produced smiles every second of it.