In anime years, that’s like 80
To be completely fair to him, he is essentially back in high school with a bunch of 15-19 year olds and a 17-year-old as his commanding officer. I would become depressed too
In anime years, that’s like 80
To be completely fair to him, he is essentially back in high school with a bunch of 15-19 year olds and a 17-year-old as his commanding officer. I would become depressed too
In addition to what’s already been said, a lot of it is people’s nostalgia for childhood because that’s the last time they had meaningful relationships. Japan’s education system has kids together in the same class from Kindergarten through 8th. Grade. Teachers change between classrooms, but each classroom stays put. This means you really get to know the same thirty or so people. Then for high school, people may go to different schools, but high school repeats the process where you have the same class all four years.
And BAM! Graduation happens. All those people you’ve spent your entire life with go to different places. Some will go on to university and get salary jobs after. Some didn’t score well enough on the entry exams and will be stuck working dead end jobs the rest of their lives. Regardless, you get crushed by the capitalist machine.
What’s different about other places is how we don’t spend all of elementary school together. We often get different kids in our classes each year. Then we shuffle between classes and subjects in middle school and high school. We lose touch with people from our youth. But it’s not like we haven’t lost touch with people we used to hang out with in elementary school by the time we hit high school, even when we go to the same school.
In Japan, there’s like this trauma that happens to each generation where the last time they remember having any real friends is high school. So a lot of anime/manga has younger characters because that’s the last time anyone remembers being able to change anything or had hope for the future.
Berserk’s author, Kentaro Miura, said he based the protagonists, the Band of the Hawk, and its characters on his friends from school.
Wait, they’re literally in the same class from kindergarten until they’re like 15? Dang. In Finland you get shuffled into a new group of kids when you go from pre-school to elementary school, then to middle school, with potential overlap in classmates provided no one moves away or if you don’t apply to some special school. Until high school classes are typically taught together as a unit setting aside elective language classes, religious education (which is mandatory), etc
Yeah. It sounds like Finland is mostly the same as the US. Here you get different classmates each year, but you’re together all year and often have recurring classmates until middle school, where you have different people each subject.
It makes a lot of Japanese media hit differently when you learn how their K-12 program works. In Another, for example, a girl is ostracized by her classmates due to them believing in some type of curse and they pretend she doesn’t exist. So imagine the horror of going through that for years.