Chapter five

At Lee's current physical age, a big change like moving and shifting from one home to another, going from in-home tutoring to the public school system... It would be quite an affair, all told.

That being said, it was his parents who seemed to be anxious and tense about the move, though they didn't particularly display it enough that someone who wasn't familiar with the both of them already would recognize their unease. Lee himself was less than frazzled by the change, and if asked by someone he could speak plainly about all the details of his unique circumstances with he would say that he was nothing if not adaptable, never mind that he had the advantage of having memories of a period of incarceration within the standardized schooling system. Not Japan's standard public school system, of course, but it was probably close enough to pass muster.

Just like if you were sent to prison, the first thing to do was find the biggest and toughest fellow inmate and/or student and decide whether you wanted to become their very best friend, or if you wanted to pick a fight with them to make sure everyone knew you weren't to be messed with. Well, it was a little more complicated than that, but the general sentiment boiled down.

If Lee had to say it, then the majority of the actual subject matter in public school was... pretty much irrelevant. You had the basics, common literacy and mathematics, some general history,  the common-sense things to make sure you didn't starve yourself like Home Ec, basic health classes to encourage exercise, and beyond that it was a scattershot of things that were designed to figure out who had the interest and talent to actually push forward into a field through college.

The average person needed to know Chemistry, for example... essentially purely and only because you couldn't graduate from high school without a sufficient grade in your Chemistry classes. For the average person, it was irrelevant from the moment that diploma was received and going on forward through the rest of their life unless college courses demanded it. If you didn't intend to become a scientist in the field or a neighborhood meth cook, it was irrelevant information that you could more or less delete from your brain and not have any issues in your day to day life for the lack. If you worked in a department store or fast food outlet, you were never going to need to know how to chemically dissolve and reconstitute gold from old and broken jewelry, right? It was at very most going to be a hobby thing.

Even if you did need the practical information again later on, the internet essentially contained the total sum repository of human knowledge. Getting that information would take a five minute trawl through a search engine. You didn't need to memorize it, the way standardized tests demanded. Once you had left the halls of learning behind, there was no penalty for 'cheating' by googling the answer to a question you had.

The same could be said about almost any field of study.

The graded scores that you would get in a course were clear and easily quantifiable metrics of advancement in this or that thing, but with the standardization of tests it really only determined how well you could memorize and recall specific facts. What was important about public school, the things that it actually taught you? There were never any scores assigned for that, not even a simple pass/fail.

You learned in school how to look busy when an authority figure looked your way, even if you were actually just screwing around and killing time.

You learned how to research the information you needed for this or that report, or more valuably, you learned how to pay someone who was good at research in lunch money and candy bars to do it for you, sparing you precious hours of your life that you would otherwise never get back from rummaging through library stacks to find just the right book that had the single passage of information you needed to cite.

You learned how to cheat without getting caught cheating, and how to stay on the cutting edge of technology, if only because the instructors were behind and wouldn't be aware that you could secretly put equations you were supposed to memorize into calculators or phones for later retrieval and use.

Speaking of teachers, you would learn how to brown-nose those in authority, building a relationship up to the point that you would be favored over other alternatives, the first person to come to mind when an opportunity or reward came up.

When it came to your peers, you would learn how to socially maneuver your way through a network of individuals forming their own groups, interacting with each other in different ways, and quietly being at each other's throats despite all being nominally all resting under the same umbrella and being obliged to cheer loud and hard for the sake of school spirit and solidarity when the team went out to a game, even if you were sitting next to someone who's guts you absolutely hated.

All useful life lessons, that absolutely nobody was going to be checking your progress on or assigning a written score for. It would likely upset parents just to address that the students were learning such things on their own, but that was how it was. In a sense, school was a microcosm of life after school, particularly when it came to the subset of it that would go on to become low-level overworked and underpaid corporate office drones, the sort of which public school was generally intended to produce anyway.

When you considered it in that aspect... it was easy enough for Lee to recognize the reason behind the differences in the school format.

In western sorts of schools, different classes would be held in different rooms, and the students would have to run through the halls to get to the right classroom, sometimes the right building, in the minimal time provided between those lessons. This probably taught time management and planning, because Lee was quite aware of the fact that it was sometimes exceedingly difficult just to get from point A to B in the required span of time, and it plain wasn't happening sometimes if you had to use the restroom or make a detour to your locker. It also accustomed the students to more adaptive social groupings and a wider network of people they were familiar with: you might have the same class with someone twice a day, but don't count on it.

As far as the eastern school system was set up, though, it was only the teachers who were obliged to scurry across campus to make it to one class or another on time, and they were always going to get away with being a minute or three late easier than the students, who would be sitting in one room and stay there all day. This promoted a more cohesive and tightly knit social group structure, Lee supposed. Rather than students forming their cliques and friendships on their own initiative, they would wind up grouping up into a herd mentality where class 1-A were the rivals of 1-B or so on. Rather than promoting a loose framework of connections, it was geared towards encouraging the students to make connections and work together in the group that they found themselves, whether they specifically liked other members of the class or not... once again preparing them for the world after their schooling was finished, as the corporate lifestyle mimicked the school structure, or vice versa.

