This second installment of Kinpachi Sensei starring Tetsuya Takeda is generally recognized as the finest series out of all eight seasons of Kinpachi Sensei series. This is probably due to the fantastic depiction of disintegration of middle school education of Japan shown on episodes 22 and 23.
Masaru Kato (Kiichi Naoe) is a transfer student into Sakamoto Kinpachi's class. He has a shady past of being the boss of delinquent students at his prior school. Not totally unexpectedly, he falls into adversarial relation with Satoru Matsuura (Hiroyuki Okita) who is the delinquent boss of Kinpachi's class on the first day. It turns out that Masaru had good reason to be a delinquent. He's witnessed violence from very early in his life where Yakuza came to collect debt his father incurred, and brutalized him and his parents. He was also treated with disdain by teachers in his prior school. But due to Kinpachi's efforts, Masaru learns that he has full support of his teacher and his class mates and turns color for the better. Unfortunately for him, his past was not yet ready to release him, and his old colleagues comes to ask for his support to boycott the graduation ceremony at his old school. As the ex-boss of their group, he takes on the responsibility to go and speak to the teachers at his old school. But the discussion breaks down, and he gets embroiled in his old colleague's rampage, and the school is under siege by them. The episode turns into a showdown between delinquent students, and the faculty.
This episode is a caricature of declining education system in Japan that was rampant at the time. Teachers were near militant force in their respective schools, and treated their students with contempt and disrespect. They even had the right to use physical violence upon the students to whom they've deemed are not up to "snuff". Many of the schools were run like a concentration camp designed to favor academically adept students, and to pass the high school entrance exam. This in hind sight can be seen as organized violence towards the youth of Japan at the time. The episode depicts the out cry of the youth against the schooling system and the faculties that were only serving their own purpose. Because of the intricate details that were woven into the episodes to depict this unfortunate social system, this series ranks high among its viewers.
Such occurrences are no longer novel in Japan and the tide has turned 180 degrees. Now school is under siege by the students who are uninterested in academics, and have no compunction to wield violence against teachers who they feel are not up to "snuff". This might be seen as a "revolution" by the youth against the violence that were cast upon them. In a sense Japanese education system has failed catastrophically because they hired so many teachers who were not caliber materials to educate the youth properly, and attempted to cram informations that were meaningless to the growth of the individuals (worst yet, used it to discriminate youth based solely on this matrix alone).
Kinpachi Sensei series was meant to be an antithesis to the educational trend of its days, but because the disintegration of Japanese education system have progressed so far, the existence of Kinpachi Sensei itself became meaningless. Writer of this series Mieko Osanai herself admits that she recognized that it was time to pull the plug on this series, and the final episode of Kinpachi's saga was aired in 2011.
