Fuzoroi no Renri - Vol. 1 Ch. 13

[MangaDex]

 

[ma_ko]

cute

 

[MacMeaties]

Page 5. I feel you.

 

[Gustbk]

Still weirded out that they are just handwaving all of that seriousness with “haha we just got used to violence as stupid kids”. Would’ve really been better if the author never tried going that far.

 

[Purplelibraryguy]

@Gustbk I get what you mean . . . but, I'm not sure quite how to put it, that isn't implausible. I'm not so young, and I remember how things used to be. We take violence a lot more seriously now than we used to, which is probably a good thing. I certainly would have been happier if the teachers had given a damn that groups of kids chased me and beat me up in the schoolyard all the time. But people did shrug it off more. Bullying was considered unfortunate, but still basically ignored, while violence between equals wasn't taken very seriously at all, including by the participants (I didn't get into that stuff because I was a nerd from young, but I was an exception). An actual "fight" was still an event, like by people who didn't like each other with a bunch of people watching behind the gym or whatever, but pretty serious roughhousing was nothing. And I'm not even talking about tough schools here--this is middle class schools in Canada.
So yeah, I'm very willing to believe in kids at a sort of orphanage/tough kids institution in a culture that isn't Post-2000-North-America basically acting like violence between equals was not an important thing. This is not the realism you're used to . . . but it is still realism.

 

[Gustbk]

@Purplelibraryguy I get that the whole "woke generation" is something recent and doesn't at all affect most of the world, I'm from Brazil, so violence, even as kids, is just something that comes naturally when in public (not a crazy jungle, but still, relative) and I used to be a pretty violent kid, never actually getting into serious scuffles, but a lot of "pretend fights", so I get what you're trying to convey. But it still feels more to the detriment of the narrative that they even tried to justify how someone in Japan would be okay with someone smashing an ashtray in their head and beating them up in public, in front of a stranger (in that case someone even more important)...and the Wokeness argument gets a bit more relevance when this story at least appears to take place in a modern setting.

 

[Purplelibraryguy]

@Gustbk Well, you may have a point. Japan does seem to be pretty nonviolent . . . mostly, even if I'm not sure they're very "woke" as such. But there may be class differences there, like middle class and up are pretty nonviolent but go down to the seamy side and it's a different deal, just like there seems to be a significant rural/urban culture divide and even to some extent a Tokyo/everywhere else culture divide.
One problem here is the format is very short, so yeah, the author may have bit off something they didn't have the space to chew.

 

[ChocoMacchia]

Japan is actually not the safe haven you guys imagine it to be. I'm pretty late to the party, so I'll keep it brief. Even though Japan might look really safe on the surface, there are lot of things going on in the underground of the society, such as yankees and yakuza, and police generally don't get involved unless there's a serious crime involved. I have a friend who used to live in downtown shinjuku and apparently the area is loitered with yakuza.

There's also the case of bullying in Japan, which for some reason is being encouraged by the teachers, which sometimes (if not often) escalates to physical violence.

These things in Japan are not taken as seriously, and even though it is beginning to change, it's still pretty bad atm.

 

[ChocoMacchia]

@Gustbk So yeah, TLDR: Japan is not as safe as you think it is.

 

[Gustbk]

@ariared26 There's never such a thing as a completely safe place unless society doesn't exist there, and the idea of "not disturbing the peace/causing conflict" clearly doesn't work. We were clear that it's not impossible and that Japan has a completely different set of violent problems. But in context (including the ones you brought up), the depiction here comes off as too far fetched and overly-dramatic.
Its just as @Purplelibraryguy mentioned, the format made it impossible for the author to actually build the foundations for it to be believable.