Gakuho Asano

Asano keeps his brown hair neatly combed above brown eyes, rendered violet in the anime. He stands apart from the rest of Kunugigaoka's staff by dressing in a brown business suit rather than the usual grey or black, and a sawtooth-leaf pin, a gift from his old cram pupils, sits on his tie.

Back when he ran that cram school his hair was longer and untidy, falling to his ears in a style close to his son's, and he leaned toward casual clothes over formalwear. As a younger man his hair had been the same strawberry blonde as Gakushu's.

Everything about Asano bends toward one fixation: perfecting his method of education. That obsession warps his priorities so thoroughly that he ranks the survival of his teaching system above basic ethics and even the wider world, floating ideas monstrous enough to unsettle his own son, such as poisoning Class E's food. He will dirty his hands to guard the structure, personally coaching the main building through exams while deliberately shutting Class E out so it cannot pass.

Even so, he is no simple cheat. He refuses to touch marks already earned, wanting his approach vindicated on its merits, and lets honest results stand for the second-term exams even when they favor Korosensei. Toward his son he applies relentless pressure, prizing perfect victory over any real bond and treating the boy as a useful tool rather than kin.

Long before, his outlook had mirrored Korosensei's almost exactly. He let students take mock shots at him during lessons, slipping aside at the last instant and rewarding any clean hit, and he raised his pupils to be good, well-rounded people. Three early cram students were especially dear to him. When one of them was bullied into suicide, his worldview shattered; blaming his emphasis on 'good' over 'strong', he ruined the bullies by turning them into gambling addicts and rebuilt his teaching into the harsh Kunugigaoka system. Defeat by Korosensei, and the sight of Class E living out his old ideals, eventually softened him back toward the educator he had once been.

In his earlier years Asano taught much as Korosensei would, nurturing kind, balanced students in the very building Class E now occupies. The suicide of one gentle pupil, too kind to defend himself against bullies, convinced him he had raised children the wrong way, and he resolved to forge 'strong' students in place of merely 'good' ones. Setting out to grasp strength, he took up karate and toppled a black belt on his third day of lessons, purely by observing and out-thinking his instructor after an initial loss. He built a new campus, left behind the old one and its painful memories, and avenged his lost student by driving the bullies into ruinous gambling addiction.

He later married and fathered Gakushu, a relationship defined by their mutual efforts to control each other. When Korosensei arrived at Kunugigaoka, Asano, already briefed by Tadaomi Karasuma, quietly permitted Class 3-E's secret assassination effort for a fee, then grew alarmed as the octopus began upending his hierarchy. He slipped impossibly hard questions into the midterms, tried to brainwash the baseball team during an exhibition match, and personally fired the brutal Akira Takaoka. As Class E kept rising, he and Gakushu schemed to peel away Kotaro Takebayashi, and by the finals his fear pushed him to hypnotize Class A and set a punishing exam meant to crush the outcasts.

When Class A still fell short, Asano cornered Korosensei with grenades and a rare twenty-percent chance of victory, only for his rival to shield him and note how alike their old teaching styles had been. The encounter began to thaw him. On Valentine's Day he even offered Korosensei a permanent post, which was gently declined, and the two spoke fondly of the late Aguri Yukimura. After the Spear of Heaven trapped Korosensei and the media savaged Asano's choice to hire him, he stood by that decision in public. Following the graduation he was forced to resign as chairman, but a surprise reunion with two of his first cram students rekindled the teacher in him. He went on to open Asano Cram School, running it himself while trying to recruit Nagisa Shiota for his gift as an educator.