We’ve had some nice weather in the UK over the last few weeks and I’ve been looking up at the night sky, inspired by Asumi in the last volume sitting outside and drawing the constellations. Her drawing particularly featured Virgo and Leo:
I’ve had great views of Leo, also a great view of Ursa Major and Arcturus below it. But Virgo and Spica frustratingly always seem to be just out of view…
Did school teachers really still hit children like that in Japan in 2001? I feel like the days of school teachers throwing board rubbers at pupils or hitting them on the knuckles with a metre rule had long since passed by then in the UK…
Very nice, I enjoyed this song. I also found this version on the ハープ
Google says it’s technically illegal, but does still happen (probably because specific individuals should have never been placed in a position of authority over children).
Interesting. I don’t remember picking up on this in other Japanese media set in high schools before. That punch wasn’t even corporal punishment, at least it wasn’t a carefully considered punishment handed out in response to an incident. It was just a spontaneous punch handed out in anger by someone who was annoyed. The kids don’t seem particularly shocked by it though!
I mean, it seems like it was normal for adults to hit children at this point in time (or maybe figures of authority), just like the father did earlier.
Page 68, as Lion-san describes, John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth, but when he did so, he became the oldest astronaut at the time, at the age of 40 (by comparison, during their spaceflights, Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova were only 27 and 26, respectively). When he returned to space in 1998, at the age of 77, he became the oldest astronaut again. The panel at the bottom of this page is entirely fictional, though - it’s set in the future at the time of writing, after all. The closest I’ve been able to find (with admittedly only a bit of casual googling) is this TikTok.
Page 85, I’ve been unable to determine whether this book is real. Amazon has a TV series called 宇宙からみた地球, and a book called 宇宙から見た日本, but not a book called 宇宙からみた地球. That said, the image that we see from inside the book could perhaps be this photo taken by the crew of Apollo 11 during their return voyage, though I admit I’m rather uncertain.
So, wow, the Sano situation resolved itself surprisingly quickly, after all the fuss they made about it. And his grudge turned out the be based on a misunderstanding? That’s kind of hilarious.
Assuming you’re talking about page 8, corporal punishment was banned in like the 80s here in Ireland, but teachers definitely still would have gotten away with something like that in 2001 in the school I went to. I think attitudes were changing, but rather unevenly depending on where you lived. Perhaps Japan was similar. Though on the other hand, this is meant to be the prestigious space school, so you’d think they’d be the most up to date…
Can’t seem to find if this observatory that Asumi is interested in exists in the real world. Or indeed, any mountain-top observatory in Chiba prefecture. Perhaps I’m just searching for the wrong thing.
Page 104, for a slightly off-topic tangent, the multi-axis trainer reminded me of something I learnt a few years back while reading the IMDB Goofs page for First Man, the film about Neil Armstrong’s career (starring Ryan Gosling). Specifically, the film shows Armstrong being tested in the multi-axis trainer (or, more formally, multi-axis spin test inertia facility - MASTIF) except that they’d only used it for the Mercury astronauts, and it had been abandoned before Amstrong joined… which was somewhat ironic, because during Armstrong’s first spaceflight on the Gemini 8 mission, a malfunction in the RCS thrusters put the capsule into an uncontrolled spin, making Armstrong one of just two astronauts in the US space program to experience the exact conditions that the MASTIF was intended to simulate.
And for a question: page 101, fifth panel, anyone know why the が is being emphasised like that?
I wondered the same. It feels like 星 should be the word emphasised, not が. And not seen little speech marks used like that, usually I see little dots alongside the words for emphasis.
Asumi says it’s opened in the last few years, so perhaps it’s a building from the fictitious future rather than a real building.
Dramatic end to the chapter. Also some seriously unpleasant things going on in Marika’s house.
