To be frank, I almost dropped this during the first episode: not another bullying series, I thought! And >>I do not like stories about bullied kids in school. There is so much such tragedies in real life: why watch a drama which does not provide a real , practical answer to the problem not the idealistic one, like here. But more about that later. Even though I wanted to drop it, I decided to finish at least the first episode at the end of which I thought I saw a huge twist. Unfortunately, I saw wrong but it made me continue watching and I actually finished it in three days!

This is a story of a teacher who wants to let the world know why one of his students killed herself and in order to achieve this, he takes a whole class hostage. Over the course of 10 days (=10 episodes), the truth slowly comes out revealing the ugliness behind the "innocent faces of children" and the "teachers' sacred mission". Spoiler alert! The kids are extremely cruel to each other, and the teachers don't give a damn!

The drama is well plotted and paced: the characters' stories and their connections with the deceased girl are revealed slowly. The suspense is palpable and the story is believable. Unfortunately everything falls apart in the idealistic and completely improbable ending: trying to speak to people's soft and reasonable side when everyone knows it is just talking in the wind. It is really silly. And even though what he says is truth, the facts are obvious, we also know that you cannot change people's base feelings, primeval instincts and insecurities and incite them to be nice to each other.

The acting is amazing with the best being, of course Suda Masaki. The rest of the cast of kids, are all pretty awesome!

The production looked a bit cheap: the camera work was really cold and clinical (digital cameras?). They probably did not have a big budget therefore the number of extras is very limited (only look at the number of parents who are there pestering the police: about 10! for 29 students? Where are the others? Calmly going about their daily life waiting for the police to free their child and send them home? As you can see this bothered me very much!!!). Another issue I have with this drama is the music. I liked it a lot but most of the time it seemed like they did not know what to do with it: they played the wrong music at the wrong time: very disconcerting! This is something I noticed in a number of j dramas, the wrong kind of music....

Apart from the disappointing ending which still managed to wrap everything nicely up, I ended up loving this series after almost dropping it, the suspense, the complicated story, the intelligent plotting. A great ride!