Translator: Tori
What do you imagine an ideal high school life would be like?
Club activities in which students sweat through hard work, give it their all, sometimes compete with their friends, encourage and cooperate with them, and share the thrill of victory they have achieved.
Confessing your feelings to the girl you like, getting married, and enjoying events such as summer festivals and Valentine’s Day with your partner, while being bashful about your feelings for each other.
Events such as cultural festivals and athletic festivals, where classmates and friends make silly noises every day, play karaoke and bowling after school, and have a lot of fun.
You would imagine such days to be joyful and pleasurable.
But you are wrong.
The ideal high school experience is to study reasonably hard for three years in order to go to a good college.
Today, Japan is an academic society. The university you go to will make a big difference in your future. It is no wonder that people are looked down upon and abused simply because they graduated from a university at the bottom of the class. In some well-known major companies, there is even an academic background filter, and if you are not enrolled in a certain level of university, you will be rejected in the application screening process and may not even be able to proceed to an interview. The university you go to is so important that it even determines your life.
So, students study. To go to a good university. To get into a good company. To have a good future.
In such a situation, there are many students who neglect their studies and are playing around, being misled by the sweet and illusory words that high school life is a time to enjoy their youth. They think nothing of the future. They think that the present is all that matters, that the present is all that is interesting, and this kind of thinking corrodes their brains and makes them turn their eyes away from reality.
I am not fooled by such optimism.
I will accept reality and live my high school life rationally.
That is because I am a realist.
Leave a Reply