Hm. That insight towards how public school was intended to produce reliable office drones for the culture they lived in was pretty good. Lee would have to make a note of it and check into how it worked in other countries for more data points, to see if it could confirm of deny the theory. For now, it was just a curious flight of fancy that might or might not be relevant. It didn't fit all the details perfectly either. For example, the Japanese school system basically had the students take over all the janitorial work as he understood it, cleaning the classroom top to bottom and taking the trash out at the end of the day, every day. Lee wasn't sure what that was supposed to represent... maybe the tendency of employers to cram in as much extra work as they could pile on their employee's shoulders, regardless of whether it fit their job description or not? ... Maybe it just represented that the school officials were cheap and found a way to cut costs by employing the students as unpaid labor until it became a traditional and expected feature of the school system.

One other thing that he wasn't accustomed to was that new students were supposed to introduce themselves in front of everyone. Had they done that before in his schooling? ... If so, it had left little enough of an impact in his mind that he couldn't really recall it.

It gave him an excuse to look over the faces of all the class while the teacher explained why he was here, at least, so he could pick out who looked like they might be a problem child. But... Well, about that... Sporty kids, nerdy kids, chubby and girlish, bored or plain or outright dozing off and all but daring the teacher to notice and call them out on it. All of his classmates looked... pretty ordinary, like normal children that were just going to school. Nothing to give it away like a shaved-sides mohawk, skull necklace, or gaudy eye-patch to be found in the lot.

Lee wasn't sure if it was because they were all basically kindergartners of the same age group as his, and so he couldn't see them as anything other than cute brats rather than genuine trouble, or if there just plain weren't any bad seeds in this bunch, but he couldn't pick out anyone that gave him the feeling of a bully or delinquent? In other words, the fundamental first step of school life.... Ah, the teacher had wound down. Lee stepped up and bowed a little, politely.

"My name is Kato Lee. It's a pleasure to meet you. My hobbies are exercise and reading books. I'll be in your care from today on." Lee introduced himself briefly.

Well, even if he couldn't identify a social target to either destroy or support, that didn't mean that there wasn't one. Every school had its subset of troublemakers and misfits that didn't want to just quietly attend and fit themselves in. Delinquents and thugs. There were certainly some, even if they didn't happen to be in this specific class.

That might actually be for the best? It would make things difficult for Lee if he wanted to befriend this notional ringleader, but if he wound up in a situation where he had to beat them up behind the gym or on the rooftop as happened in anime sometimes, them being in his class would complicate things.

This group of students was his assigned list of friendship candidates, after all. Until they started including things like clubs in the Japanese style schooling, there wasn't much room to meet and interact with any students outside of your own class roster that Lee was aware of. Even the lunch break more or less consisted of bringing out and eating pre-made lunch boxes in the classroom that you sat in all day.

The bento was a popular enough tradition that in addition to making it from scratch at home, convenience stores would sell the lunchboxes that got put out early in the morning and discounted in the evening! People would pick them up to eat for dinner as well as bring them in to work, so Lee supposed that was one more way in which the school system and the office culture reflected each other.

No matter. If he couldn't pick out the big guy to deal with one way or the other then the only other thing remaining to do was to settle into the life of an anime protagonist.

The way you recognized one of those in a school setting was simple: You looked for the one who was sitting in the back corner, next to a window, looking wistfully out of it through the glass and daydreaming as cherry petals drifted off of branches on the breeze, completely ignoring the lecture in progress! Thus, to secure a position as some kind of anime protagonist it was vital to...

... To, hm. What?

Where were the windows? The massive, wall engulfing panes of clear glass for the anime protagonist to sit next to and wistfully stare out of!? They were actually small vent-like windows up high and next to the roof, of the same sort that were put into bathrooms to deter peepers! Beneath those the whole wall was just a wall. There was no point in even kicking out the student that was already sitting in the critical position, then, since it was just wasting time and causing trouble to fill a spot that didn't even matter!

Instead, Lee wound up seated in a position more or less in the middle of the class, off center enough to be closer to the edge of the square of desks that was against the interior wall.

This wasn't the position that an anime protagonist should have. Even if he was in the middle of the pack instead of the coveted rear window seat, shouldn't it be perfectly in the center of the desks, equal distance from front, back, or either side?

Then again, maybe Lee was just overthinking it? After all, while it might be of critical importance for Lee to know if he was a protagonist that could suffer but would inevitably endure everything or just one more feature of someone else's potentially-tragic backstory, all of that applied to high school anime protagonists. While the details should be more or less equivalent... this was a elementary school. Since that was the case, maybe the usual tropes and methods didn't apply?

Lee didn't like to acknowledge that possibility, since it meant that it would be years yet before there was any indication of whether he'd managed to secure the position of a central protagonist or if he'd stumbled and wound up maintaining a side character position.

... All the same, he'd done what he could and there wasn't really anything more he could do.

For now all he could do was wait and fill time. Lee supposed that school was as good a place as any for that, and leaving aside the fact that it did, after all, take a lot of time to get his secret advantage rolling on producing new techniques for him to learn there should be plenty of opportunity to at least learn the standard curriculum and make friends in Sainan elementary school.