銀の匙 (IMC) Week 9 🥄

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Week 9


Start Date: May 17
Previous Part: Week 8

Week Start Date Chapter End Page Page Count
Week 9 May 17 Chapter 8 + omake end 23

Vocabulary

Discussion Guidelines

Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!

Spoiler Courtesy

Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.

  1. Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
  2. Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
  3. Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.
Instructions for Spoiler Tags

Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1, Pg. 1”]).

Hide Details results in the dropdown box like below:

Example

This is an example of the “Hide Details” option.

The “Blur Spoiler” option will simply blur the text it surrounds.

This is an example of the “Blur Spoiler” option.

Posting Advice
  • When asking for help, please mention the page number, and check before posting that your question hasn’t already been asked. As the threads get longer, it becomes more convenient to use the Search function, which is located in the upper right corner of the forum. It is the magnifying glass which is near your profile picture! The best way to search is usually to type part of the sentence you are confused about, and select “in this topic”. This will show you all posts within the current thread which has that string of text.

  • Be sure to join the conversation! It’s fun, and it’s what keeps these book clubs lively! There’s no such thing as a stupid question! We are all learning here, and if the question has crossed your mind, there’s a very good chance it has crossed somebody else’s also! Asking and answering questions is a great learning opportunity for everyone involved, so never hesitate to do so!

Proper Nouns

Name Reading Notes
八軒勇吾 はちけん ゆうご protagonist
御影アキ みかげ あき classmate
相川慎之介 あいかわ しんのすけ classmate
駒場一郎 こまば いちろう classmate
稲田多摩子 いまだ たまこ classmate
常盤恵次 とさわ けいじ classmate
吉野まゆみ としの まゆみ classmate
西川一 にしかわ はじめ roommate
別府太郎 べっぷ たろう roommate

Participation

Will you be reading along with us this week?

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m still reading the book but I haven’t reached this part yet
  • I’m reading this book after the club has finished
  • I’m no longer reading the book
0 voters

If you’ve already read this book but are still going to join the discussion, please select “I have finished this part.”

5 Likes
Ch. 8

Love those eyes

Also - still nothing about explaining the series title :melting_face:

Will there be an offshoot? :eyes:

6 Likes

Not a real explanation I guess but there was a reference to the title in one of the chapters, the name of the canteen I believe? Could just be that they liked the book and spoon = eating? :thinking: or maybe there’s more and we need to read on to find out…

Thanks a lot @meagstudies for leading the club! I enjoyed some of the humor of this manga and some of the facts , but I don’t think I enjoyed it that much that I will continue reading it with the club, if there’s an offshoot.

5 Likes

I thought the spoon was some kind of symbolic artifact of the school and was just on display near the canteen, but I don’t remember its meaning ever being explained.

I also had fun reading this, but I have too many ongoing clubs going to continue with this one. Especially with the blurry Bookwalker scans :angry:.

6 Likes

If Hachiken didn’t come first in any subject, I’d rather like to know who beat him in Japanese and Maths.

Page 178, it’s typical in Japan for KFC restaurants to have statues of Colonel Sanders outside, similar to McDonald’s in the west with statues of Ronald McDonald. Here’s one I saw outside of the Akihabara branch (dressed as Santa, because it was December).

I idly wondered where this particular statue could have come from - turns out there’s two KFCs in Obihiro, which has been… reasonably firmly established to be close to the school, so maybe one of those. (Hokkaido has 68 branches in total, and almost half of them are in Sapporo. Weirdly, the city of Sapporo has more KFCs than most entire prefectures - thirty-seven of the forty-seven prefectures have fewer KFCs than Sapporo, and it’s almost thirty-eight.)

Anyway, page 179, the “Curse of the Colonel” line is a reference to the Hanshin Tigers baseball team - in 1985, exuberant fans of the team, celebrating a victory, threw a statue of the Colonel into the Dotonbori River… and the team never won the Japan Series again. Until 2023, anyway.

[edit]
The afterword omake strips suddenly made me think of actually looking for any agricultural high schools in Hokkaido, and… Hokkaido Obihiro Agricultural High School. Here is a photo of the dormitory building, so yeah, this is almost certainly the inspiration for Ezono. The perimeter of this school is only 2.2km, though. A 20km-perimeter square (the size given multiple times in dialogue) would cover almost a third of Obihiro. It would also enclose an area of 500 hectares, so if it’s one hectare per first-year student for cleanup, that’s a lot of first-year students. (The 2.2km school has an area of 30 hectares, which is a… somewhat more reasonable size for the student body.)

[/edit]

I’m already reading one Arakawa-sensei offshoot, and I don’t think I can manage two. I’ll definitely watch you guys if you do an offshoot, though.

Problem is, this volume ends immediately prior to the start of one of my favourite arcs…

I have a vague memory that one of the staff members explains the symbol at some point, but I can’t remember which volume.

7 Likes

I don’t think I can face decoding most of the おまけ - I’m still not great with handwritten Japanese.

I’m not 100% against reading an offshoot but just have way too many clubs on currently. I’d consider revisiting it in the future.

6 Likes

If there’s an offshoot club, I won’t be able to run it and probably wouldn’t join. As you might be able to tell from my poll responses, this manga ended up being a bit too tough for me :pensive:

5 Likes

It doesn’t have much bearing on the main story (unsurprisingly) so you’re not missing anything of importance.

Also, why is burning trash at the individual level so common in Japan? I see it everywhere in Japanese media. Doesn’t that destroy air quality in dense cities? Does everybody just burn trash everywhere all the time?

2 Likes

Cheaper than paying someone to cart it off for you. Perhaps not quite as common in real life as it appears in the media, though. And almost certainly more common in rural areas than in dense cities. (Also, I see it freqently in American media too, so Japan has hardly cornered the market there. :stuck_out_tongue:)

3 Likes

I’m a bit sad that there’s no offshoot, more so because eventually I want to read Hyakushou kizoku and it feels like a step up to it, but the difficulty is real, so I guess I’ll return to it in a year or two (or ten :melting_face:). If anyone would want to have company reading further volumes - feel free to ping me anytime!
Thanks everyone for reading and commenting on this volume, it was fun!

Try posting a poll in the main thread maybe, there could be other people willing to continue but who can’t be bothered to post here.

2 Likes

Well, if they don’t post here, then they are probably don’t really want company. It’s ok, we have a plenty of other clubs, I just don’t really like to drop things (or suspend, even if it’s wiser atm).

I wouldn’t bet on it. I’m running a couple of offshoots where there was minimal interest expressed but then actually got enough people along to make an offshoot worthwhile.

I would potentially get dragged along into an offshoot but am a bit busy right now with 6 ongoing manga offshoots and a number of other clubs.

3 Likes