Dog-earing that library book really got to me too!
So Kei-chan - you’ve been told that only a chosen few will progress to the fourth year. So you start your year 3 by starting a fight with other students? Not a good move! Even if you are doing it for love
I love your detective work! I also picked up on the green eye comment - the newspaper guys only make a brief appearance in this chapter - I wondered where this is going.
I was interested that they stylised the text in this way in this panel. Certainly made it a lot easier to parse for an overseas learner, and presumably for a native Japanese too!
Oh wow, the decompression chamber! Honestly, the insignificant things I’ve needed to sign permission slips for for a 16-17 year old, and these kids are sitting in a decompression chamber in lessons! That’s the one where the air in your lungs swells and if you don’t have your mouth open to equalise the pressures you can cause some serious lung damage. They even need a health exam at the end of it! I thought Kei’s determination was going to end up with her collapsing or something, so I was pleased that she did so well in the end.
Page 59 - Lion san’s harmonica disappeared! Is Asumi starting to become more adult as she is recognised as a senpai? Is Lion san starting to disappear like the characters in Back to the Future…?
I’m not fussed on the Carpenters’ song but I liked the second one, that might make it onto my current playlist. 私たちの望むものは is still a favourite on my playlist from an earlier volume!
They are provided with a panic button they can push to end the test, and Oni-sensei likely has his finger on a button too. But yeah, I’m impressed that Kei doesn’t just beat Suzuki’s record, she crushes it.
Decompression - I remember a practical at university which demonstrated that your feeling you desperately need to breathe comes from an accumulation of carbon dioxide, not by a drop in oxygen levels. My memory was that this practical was considered too dangerous for us to do, so we watched a video of it instead. You breathe in and out of a closed system, there is a limited amount of oxygen in the system, but also something that removes carbon dioxide. So as the test progresses, the person does not have any sense of being breathless, but the oxygen levels measured on a sats monitor gradually drop - in theory they would continue dropping until the person loses consciousness, and then if no intervention would die of hypoxia.
Anyway, in the test, the person has to do a series of simple arithmetic questions constantly. I think this was to demonstrate that the person was still both conscious and cognitively aware - the test concluded if they couldn’t do the maths questions any more, it didn’t wait for them to collapse completely. I wondered if the maths questions in the decompression chamber served a similar purpose. The difference was that in our manga the questions were a lot harder. It may be that they are trying to demonstrate concentrating and performing under pressure, rather than just a safety feature to show they have not collapsed yet.
