This Highschool J-Drama Gets Darker the More You Think About It - Mr. Hiiragi's Homeroom review

Imagine being locked inside your own classroom, knowing that your teacher has no intention of letting anyone leave.

Eversince the pandemic, I've become incredibly into J-dramas. At first it was so I can improve my Japanese language skills, but the more I watched, the more I got sucked into the charm, cheesiness and overall uniquness that is Japanese entertainment.

Lets be honest, from a production point of view, J-dramas especially from the early 2000s and 2010s leave alot to be desired and even the plot can be a problem sometimes, but every once in a while you stumble upon a gem that reminds you why you love the genre so freaking much! The gem I want to talk to you about today is called Mr.Hiiragi's Homeroom.

As the title suggests, Mr.Hiiragi's Homeroom is about a Japanese highschool teacher called Hiiragi and his class. Days before their graduation, Mr. Hiiragi, whose played by the uber talented Suda Masaki, gathers his class for one last lesson. Unbeknowest to them, he takes the entire class hostage and will only release them if they can find out the truth of about the death of a student who passed away a few months ago through suicide.

Now how does he do that, well, that's where you need to suspend your sense of logic because, we are meant to believe that Hiiragi has set up all these traps across the school, including explosives, which he can detonate with the click of a button, and electronic locking doors, whilst also having a high end surveillance set up. Keep in mind this is a public high school!

Back to the story line itself, after the death of one of his students, Reina Kageyama, Hiiragi decides to take matters into his own hand in order to find out what exactly happened to Reina! He wants to get to the bottom of why Reina ended her life and who was invovled in her reaching that point. They way he does that is by taking the entire class hostage and giving them a series of tasks to complete in order to get to the bottom of Reina's death. The students have a deadline for each task, and if they dont achieve that, he threatens to exectute a random unlucky student.

I know you probably have a ton of questions after hearing all of that - Where are the police ? What about the parents ? How does a average High School teacher do all of this ? Well, that's where you need to suspend your sense of logic for few moments because the plot is slightly far fetched. Nevertheless, the show tries to provide some explaination to how Hiiragi is able to orchestrate this entire thing by fleshing out his backstory as we progress through the series.

The main themes and messaing of the story relate to Cyberbullying, heard mentality and how fabricating lies about someone on the internet can have detrimental consequences for the community. The show often circles back to these points, using the entire cast of students to demonstrate how each one of their actions may have affected the fate of Reina. I thought that each student had a signficant role to play and a well rounded, yet basic, character arc. But the star of the show is without a shadow of a dount Hiiragi Sensei!

Hiiragi is played the uber talented and site favorite Masaki Suda, who voices the Heron in Studio Ghibli's Boy and The Heron, and carries the show with his charm, charisma and the gravity of the role. Without going into spoilers, Hiiragi adopts this vigilente like persona throughout the show but we find out more and more about his background and character which changes how we as the audience and even the students perceive him.