I started wondering on this reading whether or not Marika actually pushed the button, or whether she lied about it to Asumi so that she’d leave her behind.
For a manga about space school, they mangaka sure loves to make running the main trait of Asumi, as well as like the one thing they keep getting tested for? I honestly don’t really understand this fixation. I do like the 1 to 1s we are getting in the way though
Q - The young people in the space school in this manga spend a lot of time running long distances. How helpful is running for aspiring astronauts?
ChatGPT answer
Quite helpful — but probably not for the reason the manga might make it look.
Running is a good part of astronaut preparation because it develops cardiovascular fitness and endurance, which are useful for the physically demanding aspects of spaceflight and for general health. Astronauts also need to be able to tolerate long periods of exercise and physical work.
But there’s an interesting twist: running itself isn’t especially good preparation for the microgravity environment. In space, you don’t have to support your body weight in the normal way, and ordinary running isn’t possible. On the ISS, astronauts actually use a specially restrained treadmill (with a harness) precisely because they need exercise that loads their bones and muscles.
The big reason is that microgravity causes:
- muscle loss, particularly in the legs and back
- bone mineral loss
- reduced cardiovascular conditioning
- changes in balance and coordination
So astronauts exercise extensively in orbit, using a combination of treadmill running/walking, cycling and resistance exercise. Resistance training is particularly important for combating muscle and bone loss.
So why would
ふたつのスピカ
have them running so much?
I think there’s a fairly realistic logic to it.
The students aren’t training because astronauts need to be good runners. They’re being subjected to a very demanding general physical-conditioning programme. Running is a simple way of developing aerobic capacity and endurance, while also testing things like:
Can you keep going when you’re tired? Can you regulate your effort? Can you cope with discomfort?
Those psychological/disciplinary aspects are probably just as relevant to the manga’s depiction of astronaut training.
And there’s another historical connection: real astronaut selection has involved very high physical standards, particularly in earlier generations of crewed spaceflight. The combination of military/aviation culture and astronaut training naturally lends itself to running, swimming, circuits, etc.
So I’d say the manga is basically plausible, although if the students are spending enormous amounts of time doing long-distance running, that’s probably more “rigorous astronaut-school training as portrayed in fiction” than a literal representation of the optimal modern astronaut training programme.
One thing that would be interesting to watch for as you continue is whether the manga has them doing swimming, strength training, or centrifuge/G-force training as well. Those would give us an even better sense of how closely the fictional programme is modelling real astronaut preparation.
ChatGPT overthinking it - it’s just standard PE teacher mentality. 
Revised answer:
Summary
PE teacher is an 鬼… 
Mission:75
| Start Date | Chapter | Start Page |
Page Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 12 | Mission:75 | 153 | 24 |
| もうひとつのスピカ | 177 | 4 |
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Page 166, this is the second time he’s told them something like フォローもない申し訳ない. Are there zero student support services in this place? They just gonna toss them all out on their backsides?
A bit careless of them to lose another main character.
In the もうひとつのスピカ, K祥寺 is 吉祥寺, another station on the Chuo Main line, so I guess that’s why he’s been taking his character names from there. Why he’s censoring 吉祥寺 in such a transparently obvious way, though, I haven’t the foggiest idea.
Yeah, I guess it follows the pattern of hiding the identity of the theme park he worked in, which was also disguised in a transparently obvious way, but there’s no intellectual property at stake here so no real need to. I tried to look to see if it’s common to shorten the name 吉祥寺 (like Sangenjaya gets shorted to Sancha) but it doesn’t seem to be.
So I just took it as a playful twist on the place name, appearing to disguise it but still very obvious where it is. He also says it’s in Kanto rather than Tokyo, which is also playfully vague.
That shop in the picture is Yuzawaya, a Japanese chain specialising in fabrics/crafts which has a well known store (the one pictured) in Kichijōji.
Yeah, but Kichijoji isn’t a trademark.
Google AI said that K祥寺 is a common abbreviation on social media, but then cited the Wikipedia article as its source, which doesn’t mention it at all, so methinks Google AI is just telling me what it thinks I want to hear.
I don’t want to spam the thread with discussions I’ve had with Chat GPT, but I quite liked the grammar explanation I got for this question and thought I’d share:
Page 172 - Boy sat on nearly empty train in the rain. さすがにこの雨だと輪をかけて人が少ない。 Not sure what he means by 輪をかけて
Summary
輪をかけて（わをかけて） is an idiom meaning “even more so,” “all the more,” “to an even greater degree.”
So:
さすがにこの雨だと輪をかけて人が少ない。
Breakdown:
- さすがに — “as you’d expect / understandably / even”
- この雨だと — “with rain like this / given this rain”
- 輪をかけて — “even more / all the more”
- 人が少ない — “there are few people”
So naturally:
“With rain like this, there are even fewer people than usual.”
Or, fitting the scene:
“No wonder it’s especially deserted with rain like this.”
Where does 輪をかけて come from?
The literal image is “putting another ring on it” — adding an additional ring/circle to something that already exists, thereby making it greater.
It has the pattern:
A is X → 輪をかけて X
“A is X → even more X than that”
For example:
彼は忙しい。最近は輪をかけて忙しい。
“He’s busy. Recently he’s been even busier.”
And importantly, it often implies that the original situation was already true, and something has intensified it.
That’s exactly what’s happening in your sentence:
The train already has few people → the rain makes it even more empty.
It’s a really nice expression to add to your Japanese reading vocabulary because you’ll encounter 輪をかけて quite a lot in narrative prose and conversation.
Yeah, that was my point. There’s no need to disguise it but he does anyway. Nor is there a need to put Kanto rather than Tokyo. I took it as playful and copying the style of what he’d done with Disney in the past.
I haven’t read the last few comments as I’ve not quite caught up, but just wanted to say I’m still here! Fell quite behind this last month or so but have caught up to the current week, and should finish the volume on time.
The penultimate volume! We’re approaching the home stretch.