By the way Koe no Kotachi has like 60+ chapters, so i don't get what that one-shot designation means. I went from a good high school in Alaska to a terrible one in a small town in a MidWestern state, and at the new school it was routine for a clique of bullies to simply walk up to people and beat them up. they had the compliance of not just teachers but the principal and vice principal, who even let them skip class whenever they felt like it. many were athletes, or in the same church as the principal and vice principal, or both. I responded by first keeping my friends from being lured into situations where they'd be ambushed and later, simply not going to school - I took correspondence courses instead and went just enough not to be expelled, only showing up for tests. Bullying often reflects a sickness in the culture, or some other problem, but people pretend it's "human nature" or "kid nature" and can't be helped. then they also lie outrageously about how they tried to fix it but couldn't. People don't get away with this crap once they leave school, and they shouldn't when in school. This duo is one solution but out in the real world - INCLUDING Japan - that's how gangs develop. For self-protection to begin with. But the "strongest" kids are also often the most crime-prone. You can't have schools on a prison system and you can't have them be a Wild West anarchy. The Japanese excuse - and I lived in rural Japan for years, and our (admittedly top notch) school didn't have bullying - is inadequate, because you could get a different "wa" and preserve that. They have the samurai bullshit the way the US has the Wild West bullshit. One of the schools i was lent out to by my school clearly did not have anything under control at all, including bullying, and part of that was simply class-based. Maybe Finland's gotten past that, but there is simply more bullying at poor schools in both Japan and the US. And no hope.
